Crazy idea: pay them both more so the public doesn’t have to
The public is going to pay them regardless. The money for wages has to come from what customer’s spend. Being said, I agree with you wholeheartedly because tipping is a leverage point that enables a lot of racism, sexism and sexual harassment.
I think the lost nuance is that the previous guy means that with tips, the public pays for tips directly.
You’re technically correct, the public, by buying food and service, is paying the company, creating a pool of money from which the costs of business are to be paid, ideally including staff in full. And currently, wait staff has to be paid by the customer directly.
(This mostly holds for most of the US, in many places, it does work according to the more ideal model)
You wanna know what’s even more lost nuanced? the fact that a customer paying your salary via tip is after they’ve paid taxes. So let’s say they tip $1 - in my country that means they had to earn $2 before tax (assuming the customer is a billy big bollocks higher-rate tax payer).
But what about if the employer pays the server instead? well now we’re talking…when the emplopyer pays the server, it does so PRE-TAX. That is to say they can pay the server $1 and in order to do so they only had to earn $1. While if they banked that $1 as profit, they would pay tax on the $1 first and so see less of it (let’s call it $0.80). Mind you, that does mean that the service worker now needs to pay $1 on that income…but surely they would declare their tips anyway and pay the tax either way? right? riiiiight?
Long and the short of it is - the cheapest way for the server to get $1 is for the employer to pay it to them and pass the cost on to the customer. The cost to the employer is what the company would have received post-tax for that $1 which as we said earlier was $0.80. The server got the $1, the employer is not gaining or losing anything, and the customer is only paying $0.80 which means they only had to earn $1.60 instead of $2. Everyone wins, except the tax man doesn’t win quite as much as he was winning before. Cry me a river.
Tax evasion ftw
Because currentlty we pay the boss but they forget the part where that goes to their staff.
This should really be the norm.
Tip culture was developed so the restaurant owner didn’t have to pay (mostly black) waiters as much.
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In some countries, it is!
Unfortunately most wait staff do not want to work for just hourly, it’s been tried a lot and almost always places have major issues with getting waiters. The majority of them like the tipping system.
Sounds to me like either ignorance or Stockholm syndrome.
Or Mario just lying 🤷
It’s absolutely lying, or at best guessing based on intuition. Eliminating the tipped minimum wage has strong support and demonstrable benefits.
What’s your experience with this? Because I was a server that organized to eliminate the tipped minimum wage in Pennsylvania and we got plenty of support. Servers liked the fact that their income was predictable rather than being tied to business volume, managers liked that they could put one strong server or bartender on a medium-paced shift without that employee feeling like they were being punished by not being given the busiest (and therefore most profitable) shifts, everyone liked that their income was no longer tied to the whims of racist misogynists who had been drinking, there was no more pressure to work off the clock and for most servers it resulted in a raise and a lower overall workload.
Like it or not most tipped servers make more with tips. I don’t know why this is some odd thing. There are plenty of stories out there like the one I posted. Almost all tipped servers make more with tips.
In the EU we like to pay a living wage and tip. That way we know that no one is getting fucked (any more than usual) and the good service staff are getting rewarded for going above and beyond.
Abolish tipping. Living wages for all, no exceptions.
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I used to work as a line cook. The waitresses would give us a percentage of their tips which was nice. But really, we understood that it was much better to cook the food than be the one dealing with the idiot customers and rude Karens, so they deserved that tip. The girls would be all smiles, and as soon as they’d walk in the kitchen they’d let out all the rage. Then back to smiling once they go back on the floor, whereas the cooks could just behave like the animals we were, and nobody would see us.
No, they deserved to be paid appropriately by their employer and the customers deserve to have a predictable bill, not one based on the quality of the service they received or the pity they have for the employee.
I’ve worked for tip for 10 years, tipped jobs shouldn’t exist.
Until some asshole went and invented the “open kitchen” concept
Cries in an open kitchen
dealing with the idiot customers and rude Karens
Of course the customers behave as entitled brats because they’re paying for the entitlement with a tip that can be withheld for any reason. It creates a rage inducing power dynamic.
So, is that basically why Americans like tipping culture? Because it lets you feel the rush of being in control of someone for money? The rush of being the abusive partner in an abusive relationship?
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Yes. The whole American culture runs around money.
As someone who has worked in customer service, customers don’t need to tip to act like entitled brats.
Exactly! I mean just watch the movie “Waiting”. It is such an accurate portrayal that it should be classified as a documentary.
18 years in restaurants checking in. I was a bartender when waiting came out. The only thing they got wrong was that we didn’t do The Game, but we started to after we saw the movie.
So so many restaurant staff did, it’s not even funny. 😅
There’s a separate level of unfairness here:
Right side is making $16-$25 per hour.
Left side has an hourly rate that’s almost always less than minimum wage. This is allowed because of the assumed tip income.
Depends on what state you live in. For example, CA requires wait staff to be paid at least minimum wage. Also, many cooks are also receiving minimum wage.
All wait staff have to be paid minimum wage, it’s a federal law. If they don’t make minimum wage in tips, then the employer has to make up the difference.
Which is a massive pain in the ass to actually track and prove, and employees who do it don’t tend to stick around for long. Especially if you (like me) live in an at-will employment state where no reason for dismissal is required.
Plus, waiters have to deal with client bullshit directly.
Plenty of low paying jobs make you deal with clients and not receive tip.
You’re saying we should tip IT support?
Left side has an hourly rate that’s almost always less than minimum wage. This is allowed because of the assumed tip income.
This part depends on the state, thankfully. Seems phased out on most of the West coast, to my knowledge. I know it’s still pretty widespread in the south.
Being phased out in DC too. That said, the transition period has been rough, many places are now using service fees to cover the costs, which makes sense but the fact that it’s still so inconsistent causes great annoyance.
Then again, so do tipping expectations, what exactly am I paying for? Can I opt out? What legally constitutes a tipped employee? WHY ARE THERE TIPPING OPTIONS AT FAST FOOD PLACES NOW!?
Overall, a clusterfuck that I’m happy to see is dying out, (I’ve also heard that it’s racially and sexually unjust.)
Here in Ontario everyone has to be paid minimum wage but, tips are still very expected. Kinda bugs me since they prob make more than I do lol
Kinda bugs me since they prob make more than I do lol
No idea what it’s like up north but the highest hourly job I’ve ever had was serving tables in college. Over a week it averaged out to $25-45/hr depending on the season and some other factors. Did it for about a year before the stress and irregular hours made it not even worth that much money. But it definitely changed how I perceived wait staff.
Waiters where I used to work were some of the best paid employees in the place even when including directors that were making 130k+… if they had included all their tip on their paycheck (instead of the default 10% of every bill under their name) they would have ended up getting a 0$ paycheck every two weeks and would have still owed taxes at the end of the year… and that’s while making above minimum wage from the get go…
Yea I know some servers who make great money
I’m only slightly above minimum wage with no tips so, pressure to leave 15-20% tips def bugs me
And depending on where you are left side has to pay a portion of their tip to the kitchen and runners as well.
Is this a USA-thing? In Europe tips are most usually split between front and back of the house.
In the USA there is a “minimum” wage, and a tip wage. The tip wage means your employer pays you $2.17/hr and you make nearly all of your income from the kindness of strangers. It’s mindnumbinly aweful.
To be clear, if you don’t make enough in tips to reach minimum wage, your employer pays the difference
Some places do pool a percentage of tips and pay them out to the kitchen and/or bar. Usually kitchen is paid more than waitstaff, and waitstaff is also likely to be cut if it’s slow, so may get less hours. Some states allow employers to pay tip based workers below minimum wage.
The fact that there are laws about “tip based workers” is insane to me.
Also to clarify, the rationale for tip based workers having a lower default minimum wage is that if they do not come up to the regular minimum wage with their tips+salary, then employer has to make up the difference. But usually they end up making more than minimum wage with the tips.
And you won the lotto if an employer actually supplements your tips. When you go a day with no customers.
If you’re reporting your income on your taxes then your employer literally cannot be doing that. Sure it gets averaged over your pay period, but you should still be making at least minimum wage.
ROFL, tell me you have no idea how the restaurant industry works without saying it …
When I was in Seattle the servers got min. state wage (15? at the time) & you could not split your tip unless the other person had interaction with the guest (no cooks got tips unless they did tableside cooking). Our best server for one restaurant group rolled in last, got 300+ tips, and was cut first- usually a 3.5/4.5hr shift. Kenny was a fucking legend.
CTRL F “union”
0 results>:-(
You’re looking in the wrong country.
I see the corollary to this as the actual injustice, i.e. “the dish was bad so you get a low tip”, because the server can’t control the quality of the cooking and yet depends on the tip, whereas the cook actually gets a full wage no matter what.
I see the injustice there as the employer not paying the server enough.
Well you’re 100% correct that that’s the injustice that we actually ought to do something about.
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I’m starting this off with I hate tipping culture, but it’s required as an American, so I tip based on the service I receive from the server, not the food I eat. I rationally know they don’t control that. I assume most people do this, except OP who apparently tips waiters based on the food quality for some reason.
Yeah, I’ll give good tips for good service of mediocre food. The Alamo has some of the hardest working servers in the industry. I don’t care how good or bad the food is (usually good, but the overall amazing buffalo cauliflower can be inconsistent) if you crawl on the floor to give me my bill without blocking the movie for the person next to me, you get a good tip.
I don’t get this meme. The phone has a back light and the book doesn’t.
The cook already has a tip: he ate half the customer’s dessert ;-)
The jobs we tip and the jobs we don’t really don’t make a whole lot of sense, honestly.
Fifteen years ago, working master control at a small local television station, someone called in just furious that a baseball game their TV schedule said would be on was not on. It was a TV station, ads paid the bills, but the person felt really entitled to baseball over free over-the-air television. This wasn’t the only time this happened, but this has always been the one I’ve remembered most vividly, because the guy was just so angry, like he’d had his whole day planned around this.
I remember thinking about tipping jobs at the time, and how I was earning federal minimum wage to do this relatively skilled job (edit: not saying waiting/chefing are unskilled), and people were harassing me because the wrong thing was on the TV. With all due respect, I was master control, I literally had the finalized schedule in front of me. Nobody was tipping me when the thing they wanted on TV was on. I mean, I didn’t expect it since ads paid for everything, but the entitlement of some people for something they essentially didn’t pay for was so weird to me, and made me think of the disparity.
Every reputable place I ever served at had front of house tip out the service staff.
Can we leave these shit memes by people who’ve never worked in the food industry (but get butthurt social conventions suggest you tip) and the resulting awful cavalcade of tired, predictable responses back on reddit?
That’s your experience.
I have worked in very reputable places and none of that tip would reach the cooks. If we were lucky they would pay us a beer at the club later. I think it’s regional though. I know in Quebec waiters won’t share because the government assume they get 15% tip from everything bill and taxes them accordingly.
Tips are imputed and taxed from sales in the US too.
That sucks. I did work at one place where the percentages weren’t set and it made for some friction because not every server tipped out BOH/ support at the same rate. The best places I worked set minimum percentages (ie, 5% to kitchen, 3% to dishwashers, etc which ended up being 15% of your sales) and got could go above if you wanted such as if the kitchen saved your ass. It made for better morale. I worked at a couple places where it was a free for all and BOH/FOH were always fighting and turnover was high
Doesn’t sound very reputable. Sounds like a Buffalo Wild Wings.
I’ve been in the restaurant industry for over 15 years and the least I ever had to tip out to the kitchen was 2.5%. Never, did they not get tipped out.
Also, I’m not complaining, I love the back of house, but don’t spread bullshit cause you had a bad go
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Yeah, well you should get paid properly or something.
Haven’t been in that industry in years but I made more doing that than I do in my current job a decade later.
Service chews your body up so I left
You made good money because of guilt tripping people into tipping 20% instead of demanding your employer pays you, and crying on social media about how waiters make almost nothing.
The entire reason people tip is out of sympathy, and restaurant workers really weaponized that. Instead of having trouble with your employer not paying you, you joined forces with them.
For the record I tip reasonably, but I find it crazy that restaurant workers do this.
Hah. No.
I guarantee I think (and thought) about tipping a fuck of a lot less than you do. I’d get stiffed on occasion, but in general my job was to allow customers to relax and facilitate they have a good time. It always shook out by the end of the night and I barely kept track of who tipped what unless it was really outside of standard deviation one direction or the other. It’s gauche as fuck to hint at a tip or even look at the slip while in view of guests.
Know who tips the best? Other servers. I and others who knew each other in those circles tipped one another 50+% when we’d patronize one another. We probably passed the same batch of money around. Of course we were usually comped rounds of drinks and appetizers, so… surprise surprise, the night out cost the same anyway, but we didn’t get shitty and cheap trying to game the system.
Also, these are the social contract seas we swim in, smoothbrain. You think someone at an upscale establishment is going to stick it to the man by walking out? I have problems with capitalism as a whole, but you and yours seem to think servers (and I’d be willing to bet other “unskilled” workers by your definition) don’t deserve adequate compensation? I didn’t come up with this system, but it’s what we’ve got and there’s an elegance to it if you don’t get all butthurt. You’d pay what you’re paying plus tip one way or another. Grow a pair and stiff your server if you’re that annoyed. I’d respect that more than you being a keyboard warrior after folding and having a clenched asshole for feeling obligated to give a server 15%
There is a really easy way for you to get what you want and not play into this system: stay home. No one wants to socialize with you out getting drinks anyway
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Racist? I’m not trying to make a bad faith argument, but… what?
Dude. No one’s forcing you to eat out. Don’t if you don’t want to pay into that system (or just stiff if tipping as an institution is satanic to you)
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And yet this sounds exactly like the kind of “more righteous than thou” condescending comment I saw on reddit all the time. But when you’re doing it, it’s alright, yeah?
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Agreed. Tipping is stupid. Abolish it and charge what the service costs.
Hm. I see what this is pointing at, but I find it odd that the guy in the shade has a phone, not a paper book. He doesn’t need the light to begin with.
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The restaurant i worked at had a tipping fund, all tips went in and where distributed (daily)
Maybe, but THIS is one step beyond madness.
