This doesn’t make sense. If the final check + tips is the cost for the whole service, just include the tip % in the base price and pay proper wages. Margins have nothing to do with this, it’s just exploitation, it’s offloading the risk of enterprise onto the workers.
As I explained in my post, restaurants that do this struggle to stay open because people only look at the price and are less likely to want to pay it. Even places that keep prices the same and add a service charge receive many complaints and a drop in business. My source is that it has happened in multiple restaurants I’ve worked at.
I doubt you read my whole post because I also spoke against the system. I’m not brainwashed, I’m living in reality.
Edit: side note, all of capitalism is built on exploitation of labor, it’s the defining characteristic
The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before.
People are dumb. Even if they should know they’re saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it’s bad.
The point is that the menu prices should not need to go up, because tips should never have been a necessary part of their profit margins.
They were literally subsidizing their expenses (including payroll) with tips, and that’s made evident by the fact that the prices had to go up when tips were ended.
If your business cannot afford to survive without paying your employees a living wage, then your business shouldn’t exist.
Thank you for the actual source! I knew there would be evidence aside from my anecdote but didn’t particularly feel like looking it up. I’ve had this argument on lemmy a couple of times so I find it a bit tiresome. Appreciate the support :)
It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista’s jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they’re all getting a living wage, and your tip isn’t a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.
This is definitely one way to approach it, but I currently make minimum wage plus tips in a city where the minimum wage is over $20 and it’s still hard to make ends meet at times. I’m a single adult with no dependents and although I have a reasonable standard of living I’m by no means thriving. The tips are still a very necessary part of my paychecks.
The problem is complex, like I said in my first comment. Lots of sub-industries thrive off of milking restaurants, and simply doing away with tipping is not going to fix it. I just wish people would have some sense of worker solidarity instead of attacking people who live off of tips.
Yeah, I haven’t seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour is still isn’t a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, “Fight for Fifteen,” was outdated and needed to be the, “Fight for Twenty,” and we’ve had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.
If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren’t enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.
Most transactions are handled by card, it would be quite easy to enforce. At a minimum, payment processors could be legislated to not have the option for tipping. Banning the tipped minimum wage has already been done in a number of states and so they make minimum wage + tips, with that tip not actually being any more optional.
What’s really short sighted is not seeing how tipping develops into a bribery culture. We’ve already seen companies happily turning on the tipping option for the payment processor in situations where people used to never tip. Today you bribe your waiter to not shit in your food and berate you. Eventually you’ll have to bribe government workers to expedite (i.e. bother at all with) your paperwork. Gotta hustle and get that bag above all else, right?
Ignoring that possibility, it’s not like it’s a just practice in any way. Tipping amount is largely detached from level of service and factors such as attractiveness, race, how the person is feeling that day, etc make a greater impact.
You are ignoring my entire argument. At no point did I say tipping culture in the US is good nor have I defended it as a just way to distribute pay. It sucks, and it sucks to live under it in my chosen profession. But it is the reality that I and other restaurant workers live with.
My point is that you should direct your ire at the systems that built this shit show. Removing tipping with no other corrective measures doesn’t fix anything, it just makes life worse for people who are trying to make a living. Service industry jobs should treat tips as an added incentive for good service, but that’s just not the real world. I’ve already detailed a few of the reasons in my other comments but you don’t seem to be reading any of them anyway so I’m not going to waste anymore energy on this conversation.
This doesn’t make sense. If the final check + tips is the cost for the whole service, just include the tip % in the base price and pay proper wages. Margins have nothing to do with this, it’s just exploitation, it’s offloading the risk of enterprise onto the workers.
You all have been brainwashed.
As I explained in my post, restaurants that do this struggle to stay open because people only look at the price and are less likely to want to pay it. Even places that keep prices the same and add a service charge receive many complaints and a drop in business. My source is that it has happened in multiple restaurants I’ve worked at.
I doubt you read my whole post because I also spoke against the system. I’m not brainwashed, I’m living in reality.
Edit: side note, all of capitalism is built on exploitation of labor, it’s the defining characteristic
Just gonna add a source to back this up:
People are dumb. Even if they should know they’re saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it’s bad.
The point is that the menu prices should not need to go up, because tips should never have been a necessary part of their profit margins.
They were literally subsidizing their expenses (including payroll) with tips, and that’s made evident by the fact that the prices had to go up when tips were ended.
If your business cannot afford to survive without paying your employees a living wage, then your business shouldn’t exist.
Thank you for the actual source! I knew there would be evidence aside from my anecdote but didn’t particularly feel like looking it up. I’ve had this argument on lemmy a couple of times so I find it a bit tiresome. Appreciate the support :)
This could be solved by banning all tipping, then all restaurants would have to display the honest price upfront.
It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista’s jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they’re all getting a living wage, and your tip isn’t a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.
This is definitely one way to approach it, but I currently make minimum wage plus tips in a city where the minimum wage is over $20 and it’s still hard to make ends meet at times. I’m a single adult with no dependents and although I have a reasonable standard of living I’m by no means thriving. The tips are still a very necessary part of my paychecks.
The problem is complex, like I said in my first comment. Lots of sub-industries thrive off of milking restaurants, and simply doing away with tipping is not going to fix it. I just wish people would have some sense of worker solidarity instead of attacking people who live off of tips.
Yeah, I haven’t seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour is still isn’t a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, “Fight for Fifteen,” was outdated and needed to be the, “Fight for Twenty,” and we’ve had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.
If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren’t enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.
Most transactions are handled by card, it would be quite easy to enforce. At a minimum, payment processors could be legislated to not have the option for tipping. Banning the tipped minimum wage has already been done in a number of states and so they make minimum wage + tips, with that tip not actually being any more optional.
I’m not trying to be a dick but this is about as short sighted as someone saying they should make crime illegal.
It works in civilized countries, why not in the USA ?
Because different things are different
What’s really short sighted is not seeing how tipping develops into a bribery culture. We’ve already seen companies happily turning on the tipping option for the payment processor in situations where people used to never tip. Today you bribe your waiter to not shit in your food and berate you. Eventually you’ll have to bribe government workers to expedite (i.e. bother at all with) your paperwork. Gotta hustle and get that bag above all else, right?
Ignoring that possibility, it’s not like it’s a just practice in any way. Tipping amount is largely detached from level of service and factors such as attractiveness, race, how the person is feeling that day, etc make a greater impact.
You are ignoring my entire argument. At no point did I say tipping culture in the US is good nor have I defended it as a just way to distribute pay. It sucks, and it sucks to live under it in my chosen profession. But it is the reality that I and other restaurant workers live with.
My point is that you should direct your ire at the systems that built this shit show. Removing tipping with no other corrective measures doesn’t fix anything, it just makes life worse for people who are trying to make a living. Service industry jobs should treat tips as an added incentive for good service, but that’s just not the real world. I’ve already detailed a few of the reasons in my other comments but you don’t seem to be reading any of them anyway so I’m not going to waste anymore energy on this conversation.