As an owner of a bar who also works as aa bar tender I think getting rid of tipping is a terrible idea. Average tips at my bar are about 10% {$1 on a $10 drink) occasionally though ill have someone in having a great day or who really loves my service and ill get a $20 tip on a $40 tab. This probably occurs everyother week or so. If I priced in the tips I would do it at the $1 level and servers would lose more then an hour per week of take home pay equilivent.
This doesn’t account for the majority of people who take an $8 dollar drink pay $8.51 with tax and then tip 1.49. If I priced that in then my servers would be tipped differently based on what drinks the customer ordered and would only get a $1.36 tip on $10 dollar drinks. Now they have an incentive to sell my cheaper drinks where my margin it lower. I would rather have people get paid on how happy the customer is that way we all win and occasionally if the starts line up my bartender walks away with $100 cash at the end of the night.
When I was first learning about how to tip, it was very clear that tipping my waiter or waitress did not include alcohol or sales tax. I could, if I desired to, tip separately the bartender and/or the chef. I stick with that.
Be careful, if you keep talking like this you are going to start to sound like someone who is advocating for compassion. what are you trying to do, give Sean Hannity a heart attack?
It’s not communist, and a smart waiter will share tips with the busboys, bar-backs or whatever. I know a lot of folks who are servers, and this is common. And if it isn’t, the owner should put a system in place to make it happen.
In the long run, undeclared tips hurt employees since it does not go into their wages and hence social security. This accounts for most restaurants, but it varies among different work places. Baristas actually have their tips calculated into their paychecks, this is common in Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and Starbuck’s.
I am trying in vain to find the article that cites the real figures, and when I find it I will come back and post it here. It was a paragraph in an article on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law.
I think we should have the same system as in Britain and most of Europe, where tipping generally does not occur. People should earn a decent wage that is fair and livable so that they won’t bark for tips. In the UK one does not tip a bar tender who just simply opened your beer bottle for you.
I see tips as money you find walking down the street, at the moment it is good but long term it is not on your declared wages.
I am not against tipping, but for workers to rely on tips to make money is just wrong, it is slave wage. Sometimes getting tips when doing a favor is great, only as a side but not to live on tips. I never relied on tips, only on my hourly wage because quite frankly tips were only a short term thrill. Heck I found $40 on the street, but really there is no long term benefit.
If the money never got taken from me, why would I lament not getting it back in the long run? If social security is still around then, I’d have the money already; if social security ain’t long for this world, it’s a question of me having that money at all.
In my extensive experience in the service industry the tip says more about the customer than the service or the food.
I’m ok with people who don’t tip, but if it’s the cultural expectation in the place you’re at say you don’t tip up front when the menus appear and you’ll get the service you won’t pay for.
Have you much experience with cultures where tipping waitstaff isn’t expected?
Americans in general want prompt friendly service. Many cultures have a far more leisurely approach to the dining experience and don’t mind aloofness from their servers.
Customers can be demanding and rude, with tipping removed from the equation they’ll get an opportunity to hear all about it.
Agree, I find the overbearing USA approach very off-putting. It sticks in the throat a little to have to pay for service that makes me uncomfortable, sadly though that is a cultural expectation.
Thankfully I mostly vacation in places where tipping is not expected, the servers and other staff are paid a proper wage and the service is pitched at the right level for me.
Tell me what the product is and what the price is. you bring it, I’ll pay the bill and we can all get on with our lives. If you are only going to do your best if you think you are going to get a bit extra then I don’t reckon the service industry is for you.
Sure but none of my points only apply to bars. By making the restaurant bake in the tip amount they are going to use average tip and with restaurants already required to pay low tips up to minimum wage all that is being accomplished is to get rid of the really big tips…
When I was in Europe a couple of years ago the prices on the menu we’re in whole Euros so that means that the owner isn’t taking their base cost and mark up then rounding to the nearest whole number that tax and tip gets applied to, instead they are putting tip before the rounding. This will either cause employees to make less power item our the owner to make less. So using my bar as an example since I don’t know restaurant numbers, a $12 drink and a $10 drink cost $2.25 and $2 to make. If a server is tipped 20% then they will make $2.4 and $2 per drink but we’re not going to charge $14.4 for a drink so it get rounded to the nearest dollar luckily the math works out for $10 excepts for my tipping to whole dollars after tax example above. So do I found my drink to $15 and make the customer pay more then they would have for the drink originally or do we round down? There is no way I’m going to be able to soak my customers like that for the long term so it’s now a $14 drink. So who pays the $0.4? We can make it so either way the server makes the same tip wether they serve a $14 drink or a $12 drink losing me a way to incentive servers to push my higher margin items. I could eat the $0.4 cents but now my higher margin item is the $10 drink which earns the server less money while also creating an incentive for them to push the $12 drink
Of course there is another option we could aggregate the average tips per hour and just add that into their pay check. This is where bars a restaurants diverse but I’ll stick with the numbers I know. We make about $1,500 per week in tipable revenue so if we get 20% tips it would be about $300 per week in tips in 26 hours of being open plus another 8 of work when the bar is closed so 34 hours per week or about an $8.82/hr raise. Unfortunately we make $700 in one night each week but we never know if it will be Thursday, Friday or Saturday and Sunday is always about $100-200. So if I have 4 bartenders that rotate their days each week one will work as hard as the other two main night people worked combined and will work three times harder then the Sunday person. Now to make it more unfair we’re open 4 hrs on Thursday, 4 hrs on Friday, 10 hrs on saturday and 6 hrs on Sunday. My employees are now making $14.04 per hour (really it would be 14) so Thursday maked them $56.16, Friday $56.16, Saturday $140.04 and Sunday $84.24. Where before it would have been either Thursday/Friday $20.88 + either 140 or 60, Saturday would be $52.20 + 140 or 60, with Sunday looking at $31.32 + 40. Under this plan my risk as an employees is mostly zero closer to zero if it spread it over a month or year rather then a week.what is really happening is the person working the hardest (most likely Friday or thursday) is subsidizing the other workers.in gerneral this would cause sunday to be the most desirable shift since you’d make the most miney for the least work.
Typical experience when eating in a sit-down restaurant:
Be seated by one person, wait for other person to show up, try not to cringe when they say they will be “taking care” of me, tell them what food and drink I want, wait for my food to arrive, try to enjoy the first couple of bites while knowing I will be interrupted any moment now, get interrupted asking how the first couple of bites are tasting, mumble something positive with a full mouth, eat the rest of my meal in between at least two more interruptions asking if I want anything (I don’t), let them refill my drink even though I don’t want them to because it’s simpler to let them than to try to get across that I’m perfectly okay with a 1/2-full drink which apparently makes me a freak, wait for my check, wait for my check, wait for my check, wait for my check.
Apparently the majority of people like a combination of cloying attention followed by a 180-degree transition into an Amelia Earhart impersonation. My ideal restaurant would have sit-down quality food and fast-food quality service.
Whenever possible, I eat at the bar. Sometimes the service is a little slower, but the conversation is usually much better and you don’t ever have to worry about over-attentive services.
Regarding the higher tips for more expensive restaurants: I only go to a “high class” dinner maybe once or twice a year when on vacation ($150-300 check range for two, plus alcohol). It seems like the wait staff at those restaurants are extremely well trained, on point, and in general very impressive compared with a “normal” restaurant.
They seem to be a lot more socially nuanced and were able to be more or less perfect with what each customer wanted. Some customers want someone who hovers and never lets their glass go below 3/4 full. Some, like myself, don’t need much attention. The wait staff at the high end restaurants have always seemed to pick up on this within minutes somehow and you don’t have to give them any subtle or obvious hints.
I’m pretty sure if you offered a waiter at Applebees a job at one of those high class restaurants, many of them could do just as good of a job under the circumstances. Some of them are also stoners and would fail. I don’t know how the career progression goes, but I assume you have to work your way up to working at a high scale restaurant. I didn’t ever feel bad having to tip for a higher total, given that the wait staff was so impressive.
Are you sure that’s accurate? Becasue the Federal law and most state laws don’t require that each individual hour be brought up to the non-tipped minimum, but rather that the average over a pay period must be at least the non-tipped minimum.
Someone earlier mentioned that the same restaurant wouldn't serve a $20 bottle of wine and a $200 bottle of wine. That's true, but it's not all that difficult to find a place where 2) the least expensive entree is half the price of the most expensive and b) they involve roughly equivalent amounts of work. Here's the thing though - I have heard every reason in the world for why and how people should tip. Often the same people give reasons that contradict each other. For example,
1)You tip based on the price- a $20 steak gets twice the tip of a $10 hamburger. Doesn’t matter than in most restaurants serving a steak is no more work than serving a burger.
2) You tip on the undiscounted price. If you have a “buy one, get one” offer so that you pay $20 for two steak dinners rather than one, you should tip the server on the full $40 price as it was just as much work.
3) Related to number 2- the restaurant gave you a discount on the food, but the server didn’t give you a discount on the service so you tip on the full $40 price.
4) You should tip even when you get no service (takeout) or minimal service (a buffet where the only service is plate-clearing)
These collide all the time - why am I tipping based on price in number 1 and based on work in number 2? If I’m paying for service in number 3, why am I expected to tip when I get no service in number 4?
I’m in the business and I’m ambivalent about tipping. As a system of compensation it’s clearly irrational and causes problems but I suspect that if our restaurant moved to a No Tipping model I’d make less money. Over the years I’ve gotten very good at extracting extra payment from customers. I do think that a big problem with the system hasn’t been covered here.
The main problem from my view is that since employers pay so little out of pocket for our labor they don’t respect our time. In our case, time isn’t money. At least not much. Our servers make $2.83/hour. That’s around 1/4 of what a line cook makes and 1/3 of a hosts’ wages. So when the restaurant is slow they cut the host. Let the servers watch the door. They send the dishwasher home. Let the servers wash the dishes. It’s so slow your servers are just standing around? Send some home so the rest can make money? Nah! Grab a sani bucket and wash down the walls in the prep room.
Yeah, there’s a definite component of “We’re not paying you $2.13 to stand around, so go do some job we’d otherwise have to pay some guy $10/hr to do.”
Back in the day, I was a busboy and a janitor at a Chili’s. I’d clock in at 8, work until 11:30 as a janitor (min. wage), and then clock out and back in as a busboy ($2.01 + 1% of the total restaurant tips). Now in general, I tended to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-6/hr for the busboy time when the tips were factored in, since I usually worked about 4 hours (11:30-3:30).
But like you say, if it was slow, they’d stick me to doing some horrid grunt labor like scraping gum off the sidewalk in July… in Houston… at 2 pm. Or scrubbing the back pavement near the grease trap… in July, in Houston at 2 pm. Or something equally awful. All for $2.01/hr, because somehow I had to be busting my ass every second. And I explicitly couldn’t clock out and clock back in as a janitor to do this crap either. So they basically got well under minimum wage labor out of me… without tips. Sometimes those bastards would even do things like have the wait staff bus their own tables, while they enslaved me at $2.01/hr to go do some other grunt labor somewhere. That had to be illegal, but what’s a 16 year old kid on a summer job going to do?
So ultimately there are two things- one, even as a busboy making a fraction of the tips that waiters and waitresses made, I still made nearly double the minimum wage of the era, and second, management doesn’t respect people making the sub-minimum wage’s time.