I am having trouble finding cites that clearly state they are talking about total income including tips.
A friend of mine said she made over 36,000 a year on average working at Olive Garden, and that in general she found this typical. (She says she had a friend who tended to make in the around $60,000 due to extra shifts and just being good at it.)
But I am disputing that this is typical. Every citation for server income averages I can find puts it at more like 21,000 for full time.
It’s wildly variable based on the skill of the server, the time slots they are on duty, how busy the restaurant is, the demographics of the clientele and the price points of the restaurant. Asking for an average is almost meaningless.
If you are decent server in a chain restaurant in a mid market location and you are given decent hours you can normally make about twice to three times the prevailing minimum wage for the area on an hourly basis.
There is a real world caveat and that is if your customer base is heavily African American or evangelical (regardless of color) you will not receive much in tips vs other demographics. As demographic cohorts those groups do not tip all that well even for good service.
I would imagine servers at high end restaurants make more, but you have to consider the dining pace is slower and turning tables doesn’t go as fast. Plus, some restaurants require servers to share tips with busboys, hostesses, and perhaps the food runners or cook staff.
Unless it’s a high end restaurant I don’t think many servers make a long term career out of waiting tables.
I was a server for thirty years. Worked in different kinds of places from beer halls up to the snobbiest high end catering. That incomes varies so enormously, from place to place, is probably why numbers are hard to pin down. There is often even a wide variance between servers working on the same floor.
(I stayed at it because I was good at it, and always made a real good living. Also I could enjoy a lifestyle with a lot of freedom. Plus working at night really suited me.)
I waited tables for a while, at a suburban mid-range family/steak restaurant. Even within the same restaurant, the amount of tips varied hugely, depending on the shift. ’
Weekday breakfast? The meals were inexpensive, so tips were low.
Sunday breakfast? Good tips, but you really worked for it, as there were lots of big groups, and lots of kids.
Weekday lunch? The most sought after shift, because there were lots of groups putting lunch on a company credit card, which meant good tips. Also, turnover was fast, since many people had to get back to the office. It was a crazy 2 hours, but people would easily earn min wage * 15, for those 2 hours.
What’s not included? All the time spent prepping or cleaning up the dining room, or hours when there are maybe 2 tables in the whole place.
Also, waiting tables wasn’t a 40hr a week job. The restaurant had probably 6 wait staff during weekday lunches, and Sunday mornings, but only 1 at 3PM. If the weather was bad, and there weren’t many customers, management would send you home early. Heavy road construction outside the restaurant? Cut back the hours some more.
I know a guy in NYC that waits tables at The Strip House in midtown. He claims that he makes about $100k a year. He says that he normally takes in about $400 a night in tips, which would assume at an average of 15%, that the tabs for the night total about $2,700, That’s not too outrageous for a high end steak house where the average meal per person is going to be more than $100 a head. He just needs 250 nights a year at that rate to get $100k.
You aren’t going to make that at the Olive Garden.
What I can tell you for sure is that most of the hourly figures are suspect, so I’m not sure about the yearly salaries. For example, on Glassdoor, there are a whole bunch of “server jobs” at various restaurants that pay somewhere between $3-6/hr. That might be true, if we’re only counting direct wages paid via paycheck through the employer, but tips are income as well. But there’s no way that $3-6/hour includes tips - why would you work for $6 including tips when you could get minimum wage (7.25) or more at a retail store.
The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13, and during Mr. Pink-esque rants this often leads to people complaining that servers rely on tips and that the system, however unfair, makes tips necessary. This is pretty true, but relies on a misconception: if you work a 10 hour shift and don’t receive a single tip, you do not gross 21 measly bucks. The employer is supposed to pay the difference up to the federal minimum wage of $7.25, your state and locality may vary (and in some tipped minimum = state minmum). That means that you would earn the same take-home pay whether you got zero tips or the equivalent of $5.12/hour, the source would just be different.
I suspect creative accounting on the GlassDoor page. Wikipedia says (in 2012), the average was $11.82.
I used to wait tables many aeons ago. Word was (and still is, AFAIK) if you actually complained to your boss that you didn’t make enough tips that they’d have to make up the difference, that you’d be kicked to the curb pretty quickly, since that pretty much meant you were the worst waitstaff ever.
The last place I waited tables was one of those 10-page menu “Greek” family restaurants. Menu prices were really cheap, maybe $7-9 a plate at most (late '90s), and also attracted a lot of senior citizen clientele, so tips were not great. Still, it was a rare night I didn’t get at least $20/hr in tips. The owners were rather miserly, so having an 8-table section was the norm. If you’re agile, not hideous, and have a decent memory and personality, it’s not a bad job in the slightest. I honestly can’t think of any other job that has a better rate of return vs. skillset/experience needed.
However, I don’t think anyone worked a 40 hour week. I think I worked about half that, so I couldn’t have lived on just that amount. At the same time, I also worked weekends for just over minimum wage at a nearby joint from 7 AM-3 PM as prep cook, sometimes dishwasher, sometimes waitress (depending on who was too hungover to come in that day :rolleyes:) and I brought home much less money from that place for similar hours worked. And yes, if I had to wait tables that day, the owners made sure to bump me down to the ~$2.15/hr that was minimum wage for waitstaff…
This is a fairly hard question to answer definitively because of the prevalence of tipping versus employer paid wages. I worked high end receptions as a tuxedo clad caterer in college in New Orleans during the mid-90’s and I averaged $20+ dollars an hour and occasionally $40+ if the host was feeling generous. I made $300 my first day on the job in 7 hours by working two receptions. The job was fun too and I got to meet many interesting people.
That wasn’t the big money though. That came from our well-known bar next door where I filled in sometimes. My bartender coworkers averaged over $100 an hour on Friday and Saturday nights and could easily take home $400 - $800 CASH on each of those two 6 hour shifts. Of course, those slots were highly coveted and you had to be very fast and skilled but the money was definitely there to be had for those that made it. You could live quite well just by working a couple of good shifts a week and a lot more if you worked other shifts in multiple busy places.
The reporting problem is that many if not most tips aren’t reported for tax purposes. I have never met a single bartender, waiter or waitress that reports all of their cash tips. Why would they? It is a pain in the ass and costs them money and hassle. Once you have the money in hand, you just spend it and that is it. You may even have to split some of it with other staff like dishwashers and busboys and you can bet your ass they aren’t diligently recording that $20 bill in Quicken when they get home.
You have to work at a given establishment to learn how much people are really making.
I agree. At the same time I was doing catering and bartending, I also worked as an administrative assistant and research assistant in college. The pay discrepancy was unreal.
I made $5 an hour at the latter two and many times that at the former but the college professors and supervisors didn’t seem to get that. I was doing the campus jobs mainly for experience but I wasn’t going to balk at any amount of money. Still, it was more than a little disconcerting to see that my campus jobs that required a reasonable amount of knowledge and experience paid far less and were much less generous overall than my nights and weekend gigs at the hotel and fancy events around New Orleans.
It kind of screwed me up for later jobs as well. I was so used to getting relatively high pay, free gourmet food, free drinks and everything else at 19 - 22 that most other people seemed cheap by comparison even when they thought they were being generous.