Is this restaurant stealing tips from its employees?

Cafe Society
21

That would be asinine, and you would probably lose, because it is “prominently displayed in the waiting area and also on placards at the table”. It would be worth it to eat there and hope that they call the po-po when you refuse to pay your full bill. Given recent reports that police brass don’t give two-shits about the use of excessive force by the rank & file, it has all the makings of good dinner theater.

…

NYC and NYS are trying to put ‘living wage’ laws into effect, and it sounds like this place is getting in front it. They don’t want to raise prices because they don’t want people comparison shopping (or maybe they are just too cheap to order new menus - wouldn’t be the first time).

Lastly Asian seafood/sushi buffets in Manhattan are a quarter a dozen. There is probably one of them for every 3 Starbucks.*

*Hyperbole, for those immune to it in the written word.

22

I 100% agree with this. The announcement was weird and good luck to that place keeping good servers.

23

I don’t get what the 9% surcharge is about, but I hate tipping and I think it should be abolished, so I would tend to look favorably on any restaurant that proclaims a no-tipping policy.

24

I don’t know if I would lose or not, but I doubt that the restaurant would want to go to court to find out.

The alternative, of course, would be to instead pay the restaurant exactly 9% of what’s listed on the menu, since they say that that’s all that’s needed to cover their costs.

25

Fuck their “administrative overhead” and the dragon it rode in on. Let them just raise their price 9% instead of trying to wank around the marketing and tax issues and essentially deceive the customer.

Every once in a while you see some business get “clever” about their sales and find some way to pad their margin like this. It’s usually some redneck/coal-roller type who has decided that if he has to pay taxes, he’s going to make his customers do it for him - or business license costs, or merchant service costs, or uniform laundering, or whatever.

These are usually morons who don’t really have any idea how to run a business and are shocked, shocked I tell you to find out that businesses have overhead costs that don’t disappear straight into sales and profits. Such costs are “unfair,” you see. And usually from gummint oppression, so there.

As for tipping - as long as they are meeting minimum-wage requirements etc., it’s their call. Assuming they can hang on to quality service people who aren’t illegal immigrants, that is.

26

Chronos, as D_Odds said, they’d be more likely to call the police than sue you. You want to try explaining to the officer why you are refusing to pay your bill in full?

27

I would refuse to pay an administrative fee and I would contact the BBB and anyone else I could think of.

28

The BBB and most Chambers of Gladhanding and so forth are about as useful and influential as squirrels. When was the last time you looked up a BBB listing on anything but something involving major costs, probably for remodeling or car repair?

I’d ring in city and state tax officials and the state labor board. :smiley:

29

If they’re paying their servers a real wage instead of the “waitress” minimum wage, then there’s nothing even remotely illegal about what they’re doing. They’re charging a price, and a clearly identified (though bullshit) fee on top of that price. They also do not allow tipping, and pay their staff a normal wage, like Burger King.

30

Leaving the tipping issue aside, I don’t see what the whining about the administrative fee is about. It’s a way to adjust prices without having to reprint all their menus (assuming they also offer table service in addition to the buffet).

31

It’s deceptive, because I would assume that like most buffet places their selling point is the $4.99 or $6.99 or whatever on the sign, the wall and the menu. Finding out when you’re already standing at the register, whether it’s before or after you’ve eaten, that it’s really - SURPRISE! - ten percent more than that is bait-and-switch. Sure, you could walk out if it’s pay-first, but most people probably won’t. Probably won’t return, either.

It’s bad practice to play the old Lucy “for the works!” shell game on customers, no matter what the business, especially with surcharges and so forth in places where they are not normally encountered.

32

From the OP:

33

I think if I were a customer there, the first thing I’d do is ask my server what they were paid (and if they didn’t want to get specific, I’d ask: are you getting paid at least minimum wage?), and I’d also ask what would happen to them if I left a tip on the table and they collected it for themselves.

Even if they’re getting a fair wage, I’d like to leave a small tip for good service, and they certainly can’t sic the cops on me for doing so; the real question is, would I be causing the server any problems?

But the 9% surcharge would leave a sour taste in my mouth. And it’s Manhattan, fercryinoutloud. Just a hunch, but I just might be able to find another restaurant with similar offerings that didn’t have that stupid charge.

34

The restaurant might be making an awkward effort to accomplish something that you might think is actually worthwhile. Generally, labor regulations provide that only service staff who customarily receive tips can share in tip pools. That means waiters, waitresses, and bussers, but not the chefs or dishwashers. http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs15.pdf

In most restaurants, the waiters or waitresses keep all the tips, though sometimes they share with the bussers as part of a pool. This creates a massive income disparity where the tipped service staff in most busy restaurants make a pretty good living compared to the back of the house staff that doesn’t share in tips. This creates resentment between the front of the house workers and the back of the house. It doesn’t make for a well-run restaurant.

But who is doing most of the work in a buffet restaurant? Not the waiters and waitresses. I’m betting the bus staff keeps busy but the heavy lifting is being done by the chefs and dishwashers.

In a buffet restaurant, because the wait staff doesn’t need to spend a lot of time explaining the menu, taking orders, etc, the restaurant manager can and does conserve on waiter/waitress labor cost by spreading a a small wait staff across a lot of tables. So, even if the tips in buffet restaurants aren’t as good per table, the wait staff can still make a fortune giving indifferent service to a lot of tables at the same time.

So, if you want good staff to keep the buffet running well, you need to pay the back of the house better. And, since you expect a lot less of your waiters and waitresses, you could live with less capable waiters and waitresses. So, ideally, the restaurant manager would find a way to supplement the wages of the back of the house staff, even at the expense of the wait staff. That brings us to a mandatory service charge. With it, the restaurant manager can raise the wages of the chefs and dishwashers, while finding perfectly adequate, lower cost, wait staff that are maybe less professional than the servers in high-end restaurants. Since they no longer receive tips, the employer can’t take the tip credit and has to pay them at least the “full” minimum wage. The restaurant you went to claims they pay a living wage which probably means at least $10 per hour. The wait staff may not like losing the tips, but they like that their income is more predictable.

Why not just raise the prices 9% and dispense with the service charge? Because customers who don’t pay the service charge will feel compelled to tip anyway, recreating the tip pooling problem they were trying to avoid. It also means that their advertised prices are 9% higher than their competitors, and no restaurant manager wants to offer the same product at a higher price.

35

It’s really weird. All businesses have overhead and you set your prices accordingly. You don’t go adding some bogus charge onto each check to cover it.

36

This sort of reminds me of a policy my local Popeye’s Chicken has.

They don’t charge a debit card fee; however, “We charge all customers a 39-cent administrative fee, and offer a convenience discount of 39 cents to anyone who pays by cash or credit card.”

As for the OP, I am in the “just raise all of the prices by 9%” camp. Why would any business even mention that it’s an administrative charge? I can understand why they don’t allow tipping; it’s almost certainly to raise servers’ wages to the non-tipping minimum wage, although the law says that if a business pays a “tipping wage,” it has to make up the difference between what the employee got in salary plus tips and what the employee would have received under the non-tipping minimum wage, so it’s not necessarily a question of the servers making more money - at least, not if the restaurant wasn’t breaking the law beforehand.

37

If this is a place that you go to on a somewhat regular basis, I propose the following test:

  1. If you notice high staff turnover, the restaurant is ripping off their employees and you should stop going there.

  2. If the employees are not fleeing a sinking ship, then this restaurant should win the business of the year award for compensating waitstaff fairly without relying on the goodwill of customers.

Why a 9% mandatory gratuity on one’s bill is a huge problem, but a 20% optional gratuity is the way Jesus intended things to be, I simply cannot understand.

38

Except you’re gonna want that 9% back if the service sucks, right?

39

Did you even read the OP? It’s not a gratuity, it’s a fee to cover ‘administrative overhead’ (whatever that is) and is not given to the employees.

40

Doesn’t really matter. There is no business I can think of that operates by tacking an arbitrary overhead surcharge onto its listed and defined price structure. It’s an unexpected cost that is going to take most customers by surprise, no matter how well it’s displayed inside the business.

The closest example I can think of is the fuel surcharges that some transportation and freight companies imposed during the gas price spikes. That made some sense over raising prices, since it was assumed (correctly) that the spike in fuel costs was temporary, but not so temporary it could be absorbed by the airline, bus company or trucking line.

Yeah, sure, any business can just tack on a surcharge. Fine. It’s just a stupid move because it usually represents some kind of deception (like eBay sellers who sold stuff for a penny, with $19.99 shipping) or attempt to get around sales tax, tip levels, something. Yes: “It’s just not how it’s done” - and it’s likely to be a self-destructive move because customers will take it as an excess cost, not just a price increase.

So defend it if you like, but it’s stupid, and it’s very rarely done because it is stupid.