So, how is the food?
In regards to law:
Everyone must be paid at least minimum wage. Let’s say a restaurant has a server that makes no tips. They resturant legally has to make up the lack of tips to the point of minimum wage for that week.
So the servers will always be getting at least minimum.
Since 2014 the IRS made business classify automatic gratuities as service charges. Under federal law, service charges belong to the business owner as gross receipts and may be retained in full by the owner. They may also be distributed among workers and are most commonly used to make sure tipped employees meet minimum wage for the weekly pay period.
A common problem arises as a service charge, even when distributed to an employee cannot be used to satisfy the requirements of the tip credit.
Tips are defined by the IRS to be, without compulsion, voluntary in amount, cannot be subject to negotiations by the employer and the customer determines who gets the tip.
Now different states, California especially, will add on additional rules. It would not surprise me to find New York State or even New York City has additional laws seeing as eating out is such big business there.
The phrasing of the OP seems to indicate it is a service fee, but the wording of it to cover admin costs, makes me think there’s some additional rule they’re trying to avoid.
This is strictly theoretical, though. Most servers who find themselves making less than minimum wage are too afraid of losing their jobs to demand that their employer adhere to minimum wage laws.
Thank you for this. I think you’ve done just about as good a job as anyone could do of justifying the policy described in the OP.
It’s also scummy for restaurants to take tips from servers to compensate back of house staff. They don’t have to smile and make nice with jerk wads, or assholes, they don’t have to smile sweetly and take public abuse, or shower demanding people with attention. Those are that skills that tipping rewards.
Back of house staff can often barely manage to be civil to server (customer) demands, and heap grief on servers for screw ups, deserved or not. Fact of life in the business, I’m afraid.
Servers earn their tips with their front of house skills and should not have to subsidize back of house staff. Tipping out to busboys and bartenders is fine, they are out in front meeting appearance and pleasantness standards, often unseen in the back of the house.
The server is not earning a 22% gratuity because the food came as promised in a timely fashion. That’s the base expectation. They earn it making two trips for bread, switching the order of food presentation, (for which they’ll take grief in the kitchen!), and smiling through every challenge, never ceasing attempting to meet customer demands. That’s the skill set that tips are meant to reward, in my experience.
Thanks everyone for your replies (I think this might be my most popular thread ever)!
Tired and Cranky makes the best case for a charitable interpretation, and if he is correct, I would certainly rescind my characterization of the policy as ‘horsesh!t.’ The missing data, of course, is how much the servers actually make (and how much did they make before the policy was enacted).
Ravenman suggested I note if there was a high turnover of servers. In my experience there, spanning a few years, the servers seem to be the same people I have always seen, and they always seem happy and attentive. (We will see what happens in the future.)
gatopescado asked how the food is; it’s good. Obviously, it’s a sushi and seafood buffet; it’s not like you’re going to Masa.
But you get a wide variety of maki and nigiri. There’s snow crab legs. Exotic things like monkfish liver (which I love, and have yet to find at any other establishment) and royal fern. The abalone salad is awesome. Fried oysters. At least two preparations of pork belly. Crab cakes. Several varieties of baked or fried whole fish. All yum!
Can the OP clarify the word ‘check’? Is there a surcharge if you pay by cash? Does check mean what we in the UK call a cheque?
No, it’s what you call a bill. It would make more sense if we called it a bill too but we don’t (we don’t call any other type of bill a check).
You might think that servers earn tips by being great to customers but research doesn’t show this to be true. It turns out that servers earn high tips by making customers want to earn their approval. This might be when servers are great to customers generally (the prototypical good, friendly server), or it might be by making customers feel inferior to servers (snooty restaurants with gorgeous/charming servers, or “professional” sommeliers who give “amazing” advice that must be recognized, or maitre d’s who somehow find you a special table on a night when supposedly they are fully booked), or it might be because the customer places what he knows to be unreasonable demands on the server and wants to win back the server’s approval (customers with known-bratty children or customers who make a million unreasonable requests/allergy accommodations). All these people tend to tip well, but it isn’t necessarily because the server was excellent.
You also point out the other part of the problem – the back of the house can have a massive effect on the quality of service but only the front of the house gets the tips. It will be the back of the house that minimizes order screw-ups, prepares food timely, deals with changing order of food presentation. So perhaps the skill that tips reward isn’t giving good, charming service to patrons but rather balancing that service with the soft skills the server needs to get the most out of the back of the house. Why not instead invent a compensation scheme that rewards the front of the house and the back of the house for working together instead?
You also may not care if the back of the house meets appearance standards, but you probably want them to meet cleanliness standards. It’s a restaurant’s and a patron’s common goal to have a happy back of the house too. You don’t want the back of the house punishing unfriendly servers by delaying meals, getting orders wrong, etc.
Yeah, because the back of house staff have nothing to do with allowing them to do that. :rolleyes:
The debit card fee is clearly something different-just a discount for paying cash. The amount of the discount is probably a little less than the debit card fee the restaurant pays. Restaurant and customer both win if you pay cash instead.
And, as I mentioned before, there are at least two reasons not to just raise prices 9%. First, it would make your advertised prices higher, which puts you at a competitive disadvantage. Second, patrons who see all the signs and notices about the 9% charge won’t tip on top of the fee. They know they have already paid a little extra for their service. That avoids the tip sharing dilemma I described. I have a hunch that the OP’s 9% charge might even have been picked to reflect roughly the average tip that buffet restaurant patrons were leaving anyway.
While the notion of going to a non-tipping model in which the servers and staff are paid a more reasonable wage directly, with some slight increase in menu pricing, is a good goal, you’re talking about going against a massive, generationally-ingrained cultural tide. I don’t know of any restaurant that’s tried it and succeeded very long, against the endless friction of misunderstanding. Customers will be wary and confused and almost unable to not tip. Staff will likely feel cheated, even if they’re making a higher and steadier wage, and be difficult to hire or retain. (No, neither makes senses - but we’re talking conditioned behavior, not rational action.)
It’s like trying to have a public mixed marriage 50 years ago - you can do it, but every step is going to be uphill.
And I am still not convinced this restaurant has found a key that suits anything but their momentary and rather peculiar assessment of the problem. We tip for service; we don’t pay ambiguous surcharges. Combining the two opposites is just going to erode their trade in the long run.
It seems to work at some high-end restaurants. Chez Panisse has done it for decades. I’m pretty sure The French Laundry still does it. These places have such high reputations that customers might be willing to leave their expectations at the door.
I think that’s precisely it. If you’re a global destination business - French Laundry, Disneyland or whatever - you can make your own rules. I’d wager the staff at CP or FL make more than some of their customers.
Maybe what’s needed is a national, branded campaign that restaurants could subscribe to - a “Visa” of restaurants, with a service mark that translates to “we pay our staff a living wage, so they are happy to give you excellent service without tips. We have absorbed some of this extra cost into our menu pricing and hope you appreciate our efforts to making this a better workplace and restaurant.”
I think this is more feature than bug: it’s not practicable for customers to interact with or directly influence the kitchen. We pay wait staff to do that for us.
That’s what tip pooling does, right?
No, because the back of the house can’t participate in the tip pooling under Department of Labor regulations. That’s the real problem. If everyone in the restaurant, or at least the non-managers, could participate in the tip pool, then the tip pool could be used to ensure that both the front of the house and the back of the house worked together to satisfy customers. And then, this one restaurant could use the tip pool this way, instead of going it alone, instituting the service charge, retraining all its customers to stop tipping, and hoping to still compete with other restaurants that scarcely pay their employees anything because they expect their customers to do it for them.
Yes, I read the OP, and perhaps I should have used the word “upcharge.”
So here: “Why a 9% mandatory UPCHARGE 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.”
Tip pooling doesn’t typically share with the back of the house, it just means the front people all get an equal share of the total collected rather than keeping the money they were handed for their level of performance.
Well, that’s kind of the whole problem with this thread. Other than that the restaurant is forbidding tips and charging a 9% surcharge, we don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
We ass/u/me they’ve raised staff pay to meet at least minimum-wage levels, because they’re required to by law. OTOH, restaurant owners tend to be a stupid, stubborn bunch and they might read the rules as that they only have to pay the staff some lesser amount, down to the tip base of $3.15 or whatever.
They might want customers to assume the 9% is going into the elevated salaries, as it should, whether it comes from higher menu prices or the surcharge. Maybe it’s going into their personal vacation fund.
We don’t know, and there are two possibly-not-related issues here.
I am pretty certain that I have heard from back-of-house employees about their receiving a share of tips in particular restaurants, which makes some sense. I’m curious how this could be illegal.
Equal sharing among front staff only sounds unhelpful at best (except to below-average members, obviously).