Like caphillobbyguy, I’m a former waitron-- off and on from 1980 through 1997 (mostly, alas, on) and held the occasional back of the house job during this time as well. I waited tables in Boston, NYC, New Orleans, Richmond VA, a resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Dublin, Ireland. So here are a few painfully well informed comments on the tipping idea.
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Just to get this out of the way first-- as your waitress, I perform a service for you without any guarantee of payment. Would a carpenter build your kitchen cabinets without any upfront payment? Does your doctor wait to find out if you have insurance after your exam? Even if you tried to blow off your payment, or even part of your payment, they have the option of taking you to court. I do not have that. Furthermore, I will be taxed on an assumed tip regardless of whether or not I get it. Yes, the tipping system sucks, but possibly it’s better than the alternatives. More on this later.
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I have worked in very high end and very low end restaurants and bars, and a lot in between. In a high end restaurant, waiters are assigned fewer tables a piece, so the waiter has more time to spend on you. High end restaurants also have more back-up staff-- plate runners, sommeliers, bus staff, hosts/maitre d’s, et cetera. The waiter is expected to tip out everyone except perhaps the maitre d’. Also, high end restaurants have fewer seatings a night-- you probably will not turn your tables more than three to, at most, five times in an eight hour shift, and it’s a rare night that you don’t have at least one party in for the long haul. In a bar or neighborhood place, or even your friendly local dive, there is less staff per table (even if you see a host and bus boy, trust me, they’re spread much thinner and there won’t be a sommelier). For the waiter, the key in these places is volume and speed.The waiter is responsible for many more tables and must turn them as quickly as is reasonable-- or pump the squatters with as many drinks as possible, depending on the place. A high end waiter has more duties per table (those crumbs don’t brush themselves, ya know), will get more cash per tip, but will only have a few tips a night-- because they’re focusing on just a few of you-- and will often tip out more. On the low end, you have more general responsibilities, like busing and prepping desserts, you get less cash per 20% tip, have more tips, and may tip out less (but more on that also below). For the waiter, it’s about the same. Restaurant popularity and management practices determine how much you’ll make in a given place much more than high end/low end.
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New York and Massachusetts labor law states that a waitron may be compelled to tip out up to, but not more than, 20% of his earnings per shift. This is BS-- I have rarely worked any place where we tipped out less than 20%, and 25% to 35% is more likely. No one held a gun to our heads to do it (although I have been told by management to do it). But your bus boy deserves better than a few bucks at the end of the night, on top of his minimum wage. Restaurant work is hard, dirty, physically grueling work for every worker there, with a high injury rate and screwy hours, with people often finishing a shift after subways stop running, and if the owner won’t pay the back-up staff a decent wage, the wait staff makes up for it.
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The minimum amount any waiter is allowed to declare per the IRS as tip income is 8% of pre-tax sales, and I haven’t worked anyplace since 1985 that would allow the wait staff to declare this low. Since 1990, every place I’ve worked has demanded that we declare at least 12% of our sales, regardless of whether or not we made that. Particularly as restaurants have computerized, and sales are tracked constantly, restaurants declare your tips automatically and the waiter has no recourse. The last place I worked declared 14% of our pre-tax sales as tip income. We could voluntarily increase it, but we could not decrease it. Many restaurants were audited during the eighties-- frankly, many restaurants were tax write-offs or money laundering fronts back then-- and the IRS is very snarky about restaurants in general.
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So, by the way, is your local labor board. About ten years ago, I had the thrilling occasion to call the labor board when twice in one week I escorted coworkers to the hospital with their severed fingers in a glass of ice water (one waiter, one prep cook). We has a broken deli slicer. The management was reticent about paying the hospital bills (Very few restaurants give their staff health insurance. I have never had it in a restaurant. Hotels, chains, and the very rare union restaurant are the only restaurants that occasionally, not consistently, do). Anyway, I had a very nice conversation with a very sympathetic woman who told me that all restaurant claims were taken seriously. Restaurants, she said, had one of the highest rates of worker exploitation, but it was rarely reported because of fear of losing a job and/or the large number of illegal or “twilight” (legal, sort of) workers. I can vouch for the latter-- we withdrew the complaint when she told me they would need the documentation of any workers who were present during the accidents. We just didn’t know, and we didn’t want half our kitchen staff deported if they weren’t fully legal. The guys ended up threatening to sue, and got the hospital bills covered. Nothing else, though-- no lost wages.
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Which leads to this point: if you think that what a waiter makes has inflated disprapportionately-- say, what a waiter makes today compared to 1975, considering cost of living increases, inflation, and so on-- you’re off your bean. Or, you’ve never worked a service-type blue collar job. Consider this: in any given market, the overwhelming majority of waiting jobs pay about $2.85 an hour. If this is where you are skilled and experienced, you probably will not have any choice but to take this wage. You will not receive health insurance (after the Twin Towers went down, I read a story in the New York Times that less than 4% of the restaurant jobs in NYC offer insurance to any of their staff. In my experience, NYC is high compared to the rest of the country. Also, some restaurants only offer health benefits to the kitchen staff). You will not have sick days. You probably will not accumulate vacation days. In addition to the time you spend actually waiting tables and earning tips, you will have a minimum of one, more commonly two, and as high as three hours a shift of prepping, stocking, cleaning, and doing all the things that have to be done for the restaurant to function, and you will do this for $2.85 and no tips during this time. Because you are the lowest paid person on the staff, management will love to give you the jobs that they would have to pay another staff member a higher hourly wage to perform. Because almost all of your income depends on tips, any slack time in the business, be it seasonal, catastrophic (think tourism after 9/11), weather related, for a day, a week, a year, will directly effect you income, immediately. A fire in the abandoned building across the street means you will not make any money today. If, for some reason, you go on unemployment, your payment is based on $2.85 an hour, not your wage plus tips. Apply for a mortgage, and the bank only considers half your declared tips. In my first waiting job, in 1980, I was paid $2.00/hour. In my last one in 1997, I was paid $2.85. In Massachusetts, there was a fight in the State House a few years ago to increases the service minimum to $3.10. I don’t know if it was successful. Meanwhile, my rent alone has quadrupled since 1990, for the same type of apartment. Restaurant prices have not quadrupled in the same period. They have gone up, but not proportionately to the cost of basic needs like housing and health care. You may be paying $30.00 for a dish that was $24.00 ten years ago, and $3.50 for a previously $3.00 beer, and you may be tipping 18% rather than 15% as you did then, but my subway fare to get to work has doubled. Way way back when, waiting was treated like any other job, with a decent if not extravagent hourly wage, all of the protections and benefits received by other workers, where loyalty was appreciated and good work was rewarded by the business owner and not expected to be provided by the clientel. Tips were the icing, not the cake. I don’t know when exactly waiting became Something Other, when restaurant owners started agitating to be able to pay extremely low ages, while crossing their fingers that tips would make up the rest. Waiting has always been strange in as much as it was a servant’s job without the noblesse oblige traditionally held towards a household servant. However, this is the sytem we have…
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… and I agree that it should change. Basically, this could happen two ways: either tipping at a set minimum could become compulsary, or tipping could be abolished and prices hiked to pay wait staff a consistant decent wage unrelated to sales. Either way, wages have to go up. I’ve talked to a lot of restaurant owners and mangers about it, and they all hate the idea of hiking wages per the latter choice (surprise!), and they all have argued that to compensate the staff equal to tips, they would have to hike prices well beyond what patrons currently pay in tips. In short, to give the staff that additional 20%, they would have to increase prices well beyond twenty percent. Undoubtedly this is partly due to increased paperwork (now done by the staff), having to provide benefits they don’t have to currently, and so on. It would also be becuse they would have to increase the wages of everyone in the restaurants who depends on the waiters tips. So I would be thrilled if we had a compulsary 20% add on. Not 15%: if it is pre-tax, it would have to be 20%. If someone tipped me 15% pre-tax, in my mind they are tipping less than 15% on their bill, and while I didn’t check every time, I checked often enough. Waiting makes you mercenary. As far as I was concerned, anything less than 15% was a shaft and that person was begging for their coffee to be Visined next time they were in. And I deserved 20%…
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…because I was a damn good waitress. I will not go into now the ins and outs of waiting (this post is already too long), but if you think waiting is a minmum wage job, then you need to go do it-- and donate all your earnings above minimum wage to the Windows on the World Fund. As I said above, it’s hard work. I’m not even forty and I have arthiritis in both knees and a bad back to attest to many hours waiting. I highly recommend Bruce Henderson’s book, Waiting, if you want an amusing inside view on the job.
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So why does anyone do it? Overwhelmingly for the hours. Two parents can split childcare duties if one can work nights. As Falcon5768 mentioned above, it can be worked around a school schedule. I waited tables while variously teaching high school, working for Planned Parenthood and Aids Action, and freelance writing, all of which did not pay well enough to not have a second job. A friend of mine went back to waiting tables after years of social work so she could take care of her mother with Alzheimer’s. Also, under the current system,you leave with cash every shift, which made a big difference to me when I was barely making my rent teaching. If I could eat ramen until my Thursday shift, I could afford groceries between paychecks.
Also, a lot of the time, I loved it. I liked making people happy. I liked the window on human nature. In some places-- not all-- I genuinely liked the patrons. Hell, I married one. Some of my best friendships are with either co-workers or patrons from the restaurants where I worked.
However, I wouldn’t set foot on a restaurant floor again for less than twenty bucks an hour. If you think that’s high, consider that the last few years I worked, via the wonders of computers, I know I rarely sold less than $300 an hour, in a moderately priced bistro, and I had shifts where I sold over $4000.00 in eight hours. And the majority of my customers were happy. And I ran my ass off for them. So twenty an hour would be my absolute minimum.