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Comment by surrealvortex | Hacker News Reader

Unless everyone decides to kill tips all at once, this will never work out. No server will work for a fixed 20% increment when they have the potential to get a lot more than that, especially on Saturday nights. There have been plenty of examples of this not working out [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/15/478096516/why...

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Very rarely do I cite market forces to address social problems, but to me this feels like an appropriate situation for it. Restaurants are constantly getting applications, and many who do not do well on high-tip nights will appreciate the stable paycheck. I won't put non-sense statistics to it, but while many servers do earn huge paychecks from tips, many others scrape by and fight for hours at minimum wage and have the constant threat of termination looming over them when they aren't able to get enough tips to cover their wages and the restaurant has to pay the difference. (Assuming the restaurant is even operating on the level)

There will be a period of social adjustment and probably some resentment as tipping restaurant hold-outs have servers that brag about huge payouts. But over time the more stable paycheck will be more reliable and better for servers, and while some servers may leave over lack of tips, they will soon find it difficult to find a place that does have a tipping policy.

But part of the problem is that the tipping-culture already VERY quickly corrects that problem.

Restaurants generally over-staff, and tend to get really cutthroat about who stays and who gos when it's needed. A place I worked when I was younger would regularly take the lowest performer off of saturday nights every saturday night.

The ones who aren't making a huge amount of money on the busy nights are already removed from it before they can even think to complain about it.

And it was a very "open secret" that if the restaurant needed to "supplement" your wage for ANY reason, you were going to be gone the next week. I saw it happen many times. So it was somewhat common for the wait staff to "pad" their own wages with tips if they had a bad week.

So now you get the situation that everyone involved wants to keep tipping.

* Well-performing waiters want to keep tipping as they make a lot of money, not tips means a huge pay-cut.

* Under-performing waiters want to keep tipping because they know the second the restaurant needs to pay their wage, they will be the first to go. So it's either keep their low-paying job, or have no job.

I disagree with the conclusion since the premise (tipped wages make for unstable work) is exactly what the restaurant owners are complaining about, and many servers do as well. As others replied, the high payout often overshadows the rainy days for those servers lucky enough to get a killer night of tips. They remember that because it's an actual event as opposed to the night the spent not earning money while looking at their phone. In the long term it's unsustainable and it is more of a problem for restaurant owners than most want to admit.

There will be holdouts no doubt but overall the rest of the world has no lack of people willing to wait tables. They just get a steady pay check out of it instead of hoping for hours.

Yup. Once we had to start pooling our tips, you better be getting a minimum of 10%, or you'd get crappy shifts. 15% was expected, and to be a star waiter, 20%+ was the goal. This was partly to weed out the underperformers, but also to limit underreporting of tips by waiters. No one liked pooling, so they'd surreptitiously pocket a few tips.

> have servers that brag about huge payouts.

I'm pretty sure that this is a form of Gambler's Fallacy.

I've heard a story of a waiter who got a high rollers table one night and walked away with a $1,000 tip.

But I heard it from a girl who worked with him. He was a 20-year industry veteran. She was some five years in at the time. The story was told another five years after it happened.

Sure, it was a massive payout on one night of work... But they don't recount the stories of the hundred rainy sundays where nobody shows up, you close shop early and go home with less than minimum wage.

They also save the story of how they couldn't get a mortgage because the bank can't see the income from tips.

I've heard the story of feeling "stuck" in bartending a number of times. You make more than you could in any other career with no skills, but you can't do anything with the money, it isn't fulfilling, the hours suck, retraining is hard and so is starting at the bottom on a new career ladder.

I know a few who've tried and failed to leave the industry and one who became an accountant for a fortune 500 (and now 'mom' too!).

Anyways, I've gone off on a tangent. My original point was unless you're getting those big-tipping payouts every night (eg: the million dollar a year Vegas bottle service girls) serving likely isn't as good as it "feels"

>I'm pretty sure that this is a form of Gambler's Fallacy.

Definitely. In my experience the waitstaff who most vigorously support the tipping culture are the ones who don't keep exact track of their tips and heavily overestimate their average hourly pay. They are also the ones who gamble the most on scratch-offs, keno, etc.

Any server who drops out because of that will simply be replaced. Waiters and waitresses are constantly churning through restuarants in any case, so the impact on business ought to be minimal.

The articles mentions a raise of 15 to 30%. A waiter who makes 40% tips would probably accept a no-tip job at a 30% raise (Assuming the 40% tips weren't very stable).

At least some of the 30% would go to back-end staff. The article I linked to presents a case where the cooks etc had a raise because of this.

Certainly wouldn't say "never". It may be true in some places, but there's a successful gastropub in our town (open for one year now) which applies a uniform 20% service charge rather than asking for tips. It doesn't have any more or less difficulty getting staff than other nearby establishments.

> No server will work for a fixed 20% increment when they have the potential to get a lot more than that, especially on Saturday nights.

So don't make it a fixed pay increment, make it a floor set by a fixed pay increment, but allow it to go higher with a revenue sharing formula.

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