Restaurants are figuring out how to do without servers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's like the difference between an old-style Taxi and an Uber, with the latter you just get up and go when you're done. The whole dance of flagging down the server to request the bill, get the bill, oops the server disappeared before you could pull out your card, wait for 10 minutes while they are off exploring Narnia in the kitchen cupboards. Finally they come to take the card and disappear again, what should have taken 30 seconds is now at 15 min+, hope you're not missing your show... ah, finally they're back! Now try to figure out the tip line, with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in your head while your house is burning down.
Waitstaff-less high-end restaurants expand the audience and frequency of visits of people who can now enjoy these better-than-Chipotle dining experiences. Much like Uber, which doesn't only cannibalize existing providers but actually creates a whole new category of short rides that you would never have previously considered using a Taxi for.
I'd prefer to see the 'tip' build in to the prices, workers paid a living wage, and any tip being purely an optional thing for great service.
I know plenty of servers who pull in an equivalent hourly wage of $30 on a good night. They’d get screwed if tips went away and they were paid a living wage of $20 per hour.
If there is a minimum wage, no field should have an exception for it; that includes the labor working at places that aren't having a busy night with expensive meals.
This is also about benefiting the customers; simple transparent pricing. No variable things added later. I also want /taxes/ to be included in the advertised price (at least on the local menus; national / widely targeted ads should include large text disclaimers)
The jist was that the /minimum/ wage was what the worker was required to take home, tips inclusive, and that if they couldn't clear that bar (the restaurant had to pay them more) they were retrained and/or otherwise moved around until they either could or quit on their own.
the worst part being the loophole around minimum wage is that it incentivizes the widespread practice of tip pooling by restaurant owners.
nowadays when you tip your waiter you're also tipping the busser, foodrunner, hostess (and with the recent law change allowing it, the line cook).
it is too easily used as a tool to skirt wage laws by making every employee a tipped one.
15% - 20% is standard, and always has been, for a full service, sit down restaurant. The tip makes some sense, based on the service given to you, some level of tip being roughly commensurate with the amount of service.
But what percentage am I supposed to tip in a restaurant where I order at a counter, bus my own table, and merely have someone bring the order to my table? (FWIW, some McDonalds now do this, yet nobody would ever tip at McDonalds.) What about if they come around and fill my water? What if I order at a counter but they still bus my table?
Moreover, in many places (coffee shops, ice cream shops) there is no wait service at all, the person at the counter merely draws a coffee or scoops some ice cream, yet tips are apparently still expected. Am I really supposed to tip 15% just for someone to scoop me an ice cream cone? Which leads me to another question that has bothered me since way back in the day: Why are bartenders tipped so richly simply for pouring a drink?
15-20% has long been standard for full-service. For lesser service I don't understand why anybody would be expected to tip the same amount. Am I missing something? I gather the younger generation might not think of things in these terms, but why not?
You could argue that, but only by ignoring practical matters of effort/level of service/value that attends a different price.
If you can afford a big tip, and social mechanisms shame you into giving it, then great! The restaurant makes a lot of profit.
If you can't, then the restaurant can still make a small profit off serving you anyway.
As for why it'd increase over time... maybe that's just an effect of people getting a bit richer, but the marginal cost of serving a meal not so much?
I'm 40+, and when I was in elementary school, pretty much every source I encountered was consistent with 15% as the norm, 20% as a reward for exceptional service, 10% as a signal for tolerable but substandard service, and anything lower as a signal of “abysmal service and I'm only tipping to let you know that I did not forget about the tip to avoid ambiguity.”
I pay $3600/month in rent for a studio. So you need like $120/day post-tax in order to just make rent (and 2-3x that to qualify for the lease in the first place). So let's say you need $300/day in tips to live here. (That works out to about 109.5k/year -- a respectable entry-level tech salary, but that would be just above the poverty line in SF if you were trying to support a family of four on it.)
Suppose that you have a ramen restaurant that's only open for dinner, seats 29, always has a line out the door, has a cycle time of half an hour, is open for 6 hours a night, and has three servers. Assuming 100% of seats are full (let's say you're the best ramen place in town), that means that each server will get tips from 116 customers a night on a $14 bowl of ramen. To make $300/day, you need an average $2.59 tip on the $14 bowl of ramen for the server alone (never mind any haircut for back staff/tip sharing/the owner takes some to cover fixed costs of the restaurant). $2.59/$14 works out to 18.5%.
In a world where entire apartments in the Mission cost $500/month, sure, you can tip 10% on a meal. But given market rate rents in SF now, the math of a 10% tip just doesn't add up.
That'll help a struggling service industry worker make ends meet, right?
-----
Realistically, odds are our hypothetical service industry worker isn't paying a market rate for a studio in the Mission. It's much more likely they're rooming with others in some fashion, and their monthly rent is at most half of $3600. And likely doing the traditional thing and under-reporting cash tip income by a non-trivial margin.
You pay higher to have waiters in the first place.
Essentially, the story of SF is the story of no high density housing.
This and delivery from a shop you order often from are the only form of tipping that makes any sort of sense whatsoever to me (at least common forms of tipping).
It's bribery so you get good service the next time. At a busy bar it's worth every dime to tip 100% that first drink and then a dollar or two after that. You will jump the 10 deep line at the bar no problem.
Same goes for food delivery - get to know the couple drivers at the local Thai place and be known as a great tipper - you'll get service above and beyond.
Any other tipping seems like it's utterly pointless as a consumer. Why tip after the fact - typically at 15-20% for merely acceptable service. Even if I'm a heavy tipper, the server has zero way to know it so I get just as good of service as anyone else.
Alternately, in cities with ~8-10% sales tax, you can double the sales tax and round up.
In fact I don't think there's anywhere in California where 15 percent is considered normal anymore. Where I'm from (small town) nobody will be offended if you tip 15%, because you're more likely to be poor than cheap. But even there, 15% is undertipping in 2018.
The math is the smallest part of the tipping problem, IMO.
Do you want inflated taxi fares of old, or do you want supply and demand? You can't have both.
Before or after paying the costs of driving?
There's tons of examples where supply-and-demand gets balanced with other considerations. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.
They have table service. I would go there much more frequently if they had counter service. The servers are very friendly and generally attentive, but the table service aspect just makes no sense, especially at lunchtime when it's all solo diners with limited time.
You could order food through the tablet from the restaurants close by.
I loved the experience. You could browse the menu, fine tune an order, get a drink, then pay (with tip) on your credit card. Someone then brought your food to you in under 10 min.
Seems simple enough, but Jesus it was a way better experience than a normal airport restaurant. Avoided all those problems you mentioned.
I have no idea how good or extensive those translations are, but assuming these are OTG terminals it's a pretty tightly integrated vertical so I imagine pretty good.
Doordash does this, which I always find kind of backwards. Just the point of a tip to reward better service?
Every single egift card fails. And the bonus cards don't even have QRcodes, and there is no way for the patron to enter them. It's just stupid.
In Australia, the standard for a nice restaurant is that you get full table service, and when you're finished, you just walk up to the front counter to pay.
That way you get the best of both worlds.
Better-than-Chipotle dining experience is not a definition of a high-end restaurant. You at most hit the bistro-class.
If a local government dictates that your base wage rate for a labor-intensive industry has to increase by 40% within less than a 5-year period and, on top of that, further dictates that you as an employer must provide those same employees with above-average health benefits together with paid leave of varying types above and beyond what market norms have been, well, at the end of that process, you are obviously having to pay a hell of a lot more for those employees than you did just a few years back, perhaps as much as 50% more.
Real wage increases tie to rising productivity. I well remember representing highly-talented UNIX engineers during the early 1990s who were earning around $60K per year (adjusting for inflation alone, that number would still not be in the six-figure range today). Today, engineers of that caliber easily command six-figure salaries plus great perks. The best of them easily command $250k+ salaries. For employers trying to find such engineers, they have to open their wallets big time and, yet, they do. Why? Because, if you are a Google or a Facebook or a Twitter or an Apple, or any other preeminent company needing the services of such engineers, you are not trying to eliminate those positions simply because they cost a lot more today than they did in the early 1990s. You are desperately trying to add such people to your payroll because of what they can do for you. The changing tech world has magnified the productivity and value of what such engineers can do and therefore the salaries and perks they can command are far higher. But this is market-based and justified because the profits you can earn as an employer are also much higher owing to their work. The engineers of the early 1990s were just as talented as those today but their value was relatively less to employers than is the value of their counterparts today. Their productivity has vastly increased. Hence, so has their compensation.
Compare that to what the city officials in San Francisco are doing with waiters and similar restaurant staff. Essentially, they have decreed (in the name of worker protection) that the cost to the employer of such employees shall increase by 50% or more over a short period when nothing whatever has occurred to increase their productivity. I went years working my way through school doing such work and it is very hard work indeed. The people doing it earn every penny. Yet those who did it 5 years ago at considerably less cost to the employer than those who do it today worked just as hard as their counterparts today. If those doing such work today are doing the same work, and their productivity has not materially increased, yet they are getting paid 50% more, something has to give.
This article basically dances around the obvious by tying the discussion to the considerable expense of living in SF and to collateral issues affecting the city's living environment. In doing so, it does not discuss the obvious: when supply and demand dictates what people will do, and you arbitrarily raise the cost of something, it will affect demand by lessening it.
That is why SF restaurants are moving to less labor-dependent models of doing business. Not all will do so but the laws of supply and demand have given them an incentive to do so and it should surprise no one that a good number of them are adapting.
Perhaps this is all worth it because those who are now working as waitstaff in SF restaurants are doing much better financially and this is worth the trade off. But no one should pretend that this does not come at a price, perhaps a very high one, for those whose jobs have vanished along with the new business models. (By "new" here, I mean not that no one has had self-serve models before, which they obviously have, but "new" in the sense that restaurants that would before have never considered such models are now adopting them).
But - as you rightly point out - a 33% jump in a short period is stupid.
It would be nice if min wage were tied to some kind of economic indicator.
But good comment.
People live in favelas in Rio. They live in tiny, one room flats in Hong Kong without plumbing in deplorable conditions. They live in 'work camps' in Dubai without any rights at all.
And they work hard.
Of course 'people in SF' would do the same.
Don't think you're exempt - you would do the same if your skills were commoditized and you had no recourse.
Your salary has nothing to do with how skilled you are, how hard you work, or how much value you can provide. It's entirely a function of 'power' relative to your employer. So even if you are a full-on genius, and can speak 10 languages, code in 10 languages and have a PhD in AI - you will earn next to nothing if those things are common and your skills are a commodity.
In any given economy, a good chunk of people have commodity skills, i.e. manual labour or not much more. This bar is getting higher. Way back before minimum wage we (and without knowing you, there's a very high chance this applies to your ancestors as well) survived on next to nothing - and probably worked hard. Land owners, mine owners, factory owners would leverage and leverage and leverage to make sure the workers had 'only enough barely survive' - after all - every additional penny to workers would have been simply charity, in the raw economic sense.
So - all modern and civilized economies have 'minimum wage' and/or collective bargaining for some groups. Minimum wage and unions were essential to bringing civilizations out of the dark ages. Some caveats to that would be a very high social security system with gracious benefits - i.e. the government gives you a 'job' which is 'not doing anything' which would set a floor for wages obviously. Or an economy in which there were very few people with commodity skills and 'everyone' was somehow empowered a little bit against everyone else (like 'equality and diversity in skill set' kind of thing), which is not very common.
Because of the imbalance of power - we have no choice but to have minimum wage, or something like it - and it's also generally why we don't need such things in areas wherein people are not commoditized.
The really interesting paradox is that the 'minimum survivable wage' for any individual is not the profit maximizing wage for employers in the long run!
In the 'short run' employers save money / increase profits by cutting wages. But - those people can then 'spend less' and it hurts the economy, which hurts business!
Henry Ford realized this pragmatically. He realized that if he wanted to sell a 'model T' to 'everyone' and his own factory workers could literally not afford one, then few people would be able to buy his cars, ergo, his business model was not going to work! So he paid his employees more than the short-run minimum requirement.
This requires a fairly enlightened strategy on the part of employers - moreover - it requires kind of a common buy-in by most employers, which is like a strategy game:
> If all employers pay subsistence wages - then they all kind of lose because nobody can afford to buy the crap they make in their factories.
> If all employers pay some difficult-to-calculate wage higher than subsistence, like a minimum wage ... well, everyone is better off.
> But - if most employers pay this 'decent wage' but some employers 'cheat' and pay much less, well, those 'cheating' employers can benefit quite a lot, and get rich of a system by sneaking off surpluses from a system they are not paying into. Kind of like 'not paying taxes'. But of course - every employer is under constant pressure to keep wages down - and they have no formal pressure, like a taxation agency or regulatory body, to keep them from doing otherwise. So of course we're going to have low wages without regulation.
The minimum wage is actually economically rational from a practical, surplus sharing perspective (you could say 'socialist' or 'communitarian'), but even if you want to look at it more from a 'free market' perspective, minimum wage could be argued to be the wage at which the economy (including employers and shareholders) maximally benefit in the long run ... but it's just simply impossible to get 'all business' to intelligently collude and set this wage because they are all competing more or less on short-run business cycles, and have great incentive to cheat. Hence regulation.
As for SF, especially the increasing ratio of undocumented workers who have no access to social services, yes, they will work for next to nothing - the minimum that will allow them to survive.
SF would form favelas just like in Brazil, and there's absolutely no economic reason why it wouldn't - only regulatory policies etc. keep it from that i.e. wages, rights, services, etc. etc...
FYI - this partly why having a lot of undocumented folks in the economy is a really bad idea. For a host of other reasons well. If you're going to have people participating in the economy - give them full rights. But that kind of means 'open borders' - which you can't have ... (ie can't have open borders and social welfare at the same time). A much better solution would be to have 'reasonably effective border control', close unprofitable factories/businesses in the US and move them to Mexico so that entire communities of regular people can aspire to a higher standard of living, safety, civility etc.. That's a much better win for everyone.
You just used examples of places for which a tiny one-room flat is an improvement over previous conditions. If you think a favela is bad, try being a peasant on a working farm.
The idea that people used to life in, for example, Texas or London will get used to a similar lifestyle which represents a massive downgrade is ridiculous. Historically people started overthrowing governments and sending people to guillotines for more modest losses. You’d have riots in SF if the options were “work for $1” or “starve.”
I think minimum wage laws are a good idea too, but your argument is bizarre.
YES. And what would those riots be for: MORE WAGES. Basically a minimum wage or collective bargaining. Hence my point of why minimum wage has to exist!
Using an externalized or non-market function like rioting to achieve wage increase, is the same as voting to require minimum wage etc:
--> You literally just made my argument for me <--
"Texas or London will get used to a similar lifestyle which represents a massive downgrade is ridiculous."
People have no choice but to accept the economic conditions they face.
This is 'reality' , it's not 'bizarre' at all.
My argument is nothing but basic, classical economics. It's not even an argument, more so an explanation. Nothing new.
If people have to work for 'next to nothing or die' - what do you think they will do?
Die? Or work like a slave? The later in most cases.
It's economic reality.
I think what would happen in London/SF/Texas is that irregular workers would probably move in and form the basis of this ever lowering economy, and empowered citizens would be much less likely to fall - but they definitely could. And that includes you, and me, if we didn't have access to family, social services, minimum wages etc..
My whole point is that as I said, people don’t just accept, they riot and revolt. I agree with minimum wage laws, but not because of some hyper-extreme scenario in which San Franciscans are working and living like Brazilians in favelas. Frankly we shouldn’t need to resort to that kind of hyperbole to make the case for a living wage.
If you want to see what happens, even in traditionally poor places when people face a “fight or die impoverished” scenario, see Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. People were willing to face tanks and bombs with their bare hands because the alternative was to starve. I think you underestimate the potential belligerence of the average American if faced with a similar scenario.
The larger issue though is that riot, abject poverty, and revolt aren’t actually the foundation of a minimum wage. Fairness, and Econ 101 are, and there’s no need to get so far out there as to divert the debate away from present conditions to extreme hypotheticals.
Of course American citizens would revolt and demand non-market interventions, like minimum wage etc..
Without non-market interventions, they would be serfs, is my point.
That said, there is probably some wage at below minimum wage at which people would be willing to work. That wage would, imho, be very exploitative, but it would have a very high chance of happening.
The difference in bargaining power between employers and low-paid employees is astounding — astounding to the point that a true floating point “market rate” would be tough to describe as a living wage.
Can you please show us the people that were living in huts there from the post war recovery until 2015.
Germany is a 'socialized economy' meaning that they have welfare benefits, collective bargaining, social services, strong rights, and fairly high control of the economy by the government [1]. In fact - workers in Germany have representation at the Board level (!!!) [2] which would be unheard of in a place like America.
Germany, is in fact the 'founder' of modern socialized economies. Otto Von Bismark was the first person to offer state workers a healthcare plan.
So in my (way too long) explanation, I indicated that people would obtain the best possible economic deal - of course if they can 'get a job with the government and do nothing' by collecting welfare benefits, they will do that in lieu of working for wages below that.
By this I mean: there has to be some externalized, or non-market intervention. Minimum is one of them.
So no, technically Germany may not need a minimum wage, but they have market interventions that are so strong, that it was not necessary.
My point was more general (maybe I should have been more clear) absent non-market interventions, people will work for the minimum survivable wage.
Irregular workers in an area will work for that minimum survivable wage so long as it's beyond what they can get elsewhere (i.e. at home), i.e. undocumented workers will work for a salary provides them just a little bit higher standard of living than they can achieve in Mexico (which is roughly what's happening) - and that 'Mexico-like economic conditions' will develop in certain areas to support that. Have you been to South San Jose - to the primarily Mexican marketplaces there? They are reminiscent of Tijuana in terms of services, quality of goods etc..
And absent the ability to 'return to a homeland' - they will accept extremely low standards of living - like people living in closets in Hong Kong, even though HK is very rich.
Absent non-market forces, like minimum wage, welfare etc - workers are effectively serfs, and will live in cardboard boxes, as they do in almost all places without such interventions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending
[2] https://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Rela...]
This is the first time I've seen inflation attempt to be used as an argument in favor of minimum wage.
- that there are some jobs necessary to basic local functions even though marginal productivity doesn’t add much value to the employer
- nobody wants to work those jobs, and so the people who end up with them end up there in a musical chairs sort of way and, for whatever exogenous reasons, cannot retrain for different jobs
- workers at these jobs will have their wages marginalized toward zero, with unlivable lack of medical benefits, in free market operation, because employers will respond to the lack of adequate value added for marginal additional labor in these jobs.
Add a fourth, more speculative position to the discussion:
- in the media and in political grandstanding, people in the working class who depend on these jobs will have an outsized sympathy effect from how cases of suffering or perceived unfairness are amplified to create bad press for businesses or politicians.
In the end, it creates a real mess.
- You can’t allow market forces to pay these people less, cut benefits or outright remove the headcount. This creates an unemployable underclass who cannot move away or retrain. They either can work these jobs or be wards of the state or appeal to live on charity or just die from lack of resources.
- You also can’t require businesses to pay more or pay for adequate insurance, especially at inflated modern insurance prices. Businesses are already fighting for their lives at the margins and it would be counter-productive to require them to pay more as they’ll just reduce headcount instead.
In my view, it suggests that the local government should pay a living stipend with insurance to many of these workers, which could be supplemented by part-time or low-wage work in some of these jobs.
People might be incentivized to work them if the money is meaningful as a supplement to a living base stiped, while allowing businesses to maintain staff.
But basically, as a tax-payer in SF, one option that is not possibly open for belief is to keep wages & benefits low and/or economically force out low-wage workers. It’s just not a possible option, because the result would just be a bunch of people either living on charity or just directly dying from lack of resources. In no scenario will they be able to move elsewhere to get more resources for a low-wage job or retrain to get a higher wage job. Just no.
To me, this issue is one that demands some serious reckoning, and politicians who don’t want to catch the falling sword can only keep pushing it off a little longer before we start having urban zones where it’s just opulent wealth juxtaposed with humanitarian crises on virtually every block.
But if you do think some minimum wage is necessary and just this particular hike is too much, you'd have to justify what that minimum wage should be. And ostensibly you'd probably think that its based on some factors like cost of living and inflation, both of which are going up.
The bottom line is the US is not going to let its citizens starve, and it has 300 million citizens here and now who need to eat everyday and sleep every night. Some of them are qualified to work at well-paying jobs and some of them are not. For the ones who are not, do you want to make sure that the jobs that they can get pay enough so that they can get by, or do you want them to not be motivated to work at all and live off welfare?
1. Flattens the wage curve. More money goes to the bottom end and less to the top. Given economists penchant to complain the distribution doesn't matter it's interesting that that freaks them out.
2. Low paying jobs are very likely in industries where employers have more bargaining power than workers. Minimum wages correct for that.
3. Increasing labor costs motivates employers to invest in increasing productivity which leads to better long term economic growth.
Owner/operators tend to be compensated with profit. However the (low/mid) middle class aren't often even compensated with stock options. This leads to rising minimum wages raising the price floor of an area without a corresponding rise in the compensation that the middle classes receive.
As a result of that cost of living increase, the poor remain effectively just as poor while the middle class become more poor (relatively speaking).
A more socially progressive stance is to influence the market supply, thus tipping the scales towards minimal profits, particularly in "need to have" categories such as housing, healthcare, and other basic social infrastructure (transportation, power, communications (of all types), water/sewer).
For some of those there is a natural monopoly within a given area; it makes more sense to focus on highly regulated quality (particularly for the last mile, where parallel infrastructure can be massively wasteful).
For others a hybrid approach can help: a regulated marketplace where there is ample competition among similarly sized players and/or a public option of last/default resort to control prices/quality.
Finally there are healthy markets for //optional extras// (such as fast food) where competition is robust and effective.
Out of curiosity (this is a slight tangent), why do you think businesses should shoulder that burden (if you do, I'm just guessing). Just as a reminder, we're not talking about mega-corp businesses like Google here, we're talking about restaurants, which I think are commonly small businesses. Why should their owners be forced to pay for employees' welfare, vs. doing the more equitable thing and spreading that payment to everyone?
That's not the situation we were talking about, really. We talked about a minimum wage, which raises the wage above what the business would normally pay. And we talked about doing that as a way to give a social net to some workers. But this effectively amounts to a business owner paying extra money, on top of what they would normally pay to get the benefit of the labor, out of their pocket, to help workers. The question is, why does it make sense for this only to be paid by them?
> Why should I as a taxpayer subsidise small business owners?
You wouldn't be subsidizing small business owners, you'd just be subsidizing workers. Which makes sense, since the stated goal was to help workers. Why should business owners be the only ones to subsidize workers, and not everyone?
Or at least it's supposed to, but some think it has become decoupled:
Just about every graph on the subject demonstrates this statement to be false. Productivity has skyrocketed since the 70s, yet wages for all but the top have stagnated.
"Compare that to what the city officials in San Francisco are doing with waiters and similar restaurant staff. Essentially, they have decreed (in the name of worker protection) that the cost to the employer of such employees shall increase by 50% or more over a short period when nothing whatever has occurred to increase their productivity. I went years working my way through school doing such work and it is very hard work indeed. The people doing it earn every penny. Yet those who did it 5 years ago at considerably less cost to the employer than those who do it today worked just as hard as their counterparts today. If those doing such work today are doing the same work, and their productivity has not materially increased, yet they are getting paid 50% more, something has to give."
This is also being done because productivity is not the sole measure by which those wages should be judged. Cost of living absolutely should be taken into account.
I have never seen an article hype up the McDonald experience so much.
[Side tangent, I hate the concept of waiters. If I am having a romantic dinner with my wife, I would much rather get her a cup of water than have someone butt into our conversation]
One shouldn't feel like they have to go and figuratively grovel their patrons into a tip by showing up every three bites to ask if I need anything, just to walk out at the end of their shift feeling like they've earned something.
If there's ever a call for a workers revolution in food service (in addition to the Fight for Fifteen) sign me the hell up.
This is solved in Japan with the call button in family restaurants, I'd actually want an app to queue requests without needing the waiter to come to the table first.
That is a partially solvable problem, though. While you cannot fix a restaurant when it fails at that, you can simply not visit there. Well, assuming not all restaurants fail at this (which at least isn't my experience).
It's occasionally difficult to catch the waiter's attention if you want to pay in a hurry and it's a bit busy, but I prefer this to the unwanted interruptions from waiters in America.
Median waiter pay in the US: $20,820; mean: $25,280 (per the BLS).
Mean waiter pay in Germany (the median is always lower): $16,500 to $18,000 (depending on your source). Germany pays atrocious waiter wages.
The US pays about 40-50% more at the mean for its waiters, while having a lower cost of living. If the German mean is that low, I hate to see the median ($14k?).
The French average at near $21,000 is about 16% below the US average, and is barely above their required minimums:
"French waiters are paid, on average, 1,495 euros [$1,749] a month, only a shade more than the statutory minimum wage, and they usually expect some sort of tip. "
In France, tipping is not mandatory and if I do it I usually leave 1 or 2 euros in change.
Waiters in France do not have to pay for their own health insurance.
They can actually afford to go to the doctor and get help if they need it. No risk of medical bankruptcy here.
Waiters get paid the minimum wage in low-end restaurants but make more money in the upscale ones.
Waiters dont need to rely on the patrons' generosity to pay their bills.
>And because of California labor laws, even tipped workers like servers earn at least the full minimum wage, unlike their peers in most other states.
So at least in San Francisco they're saving $15< per hour
A rule of thumb, 1/3 on wages, 1/3 on capital, 1/3 for everything else. If you're not meeting that you'll be closing soon.
You're criticizing businesses for following your prescription. They were 1/3-1/3-1/3. Wages went up. Quantity of labor demanded is being reduced to compensate.
If 1/3 of their cost went to labor in 2014 when the minimum wage was $10.74, the proportion will be much higher at a minimum wage of $15 in 2018.
Sure they could raise prices, but you risk pricing customers out, and as the one restaurant owner discovered, customers will still spend the same amount by ordering less or cheaper items.
Wouldn't all their competitors face the same "problem"? So it wouldn't be a "problem" in the end?
(Now, whether that actually happens or not...)
OTOH we have the same problem in every city that goes through rapid gentrification: People at the local lower end of the pay scale are not able to afford to live where they work anymore.
I never have waiters butt into my conversations. They (politely) interrupt so that they can be of service to me, but they never butt in.
For instance, no sane waiter where I am from would try to push the bill to a romantic date dinner or ask if we want more drinks. They will be watching around for a signal (more wine, would like to order, more water, the check please etc).
P.S. Also extremely annoyed when I am clearly the driver and I get bombarded about getting more drinks...
I'd still rather pay a little more for wait service than be one of the cattle.
1) they cook the food (including knowing the recipes) 2) the serve the food to your table 3) they do the dishes (including bussing the table)
Lets award a potential 3 points to a food establishment for this 'litmus test'.
McD's of course gets only 1 point (they cook the food). Hardly a restaurant experience, no surprise there.
Your corner bar and grill gets all three points: they have a server and bus tables. And even a burger or frozen pizza counts as 'cook the food'
And so on. Easy! And I'll just leave you with this, my least favorite lunch place of all: Subway. They get Zero (0) points. Not really a restaurant at all. Just a place to store ingredients for you to come and put together yourself, for outrageous prices.
So if I buy a $20 meal, I pay the waiter $3 to take my order, go to the kitchen, tell the chefs, go pick up the order, put it on my table and later take my credit card when I flag him down to pay. This should be included in the price. But hey. Whatever. $3. Fine.
Now when I go to a fancier restaurant and order the same amount of food, where the waiter does the exact same job of taking an order, putting it on the table and comes back later to take my credit card I suddenly have to pay him say $20? Why? How on earth has his job changed in any way shape or form to earn so much more money than the previous restaurant's waiter for the exact same amount of work?
I really do not get it.
If anything, the Chefs and Sous Chefs should be tipped and should earn more at fancier restaurants because food preparation there often takes longer, is a more intricate affair and often needs more skills and experience. Not the waiting staff.
In a normal restaurant you might just a bottle put on your table.
In a fancy they tell you about the wine. They have to hold the bottle right. You get to try a sip of it first,...
Still gotta pay way more for when you just order a meal.
You can get reccomandations, they tell you what fits good togheter... They have to serve it probably in some special way (that we don't even notice). Idk.
Just because most people don't notice or appreciate the added service, it doesn't mean that it's not there.
But yes, mandatory tips in general are stupid. It's the employers duty to pay their stuff a fair "base" salary. Tips should be additional income for extraordinary skill.
This is kind of to-be-expected as the wage/cost-of-living ratio dips too low so that lower-labor models are preferred. [1].
My peeve about these kinds of models is the ambiguity of the tipping situation; it's obviously not full service, but it's not zero either. And places like Super Duper are zero service (you stand in line, fetch your order, and bus your table) but still guilt you into tipping. I don't know the amount for "this satisfies the standard expectation".
[1] If you automatically say "lol pay them more", it's not that simple: higher prices and you'll scare off too many customers -- into fast casual and home cooking -- to cover overhead. Take lower profits and it may not pay enough to be worth the investment.
[2] Edit: original version was something like “... putting diners to work”.
- someone takes my order, and busses my table: "full tip" (whatever that means to you)
- I stand in line to place the order, but someone busses my table: "50% tip"
- I stand in line to place the order, then bus my own table: "Look in the mirror, and shoot myself some finger guns"
But having the ability to customize items to your exact specifications is very nice; reminds me of the old Burger King wrappers that had icons for ingredients around the edges, with the intention of their inclusion or omission for custom orders being marked, but it's a practice I've never observed being used.
The McDonalds in-app ordering and pickup is a superior experience to the kiosk, but it needs location to be on.
The McDonalds in-app ordering and pickup is a superior experience
I like the kiosks for the reasons you mention, but the arrangement of them in the floor plan made it impossible for people to figure out how to form a line. It was just chaos.
Who are all these people in this thread who don’t value a server’s knowledge and flexibility? It’s as if they’ve never been infuriated by an IVR system and cannot imagine that kind of horror landing in their restaurant booth when all they’re looking to do is enjoy themselves.
Sometimes you want recommendations that come with more details than what the web guy baked into the hero piece. Sometimes you want something prepared a certain way, and the UI isn’t going to be up to it. Good luck getting that through an abused table tablet.
So some servers underachieve. Fine. I still want one.
Even at a local restaurant a waiters recommendation is always biased. I'd rather integrate reviews into the system.
But getting back to my Outback example. Did you know if they pan sear your filet they do it with a weight on top of it? I didn't until a server told me, and gave me the option to skip the weight. (Much better result, by the way, even if it does take longer.)
And did you know at Outback if they wood fire your filet they don't use a weight, but instead of the 17 spice seasoning they use in pan searing, they switch to salt and pepper? I didn't until a server told me, and gave me the option to go wood-fired plus 17 spice seasoning, which is a terrific combo.
Drawing a larger point, computer people would rather deal with computers. I get it. But there's a whole world of possibilities out there you miss when instead of building relationships with the people you meet casually around you (like wait staff), you instead constrain yourself to the choices made available to you through silicon and Javascript.
Take everything you read with a grain of salt, and stick to first-hand data as much as possible.
Here is a good, minimally biased (although by a libertarian-leaning economist) synopsis of the initial results: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se...
And some jobs just don't entail that much productivity.
If we pay everyone enough to make a living wage, then it should cost the same for me to grab my own menu, utensils and water bottles as it would for a server to do so.
Honestly, the high cost of renting in SF has already made the "move to California and bus tables to get by while auditioning for movie / working on startup" dream impossible. This is just a side effect of the bureaucracy and housing policies here.
I don't see how that follows. The opportunity cost per unit time for a skilled worker is typically greater than the living wage.
Many fast dining restaurants exist where you order your own food at a counter, they call your order name/number, and you bus your own table. It's fast and obviously must be efficient for the restaurant otherwise they wouldn't do it. I don't see a problem with that either.
But, I don't see this becoming normal. Certainly, I dine out when I don't want to prep my own meal. Having the drinks refilled for me is part of that experience. And while I wouldn't classify myself as a foodie, I am willing to pay for quality service.
I guess people are supposed to look at less glamorous cities, but if everyone affected by this did that then they would probably run out of opportunities, fill up, and have housing prices shoot up as well. Something's gotta give here. There's a real disconnect between the prices and the ability to pay. Who is paying for these things? People with lots of generational wealth? People with upper-middle class jobs yet no savings and razor-thin margins due to living expenses? That's so shitty.
The Fed should have been bumping them up years ago, forcing liquidity into other parts of the system.
It would be better if there was a more natural way to set rates.
Also - it has to do with perpetually extending our visibility into our economic future, i.e. as loan times get longer and longer - the lenders win as housing prices go up.
If everyone had the same term mortgage, and it was fixed - this issue would not cause problems for for housing inflation.
But as we go collectively from 25 years to 50 years to 75 years ... well, housing prices go up.
It's predominantly a supply problem. Interest rates are low across the country, yet San Francisco is in a unique situation.
That already happened in Austin, Denver, Nashville and Portland, and is now underway in Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/06/14/menlo-park-resta...
Old joke: some Australians take a taxi from LAX to their hotel. As they get out, the driver asks, "Your tip?" "Our tip is, live somewhere with a minimum wage, mate!"
First it was pizza places and now it is McDonalds and others.
Wife and I went to a Wendys and nobody answered the drive through system. We only wanted small frosties so we went home without them. Other cars got mad that they were not taking drove through orders.
These jobs are not 15 dollars an hour, but a lot of workers don't deserve that and will be replaced with competent workers or computers or kiosks or an app.
Except because everyone is too price sensitive with a race to the bottom on pricing, customer service is no longer valued. So we do away with customer service to keep the pricing the same rather than raise prices.
Well not really housing but property market. Don't know why they "discover" it now. Well it has been going on in some places for well over a decade.
Sounds like another Chicago restaurant that I visited once. Once. That establishment remains to this day the only place where I have ever left a $0.02 tip--worst service I have ever experienced as a restaurant customer.
I feel like so much of this could be fixed if we had a highly regulated housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for everyone. It's hard to imagine that this housing bubble can last much longer, it's distorting everything to such an extreme already.
The cost of housing doesn't have to keep increasing, just look at Germany: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-w...
The former has a terrible track record of leading to the latter, particularly in America (where housing is treated as a proxy for savings).
Regarding Germany: "During the current real-estate cycle, i.e., from 2009 to 2017, house prices have risen 80% in large metropolitan areas (A cities) and c. 60% in B and C cities. In 2017, the number of newly completed residential units looks likely to have risen to more than 300,000 for the first time in the current cycle; in 2018, it might climb to 335,000. However, assuming that there is demand for at least 350,000 new apartments, the gap between supply and demand should continue to widen in both years. As demand remains high, upward price pressure will continue. This suggests that prices and rents will rise further in all major cities. Overvaluations are rising, and the risk of a price bubble on the German housing market is increasing. The price uptrend is likely to continue for several years to come, at least in most major cities in Germany" [1].
[1] https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD000000000046...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/25/home-ownersh...
London's solution is the same as Manhattan's: build more. Case in point: my Flatiron neighborhood. Our building is upper-middle income, except for a few higher-end flats. Let's call the average rent $3,000.
Luxury building opens; prices at $5,000. Not enough biters. $4,000. Highest-priced tenants in my building moved. Our building had to drop rents to (a) attract replacement tenants and (b) compete with the luxury building, which now wicks off the highest-earning renters.
We need 'small jobs'. They're an important part of the ecosystem.
Uhhhh. No - that is really the wrong way to say it. There's a supply/demand mismatch obviously.
Clearly the wealthy residents of SF simply don't want to pay ... for some reason.
I think there is something sneaky going on - when I lived in SF, restaurant prices were disturbingly cheap. As a Canadian, I'm used to not very good prices. But in SF, I couldn't grasp it. I know that they employ a lot of undocumented labour, and I suggest this might have something to do with it - i.e. - a resto starts employing undocumented workers in the back simply to 'stay alive' - but then it forces other restaurants into the same competitive bind. And then they start moving into other jobs - forcing those layers of the value chain to have 'real wages' that are under minimum wage.
This is effectively what has happened in farming - and the same thing could be hitting restaurants - it's one of the more pernicious aspects of irregular immigration and employment.
It's nice that we can provide employment to people, and I understand the argument of 'jobs for things American's won't do anyhow' - but there are better ways to move civilization along.
Make sure workers are documented, have decent conditions, minimum wage and some kind of healthcare.
The factories and farms that are not sustainable will move to places like Mexico where jobs will be created to help entire communities and families live well - not just those who risk an illegal life in the USA.
Young Mexicans don't want to join cartels, people would rather a 'decent job with respectable pay' any day. A well run Toyota factory could provide such a powerful economic basis for the community and allow them to re-take control of their communities.
There's no reason for strife and struggle in 2018, we have all the knowledge and technology for everyone to be 'ok' - we can't blame it on the Gods for famine and disaster anymore, it's 100% all on us! We have to organize ourselves conscientiously.
[1] as is the popularity of the Orwellian euphemism “undocumented”.
Having spoken to a few restauranteurs in carpools et cetera, it does appear the Bay Area restaurant labor pool contains lots of undocumented persons.
This is not a general problem in SF.
But this is unrelated to the article.
Furthermore I'm not sure that there's even a critical mass of people in SF who think it's a problem. In any thread about homelessness in SF, you will see at least a few locals get very incensed that anyone is complaining about the sheer numbers of homeless on the streets, and accuse people who would like to move them off sidewalks and into shelters as being heartless monsters.
I don't know how many SF locals are in the homelessness-as-a-human-right camp, but enough to be visible here and elsewhere, and probably enough to muddy the waters even further politically. I've lived in the Bay Area for 10+ years and it always seemed like no one could even agree on what the problem was, much less a solution.
”Out of sight, out of mind” is not good policy.
They’re practically the definition of Conservative. There’s just this wildly mistaken belief that CA (and SF in particular) is populated by ultra-left people.
The Bay is centrist at best.
If SF is centrist I want less than nothing to do with the whatever is left of it.
I'm sure if you want to pick and choose an issue to use as your measuring stick you will find that a substantial chunk of people in SF do not have a far left position on an issue when a far left of center position hurts them personally. However, justifying exceptions to the rule when the rule is not in your self interest is pretty common. Fiscal conservatives don't complain when the government pisses money away on things they like. Commies will gladly redistribute all the wealth that isn't their personal wealth. Few people are so dedicated to their beliefs that they advocate against their own self interest.
Edit: Is it the slight against SF or the observation about humanity that people don't like?
We could have a No true Scotsman [1] argument. Or we can talk about who considers whom else "in" their group, and what those groups call themselves. San Francisco's predominant economic and political block is homogenous in opposing new housing and calls itself progressive. (This pattern lines up with NIMBY policymakers in Seattle and New York City, too.)
I wonder if the homeless issue in california is a lot like it is in hawaii where people actively go there just to be homeless there rather than being displaced from their homes due to housing prices. After all the weather is nicer so its better to be homeless there than anywhere else.
Could the real issue be something like the opiod epidemic and homeless people are just moving to places with better weather? drug addiction makes sense to me why someone would want to stay homeless because I know people who live like that and everyone I've ever know whose rent was something they could not afford anymore just moved to somewhere less expensive.
Really? Cause that is the leading cause of homelessness. When your housing costs are eating up 50+% of your paycheck, that really leaves no slack whatsoever for if your car breaks down or you have a medical emergency or anything else.
"I wonder if the homeless issue in california is a lot like it is in hawaii where people actively go there just to be homeless there rather than being displaced from their homes due to housing prices. After all the weather is nicer so its better to be homeless there than anywhere else."
I have no idea who you're talking to, but I can guarantee that no one is homeless because they want to be homeless.
"and everyone I've ever know whose rent was something they could not afford anymore just moved to somewhere less expensive."
With what money? Again, if you're someone who's rent is taking up the majority of your paycheck, you don't have money to move elsewhere. Not to mention, leaving an area you grew up in, where most of all your connections and support structure reside, is not an easy thing to do.
The strongest predictors of homelessness are population density, walkability, and climate. Homeless people move to places that have those and away from places that don't. There's a theoretical case for provision of services driving homeless migration to the cities that provide services, but it's silly to imagine "progressive" policies generally being the reason why people are homeless. In San Francisco, if you're priced out of your home, you don't end up homeless for years on end; you need severe mental health issues or addiction to account for that. San Jose and San Diego are hardly wildly progressive, but they rank near the top on homeless population.
Excluding the dirty kids who choose the lifestyle, the easier you make it to be homeless and drug addicted the less likely they are to seek treatment.
In Ottawa I remember the mayor pleading on television not to give any handouts or cash to the homeless, so they'd seek out the govt services that would help them.
SF enables them far more than most cities...they can shoot up in broad daylight in a Bart station or busy street with no police response.
Try, "Nobody wants or can afford to do the work for such a pittance, so nobody does." I hope those businesses that do this die. Then again, won't really need hope. New restaurants easily die within 1 year. Good riddance.