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Comment by SurrealSoul | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but as someone who pays the majority of a resturant waiter's salary via tipping, I don't think it's an issue of the restaurant saving the $5.50/hr.

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]

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Reply on the side tangent: That is due to tipping in my opinion. Waiters attempt to be in your face all the time in the U.S. in an effort to leave a good impression, invoke empathy (they are doing a a lot of running around; let's tip them well) and get tipped.

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...

Mixed feelings here. Yes, I definitely prefer wait staff with less of the "I want to be your friend!" attitude. But at the same time, I'm not going to stand in line 30 minutes for the privilege of ordering my food and then wait again for a table to open up in a tiny overcrowded dining area, which has become the normal mode at trendy restaurants in every American city -- not just SF.

I'd still rather pay a little more for wait service than be one of the cattle.

In fact I don't call it a restaurant without one. There are three obvious, fundamental traits of a restaurant:

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.

You're being a bit harsh on Subway, and maybe rating them on a completely wrong scale. A salad bar in a grocery store literally makes you put your food together, and not at altogether cheaper price compared to Subway.

It might be the same price but you don't have to eat Subway.

From the article;

>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

If you're business is going under because you can't afford $15 an hour you should be shutting down anyway.

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.

> 1/3 on wages, 1/3 on capital, 1/3 for everything else

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.

Exactly. And restaurants already operate on very tight profit margins (~5%).

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.

>>> 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?

Eating at a restaurant is a luxury not a necessity. Thus, if all the restaurants in a certain area were more expensive than what they were comfortable with, people might eat out less in general.

Well, probably more. It also takes people to manage, schedule, and hire those other employees.

I was under the impression that this was the case everywhere - if a server doesn't make minimum wage with tips, the restaurant owner is required to make up the difference.

(Now, whether that actually happens or not...)

No - california waiters get minimum wage plus tips. Some of them make six figures. Their cultural negotiation of the standard trip from 15% to 20% was a genius bit of persuasion relying on the American discomfort with service workers. Nobody’s talking about how “hard work” bathroom cleaning is and tipping their office janitor, despite the fact that their office janitor is working much harder for much lower wages.

Ah, I see, I misunderstood.

It's more like 25k than 6 figures.

In expensive restaurants waiters can make BANK if they're being tipped well.

Waiters Georg is an outlier and should not have been counted.

Six figures is the top earners at the top restaurants, for sure.

Of which there are not many. More common is the regular restaurant, where no server is making six figures.

Go to dinner in Europe. The wait staff is paid a humane wage and they won’t bother you at all unless you wave them over. This was my experience across Germany, Poland, and Italy, so I assume it’s a continental preference. YMMV.

This is my preferred method of service, not as a means of disparaging service industry workers (hell I still am to this day part time because I make one hell of an old fashioned #humblebrag) but rather in support of them.

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.

A summary of why I don't expect good service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9PSg0sQyfs

You have the opposite problem though. Getting a waiter's attention is a PITA and you'll easily wait 15min to get more water or order something else.

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.

>You have the opposite problem though

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).

Yes, all of Europe. (Most of the world, in fact. The USA and Canada are the exceptions.)

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.

Wait staff in the US earn more than wait staff in Germany, France, and Italy. Your supposed humane wage is less humane than the US wages being paid. The cost of living is also higher in Germany and France than in the US.

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. "

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28793677

I am French so I can respond to your comment.

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.

You are leaving out that Germany and France are not as rich as the US and wages in general are lower. US, Germany and France have average wages for full-time workers or respectively 60k, 42k and 40k nominally.

It's not really comparable as France has universal healthcare, massive social safety net, free education, cheap public transport. A waiter in the US has to buy insurance, own a car, and support themselves when a re establishment shuts down.

The problem is that is very hard to live on a $15/h job in SF.

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 don't think you read the article because it clearly states that the restaurants they are talking about are in San Francisco where the wage is $15/hr + medical benefits. When you factor in the required medical benefits that could end up be closer to $20/hr which is much higher than the $5.50 you are quoting.

To each their own, but if I am having a conversation with my wife, I would much rather disturb it for a few seconds than for a couple minutes.

> ... butt into our conversation

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.

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