Then I moved to Seattle and noticed something entirely different. Same sort of friends - mostly service industry. And this was before the increase to $15/hr, when it was $12/hr. What was starkly different was that our new friends could actually afford to do things. Nice dinners, bars around town where we didn't know the bartenders, movies, trips to Portland and Vancouver. Same jobs, but with money to spend.
And then there's the side that was close to home. My wife was, for the first 2/3 of our relationship, a bartender. In NYC she had her good weeks, pulling in over $2k and her bad weeks, making somewhere around $100 for the week. Hard to say what was "normal" and impossible to predict. It was impossible to plan around her income so I basically just asked her to give me half and it would essentially even out. Then we moved to Seattle, again at $12/hr minimum (she was making $17-$20 I think) and our whole situation was different. We were already doing fine because I make a good living but now I could finally count on her contribution. We were able to save, plan trips, etc in ways we couldn't before because now we had a baseline amount that she would always make. The tips we're just a cherry on top.
And then we moved to Chicago with a shitty mimimum wage for servers and my wife left the industry entirely. She had gotten used to some stability in her income and now with a low minimum wage for servers, there is none. Even at a nice theater gig, she was making less than any job she had in Seattle and again relying upon the whims of her customers rather than the stability of the industry.