But what about the people who have actively just been shortchanged out of 61.7M USD in tips? Surely that' the topic here?
A related topic might be all the people suffering the same theft while working for much smaller players.
From there, it moves pretty rapidly to, "get rid of tips and pay a wage that funds people existing reasonably and showing up for work" rather than start a fairly expensive and difficult enforcement effort.
Maybe the idea of just avoiding all this mess to prevent what did happen, and what is happening to a ton of people is popular because it is relevant?
I would be going to jail for the rest of my life.
Who is going to jail for this theft?
The hassle is that even if a place charges more for food, you don't know if they pay their service better. So if you're going to support the "no tips" agenda you'll have to put in the additional effort of looking up wages to decide Starbucks is better than Tim Horton's
I just....don't see why. I honestly don't get an argument why. When you get a plumber do you check how much they earn per hour and decide accordingly?
Like seriously, it's the biggest scam the restaurant industry has managed to pull off - they are making customers a) worry about this stuff at all, even though you wouldn't for pretty much any other industry b) make them feel bad for not tipping if the company pays poorly. That's incredible. And it's so incredibly condescending towards the workers too "oh you poor slave, you are paid so little, I'll give you some extra cash so you can actually live like a normal human being". There's probably some kind of syndrome that fits this situation.
I worked ice cream vending (https://serprex.github.io/w/Ice%20Cream%20Biker if someone wants to read a very dry recount of my first day) where half my income was from tips. The prices of the items were generally like 2.75 to encourage getting me the extra quarter. It's a weird way that the business can leverage advertising a lower price while allowing tips to average out to cover a shitty wage
Here's a cbc article on the topic where a no tips experiment failed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/caf%C3%A9-linnea-all...
But....why should I care about this as a customer at all. Again, I'm baffled how did the responsibility for the wellbeing and income of restaurant workers has been shifted to the customers. The employer should be responsible, not me. It literally doesn't work like this anywhere else. As a customer I also don't check if there are rats in the kitchen or if the chef is pouring grease into storm drains, yet I'm expected to be responsible for the salary of employees?
>>Here's a cbc article on the topic where a no tips experiment failed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/caf%C3%A9-linnea-all...
So I've tried to see why it failed:
"After several months working at Café Linnea, he also found he was making less money than if he were receiving tips.
"I think that the wage ended up working out to be like ... an average of what one might expect to make on a slow night, but it didn't adequately make up for the busy nights.""
So sure, people who benefit from the broken system complain if it's being changed. What a surprise. Of course people who happen to make really good money on tips will complain about removal of tips. Shocker.
Somehow elsewhere in the world tips are just not expected and restaurants still manage to hire and retain staff.
Another quote: "Fox said the no-tipping policy meant management couldn't end up sending servers home early on slow nights."
And....? How is this given as a downside?
And another:
""My employer paid for less than half of my total earnings," he said. "Most of the burden of my earnings was on the customer and thus didn't have to be reflected in prices."
Café Linnea never increased prices enough to make up for the higher staff wages, he said."
Like, I could have told you the outcome of this "experiment" before they even started.
And jesus, if this is not late capitalism then I’m not sure what is. Through the phenomenon of tipping everyone becomes a Caeser-like philanthropist, making life or death choices based on the perceived suffering and performance of their precarious underlings. Meaning waiters, and other service industry workers, compete for crumbs by trying to make other people feel like "the golden child of their day", in a system that systemically undervalues and underpays them (that's putting it very lightly).
David Graeber has a great name for service workers, he calls them 'the caring classes'. [1]
In another article he writes about the British working class:
"In other words, the historical defeat and humiliation of the British working classes is now the island’s primary export product. By organizing the entire economy around the resultant housing bubble, the Tories have ensured that the bulk of the British population is aware" [2]
In a talk he gave he says despite technology increasing the productivity and therefore some wages, "in the caring sector the exact opposite has happened. Digitization is being used as an excuse to make lower productivity so as to justify the existence of this army of administrators" [3], in Britain this has created a "cheerful, creative, and subservient working-class population who, drawing on centuries of tradition, know exactly how to be butlers" [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/caring...
[2] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber
[3] http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/managerial-feudalism-r...