Tip outs are better in bougie joints frequented by tech workers.
This isnt a contradiction to your main point, maybe more of a damning with faint praise if anything.
This isnt a contradiction to your main point, maybe more of a damning with faint praise if anything.
This sounds a little trickle-downy. Why not strive for an economy where people doing important work like feeding their communities just... Don't need to be tipped?
I know it sounds crazy in today-terms, but if it makes any sense, it makes tipping culture look like more of a problem than a boon to anyone receiving the tips.
On the high end that means you get paid a lot more, because each of your individual customers is paying you and none of them are looking at your total income and deciding you already made enough.
If you want fierce resistance from servers
- ask them to split tips more equitably with the kitchen
- offer to abolish the tip system altogether and just pay them $15/h flat, hell even $25/h
Bollocks. Maybe at the fanciest, high-end locations, and only on busy days, i.e. Fridays or Saturdays.
Maybe a Jr SWE in, like Mississippi, but there is no way even the top 10% of servers are pushing tech hub SWE salaries. And even if the pure-cash gets kind-of close, there is often no healthcare, no 401k, no bennies, no bonus; the TC wouldn't be close at all.
Many states only pay $2.18 per hour for tipped jobs; 15/hr would be utterly amazing and 25 would be great. No server I know would ever push back on that, save for the tiny, tiny handful working at high-end locations. Yeah the dude working at the trendy bar in NYC with $33 highballs might be able to pull near six-figures while handling a cocaine habit, but I'd bet my hat that a majority of servers would make more money if they 25/hr.
WOW
In the US salaries are smaller for tipped jobs???
That is the problem right there. I bet everywhere else, like literally every other country, the minimum wage also applies to waiters
I'm not claiming it should never be a thing. I just wonder if we should collectively accept it and want it to be part of our economy and how our communities function. I have had many friends who do well as servers (and indeed, one earning more than I did was a junior SWE), but it doesn't seem typical, nor does it seem sustainable.
The restaurant industry certainly can't be responsible for fixing any issues with this; it's a symptom of something greater. I just don't think we should accept it as okay. Primarily due to the variability of tipping... I will always need to pay enough to cover the cost of the food and kitchen, so the restaurant is okay. But how can I be certain that the person serving me is taken care of? My individual tip isn't enough, and I know many servers do terribly depending on time and location.
I've worked shitty jobs, but I always got paid the same amount by my employer and there were legal frameworks to protect me. Servers don't get the same from us, and I don't think that's alright. We can point to when it works out well for servers, but again, I don't think that's typical.
I know of no other country where tipping is such a major part of sustainable wages. In all other countries I know of, tips are a supplement to the wage - a nice-to-have, a perk of the job. Sometimes needed to make the job worthwhile, because it isn't worth doing at minimum wage. But nowhere near the extent the US has lifted it to. Basically: industrialised begging for change.
So: no, it doesn't sound crazy at all in today-terms.
As such I really do prefer the model where the food covers all wages with no employees being deprived of minimum wages. If tipping is provided on top, great – it's nice to say thanks if it's culturally acceptable. On the other hand, it's not okay to have to depend on those tips.
This is an opinion, but even major cities with high living expenses where minimum wages are provided seem problematic. In my city we had a brief period where more than minimum wage was offered due to worker shortages, but those days are over. Now servers are being hired back at $15.50 per hour which is an insanely small amount to live on. Shifts are provided such that you can never be considered full-time, depriving you of various benefits many would consider essential.
Do tips _really_ make up for that? No health benefits, not enough hours to work in order to earn a reliable minimum income, no regular hours, etc. What a shitty deal.
Sure, it could motivate people to "do better", but that's not always an option and it means we've essentially got a meat-grinder of an occupation that churns out people in a cycle of exploitation. Why not do better?
My shittiest jobs were miserable but at least I was compensated well. And I could be pretty brain-dead to do it. Stacking wood for kilns, pushing it through machines, bundling it, etc. I made way more than today's minimum wage, got vacation time, health benefits, etc. doing that stuff, but I did it 15 years ago.
I get that margins are slim in the food industry so that isn't possible today. My point is more like, maybe we should collectively work towards rectifying that and consider what we've got today to be a problem.
Of course I'm open to being totally wrong. There are a lot of forces at work, I'm not all that smart, and I just don't like the idea of being a server and having that experience. I'd personally prefer to pay a little more to alleviate that, but I know many would prefer to pay even less still.
If you look into the details of those minimum wage laws that have lower minimums for tipped workers, it usually turns out that if their wage + tips turn out to be less than the ordinary minimum wage, they’re still entitled to the ordinary minimum wage.
In Japan, where tips are prohibited, attitude from service workers is much better than US.
There are cultural differences between the US and Europe, also concerning how service workers interact with and towards those they provide service.
Thus, Europeans and USA'ians could observe the same set of behaviours from EU/US service workers, and both would praise "their" worker and be appalled by the "other" worker's behaviour.
I find it bizarre that we expect good attitude from service workers when, generally speaking, they are not working a particularly enjoyable job nor earning much for doing it. I know there are exceptions, but the bulk of service workers I encounter are probably not making bank by any means. I can't bring myself to expect them to deliver a specific attitude with my food or coffee or whatever.