Us Europeans simply cannot understand how the US tipping culture has been allowed to exist. It is terrible for everyone except restaurant owners. Don't pay your staff properly and expect customers to deal with that separately? WTAF?
I own a pub and restaurant and help run a Yacht club that has a very good restaurant and bars. In both cases we pay our staff well above minimum wage and oddly enough we have staff who have been with us for 20-30 years and do a fantastic job and our customers are happy. In the Yacht Club, there is a specific ban on tipping of staff. It does occasionally happen, but we prefer to deal with it directly. For example, we have just had an amazing summer and have done really well, so I'm just sorting out the bonus payments for all staff this morning. All of them will get an additional £500-1500 in their pay packets at the end of next month.
I realise it is a weird concept, but well paid staff means a good service, happy customers and from my perspective a successful business. We never have any issue recruiting or retaining staff, whereas other businesses in the hospitality world around us are always crying for staff and complaining that "no-one wants to work in the sector any more." They do, they just need to get paid properly and treated with respect.
Us Europeans simply cannot understand how the US tipping culture has been allowed to exist. It is terrible for everyone except restaurant owners.
It's actually also alright for the staff in high-end places, they tend to make far more than they would if they were simply paid a wage. This doesn't mean I agree with it (I don't), I'm just making an observation. Much more than the:
All of them will get an additional £500-1500 in their pay packets at the end of next month.
Again, I hate tipping culture. It sucks for the majority of serving staff, and above all for customers. No idea how it's gotten to the point it has in the U.S.
I know I’m not the first to reply saying this but it’s not just at high end restaurants where tipping works well for front of house staff. I’ve worked at multiple firmly middle of the road places where I averaged $40-60 an hour on the majority of my shifts. My last job was at a beer bar that served pub food essentially, and it wasn’t a particularly popular restaurant either. There is just no world where a consistent wage is going to come close to meeting that.
There’s an idea online that servers and bartenders in the US are begging for tipping to end and to have an increased wage. I have never once met a FOH worker who wanted tipping abolished.
Like I said, $40-60 average. Maybe over winter months there would be weeks where I was averaging closer to $30 an hour, but it always evened out to somewhere around $50 an hour by the end of the year. I worked there for 6 years so I think I have a pretty solid sample to be pulling from.
Restaurant work is brutal and hard and it can really ruin your body. Part time work doesn’t have health insurance. There are absolute downsides to doing it and I would never have done it for $20 an hour. But tips put me through grad school. Truly one of the few jobs that you don’t need any kind of degree or certification for that you can truly live off of.
I also have worked at all levels of service industry, and always my wages were more and 25$ and up to 50 average. Sucks, but you make fast money as a bartender in us. I don’t think the FOH staff would change things to making minimum wage, or even 20/hr.
Totally agree. A lot of people who have never worked in the industry are acting like they know how everything works and love calling owners of small businesses greedy lol. If you don't like tipping then don't go out . In America we have a service industry where better service and pleasant interaction is incentivized. Tipping isn't mandatory but it is customary. And we all know that not everybody is gonna tip but if nobody did the whole service industry would collapse. Its already probably the most failed business venture you could have to open a restaurant. Small business owners work as many hours as they can to control payroll and not go under . And yet 4 out of 5 new restaurants can't make it to there 5th anniversary but let's quadruple payroll and see how that goes. All that will be left is McDonald's, Applebee's, etc.
In America we have a service industry where better service and pleasant interaction is incentivized.
That's certainly BS. Tipping is de facto mandatory, no matter the quality of service (short of extremes). If tipping went away, base costs would simply increase to reach a new market equilibrium, like they do everywhere else. It's not rocket science.
That is what is always preached to stop change. Oh, the employees are secretly making MORE this way 😉
Except it’s off the books & it’s never guaranteed. It absolutely effects the employees at every angle, from their taxes to their bank loans to the apartments they qualify for etc. This is essentially the same arguement the wealthy class uses to convince blue collar workers they don’t want a raise (oh, a raise would put you in a higher tax bracket & ruin you!).
If they ACTUALLY make so much more money this way & it’s so much more lucrative, why isn’t the boss doing it to himself? Why doesn’t he hang a sign on the front door of his restaurant that says “Pay us whatever you think the food is worth.”
For obvious reasons, that’s why. Every reason you can think of (shitty bad faith people, assholes, bad economy money hoarders, etc) applies to his servers too. The idea that the rich tip so well that it’s better than a steady wage is a total myth. Most rich people got that way by being selfish with their finances, not the other way around.
Have you ever worked in a bar or restaurant in the front of house? We are literally making more with tips, truly speak to any server or bartender. It’s not a conspiracy lol
It depends on the server though. Your experience doesn’t speak for everyone, and a lot of servers aren’t happy that their bosses get to justify their hourly wage of $2/ hr as a positive thing because they can “make more in tips.”
Servers aren’t all making $60/hr and if you think so you’re incredibly out of touch.
I realize you’re currently making more off tips than wages due to the intended structure of the system…. But as you see from the arguments going on here, it’s hard to demand higher & higher tips as inflation increases. In proper economies, wages increase over the years with inflation. You don’t have to rely on the goodwill of hundreds of people to pay you in tips because the law protects you & makes your employer pay you for your labor.
It’s not hard though, menu prices increase with inflation and tip percentages increase with it. In the decade I spent serving tables this was never an issue.
It's not off the books if you don't want it to be, you can report it to the IRS no problems. And it's pretty much guaranteed, for cultural reasons.
If the boss could say that you have to pay 20% extra "optional" tip on top of the price to them, they'd do it in a heartbeat. For cultural reasons it's not done.
It's obvious it's great to be tipped when the average diner spends $50+. If you have 5 tables of 4 that spend overall $1k, you get $200 in an evening pretty much no matter the quality of service and simply because the restaurant is expensive.
But WHY is he? Because either he’d be using it to evade taxes or not doing it at all?
Exactly. It’s a circuitous argument any way you turn. If the boss shouldn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t do it, then the employees should not be paid by such a means.
It's actually also alright for the staff in high-end places
No, it's good for front of house, who actively try to sabotage any type of progress being made in the culinary world in term of work-life balance and wages, because it'll ruin what they have going on.
What they don't seem to understand is that once every single fucking cook and chef has left the industry, as they currently are in droves, they'll finally realize that front of house isn't actually anywhere near as valuable as the back, because without the back you don't even HAVE food.
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u/RofiBie Aug 28 '24
Us Europeans simply cannot understand how the US tipping culture has been allowed to exist. It is terrible for everyone except restaurant owners. Don't pay your staff properly and expect customers to deal with that separately? WTAF?
I own a pub and restaurant and help run a Yacht club that has a very good restaurant and bars. In both cases we pay our staff well above minimum wage and oddly enough we have staff who have been with us for 20-30 years and do a fantastic job and our customers are happy. In the Yacht Club, there is a specific ban on tipping of staff. It does occasionally happen, but we prefer to deal with it directly. For example, we have just had an amazing summer and have done really well, so I'm just sorting out the bonus payments for all staff this morning. All of them will get an additional £500-1500 in their pay packets at the end of next month.
I realise it is a weird concept, but well paid staff means a good service, happy customers and from my perspective a successful business. We never have any issue recruiting or retaining staff, whereas other businesses in the hospitality world around us are always crying for staff and complaining that "no-one wants to work in the sector any more." They do, they just need to get paid properly and treated with respect.
The US tipping culture fails on both fronts.