Its not about being able to afford to tip.I can afford to eat out for the rest of my life.Its about quality of service and if a tip is earned.I worked in the Business and usually got a tip but when I didnt I knew it wasnt because of poor service.As with any other job in my life I always try to be the best at whatever I do.If Someone does a good job I am very generous.

this is what eats my shorts in america ........Its not my job to pay the servers salary ....that job belongs to the owner of the resturaunt .....if he is to cheap to pay his people ....why should I help that scumbag out .........go to Spain ....they do not expect you to tip and kinda get offended if you do they pay their people well enough to live. The resturant owner should have to pay health care and benefits just like any other employer in the united states ....what makes him or her fall under different rules then the general contractor ......when is the last time you tipped your general contractor? .....exactly !!!!!....
That being said I do tip my servers well but I sure as hell don't agree with it and I could give a shit if all these resturant owners go under untill they are expected to play by the same rules as everyone else

BS about tipping take out, I’ll throw in a few dollars not 10% tho. Do you tip McDonald’s take out? They put it in a bag with napkins and ketchup. It’s not that hard and half the time it’s wrong when you get home anyway.

I was somewhere maybe California (maybe Monterey I can’t remember) but the bill came out with food total, workers fee and tax added. I said what’s this workers fee they told me it was for healthcare, PTO, etc it was like 10-12% and it wasn’t a substitute for the tip but an additional fee for the workers.

"If the employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 per hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference. Many states, however, require higher direct wage amounts for tipped employees."

I think this part of rules is where "tips are expected" culture comes from.

In other countries, they don't lower the minimum wage assuming that the tbd tips will make up the difference. Hence, no tips needed.

I would LOVE to get away from the tip culture. I hates it so much. Just pay people straight and charge me straight. Heck, let's go crazy and add all the taxes and fees into the list price too across the board! Give me my true price of my burger, widget, car, etc.. upfront and I can die happy (or more likely of sticker shock).

I always tip and tip well even for mediocre service. But in the technology age, now 'tipping' has become more of a way to subsidize giving more pay than anything else. I hate the new CC machines that ask for a tip everywhere, because if you are just taking my cash, why would I tip but you still wonder if it is expected, or if you are an ass because you don't or how much.

Guess what, this is a form of a handout, a tax, a burden. So for those that are so anti handout..keep this in mind.

This right here is what I am most annoyed about. Every single payment kiosk asks how much you want to tip. I am picking up my own food, why do I need to tip? Also all of the charity orgs that get tied to retailers. Would you like to round up your total to give to X charity? It gets exhausting.

Tip for doing your job?

Right. So both the employer and the employee benefit and are hoping to keep those tips rolling in.

I propose that this then leads to the “Tips expected” culture

except states that do not have the exception for tipped staff in minimum wage (aka they are getting paid at least full min wage by the employer) there is still an expectation of the same tip. Servers do not expect to make min wage, they expect a higher avg earning based on expected tips. The old min wage exception really doesn't have much to do with it anymore.

Besides, employers would screw employees out of this 'owed min wage' anyway by evaluating this over a pay period, not over a smaller time period.

Yep, you're totally right! Folks should be paid a living wage. I edited my earlier post to clarify that my point was meant to be US-specific.

It can, but unless you want your new hires living on the streets, it still needs to be a living wage.

Abolish minimum wage all together

The customer benefits too.

Yes, it is. 100% of all expenses of any business are paid by the customer. Any business where the customers are not covering 100% of the costs of the business, that business gets rebranded as 'closed'.

The average server in spain makes about $7-$8 USD per hour. The median in the US is significantly higher than that.

Non tipping models have been tried at every level of the F&B industry in the US from Mom and Pops, Chains to the extremely high end. It almost always fails.

Joes Crab Shack tried it. The customers didn't like it and location sales dropped drastically. The servers didn't like it, they made less money and left.

Danny Meyer/Union Hospitality Group (high end) tried it. They had the exact same issues as Joes Crab Shack.

Do people really think something positive will come about by taking federally protected wages (tips) and diverting them to the owners via higher menu prices?

IDK, I personally loved it both times I was in Australia and didn't have to tip because it wasn't part of the culture and min wage there is $20+. Their economy is far healthier than ours so clearly something is working over there.

Australia's MW is over $20 but converted to USD it's less than $15 an hour. On average the cost of living is also 10% higher there. That said, even just shy of $15 an hour it's the highest national MW in the world.

Researching the area is something that I don't understand being a step that gets skipped so often. On one side of town we had a very successful, but small mexican restaurant. It moved to a bigger location - on a different side of town, and directly between two other successful mexican restaurants. They took something that was a runaway success for 10 years and closed less than a year after relocating. They dumped all of their loyal area/lunch clientele and moved into a location with more competition, competition which had earned loyalty from people in that area.

Agreed that moving to a no tip model piecemeal style is just asking for failure. Even though so many claim (like me!) to hate it, I don't see a national change as realistic either. But a boy can dream.

As far as whether the change would be positive or negative to the workers...you are probably right that net net, it is a loss of wages. Which then leads to carve outs/mandates/regulations to try and insure no loss of net income, which is...not where my dream wants to go.

Our family business growing up was service oriented, mostly near minimum wage, non-tipped, low skilled, so my background is a bit biased I suppose. (Depending on the month, the subset of skilled labor actually made more than my parents).

The kids did put a tip jar out now and then which tended to annoy my dad. If he was in the building (which was 10-12 hrs a day 6 days a week), that tip jar tended to be put away. "If you think you deserve a raise, ask don't beg" or something similar was his go to response.

As an aside, watching my dad practically kill himself working for decades non stop from sunrise to sunset and extra if there was a problem (and there was always a problem) made me take a hard pass on taking over the business. Missing half of every single holiday with my own kids was not something I wanted to inherit. Guess that makes me one of those lazy youths.

You're not a real man until you let your career ruin 2 marriages, have 1 kid grow up completely void of you and work at least 3500 hrs a year for 40 years straight!

I'm a lazy youth. I put in 12 years post college and through grad school working full time. When I graduated in 2008 we were right at the start of the great recession. I took a "full time job" where I was told when I worked the day before I worked in advertising, and took a 33 cent pay cut per hour to do it. I've had a bunch of jobs over a 12 year period until I got furloughed in the pandemic. I started my own business, and now I make double what I made at my highest paying job and work half as much and have a 5 year plan to step further away from the day to day business aspects and just run operations. Honestly, fuck money and fuck working hard. Working fucking sucks and it's a waste of life. Do what you have to do to get by, but hard work is overrated and takes away from the good parts of life. If you can somehow figure out how to work where you barely work and make enough money to get by and do the things you want to do, then you figured it out.

Work smarter, not harder. The pissing contest some people get in about who did the hardest work in their lifetime, who worked the longest hours and the crappiest jobs is silly to me. "Look at this tree I cut down all day. I work hard."

Winning the most while doing the least is always the best.

But don't whine when you lost doing the least.

Or when all that hard work just doesn't pay off.

Yup... sometimes you get dealt a bad hand. But the difference is people who do something about it vs expect someone to fix it for them.

It hasn't failed in almost every other country in the world, like the metric system hasn't failed all over the rest of the world, but USA seems to want to stick with a less simple system. I suspect there is an ingrained culture that is very difficult to change. The system of no tips will (and does) work, however the end user is just not comfortable with change. People not wanting change is actually fairly universal, regardless of what background or culture we are brought up in.

In every other country they make less money both on average and at the top scales.

This is more than balanced out by better publicly funded benefits like single payer healthcare and better mass transit that we don’t have.

So, you’re comparing apples to oranges.

The current US tipping system, even with it's flaws, creates higher income for employees, reduced overhead for businesses (and I'm not talking about direct labor costs) and saves the consumer money.

Me too. For a few months local restaurants could only do carry out and I was happy to help keep them and their employees afloat and started tipping 20% and carryout. I've dropped that back down to 10-15% now that restaurants have returned to normal, but I still plan on tipping for carry out going forwards.

Exactly, they don't normally tip in Europe, but servers in Europe get free healthcare, free college, have way better mass transit so they don't buy cars and auto insurance, and they get more paid sick and vacation leave. American restaurant staff have a lot more to pay for out of their pocket. Health care in particular, the reason why most of us work for years or decades longer than we want to before retiring is because our healthcare is so damn expensive.

Voting against our own self interests is a national pastime in the US.

Single payer healthcare is a no-brainer fiscally. Per capita healthcare spending is drastically lower and the healthcare outcomes are equivalent.

Some people would rather pay twice as much as the rest of the world as long as someone else doesn't get a "free ride".

And, no matter how hard you work or if you are insured. A family healthcare crisis in the US is probably going to wipe you out.

and I don't tip my electrician .....gave me a quote ,paid him what he asked and he paid his employees that is the way it should be....he's happy , Im happy
give me a bill and pay your own employees what you are required to pay them thats it and thats all. It's not my responsibility to make a resturant owners life easier by allowing him to be a cheapskate.

Assuming staff made the same amount of money after converting to a non-tipped system the same thing would actually cost you more money than under the tipping system (and that's current price + tip).

What you advocate is for currently federally protected wages (tips) to be put under the control of the owner. Who's that going to benefit? ...the owner.

So what’s your plan for retirement? Or do you just plan on working up till the day you die? Cause it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to put enough away for retirement and if you plan to rely on Social Security a.) if it’s even still around the benefits will be greatly slashed and b.) it doesn’t sound like you’ll be contributing enough to get much out of it anyway.

Totally. We are much better off in a system where a 30 million people don't have insurance yet we pay twice as much per capita as our peers with single payer systems and universal coverage.

I am totally down for healthcare being wholly reliant on non direct healthcare related services (insurance companies and the required administrative labor to deal with them) causing us to have a higher % of our healthcare dollars go to administration than our peers.

My wife is also in healthcare. She disagrees with you.

pasted_image (resized).png

What case size?

Random breasts are only $2.18/lb right now. Switch from double lobe/hump/butterfly breasts to single lobe for sandwiches and randoms for everything but sandwiches.

Chicken went up but we have not seen 170%...

I retired 25 years ago at age 20. Not because I had a bunch of $$$, but rather because I got sick of watching my fat boss roll into the office everyday at whatever o’clock in his giant red Cadillac just to plop down in his office and watch me run his company from his bank of cctv screens.

Those 25 years of answering to no one has turned me into a shit kickin cock sure boss hawg cancel me if you can type of sort

God help us if we end up with a country full of me’s

PFG. Why are you forced to use one supplier?

Healthcare spending is public data.

I certainly have a different perspective than most since I was in the industry so long.

I am somewhat on the fence about tipping. On one hand, I worked in top-end restaurants, was a certified sommelier, had a cicerone certification, and a massive list of regular diners that only would sit in my section. Tipping culture made me a lot of money (way more than most would dare to dream). Tipping was a catalyst to me improving myself, learning, and getting ahead.

On the other hand, some places in my area do pay their servers a living wage, and don't require tipping. I find them (on average) to be some of the laziest, unprofessional, and non-caring workers out there. You could certainly insert some of the low wage fast food workers in this category as well.

It's funny how money motivates people

If servers were paid a 'living wage' as opposed to being tipped, restaurants would go out of business because of expenses being raised dramatically and fewer diners would go out. I would also bet donuts to dollars your service levels would drop as well (as they do in most other countries where tipping isn't a thing)

P.S. I HATE that everything has a tip line on it now, however. It is getting ridiculous. It's one thing to tip someone who makes 2.13 and hour and has worked extremely hard to give you a great experience...and quite another to tip someone for ringing up a retail purchase who already makes 15 an hour, says nothing to you, and who doesn't really add to the situation whatsoever.

I was surprised to find there are only 3 countries in the WORLD that don't use the metric system, the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar.....

I worked for Chrysler in the 80s and was told it's because it would cost too much to re-tool the entire US manufacturing industry.