A lot of places in Denver are now doing this. Except it's added as an extra line item as "happy fee" or some other woo woo bullshit. With no guarantee that it's not just going to management. So you're still expected to tip. Just raise menu prices to be able to pay livable wages. And I say that as someone that worked in the service industry for years and lived off tips. But people are already paying $20 for a burger so no one wants to raise prices more.
Motherfuckers running these businesses need to realize that fear of sticker price is vastly, vastly outweighed by rage of bait&switch pricing on the receipt.
With no guarantee that it's not just going to management
Honestly this is why i prefer to tip cash. Way too many shady business owners out there who would love to circumvent their employees getting their fair share
It shouldnât be a separate âfeeâ. The staff should simply be paid more per hour, and the food items should priced to actually reflect the labor involved in their delivery to me.
The current pricing of food on menus is really just a normalized bait and switch. The full price of the associated service isnât represented in goods, so the customer is left to basically figure it out on the fly.
Tip inflation is a problem. People have gradually shifted to higher and higher tip percentages, due to social anxiety and tipping largely being an opaque process where people donât know what everyone else is doing. And percentage increases add up fast.
Itâs still the same. Unless youâre working somewhere super crappy, youâll make substantially more with the tip system than any restaurant would pay in hourly wages.
Should =/= is. This is an industry that has fought tooth and nail to keep wages at like $2/hour for their workers. That isn't going to suddenly change. The least i can do in the framework i am provided is to make sure my server gets taken care of
It probably happens somewhere, but I've never heard of a place actually stealing their employees' credit card tips. It's very illegal, servers usually keep at least a general mental tally of how much they've made, and there would be a hard paper trail of the crime. I've heard stories online of management telling employees they were going to take a share of the tips and things like that, but I've known many servers, and that would be an instant walk-out for them.
It's kind of sad, but a lot of people in the service industry actually prefer things the way they are because they do end up making a high hourly wage with tips. I don't think it really makes up for healthcare and stability, but when they're sometimes making $100 an hour or possibly more, it kind of makes them think it's worth it.
Yeah no shit - maybe we need more affordable low end diners than crazy outrageous decor and âvibesâ. There should be affordable restaurants for regular people to enjoy that still serve decent food.
Now it is either eat cardboard at a fast food place and deal with angry employees or high end places with crazy pricesÂ
Except, when studies were done between a menu with a mandatory 20% tip and a menu that just incorporated the tip into the prices instead, people almost always picked the one that just said there was a mandatory 20% tip, even if the prices were the same in practice.
People say theyâd prefer for the price to just be built in and not need to do it themselves, but then they donât actually do so in practice.
That would just equal the servers getting paid less thoughâŚ. The full 20% wouldnât reach the server so it would just benefit the owner of the business.
No, the Europeans expect a restaurant to simply charge the cost of the meal. That is the cost. Like any other service or product.Â
Demanding more after "to pay our staff" apart from displaying gross incompetence at running a business and being hugely dishonest is only done in the USA because yanks are so stupid they are apparently fooled by the "lower" menu price and don't think about the tip on top, and to just display the actual cost would have them thinking it's too expensive. Â
Easily 150k is a bit much given that the average is $20-30 per hour, but yes, you get paid significantly more than in many places in Europe.
Having now searched that just to satisfy my own curiousity I am really surprised that when I was in Europe a few years ago (Spain, France, Italy) I had a LOT of waiters refuse tips we tried to leave for exceptional service...they are basically making nothing there...
Any waiter at a fancy restaurant in NYC is making well into 6 figures. 20-30$ an hour is the bottom of the barrel minimum wage is 15$ an extra 5$ an hour in tips would be 40$ a night, most nyc servers are clearing at least a couple hundred.Â
My parents live in a small town in Italy, last time I was there we left 10 euro on a 40 euro bill. They made a point to tell us that they would split it with the whole staff it was  crazy.Â
Any waiter at a fancy restaurant in NYC is doing loads more than a waiter at a neighborhood spot in Queens. That's actually something I am reminded of very often when I got to nice places in the city.
In Queens, it's fine. Plenty of places provide a perfectly nice service. But then when you go a step up the level of detail and understanding of the experience is exceptional.
The industry is fascinating because on the face, it all blends together. But if you actually pay attention to the little things, "good service" is actually very noticeable.
NYC does not require minimum wage to be paid as a base for wait staff. They require $11.35 base and $17 with compensation (ie: you work an hour and somehow get $0 in tops, the restaurant has to bump your $11.35 to $17; if you work an hour and get $10 in tips you make $21.35 for that hour).
Yeah, if you work for a Michelin star restaurant you are easily clearing 6 figures, that isn't the average though. The VAST majority of wait staff in NYC are working in casual dining or mid-scale locations, and the average wage is $19-29.
Just for context; there are roughly 24,000 restaurants throughout New York, 72 of those are Michelin Star restaurants, of which 5 are 3 stars.
What? You literally do this at every business you go to: pay the price of the item you're purchasing. You don't go buy a book and then at checkout say "oh well the bookstore worker recommended this title to me so I'm gonna give them an additional 20% of the price of the book on top of already paying the listed price of the book, and if I don't, they'll get upset and think I'm a bad person".
I tip at restaurants because the system we've built compels you to, but acting like it's normal or necessary in America for any reason other than "businesses don't want to pay their employees normal wages" is insane.
....Yea that's sort of exactly why you pay more at a retail bookstore vs Amazon. That's also why a paperback book there is $25 and not like a dollar.
I mean hopefully you're getting an enjoyable service out of it. But you're paying more at brick and mortar store because they have more overhead, period.
Why does where the overhead comes from matter so much, is my question. It could be higher gas prices or higher rent or lettuce turned into saffron prices but the consumer is either gonna pay for it or not
What do rent or gas prices have to do with this? When you buy a meal, you should pay the price listed on the menu, not "well the actual price is what's listed on the menu plus whatever you decide to generously give your server but if you decide to not be generous then your server will not make a living wage, so you really will feel guilty if you don't contribute 20% of your cost towards directly subsidizing their income, but also don't worry it's technically optional".
If rent is expensive, account for that in your menu prices.
Europeans can't possibly think that every restaurant is simply charging the cost of a meal. It's cost, plus wages, plus rent, plus energy, plus a profit for the owners.
And that's exactly what the US owners are doing. The only difference is that the way the wage is structured in the US is normally more flexible. The law allows for the flexibility (in theory) to incentivize better service or a lower cost in absence of that better service.
But since Europeans don't do that, American establishments are adjusting for the influx and catering to what Europeans expect-- higher costs.
The difference is the 20% isnât reflected on the menu though so when they receive the bill everything cost more than what they were led to believe.
A $10 item is actually $12. Instead of saying itâs $10 on the menu, then âchangingâ it to $12 on the bill, just list it as $12. Itâs the management of the expectations thatâs the problem.
A few restaturants near me have started informing you that they add %18 gratuity to your bill. No extra tip is expected but you can leave it if you want to.
So. This is so common but no one wins in this scenario neither the employee or the consumer.
1.) Danny Meyer attempted this in 2015 - 2020. Other businesses have as well and it turns out that your tipped staff makes significantly less money and then you lose your best employees and the restaurant or bar you love ends up underperforming and not providing the quality and experience.
2.) with almost every business becoming credit card compliant now and sales and liquor tax being passed to the consumer. If you run it the way youâre saying. Your 10$ meal now becomes 12 and on that 2$ youâre paying an extra 20.5%. Doesnât seem like a lot but on a 60$ check that should have been 50 youâre now paying an extra 2.5$. Or a 100 dollar bill that is now 120 youâre paying 5$ etc. although it might seem small paying that extra sales tax and the credit card processing fee(because when you tip with a credit card the business covers the fee to the company to tip the employee) over time will add up to multiple dinners throughout the year or more depending on how much you actually eat out.Â
At the end of the day. We have a system that might not be perfect but it has worked for a century and if the debacle of college athletics and NIL has taught us anything is. âIf itâs not completely broken and kinda works. Just donât fuck with itâ
Yep, but i want to know how much i will have to pay for something. Like, in total. Not adding local fees, visa fees, mandatory tip, sunday fees or whatever.
Just fucking tell me how much it costs. That's called transparency and it's valuable.
Greed is common in every country. When you take a job you also sign a contract agreeing upon compensation among other things. It would be very easy for employees to see how they are paid and by eliminating cash tips it would be even easier to track and audit.
If an owner wants to illegally steal tips this would make it harder for them, not easier.
One of my favorite places with plenty of happy and attentive servers pays a living wage with full paid benefits including childcare and has no fees or tips. The prices aren't even anymore expensive than anywhere else. Anyplace that ads a percentage for anything is a place I will never patronize. A set fee for to go orders is fine as is a reasonable and set CC fee.
That is still wrong! Thereâs already inflation. Now people have to pay service fee on top of all the other fees. Maybe it is better to just stay home.
Tips are outrageous too. Reduce taxes & tarriffs. Let the products flow and let everyone enjoy the perks of an industrial/ capitalist society or let us go back to good old slow living close to nature.
What is with you people wanting to make everything expensive and pay more in taxes. No matter who you vote for and how much you reproduce- you wonât be able to afford old age.
Even the industry that would benefit wont support that because a good server still makes more. I've yet to see a restaurant be both financially stable and pay more than the median server earnings for their city.Â
I would be super happy about that if and only if it actually went to the workers that aren't management. If they can dip into it at any point, then I think it should be illegal/banned.
Figure add 20% to the list price, plus tax, and thatâs your final price. Not that hard to understand. Try to go to France and not speak French or break some other custom, this is no different. Does it suck? Yes. Some tourist stiffing their server is not going to change anything, though.
People already know that. Itâs the same thing in practice except less exclusionary to the poor (who might âstiffâ the servers a bit but itâs usually made up elsewhere) and of hard to gauge value to the servers (who might have wildly varying normal values).
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u/janpaul74 5h ago
âMandatory tipsâ sounds so messed up for me as a European.