Leather Storrs: Tipping and Minimum Wage
Saturday, June 06, 2015
First, some disclaimers:
I could never do what servers do. The idea of being trapped into courtesy leaves me cold.
Sh%t rolls downhill, meaning that waiters are often the recipients of a customer’s bad day, or life.
Good service saves a bad meal, while the reverse is rarely true.
Exceptional service makes a good restaurant great.
But all that being said doesn’t change the fact that should the status quo remain, when the minimum wage bumps 50%, the difference between the front and back will jump to a multiplier of five. This seems fundamentally untenable. If the resentment doesn’t deflate the kitchen, the inability to live above the poverty line certainly will.
Same goes for the idea of an 18% automatic “service charge”. But while this policy also removes the customer’s option to reward or punish service, it has the benefit of protecting the restaurant from the inevitable dips and swirls of erratic business. The service charge would be divided among the staff, at the discretion of the owners.
Both of these techniques would affect the quality of service in a restaurant, most likely in a negative way. Excellent servers will jump to restaurants that remain committed to the existing formula. And those restaurants would benefit doubly: they would present exceptional service and their prices would seem to be 20% lower than their competitors. However, those restaurants might lose talented cooks to other shops practicing a more dynamic rewards program. Pick your poison.
Of course, there will be no wholesale change in the industry. Different houses will implement different formulas and the result will be confusion. But there is a silver lining. If servers can’t live nicely off of their gratuities, then a bunch of liberal arts majors are gonna go back to school, return to the Oboe or finally finish that novel. In the mean-time, buy the kitchen a six-pack.
Related Slideshow: 10 Restaurants with Highest Back Wages
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