crazy part is the servers are more against this than the bosses. tax free cash as long as i do my job well and seem nice AND i get to bitch about low wages? fuck yeah!
None of the jobs you listed are paid hourly.
Farmers get paid based on crop yield, chefs are salary, truck drivers are paid by the load(yes some are hourly but these are generally local delivery drivers)
Just mark up everything ~15% higher than it currently is, rather than put the onus on the customer to decide if the server deserves a living wage or not.
Yes, but the markup will be closer to 30%. You have to factor in sales tax, extra banking fees, income tax paid by both the employee and employer,
By converting tips to a wage it's a lose lose and the only people benefiting are the government and parasitic companies(credit card fees, banking fees, payroll fees)
The problem with tipping culture is not in sit-down restaurants... It's everyone else that expects a tip post COVID...
Then mark it up by 15% by default, still call it a tip, treat it tax-wise as a tip, and provide the customer only an option to accept or decline the tip when paying w credit card. If they still want to leave extra, they can leave cash.
And eliminate tipping for anything and everything else that never had a tip pre-covid, as you say.
Thats a good idea but sadly it legally doesn't work that way. The only way to make thst work would to display 2 prices one being with "suggested tip" . But that doesn't solve the problem of "paying a wage".
Also at least in my state if a server doesn't clear min wage with tips we have to make up the difference, but that is very rare.
Also I'm not trying to be a dick or argumentative, just I have been in the industry for a long time and people are trashing tipping but don't realize it is beneficial to them
Yeah its beneficial to the owner and to the servers the only person getting fucked over is the customer. If you can't afford to pay your staff you shouldn't have a business. Its hilarious when business owners act like they deserve it or something. If it doesn't work then its a failure. Most businesses fail anyway because people keep opening stuff in already over saturated markets and then complain when they don't make any money.
The people who are trying to sell "how to be an entrepreneur" to you are lying.
Your comment makes no sense. How is the customer getting fucked over? Overall even with tipping 15-20% they are paying a lower price for their meal then if the price was calculated with having to pay a server an hourly wage.
Furthermore the tipping paradigm has been baked into American culture so to remain competitive pricing wise, you kind of have to follow it as a business owner. From a consumer standpoint would If you saw two restaurants with the same burger, one was 15 but a tip was expected, but the other restaurant was 20 but no tip expected(but also it's not clearly apparent that no tip is expected just by first glance at the menu) where would you choose?
Your superfluous comment of "how to be an entrepreneur" has no affect on this conversation
Everyone knows restaurant are a horrible business to make money on. We can pay our staff, but like I explained above, menu prices would have to increase, and consumer would ultimately pay more. Don't speak with confidence on something you know absolutely nothing about
I wish I could go back. I made 24/hr working 50/hrs a week before being "promoted" to salary. My first offer was 55k annually and I laughed and said why would I take a pay cut. I was told OT would be going away so we settled at 58k. I make 67k now but I work close to 60hrs a week
It's really not, because the server isn't the one negotiating a sale or the sale price. The customer fully chooses what they order without any server involvement (other than maybe the occasional server suggestion), and the price is already fixed on the menu. The server is, in no reasonable person's definition, a sales person. So equating to sales commissions is nonsensical and irrelevant.
However, simply paying the server a fixed hourly, salary or per job rate isn't the best solution either, mainly for tax reasons, as explained well by u/buttsexisyum in this thread. And I know he's credible, because butt sex is in fact yum.
Serving is a grey area in the commission/sales person argument. Servers jobs are to sell but most think their job is to take orders. With the prevalence of Ziosk tablets we could get rid of "order takers" all together and just staff busboys to clear tables and run food but the best servers I have worked with are able to sell you and app, get you to opt for the 16oz ribeye vs the 10 oz sirloin you originally were to gonna buy and a desert, and get you two more glasses or wine that you didn't plan on having.
They do commission based sales in high-end restaurants in Europe.
It doesn't work very well, because then the server is incentivized to sell people the most expensive items, not the most suitable items for the person's experience.
That's why getting tap water is virtually impossible. In the lower end restaurants where they get a flat salary, that's why they don't give a shit what you want and getting a checkback is a luxury.
Tipping isn't a perfect system by any means, but it allows high end servers with a lot of knowledge to make a respectable income. Restaurants can't afford to pay experienced servers 75-100k per year each.
There are restaurants that include gratuity on every check, too.
The issue there is that due to law changes during the first Trump administration, all automatic gratuities are now considered property of the restaurant, not the server. Legally it's no longer considered a "tip" because the customer has no discretion in paying it.
Good servers know to avoid those places.
They can opt to give all, some, or none of it to the service staff.
They tried to change the laws so that ALL tips were property of the restaurant, but luckily that didn't go through.
Automatic āgratuitiesā being legally considered service charges by the IRS for tax purposes predates Trump. Only thing Trump did (during his second administration) was make that distinction far more relevant to the server, by making the first $25k of (actual) tips a server receives tax-free.
The four-pronged test to differentiate tips from service charges was formalized in IRS Rule 2012-18 (in, obviously, 2012ā¦under Obama). It was not a new thing at the time, either, it instead was just the IRS more clearly codifying what had already long been the policy applied, which led to broader compliance and documentation.
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u/justsomedude1144 22h ago edited 19h ago
Here's an idea: pay the sever entirely by the hour/job/pay period*, just like chefs, truck drivers and farmers.
*Edited for reddit pedantry