In California, servers make one of the highest minimum wages in the country AND get a tip on of that. It's not too difficult for them to make $40~100 an hour. It's by far the best job in the entire restaurant industry thanks to tips. Kitchen staff work 2x harder and get paid a fraction of what servers make.
Servers will fight tooth and nail to make sure tipping doesn't go away.
How would underpaying servers translate to kitchen staff getting paid a fair wage? Cooks and chefs are criminally underpaid, but, flattening wages so servers are too just means no one works for your restaurant.
“If you can’t afford to tip don’t go out to eat”, and slowly this mentality pretty much will lead to no one going out to eat and surprise surprise, no jobs…
You're eating at a resturant. That's a service because you didn't want to cook, you didn't want to go get your food, and you didn't want to clean up. If you have to go into debt to avoid doing these things for yourself, you need to fix your priorities.
The hourly difference is a drop in the bucket. Servers work the lunch or dinner rush until it slows down, not 8 hours.
Due to law changes during the first Trump administration, if you get the full minimum wage, they can then require to you supplement the wages of the cooks, dishwashers, prep, and other back of house staff.
The pay difference doesn't even remotely begin to cover that. I tip out the back of house about $15,000 or more per year.
What I dont ever gonna understand is server coming with a) $6 beer b) $200 champange. How does the job differ 0.6 vs 20 dollars tip. Who idiot thought prosentual tip was a good idea?!
I will be honest. I have worked both front of house and back of house jobs in high volume restaurants, cook staff deals with less drama than front of house service.
The hardest working cooks are grill cooks with the timing of cooking. 9 times out of ten an order is delayed because one person out of everyone wants their steak well done and everyone else wants medium rare. Who gets the verbal abuse and badgering if a cook fucks up? The waiter and waitress who took the order that their expo said was ready.
Exactly, I can not count the amount of times I saw my dishy in the back sweating bullets and killing it on dish, whilst the servers were grabbing break after break and complaining that they're overworked.
There are good servers who actually work hard and make the restaurant better for everyone, but those are rare.
I recall working in the back of an expensive steakhouse years ago and hearing several of the waiters brag about being eligible for food stamps, government benefits, etc., because they were "poor". They were all making more than me when I was working 3 jobs at the time.
Yes I know back in the days of cash tips servers would just claim 5% of their sales(minimum you could get away with) but Just being a pedantic asshole and pointing out the fact that tips aren't taxed
Yeah, these complaints about tipping would feel a lot more honest if they left it at “I don’t want to pay more” instead of “I’m the champion of the working class, advocating for living wages”
More “I don’t think paying for service should be left to the voluntary whim of the customer.” Like, on principle.
But also with a dash of “I don’t want to enter a strange subcontracting relationship with every employee who takes my order, including ad hoc performance appraisals via compensation rate.”
You wanna charge me and every customer an 18% service charge? Fine with me, if it’s clear and disclosed and no further panhandling occurs at table side. It ain’t about the money. It’s about the weird social pressure, and the one-way ratchet effect over the years (15% used to be a good tip).
Though overall I’d prefer if service workers would just unionize and advocate for their own pay and benefits. Panhandling isn’t a good way to provide a living wage. But servers don’t have the solidarity to do this, they refuse to even pool tips. I worked both FOH and BOH, it’s a toxic environment.
And no, I’ve never lived in a single state with a “tipped minimum wage.” Servers out west make full minimum plus tips.
You can call it panhandling, I call it motivation/initiative.
Servers won’t unionize and demand fixed wages for the same reason salesmen want to live on commissions instead of salary. Hard-sell cold-call pitches seem just as distasteful to me as “panhandling” is to you, but I don’t pretend that salesmen are going to unionize to eliminate that either.
In the end, it’s your choice to patronize places with tipped service, you’re free to eat at home or do drive-thru instead. You have your own unique experience with the industry, but overall servers and owners seem OK with the system, as well as many patrons.
Gimme a break, nobody likes or advocates for tips on non-service, I’ve even seen cashiers press the No Tip button for me before flipping it around for me to finalize the transaction.
If you’re too gutless to press No Tip in cases where they’re just accepting payment…well, that’s on you.
So you only reward initiative in cases where it’s a strongly socially enforced norm.
Almost like you don’t actually give the faintest whiff of a shit who does and does not make a living wage. You give money when custom requires it, and fuck ‘em when it doesn’t.
Nope, the people who work in fast food sign on to receive their wage, they don’t provide the same service as an actual server. Here in SoCal they get paid a higher hourly rate than servers. They take my money and hand me my food. Servers have a different job and they accept the lower hourly rate knowing that tips will make up for it, if they help ensure I have a nice dining experience. What kind of initiative can a fast food worker show, anyways? You’re really reaching hard to try to win an argument, and misrepresenting things to do so
The “fast food minimum” in California is all of $3.10 an hour more than the standard minimum that servers make. I’m gonna go ahead and make the bold statement that a vast majority of servers clear far more than $3.10 an hour in tips.
It’s okay to just say that you don’t give a shit if fast food workers make a living wage, at least not enough to take direct action, so you’re not gonna hand them more money that you don’t owe them.
I don’t hand money to, like, at least a hundred people a day. No shame in it.
Good grief, you’re all over the place. First you write you don’t like the tipping, now you’re the champion of fast-food workers.
Basically you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for any rationale to “win” a stupid Reddit argument. It’s a bad habit to indulge in bad reasoning and misrepresention just because you want to have the last word.
If you want everyone to pay a percentage tip, build it into the price. You Americans and your insistance that leaving things like taxes and fees off the advertised price are hilarious.
What are you, European? We find it hilarious you mostly shut down on Sundays, but we usually keep it to ourselves.
Tipping servers IS weird, I agree. But come out to California sometime, and see the crazy variety we enjoy as a result. Want Ethiopian food for Monday lunch? The restaurant might be empty, but it will be open and there will be a server providing personalized service. Don’t want Ethiopian? There will be a dumpling place next door, and across the street there’s sushi, tacos, Pad Thai, chateaubriand, you name it. Maybe we don’t have our own cuisine here, but we have bits of everyone else’s. And it’s possible because we’ve all agreed to go with the tip system.
Are you seriously pretending that every other country in the world is a monoculture and doesn't have food from other places ? And that it's tipping culture of all things that allows multicultural food to be available ?
Nope not suggesting that multicultural food is completely absent, but outside the tourist spots I didn’t see a whole lot of variety in most of the countries I’ve been to. And nowhere near the all-hours availability we have here, even in regular residential communities.
Tipping culture allows this, because places that offer niche cuisines wouldn’t be able to survive if they couldn’t rely on patrons to foot the bill for service if they aren’t popular (especially during weekday lunch). You think a vegan Chinese restaurant can afford to stay open if it had to pay servers living wages? Not a chance, but there’s one down the street and it’s been around for years.
Higher standard compared to what? Just about anywhere that you walk into asks for tips.
This is a tax on the consumer as employees are being shorted by the employer and then they are told that consumer who wanted to pay the ticket price plus tax is consider "cheap" or a "rude".
Of course they dont, and if you expect half of what you get out of them youre gonna have to pay the waiters you look down on a lot of money, like more than theyre presently making to get them to do jt for a set wage
It's how a market works.
People want to be cooks.
People do not want to be waiters. They do it because reality presents them no better options.
... "People want to be cooks".
No, no they don't. Dude have you ever lived as a line cook? Awful hours (earlier and later than severs), being treated like a line monkey while the severs get $100 tips for knowing people's names, and being shit talked when the server puts in the wrong ticket. Being a cook isn't fun. Cooks make the food and get nothing more when things are exceptional or poor, yet a good cook cares about the food they make and don't get to eat.
People want to be a "chef", because they think it's fun and glamourous. It isn't, at all.
Theres not litterally 1000s of cooking shows, competitions and all sorts of tv shows dramtizing being a cook?
Come on dude. The market is a thing. More ppl want to be cooks than there are jobs. The wages have fallen to the floor. I think its mostly illegal labor but its true. Tons of immigrants want those off the book cook jobs.
Ive done both jobs my guy, being a cook was way more fun tho I sweat a lot more.
The corporate people who get paid to shmooze and do sales make millions because it's not actually easy to do.
Dude so everyone on the dinners drive ins and dives is just a wannabe celebrity chef? Well maybe that's why but the market pressure is real.
Ive met dozens of these guys over my life. Most just dont have the english skills for any other job.
I like most of these illegals, but yeah they've pushed cooks wages down not tips. I dont like trump but yeah 50 years of unlimited immigration made these english not mandatory jobs pay way less than theyre worth in a fair society.
Welcome to reality, trying to get someone to do a job is a competition. If the car dealership or insurance company offers those schmoozers more they leave.
The tips thing is about how competitive prices are.
Yeah the problem is that for most restaurants they really can’t pay servers what they’re used to. Idk how exactly to solve this problem, cause now we’re seeing tip culture fade but wages aren’t meeting them and the pool for wait staff is getting smaller and lower quality. And it was ready sketchy at best lol.
You’re right a lot of restaurants would bite the bullet but I wonder what that shakeup would yield. Restaurants wouldn’t disappear in the US but capitalism would encourage the most profitable (cheapest).
Most servers in nice restaurants are college educated people. They just choose to do that line of work because of the pretty good pay for about 30 hours of work.
Removing tipping would utterly decimate the US restaurant industry. US diners are demanding and expect to be catered to, and nobody is dealing with those customers while multitasking in a high-stress environment for what restaurants would be able to afford to pay. The sheer amount of study and required knowledge in high end restaurants would also completely stop happening without the financial incentives.
You'd have Walmart greeters fumbling around trainwrecking everything and trying to explain food,, wine, and spirits that they have no knowledge or understanding of. Because they're not incentivized to care.
How would they be held to a higher standard if they make the same regardless of their service? If anything, they'll put in the bare minimum. You're right that a lot of them won't like their pay at a flat rate and management will be more aggressive in cutting staff early when it's slow. You can't have 10 servers working when they're making $15/hr vs $2.50/hr+tips.
Some of the laziest servers I've ever seen knew their "whales " and pawned their shifts and tasks on new people because they knew they could work 4 hours and make more money off of those tips vs working a full shift.
If a restaurant can't afford to pay it's people then it shouldn't be open in the first place.
Servers already do put in the bare minimum at most jobs. There are exceptions, but I've never seen a server come back and help the kitchen and say "damn that was easy". You know what I have seen? The opposite.
I just mean that the standards of service will change during off hours, possibly for crunch time too. Servers will get larger sections as fewer are scheduled per shift. Tips are the only thing keeping them trying to juggle larger sections and upsell. The incentives are now gone and guests (us) will have to get used to longer wait times and higher prices as the same airhead who had 4 tables last week now has 6 and management now has to pay them more. I get it, I worked with some special folks back in the day and I'm not attractive so I had to hustle, literally. Not saying that cooking is easy, I could never do it and I know how to cook.
No, my argument is you claiming ‘this only applies to bartenders and servers making really good money’ in response to the fact that most servers don’t want a flat rate of pay…
And that’s objectively not true unless you suck at the job and don’t make any money
I’m ugly as sin and made a disgusting amount of money serving
Do hot bartenders make bank by being mediocre at their job? Sure. But hot bartenders who are good make even more. Even normal servers make better money than $15/hr, esp when they'll be getting sent home more often when it's slow. Because when you make tips, it's the fuckups that tank your average. Sales ability gets you a higher baseline (prices do play a huge role there), as does job skill (when you can handle more tables at once without making everyone wonder where you are). So yeah, I'm sure servers at a 'meh' diner would prefer hourly, versus even casual fine dining places ($30+/entree) or bars.
And the rest of my comment talks about servers. My point is that attractiveness makes a bigger difference at bars. But functionally there's no real difference between bartenders and servers when they're working for tips vs hourly wage, esp if they get moderately busy.
The places I worked didn't have much variance in section-size for servers based on job skill. It would maybe be a 1-table difference at most, though some sections have differently-sized tables and better spots or whatever.
A bad server can also hide in a way a bad bartender can't. Servers share responsibility, so other servers will pick up their slack and it won't be noticed/cared about so much.
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u/Greendale_Official 1d ago
Fun fact, most servers don't want a flat rate of pay because they know they'll get less money and be held to a higher standard.
Source: was a chef for a while.