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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Some restaurants divide those tips between waiters and kitchen staff, but the IRS sees tip income as belonging to the waiters. So, it's taxed against the waiter's paycheck. Thus, cities like New York will prosecute your boss for collecting tips or service charges that are taxed against the waiter's paychecks even when they are paid to the kitchen staff or hoarded by the owners.
Psst, hey, owners... Pay the damn waiters a fair, competitive wage, and stop collecting tips.
And, for those restaurant owners who complain about having to pay fair, living wages, I have a word of advice - share the profits or share the ownership. It may be your business (I mean, the bank's business), but it's your worker's and customer's life and labor generating those profits. So, learn to share, damnit!
Mine! Mine! Mine! What the fuck is wrong with you people?
Other businesses manage to do it and turn a profit... if you can't, the market is telling you you're not fit to compete.
Just do this, Seattle. An easy win for social justice. Kshama Sawant? Richard Conlin? Anyone?
Info on why tipping is pretty much every kind of -ist out there: http://blog.friendseat.com/why-tipping-s…
My family of 7 dined at a middle-brow restaurant last weekend, and the bill came to $140+. Nothing on the menu said anything about a service charge being added for large parties, and the waiter said nothing when he handed me the bill. But I quickly noted that an 18% "gratuity" was added into the total -- and the credit card slips included the usual blank spot for added tips. Perhaps he was hoping I'd add another 20% or so on top of the service charge (misnamed gratuity)? If so, he was disappointed.
Yes, there's gotta be a better way.
But in Seattle I won't tip 20% if the service or food is bad and won't feel immoral about it.
Seems to me that to make the system work better for diners and workers is to pay everyone in the house the same decent wage and share tips among all the workers evenly
http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/03/shoul…
TORFASON: The more tipping you see in a given country, the more corruption you generally see in that country as well.
DUBNER: Justin Swartz is a lawyer at Outten & Golden in New York City. He represents employees in class-action discrimination cases. He’s sued some of the biggest restaurants in New York for shorting employees on the tips they deserved. If his firm were to take on a discrimination case, like Michael Lynn has proposed, Swartz pursue two lines of argument.
SWARTZ: The first would be disparate impact analysis. The purpose of disparate impact analysis is to eliminate what the Supreme Court calls headwinds, policies that make it harder for racial minorities or other people in other protected classes to succeed.
DUBNER: With disparate impact, you don’t have to prove that discrimination is intentional; it’s a proxy for discrimination.
SWARTZ: The idea is that if there’s a disproportionate impact on a particular group here it would be African American or non-white servers, then the plaintiffs have made the first showing that they need to make in their case.
Y'all are proposing to drastically and artificially alter a system that has developed organically, and which is based upon culture, not law. Want to open your own restaurant, pay your servers $25/hour, and have them sign agreements that they will not accept any gratuity? Go for it. See how well that works for you.
like de rigeur standing ovations at classical concerts, what was once special has become normalized.
I run a small business. I pay my people fair competitive wages ( including our interns) and minimum insurance.
And you know what? We get shit stomped in the so-called market place by competitors that don't. They can undetcut us at every turn. The market place REWARDS people who don't pay fair. You idiot. The MARKET is the problem.
So yeah. I don't blame small businesses who don't pay insurance. Your choked out of the market place by a race to the bottom when you do. We've been lucky. But we've had to make terrible choices to keep going because we have ethics.
That's THE reason for universal healthcare. So small businesses CAN then compete fairly. The pressure is off and they can offer better compensation if they don't have to worry about paying their own or thier employees healthcare.
We had one employee have a heart attack. Our company of eight employees then had our insurance rates go up 400%. So you know what? To survive we had to either cut our rather rare and generous inurance benefits -or- lay off three people. OR go out of business and put all ten of us on food stamps. That's people with families, you moron.
THAT'S what happens when the market is your only solution. It's called unemployment.
Don't fucking tell me about the reality or fairness or what people deserve in the might free market. You dont know what your talking about. When businesses go under actual human beings lose thier livelihoods. You fucktard asshole.
As for tipping. You realize there is no way for pay scales in many restaurants to fully compensate for tips AND have the business pay for healthcare in our current insane system, right? No small restaurant is going to survive paying a huge increase in wages and insurance. Not without becoming prohibitively expensive. European restaurants pay living wages becuase they have universal healthcare and they charge proportionally more. We're not talking McDonslds and Applebee's. We're talking Republik of Kaffee where margins will always be razor thin.
Of course living wages are better than releying on tips. But do you want to pay for that? Becuase judging by the sheer overwhelming success of cheap-ass shitty corporate chain restaurants America has repeatedly said "no we want everything cheap as shit." Becuase if you want to ban tips with out also making the marketplace humane for small businesses then your latte and your sandwich are going to be more expensive.
This thread is a veritable smorgasbord of clueless idiocy. Some people honestly think small restaurants are all getting rich off of ripping off thier servers. Jesus. Run a restaurant sometime. Most WANT to pay more. Most restauranteurs were servers and cooks.
Pass universal healthcare. Then you can start talking about fair wage issues in small businesses.
-trying to upsell me in every single interaction
-filling the glass full when I don't want the interruption
--fucking interrupting our conversation whenever they feel like it about six times an hour in a normal meal
--asking me 4 or 5 times if everything is okay, interrupting again, and
--"announcing" trivial things like "and heeeeere's the ketchup you wanted" recently they announced a baked potato and a new fork after they dropped one.
the upshot is they take up about 20% of the time and the talk and I don't want to fucking talk to the server. they are trained in this degrading set of interactions by their employer's consultant, or most sheeple just love this attention. it's over serving and it's disserving and I stopped going out because of it. Worst are the "servers" who put their HAND on your shoulder or touch you or draw up a chair and flip it around to talk to you like one of the guys, while I thinking "hey asshole...who invited you to my meal?" they routinely do stuff which if my friend did it I'd drop him as a friend, esp. the constant total interruptions. used to be they knew how to hover and approach only when eye contact made. that was "service" this shit is disservice, akin to forcing you to watch 20 minutes of ads before every movie. fuck it, I stay home or picnic in the park to get rid of this mistreatment. if the servers weren't required to do all this bullshit nonwork they'd have more time for actual better service or would serve more tables perhour and could make more that way.
Wow... call off your attack dogs there, chief.
For what it's worth, I agree with everything you wrote. Well, except for the "fucktard asshole" stuff.
But I guess it's easier for you to just lash out in blind rage than to simply ask "what'd you mean by that?"
The price of the meal pays for the food, the drink, your use of the space (room, table, napkins, silverware place settings, etc.), the kitchen staff and the management.
The price of your meal doesn't pay for your "servant" who does everything for you.
To gain an appreciation of the value of your server, invite 8-12 people to your home for a multiple course meal that they create from a menu of choices (not family style, not buffet, not a prepared set menu).
Clean & prepare the space, greet & seat everyone, figure out the mood and politics of the table, take everyone's unique requests for their meal (including what's not on the menu & peculiar directives that will challenge your and the cook's ability to please them), communicate (and translate) everyone's demands to the kitchen, deal with the chef and staff's reactions, help plate and prepare the food all while returning to the table constantly to assure everyone that their food is in fact being made while they tell you about changes they want to make to their order and make thinly veiled (if even) complaints about their custom orders taking soooo long (it's been less than 10 minutes since they ordered), bring the food all at the same time (no food orphans allowed) along with everything and remember who had what (or suffer their wrath), get more last minute changes and additions along with more of those thinly veiled complaints, take requests (sans nasty attitudes) to the kitchen, figure out how to make these changes and additions without the chef flying into a rage, return frequently enough but not too frequently to keep everyone happy (let's hope you read the mood and dynamics of this group right.), listen to more of those not so thinly veiled complaints and words of advice, help everyone exit, clean up the mess.
Got all that? Good. Now, add money and the politics of money to that whole experience. Then, add the management and owners to the equation. Okay, so far? Now, change your relationship from hosting this group in your own home to being an unpaid or barely paid servant in someone else's house. Finally, add the expectation of your discretion about all you've seen and heard.
And, just for shits and giggles add some drunks, sexual harassment, racism, homophobia, and condescending class bigotry. Include at least one or more assholes taking out their shitty moment, day or existence on you.
Now, repeat the whole scenario a few dozen times per day.
Do you still want to argue about paying for service?
Do you still want to confuse paying for your "servant" with registering a complaint with the chef or management?
Not my "servant". A salaried employee of the business I am frequenting, same as the cashier at the supermarket or the sales clerk at the store.
I am happy to tip, knowing that this particular type of employee is, more often than not, not actually paid a living wage by her or his employer. But I would be a lot happier just paying my bill if I could be confident that all employees of the restaurant were being paid appropriately.
I am middle-aged, somewhat overweight, and buy my work clothes at H &M. My tips average 20% after tax. Maybe you tip depending on the youth, style, race, etc. of your server, but don't generalize.
I overtip like crazy when I'm in the US, and I will be from Friday; I deeply worry about low-paid workers in a country without publicly funded health care.