Lemmy discovers Commodity Fetishism
Love that Lemmy is pro worker everywhere except if they get tips. Then it suddenly becomes the workers fault that they have to beg for a living wage while also working full time.
Pro Tip is not Pro Working.
Pro living wage, pro profit sharing, pro median income for CEOs… These are pro-working views.
Tip economy is part of the very class war problem we find ourselves in.
That’s not the point. Point is two fold; first, we shouldn’t normalize closing the wage gap that shitty business owners choose to create, their vacation home is built from wage theft. Second, the other laborers in the first photo also get paid shit wages relatively, especially the chefs who do infinitely harder work and don’t get a split of those tips in most situations. And to be frank, wait staff is often traditionally filled with more attractive people than the bridge trolls in back of house, and that’s a big part of why they clear so much in tips. I’ve known many servers who clear more than double the average cooks pay at the end of the year. That’s not equitable.
So the tension is well founded and much more nuanced than you know or want to acknowledge.
All of these things you name are not the servers fault, yet the server is the who gets all the hate and the reduced pay due to the problem people have with tipping. No-one says - wow fishermen get paid terrible but also they don’t deserve money for work. I am going to stop buying fish. Every one gets paid like shit, shit on the system not the worker. Fix the system, don’t punish the worker for working within the system.
I don’t think anyone in their right mind is tipping less or not at all due to beliefs about how dumb tipping is. Also, some servers are strong supporters of tipping so, depending on the person, it kinda is their fault.
Every time Americans call them servers I think of a computer lol
Everyone in this panel is underpaid. No change happens blaming one worker against the other. We’re all under the boot
Yes, but in the US servers get paid much less than minimum wage with the presumption that tips will make up the difference.
Businesses are supposed to make up any difference between what servers fail to earn as tips up to minimum wage, but:
- It gives businesses an opportunity to fail to do this,
- It means that minimum wage is what some servers effectively get, and
- It effectively means the amount of tips servers get per hour is lessened by the difference between their hourly pay and the minimum wage rate; it’s a way for businesses to reach into server tips and get some of it for themselves.
Remember to tip your landlord
And say thank you.
There’s these new payday loan scam apps they call earned income advances or some bullshit like that where they take the loan amount and fees out of your next paycheck directly.
These asswipes charging what amounts to like 500% APR have the fucking audacity to ask for tips.
I dislike this cartoon because of the way that the server is pointing angrily at the tip box. In reality, the servers are also victims of tipping culture. They deserve consistent and fair wages.
Sure, but there are already news reports of servers complaining that all the people visiting aren’t tipping for the World Cup. Trying to call it “our culture”. Sure they should be paid normally, but, that’s also something that’s been said for at least the last 2 decades (and probably far longer). If they (servers) are going to keep pushing for tips, businesses keep pushing for tips, and people keep tipping…
It also depicts servers as doing some decadent super easy job when those people work their asses off. I dislike tipping culture, but I factor it into the cost of a night out and make sure someone gets paid fairly from my side if they’re doing a great job and making sure I have everything I need while I sit and enjoy my meal and conversation.
The whole system needs an overhaul, but until that happens, I’m on the side of the working people that make my night out easy and pleasant.
This comic was not made by someone experienced what its like to work at Applebee’s in Oklahoma before, that is for sure.
I used to be a line cook. I’ll take staying in the kitchen being grumpy over having to serve and fake smile at asshole customers all day
That will only happen when we stop tipping
No, if you stop tipping the servers just get paid less and the owners feel nothing for not paying them a fair wage. If you really want to make a change, don’t eat out any place that makes you tip, if you have ever seen a tip jar or a tip screen, don’t go there. That is how you vote with your wallet, you don’t make the workers subsidize your food and not tip.
I can choose to not eat somewhere and make a statement, or i can choose to eat someone and make a statement and get subsidies for doing so.
Which do you think I’ll choose?
That will only happen when we stop tipping
Don’t tip, but also don’t think your not tipping is going to change anything except that the people who work as servers who might have liked now think you are an a-hole. I am sure you don’t care about this either, also fine, you don’t have to care about any other person, place or thing, the world will go on.
And you can keep the system in place by being a part is it, and knowing your tip helped an underpaid worker for that day, while many fail to make a living wage and employers continue to profit. At least you feel better for that day.
In everywhere but USA, yes.
In the USA - No, that will just make servers go hungry.
The fix is to change tax law. The reason tipping is so big a deal there is that tax law is FUCKED, servers are taxed as if they were tipped, regardless of whether or not they were. Literally no other country does this.
The fix is to raise the minimum wage. Servers are exempt from most minimum wage laws because the restaurant lobby has carved out that exemption, in the assumption that tips will make up the difference.
No one is forced to work as a server. If the job can’t pay a living wage, don’t take it.
No one is forced to work picking fruit/mopping floors/trading their life in a mine, if the job can’t pay a living wage, don’t take it?
Can you explain what motivates people to work horrible, underpaid, poverty jobs? I’m confused because I thought people didn’t like working some jobs, were not paid enough to live working some jobs, and yet had to work them anyway or they would die. I was under the understanding that this has been going on for untold generations.
Why do they do this if they can just “don’t take” those jobs? Maybe you can fix this horrible situation we’ve all be confused about for centuries?🥰
Can’t speak for the “no other country” but Canada does this.
America’s Hat
deleted by creator
Servers are no longer taxed on their first $25k in tips.
That is the reason Tips won’t disappear.
If Tips were taxed like any other income then there would be less demand and more likely to be included in the wage…
It won’t make the server go hungry. It will force them to look for a different job.
So then nobody wants to serve anymore and restaurants will be forced to fix the broken system.
No tipping anywhere, especially in the US.
Yes, finding a new job is notoriously incredibly easy, and homelessness rates are going down!
Oh wait, no, the exact opposite is true.
Tipped workers represent 5 million+ workers in the US. While yes, ending tipping is important, probably better ways like raising minimum wages and getting rid of ‘tipped wages’ would work to end tipping rather than just telling 5 million people they need to find different work.
But if you talk to the majority of tipped workers, they don’t want to change the system, which is likely a far larger hurdle compared to diner preferences.
Sure, that would be better for everyone. But it is also fiction that will never come true. So … back to stop tipping for me
I mean, it’s not fiction if we all want things to change. I don’t think I will stop tipping those who can’t afford to not be tipped, but you do you. I’d say the better solution for someone like yourself is to stop going to those places to begin with if you are that against ‘tipping’.
Ah, your superior morality matters more than their livelihood, smart!
It won’t make the server go hungry. It will force them to look for a different job.
And what do they eat in the meantime?
Exposure, obviously
No. It will happen when you stop going to restaurants that underpay their workers. Patronizing those establishments and not tipping is just punishing the worker while rewarding the business. Business owners will not change unless you hit them in the wallet.
I agree it would suck for the workers in the mean time, but I think the labour market would adapt pretty quickly if servers actually started making $3/hour. No one would want to be a server and restaurants would be forced to pay competitively if they expect to hire anyone.
I think stopping patronizing those restaurants altogether doesn’t send any clear message about why it’s happening. Maybe combined with some large-scale public campaign, but on its own it wouldn’t achieve too much.
They could skip all of the “quit en masse to force an entire industry to change” (which would never happen, by the way, as many tipped workers in the US will tell you that they want it to be like that), and just unionize instead.
Maybe then it could be done without putting millions of people out of work for an unknown period of time.
Well, they would be making the legal minimum wage in their area since their tipped wage does not meet or exceed minimum wage per hours worked. Still not a liveable wage, especially considering the amount of unclocked labor that occurs in the food service industry.
Ah interesting! Yeah fair enough… either $3 or $7, it’s gonna be real tough to staff those positions.
Restaurants that do not provide table service (such as fast casual chains) do not rely on tipped workers, but I am not sure those workers do any better than workers who live on tips.
Correct, and that’s the rub. Tipped workers don’t want to change the system, because by and large they are far better off with tips than simply a minimum wage (or even prevailing minimum wage for an area). So realistically the only way to end it is to get rid of tipped wages in general, raise the minimum wage, and for people to stop going to places that ask for tips to pay for their workers.
IDK how common it is but in the sushi restaurant I worked at the server and the chef split the tip but you also had more than one chef, not that it changes the point of the comic much.
Country dependant. Some places it’s highly common some with up to 50/50 split, where I am 2% pay out to the kitchen is typical / required, other places it is illegal as management to even ask the server to split tips.
I’ve worked as a chef many places.
Yeah but the waiters don’t have a living wage in the us without tips while the fishermen get paid –
Sorry I just got word that the fishermen are actually just permanently trapped on the ships and do forced labour out somewhere in the Pacific
there is slavery in the food industry.
Sometimes it’s children too
Same in every industry. Food industry is especially bad. Hell, I grew up on a farm in the US and we were free labor for our parents, but we wouldn’t have survived elsewise.
in parts of the US. if you want to be paid fairly in food service (and still complain about being paid unfairly because (1) no one is paid fairly in this HCOLA so technically yeah and (2) outside of payroll no one knows you’re lying) move to california. Minimum wage, pre tips, is $16.90/hr. All you tech workers probably don’t think a thing about it because your minimum wage is $27.63 (apologies but i can’t find the exact authoritative source, but this is close enough. look for the words “standard wage”) and has been higher than any other minimum wage in the US since computer workers legally existed.
edit: A. always forget the A
The source you are quoting is a US law that says tech workers don’t qualify to get paid overtime if they are on salary or if they are paid more than $27.63/hour. This has nothing to do with minimum wage, this is a law specifically made to not pay developers overtime for crunch.
There are several more qualifications for it, but most jobs ignore those and most workers don’t know them well enough to not get ripped off.
most workers don’t know them well enough
Or can afford to hire a lawyer to go after the company that employs them for wage theft.
I think you are misreading this rule. This allows an exemption to the time and a half pay minimum for overtime for highly paid people in a computer related field whose job duties are sufficiently executive or administrative in nature. If they are very highly paid (~$150,000 per year) the exemption is easier to qualify for.
The referenced section of the FLSA exclusively reduces the wage protections of people exempted under its rules.
i didn’t look too close at the rule i was finding as it’s been a while, but there’s a minimum wage for computer workers at which their employers are exempted from being required to give them certain benefits. I don’t see the financial logic in paying them less than that wage, but i never employed a ton of computer workers. it’s an effective minimum wage without being a minimum wage. de jure versus de facto
A “yes, but” like this, but instead all the countries where servers get a (relatively) decent wage vs America where tipping is mandatory.
American tipping culture is so arbitrary though. You tip your taxi driver but not your bus driver. You tip at a coffee shop but not at a fast food shop. Your hairdresser gets a tip but not the people looking after your children.
Have you been in fast food recently? Half those places are asking for tips now
None of them ever asked for a tip? There will be a “just a quick question” on the next screen though.
I haven’t lived in the US for a few decades now, so I might definitely be off for some!
There are automated kiosks asking for tips now. It’s insane.
Yes, but waiter are underpaid and should have a salary too.
… Apparently. This is too american for me to understand
As wish many things American, it goes back to slavery. Tipped workers were a way for employers to avoid paying (mostly black) workers, effectively providing slavery-lite even after slavery had ended (Happy Juneteenth).
In any case, current U.S. labor law has specific carve-outs for certain tipped jobs that allow the minimal wage to be not the already unlivable $7.25/hr but the unsustainable $2.15/hr. Technically, employers are required to bring a tipped workers pay up to $7.25/hr if they do not report enough tips, but in practice employers encourage reporting incorrect tips and find reasons (if needed) to dismiss employees that do not report enough tips.
Fisherman, Sailor, Teamster, and Chef are not tipped positions. Waitstaff is a tipped position.
Tipped workers were a way for employers to avoid paying (mostly black) workers, effectively providing slavery-lite even after slavery had ended
It’s not just about being cheap though. It reinforces the idea that the worker is of a lower social status than the customer. The customer may, at their own discretion, choose whether or not to pay the worker a fair wage for the work they have done. That’s a very clear power imbalance.
my wife hates this but money burns a hole in my pocket. i inherited it from my dad. so while i contribute to the problem, it’s because a larger than average tip really brightens someone’s day. it means i can’t eat out as much, but that’s my problem not theirs.
As someone in the industry, I can’t thank people like you enough. A great tip can make a shitty shift so much better. I wish so many others were as kind. Or at this rate, just kind enough to tip 20%.
I mean let me read a book in a quiet corner for a shift and check in every hour, keep me full of bread and coffee? That’s worth a hell of a lot more than 20 per cent. More like $25.
True but some states don’t have this distinction and it means servers actually make pretty decent money.
Yes and “tipping” has gone insane. Not just amounts (tho even when I was a child, my parents consider 10% the bare minimum) but also you get prompted to leave a tip for transactions that don’t involve a tipped position.
My experience is from one of the shittier states for workers (Arkansas), right-to-work effectively eliminates all union activity, the state would remove the minimum wage if it could, and there’s even people that want to make it easier for 14-18 year olds to work.
Outside of the US it’s a reward for good work
Inside the US its you directly subsidising the businesses refusal to even pay minimum wage.
So bitching about a higher tip is bitching about fair wages for work. You got an issue paying that, you take it up with the employer who has shoved the burden of paying their waitstaff onto you.
Stop being little bitches and unionise. Tip is not pay.
How many unions you a member of?
Exactly! Don’t like paying tips? Stop eating at those establishments.
Or we could tip while we continue advocating for legal ends to the system of tipping. I won’t stiff someone who isn’t making a fair wage, but I’d really like to switch over to how europe does it
One of the greatest achievements of restaurant owners was to pay waiters sub liveable wage and make them blame customers for it.
And ironically one of the biggest proponents of keeping the tipped minimum wage was Herman Cain (who is black. Or was. He dead now).
please oh please phrase it Herman Cain (who is dead) it tickles so many ex-cultists on here’s funny bones
Waiter is the only one who gets their wage subsidized by their bosses customers.
Everyone gets their wage subsidized by the customers of the business (both B2B and B2C) they work for.
So, they all can ask for tips?
Tip?.. 15%… 20%… custom
it’s a self-checkout machine
The money comes from the customer in either scenario, functionally there is no difference it flows from customer to employee regardless.
Edit: just to be clear, I am very much against the tipping culture in the US as it only benefits the employer and leaves employees at the whim of the customers mood. But all employee salaries are paid by the customers money in the end.
Yeah, but that’s not what subsidized means at all.
No the definition is technically to be partially financially supported by public funds (I.e. government or other organization)…but that wouldn’t cover tipping from private customers either so…
No, you’re just wrong here and there is no technically.
You’re misunderstanding what public funds are.
ARGLEBARGLE I LOVE YOU FOR BRINGING UP THIS POINT
They can all ask, I’ll still say no.
No, but we shouldn’t expect to pay less if they stop receiving tips and the employer pays them instead. I think a lot of people make this assumption. In reality it’ll be more like you don’t have to tip but your meal is 20% more expensive.
No one HAS to tip. Also the meal is priced at what the business believes the customer will pay.
7% more expensive in reality. labor costs are a lot in restaurants, but the big one is rent followed by utilities
there was a study on fast food prices rising in relation to the 15 dollar minimum wage hike. that’s where i’m getting my number from. also my ass because it’s me, but my estimates are usually spot on.
And we won’t pay less!
they stop receiving tips we pay the same
employer pays them insteadoops, forgot this part. restaurant owner makes 15% more money!To be fair, they will do the whole boiling frog pot thing. It’ll be easier to do with 7% inflation a year.
we’re currently1 at 4%/mo or 28% a year which is fuuuuun
1last i checked which was i forget but it was less than a year ago and the number makes krasnov look bad so meh.
Yeah, but now everyone’s running out of strategic oil reserves.
Are you saying the restaurant should charge more and prevent tipping or if you don’t tip you get hit with an extra charge? Or is it a different method?
Ideally, the restaurant should pay enough that tipping is not required (which does require them to raise prices). As a customer you would then be free to tip a smaller amount if you thought that the service was exceptional.
That’s how it works in the UK although a lot of businesses are adding a tip onto the bill in advance so that you would need to complain about the service to get it removed (technically you can just ask them to remove the tip without giving a reason if that’s how you want to play it).
I would like the charge to stay the same but the waiter still gets a living wage but it’s absurd to believe that will happen and may be unrealistic to expect that it should. I don’t know what profit margin any given restaurant has but none will give up 20% of profits and a lot may not be able to remain open if they have to. In any scenario the business would have to change beyond recognition. The ones who choose to adapt may just fire the waiters and have you order through a machine and then you don’t have to tip but that business model already exists in most fast food chains.
I would like the charge to stay the same but the waiter still gets a living wage but it’s absurd to believe that will happen and may be unrealistic to expect that it should
which is why it takes a change in law. california did it.
I may have misunderstood the question. Restaurants who have adopted no tipping add the 20% charge in one way or another. Either the food costs more or there’s a service fee.
(I get it. It was just for the meme)
No, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of Americans are fooled by this sort of anti-worker division propaganda. This is a conservative / right wing comic.
(I get it. It was just for the meme/joke)
Right wing propaganda is still right wing propaganda when packaged in a “joke” or as “irony”. You were correct to question it.
I mean the last part of my message. I fully understand it,
Visit Canada where wait staff don’t have a separate minimum wage yet still we have American tip culture.
Canadian from Quebec here.
Yes, we do.
So is the fisherman and the cook.
It’s because everyone except the wait staff gets paid a living wage. The waiter probably gets paid $2.75/hour because the shady restaurant owner wants YOU to pay the rest of their employees wage for them.
The problem is not overly entitled wait staff, it’s tipping culture in general. Any other job would pay at least normal minimum hourly wages.
Correct, except for saying everyone else is getting a living wage. I bet most of them are not. Still higher than the server.
Every step of that chain is nickel and dimed. Only the public facing employees get to ask for tips.
I’m not sure if that is the reason. In Ontario there is no separate minimum wage for servers, it’s $18/hour. But servers expect 20-25% tip.
You ask wait staff if they prefer a stable wage or receiving tips. The overwhelming majority of them will want to keep tips.
It would be better if we eliminated tips overall and paid fair wages. But the people who directly benefit will still fight you on it.
I’d much prefer a stable, livable wage over recieving tips.
The problem is that no one is making a livable wage. At least as a server, there’s (on average) a pretty direct correlation between skill & effort and your income, so a decent server is probably making enough to live on. If you’re working retail, you’re barely making enough to survive on even as a low level manager.
That’s what I meant by fair wages.
I completely agree.
People also choose individual lines at the cash registers rather than one shared line that splits into the next available opening. It doesn’t matter that it’s better on average, human intuition is really bad at statistics.
Having worked in food service, and having many friends who do, I don’t know a single person who would rather keep tips. The majority have openly talked shit about tipping. Everyone I know hates tipping except the management that benefits from it.
I live in a very HCOL area and that probably has more to do with attitudes on tipping anything. Wait staff in this area can easily earn wages that are much, much higher than minimum wage with tips.
For example, the state in the US I live in does not have a lower base pay for wait staff. They’re making at minimum $17.13 an hour before tips.
Cool. That restaurant, also being in a HCOL, could afford to pay those people a living wage without tips. You’re advocating for them to not have to do that.
Read more of my comments. I support fair, living wages and eliminating tipping.
And that’s why. For a lot of states they’re making like $2.75 before tips.
Plus, it’s also very relative to what exactly you are doing. A decent bartender can pull like $200+ a night on a weekend in tips.
Yep which complicates the conversation because all wait staff aren’t the same.
So you have bartenders in big cities scoffing at the idea of eliminating tips while there’s waiters in small diners barely surviving on minimum wage.
Plus then there’s the variance of the individual. If you’re naturally good with people, you’re likely to get tipped better. If you’re a pretty young girl, you’ll probably make decent money even if you’re not good with people, etc.
It’s such a complicated situation to talk about.
Which is why I think tipping should be eliminated.
Holy fuck I’ve got a friend that will die on the hill that you (customer) should tip, and generously every time. Given his experience with it, I agree to a point, but only because he willingly chose to dig heels into that job for better or for worse. I do tip because I feel it’s earned in most cases. I just don’t agree with being over the top about it for sure. Part of that is his personality too… And the more I think about it; fuck that guy.
But the people who directly benefit will still fight you on it.
Is that still true? Even back when I has tipped workers as peers, their attitudes were mixed. If you have any polling data, that would be appreciated – but, I don’t have any data either, just vague memories.
I’m admittedly talking from a personal experience living in a HCOL area that does not have a lower wage for wait staff. Wait staff are paid $17.13 at minimum here and that’s before tips.
So it is area dependent. Probably.
When I had tipped peers, wait staff got $2.15/hr + tips. It certainly changes the calculus.
While the waitstaff has particular challenges in U.S. labor law (lower effective federal minimum wage), it is not safe to assume any of the other workers in the chain are still paid a living wage either.
I keep seeing this repeated in the comments. Apparently no one on Lemmy has actually worked in a restaurant before (because you’re all bots?), otherwise you’d know that a lot of cooks, dishwashers, etc don’t make a living wage either and split tips with the front-of-house staff. It’s not just the wait staff.
My point still stands though that it has nothing to do with overly entitled wait staff as the cartoon would suggest but an issue with tipping culture and the restaurant industries unwillingness to pay anyone a living wage
I’m not trying to single you out, like I said it seems like everyone here has the same misconception. But even if your point could stand on its own, it’s weakened when you support it with an unrealistic example. It hurts your credibility.
I may have overgeneralized because the cartoon was so silly in its implication that the wait staff are somehow cheating fishermen out of tips
Ok but some people argue for paying tips outside the US too where this isn’t the case.
I have also heard owners ask about making a service charges mandatory instead of optional. They don’t like it when I point out they will now have to pay tax on it and try to ask about any other options in the POS software. No, if must be optional or tax must be paid.
Small correction, $2.75 an hour against tips. In a lot of states it’s legal to withhold that $2.75 once they’ve made more than that in tips per hour. They only have to guarantee that you make minimum wage they don’t have to actually pay you it If you’re getting it paid by somebody else.
The waiter probably gets paid $2.75/hour
In a specific country
Everyone else in that supply chain gets a living wage, except maybe the chef who shares tips with the waiter. It fucking pisses me off when people bitch about the fact that they’re asked to tip an underpaid employee instead of getting angry about the fact that the employee doesn’t make as much money as anyone else in the first place.
Where the fuck is the restaurant owner who isn’t paying their worker a fair wage? Where the fuck are the politicians who put a loophole in labor law the allow this situation to happen?
The waiter is even being villainized in the last frame, jesus h christ. Fuck this comic and fuck you OP for posting it uncritically. I fucking hate this anti-worker propaganda so fucking much.
Nobody gets a fair wage but at least food service workers in my area get paid the same as everyone else (Seattle $21/h minimum). Tipping is rooted in racist class division and we really should be pushing to end wage exemptions rather than perpetuate a ridiculous sales-commission structure.
Absolutely!
But the people who say “just don’t tip” aren’t fixing anything.
If anything you should boycott the restaraunt.
This is always so funny… why would you boycot the restaurant? Don’t hate the player, hate the game. So if you want change, change the rules of the game. Get politically involved, campaign for minimum wage, waiters will get a minimum living wage, tipping won’t be required anymore… this idea that you can and will vote with your wallet is absolutely ridiculous. You will never get critical mass that way.
So boycotts never work, huh? Sure about that one?
Changing your economic habits can and does work. It’s just difficult, so people would rather not do it.
But yes, also vote, campaign, protest, etc.
The thing with voting with your wallet is that it is not permanent. It can help for a while if you somehow manage to get critical mass, but I believe that human willpower is not strong enough of a force, it is more or an exception than the norm. If you create a system that incentivizes exploitation and make it legal, someone who participates in the system, say a restaurant owner, can only whitstand the pricing pressure for so long untill the competition, that uses all legal ways to gain an advantage, will take over. I believe that lasting change can only be achieved by rules and enforcement of those rules for everyone. Voting with your wallet makes you feel good about doing your part and it’s better than nothing, but if you want to really have impact, you have to go through the legislative route. I think you call this an collective action problem
Why is it an either/or? Do both.
I remember reading that the only way a restaurant can pay less than minimum wage is if the employees make enough tip to make up for it. In other words if everybody just stopped tipping, it would force restaurants to pay normal wage right?
Technically yes, but in reality it rarely happens. Wage theft is the largest form of theft by far, and that’s just from what little ends up reported.
Also keep in mind that wage theft is rampant in the US, to the tune of up to $50 billion per year. I don’t know that it’s safe to assume that all of these employers are gonna do the thing they’re supposed to do.
On paper, yes. That’s how it works. Although let’s not pretend that minimum wage is actually a livable wage.
In practice, most employers have a policy that reads something like “we assume you’ve made enough in tips to hit minimum wage, if you don’t, please inform your manager.” Not only does this put the onus of enforcing the rule on employees, it also makes it easier for the restaraunt to say “you’re the only one having this problem, so you must be bad at your job” (when the reality is that no one else reports it for fear of disciplinary action).
reads something like “we assume you’ve made enough in tips to hit minimum wage, if you don’t, please inform your manager.”
I’m sure they do this, but it sounds illegal as fuck and the DoL should probably be made aware.
They might claim that the onus is on the employee to tell the manager, but that’s absurd. There’s no way that can actually be the case, right?
Wait til you hear how they handle breaks
It’s industry standard as far as i’m aware.
I’m surprised as well. Do restaurants not track how much tip each person makes?
In the US there are so few that prohibit tipping and pay a fair wage. I don’t think this is a reasonable solution either. Legislation is probably the best answer. Even with that it’s so incredibly engrained in American culture it would be really hard to break. It’s a total shit system though that is only becoming more and more prominent as a way for companies not to have to pay people and playing on a deep sense of guilty charity.
Unionization would probably be the best solution, but not an easy one
Well start with “places that pay a fair wage.” At least there, you can feel better about not tipping, or tipping solely based on service quality. Obviously any restaraunt will still let you tip if you want to, why would they stop you?
Yes, it’ll be hard to stick to only those places. It will limit where you can go and you’ll have to do research before going someplace new. But doesn’t any meaningful action require effort?
There are places like Sugarfish, that actually ban tipping. That’s necessary, because otherwise we still stay in that cycle.
They also are adding a 16% service charge, which is kind of like a mandatory tip, but they have a good reason for it.
The reason is that if they would put actual price on the menu they would be perceived at more expensive (people are dumb) so they impose this service fee to look competitive.
I prefer that approach. Ideally what should be done is as someone suggested is to ban tipping through a legislation.
Understandable to look competitive but I’d prefer it to be part of the actual price with the clear assumption that at a restaurant the service of bringing the thing you ordered out to you is included. I also don’t think percentages make sense. Up charge my beer 2$ or whatever such that if I order 6 of them the server essentially earns more for bringing 6 of them out. But don’t upcharge my bottle of champagne $12 for bringing it out once. There shouldn’t be such a disconnect between service / labor and cost/payment.
I live in the US and I’ve worked in the industry since 2008, and I hate the anti worker framing of anti tip culture sentiment so much. I’m a cook but my wage is just as reliant on tips as the servers. The servers and the kitchen staff do equally important parts of the job of giving people a good dining experience. Servers do more than just carry food to the table in a quality restaurant, and there are hours of labor that go into every plate.
Furthermore it’s not always the employer’s fault that the pre tip wages are so low that tips are necessary. The industry involves several players outside of the restaurant itself, including landlords, purveyors, HVAC and sanitation services, and so on. All of them charge as much as they can get away with, which leads to razor thin margins for the restaurant, and labor is always the highest cost. Many corporate entities diffuse this cost in various ways but small scale places like the ones I prefer to work in don’t have as much room to maneuver.
If people had to pay the full cost of a meal that adequately supported the staff, it would likely be just as much or more as the same meal at a lower price with an adequate tip included (15-20%) and restaurants would struggle to stay open even more than they currently do because people would complain about the high prices.
I wish people would address the system as a whole, including the capitalist mode of production, rather than blaming the workers who are victims of this system. I’m opposed to tip culture and I wish livable wages were guaranteed for all forms of labor, but in the current reality we all live in, not tipping doesn’t do any damage to the system, only to its victims.
This doesn’t make sense. If the final check + tips is the cost for the whole service, just include the tip % in the base price and pay proper wages. Margins have nothing to do with this, it’s just exploitation, it’s offloading the risk of enterprise onto the workers.
You all have been brainwashed.
As I explained in my post, restaurants that do this struggle to stay open because people only look at the price and are less likely to want to pay it. Even places that keep prices the same and add a service charge receive many complaints and a drop in business. My source is that it has happened in multiple restaurants I’ve worked at.
I doubt you read my whole post because I also spoke against the system. I’m not brainwashed, I’m living in reality.
Edit: side note, all of capitalism is built on exploitation of labor, it’s the defining characteristic
Just gonna add a source to back this up:
The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before.
People are dumb. Even if they should know they’re saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it’s bad.
The point is that the menu prices should not need to go up, because tips should never have been a necessary part of their profit margins.
They were literally subsidizing their expenses (including payroll) with tips, and that’s made evident by the fact that the prices had to go up when tips were ended.
If your business cannot afford to survive without paying your employees a living wage, then your business shouldn’t exist.
Ok, well, most restaurants have notoriously small margins (3-5%) with tipping. So, setting aside what you think should and shouldn’t be, what is an actual solution? Eliminate tipping and raise prices? Restructure the agricultural pipeline to lower costs? Cap commercial real estate prices to reduce rental overhead? Because as it stands now, you can’t eliminate tipping without getting the money somewhere, and it’s not in the restaurants profits.
Thank you for the actual source! I knew there would be evidence aside from my anecdote but didn’t particularly feel like looking it up. I’ve had this argument on lemmy a couple of times so I find it a bit tiresome. Appreciate the support :)
This could be solved by banning all tipping, then all restaurants would have to display the honest price upfront.
It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista’s jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they’re all getting a living wage, and your tip isn’t a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.
This is definitely one way to approach it, but I currently make minimum wage plus tips in a city where the minimum wage is over $20 and it’s still hard to make ends meet at times. I’m a single adult with no dependents and although I have a reasonable standard of living I’m by no means thriving. The tips are still a very necessary part of my paychecks.
The problem is complex, like I said in my first comment. Lots of sub-industries thrive off of milking restaurants, and simply doing away with tipping is not going to fix it. I just wish people would have some sense of worker solidarity instead of attacking people who live off of tips.
Yeah, I haven’t seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour still isn’t a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, “Fight for Fifteen,” was outdated and needed to be the, “Fight for Twenty,” and we’ve had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.
If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren’t enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.
Most transactions are handled by card, it would be quite easy to enforce. At a minimum, payment processors could be legislated to not have the option for tipping. Banning the tipped minimum wage has already been done in a number of states and so they make minimum wage + tips, with that tip not actually being any more optional.
If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don’t really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you’re right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it’s important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.
All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let’s say you go to your local bakery; you’ve never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they’ll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he’s required to make up the difference anyway. At first it’s great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren’t earning enough tips, ane he’s making up the differences. That’s when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they’re overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.
Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I’d have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.
I’m not trying to be a dick but this is about as short sighted as someone saying they should make crime illegal.
It works in civilized countries, why not in the USA ?
Because different things are different
What’s really short sighted is not seeing how tipping develops into a bribery culture. We’ve already seen companies happily turning on the tipping option for the payment processor in situations where people used to never tip. Today you bribe your waiter to not shit in your food and berate you. Eventually you’ll have to bribe government workers to expedite (i.e. bother at all with) your paperwork. Gotta hustle and get that bag above all else, right?
Ignoring that possibility, it’s not like it’s a just practice in any way. Tipping amount is largely detached from level of service and factors such as attractiveness, race, how the person is feeling that day, etc make a greater impact.
You are ignoring my entire argument. At no point did I say tipping culture in the US is good nor have I defended it as a just way to distribute pay. It sucks, and it sucks to live under it in my chosen profession. But it is the reality that I and other restaurant workers live with.
My point is that you should direct your ire at the systems that built this shit show. Removing tipping with no other corrective measures doesn’t fix anything, it just makes life worse for people who are trying to make a living. Service industry jobs should treat tips as an added incentive for good service, but that’s just not the real world. I’ve already detailed a few of the reasons in my other comments but you don’t seem to be reading any of them anyway so I’m not going to waste anymore energy on this conversation.
every step is about 30% of the total cost so far
so, it might cost $1 to get the equipment for getting fish out of the sea (buying nets, buying ships, etc.)
- then, it costs 30c to pay labor to get the fish out of the sea, making $1.30 in total
- 30% of that is 39c for packaging so it makes $1.69 in total
- then 30% extra for processing it (cooking) which is 50c, makes $2.19 in total
- the waiter wants 30% tip so that’s 66c making a total of $2.85
every step seems to get more expensive than the one before it
Well yeah, because the waiter is getting a tip based on a percentage of the cost of all the work done before him.
Yes, but the author of this comic turns out to be a real moron. Third comic in the row that is just stupid.
Bro thank you for saying this. I was gonna say I’m starting to dislike this yes but person. No surprise since they’re probably popular on Instagram. Not many Instagram popular people that aren’t kinda stupid. Gotta be peddling stupid to appeal to a majority of that crowd tbh
I don’t know if intentional or not, at the beginning I liked the comics, as they were showing how ironic certain situations are. But the past three ones were not ironic, not funny and just the result of a person who is very naive.
Maybe just the result of being successful, now they force themselves to produce, desperately looking for new things to draw, while forgetting what the core message should be.
Am I exempt from tipping and the no tipping shame if I walk over to the chef to order and pick up the food myself? Because if the customers are the ones who must pay the servers a living wage via tipping, which is optional, that must mean the service itself is optional and I can do it myself.
Tipping presents a philosophical problem for me, and I just can not do it. Luckily, I live in a nation where its not done and service is not optional and I can not go to the chef to order my own food so the restaurant provides the service of a server (and pays them a wage).How to tell everyone that you’ve never worked in food service without actually saying it.
You make the exact same arguments that the Sovereign Citizens make.
You’re every bit the asshole that they are.
You’re every bit the asshole that they are.
You don’t even know me, but hey… whatever.
I am judging you solely off what you said, dumbass.
I mean Christ, do you people not have ANY reading comprehension?
Get a little angrier, you’re just not disdainful enough to be right yet. Insult them with the very first word and end the sentence with a nazi closer, maybe.
Sure, you could try to make a point, but why? Insults are all that matters.
p.s. you’re still wrong, throw a tantrum
We people?!
You’ve become plural, congrats! Big achievement.
See this way capitalists get to underpay workers
Nah, all of the people in that strip are underpaid. Tipping waitstaff is a mechanism to tie their ability to feed their families directly to sycophantic ass kissing behavior. It’s essentially a way for the rich to know they can get dancing monkey entertainment anywhere they go.
I mean it literally started so owners wouldn’t have to pay POC waiters, the rest was just added bonus
But yes everyone on a wage is underpaid
Well yes, the owners didn’t want to pay black waitstaff, but also tying it to patron tips meant that they had to perform fealty and fawning and “good humor” under abuse in order to get paid. It’s both a way to underpay and a way to control and break the spirit.
There’s really only two classes: Us and them… And if you’ve got less than 10 million, you’re probably one of us.
