Shortly before opening, Casa Bonita’s new owners Matt Stone and Trey Parker decided to eliminate tipping and instead pay workers a flat wage of $30 per hour.
Now I could be wrong, but getting a an hourly wage as a restaurant worker is FAR better than relying on tips. I feel like either workers in this situation are too obsessed with tips or there’s huge context missing.
Yes, the workers are wrong. This is a better way to do it. Unfortunately, many waiters really do come out ahead with tipping, especially those working at higher end restaurants, conventionally attractive by euro standards, or just really good people skills, so they argue tipping is good actually. It benefits some individually, but collectively a lot do not end up with more money this way. It’s part of the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology - yes you theoretically could do better with tipping, but how many do, compared with the many who don’t? But of course restaurantbusinessonline would prefer business owners still be paying less than minimum wage, so they find those workers whose interests for whatever reason line up with theirs.
It’s just a dog shit way to handle employee compensation. Your one job as an employer is to manage your employees and pay them what you think they’re “worth” in the labor marketplace. Do your fucking job.
It’s like when Walmart started phasing out cashiers and forcing you to do self checkout in those dinky little kiosks. Why pay someone to do a job if you can get the customer to do it for free?
Yes, the workers are wrong.
This is a better way to do it. Unfortunately, many waiters really do come out ahead with tipping, especially those working at higher end restaurants, conventionally attractive by euro standards, or just really good people skills, so they argue tipping is good actually. It benefits some individually, but collectively a lot do not end up with more money this way. So yes, alot of waiters start off making less money. The current system while deeply flawed allows people to have careers in waiting where they can start making pretty low wages to making above middle income money. If they work into bar tending then they can make up to 80 an hour on a good day.
Such career tracks are things you see in logistics and trades. If you want to make a career here you can, the difference being that it offers income mobility without getting a degree making it a far more egalitarian field than most since the “meritocratic” career paths since college overwhelmingly fails poor people, people of color and first generation college students. If it doesn’t fail them then they’ll likely end up underemployed, unemployed out of their field or in so much debt that they might as well be in fast food.
It’s part of the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology - yes you theoretically could do better with tipping, but how many do, compared with the many who don’t? But of course restaurantbusinessonline would prefer business owners still be paying less than minimum wage, so they find those workers whose interests for whatever reason line up with theirs.
the real solution then isn’t abolishing tipping, its abolishing the tipped wage and retaining tipping
I don’t understand how one can argue minimum wage + tipping is a better system than paying someone a living wage. There are very few and quickly decreasing places in the us where minimum wage = a living wage, and further the tipping system is often used by restaurant owners to justify paying less than minimum wage. So people’s incomes are wholly dependent upon their unique set of circumstances and attributes and how well they can milk money out of customers. It individualizes restaurant work, since suddenly you’re not making a low wage because your boss refuses to pay you, but because of your own failures in convincing your customers to give you more money.
Further this ignores two things. 1) according to the story they instituted this system because people weren’t tipping. Tipping as a system won’t work if individuals refuse to tip. 2) the crux of the issue seems more to be that they were promised full time work, but work is currently part time 3 days a week with no plans in place to open for full service, not the tipping.
I’m not against people working their way up to higher wages, nor am I against people getting payed differently based on seniority or something. But the way this story is written suggests a desire to return to a minimum wage+tipping system, which I am against. However reading the rest of the story and the workers’ petition, I’m not even sure that’s what the workers are suggesting.
You’re looking at a magazine called restaurant business online. They have another article about a bunch of people calling the protest of the Israeli PR person’s restaurant “anti-semitic”.
I feel like the media has an incentive to focus in on the voices of those who resist this change over those who benefit from it, since the tipping norm benefits the owners of the restaurant industry at large.
But by the sound of things there are more issues here than just the pay structure. The workers want a representative at top level meetings, notice ahead of time when policies change, and reinstatement of people who were fired due to contract disputes. I’m not surprised at all that a couple libertarians with no experience running a restaurant would buy one and immediately run into a bunch of avoidable issues.
Tipping is a bad system for workers no matter how you cut it and the data shows this. Largely tips are completely disconnected from the actual performance of the waiter, and the biggest factor is simply the race and gender of the waiter in question. I have worked in restaurants and I know how good getting a generous tip can feel, so I understand why workers might preceive it to be in their best interest, but the data on this is really clear. Tipping is a holdover of jim crow that allows owners to offload the cost of paying wages onto both the customer and employee entirely and it should be abolished as a system.
Edit: Also for people reflexively saying “the workers want it and therefor it is good and you are reactionary if you don’t support them!” That’s called fucking tailism. Just because s group of workers want a thing doesn’t necessarily make it good its called the working CLASS for a reason, it’s not about individual interests or even the interests of a sub group its about the interests of us all.
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some tipped workers come out ahead in effective wage, but it’s fleeting and a bad way to organize society
i wouldn’t put it past the park brothers to be screwing them over in some other way and the “return to tipping” is just sensationalized from the old benefits being better and “we want the previous deal” being easier to argue for as labor.
say it’s friday night, you’ve got 4 tables per hour, each table runs a bill of about $100 and tips $20. That’s $80/hr not including hourly wage. I know not every time on the clock is friday night, but i get the complaint.
I’m not American, but don’t the wait staff have to then share their tips with the cooks and the bussers? If you give a reasonable percentage to both, doesn’t your sick $80 peak suddenly start getting very close to your standard $30 untipped pay?
If cooks and bussers are getting tipped… Why the fuck not? If a customer gets great service but shit food, they’re not going to tip as generously, right?
don’t the wait staff have to then share their tips with the cooks and the bussers?
Yeah, nah. This is required almost nowhere but the 9th circuit court states (west coast to Montana, plus Alaska and Hawaii) because of a circuit court case, and the states affected also got rid of tip credit, so that FOH and BOH are paid the same base wage as well.
Some restaurants have pooling, but it’s often very low and often ignored.
Wtf are waiters just restaurant Kulaks?
Because wait staff can be (and are) paid less than minimum wage due to the tips.
This seems misleading. If no one tipped the employer would be required to pay staff the state minimum wage, not the $2.13 that’s often brought up. Tipping is really a handout to the owners, because now they don’t have to pay their employees.
Ah, I didn’t know that.
Are most restaurant workers reporting their tips as income? Maybe they’re worried about making less due to taxes even though the pay check is more consistent rather than some busy days with lots of tips vs slow days with less tips
Excellent point. I wonder how it would go if there was a study comparing tipped and non-tipped income, as declared to the tax department. “Numbers show you’re clearly earning more money without tips. What’s the problem?”
The problem with not reporting your tips on taxes means it doesn’t show as part of your income. So if you want to rent a place that’s easily affordable but you don’t have proof of half your income you’re gonna get denied. Of course if your hourly wage is low enough it can be worth not reporting tips for the same reason. Many aid programs only help those below a ridiculously low income. I’ve been on both sides of the equation.
The bartenders I know ask for cash if possible, don’t report their tips, and then photoshop their paystubs to reflect their actual income when they apply for rentals.
Who the hell still uses pay-stubs for rental? Most places just do a background check and then pull your public W-2’s from a reported employer. That is some mad skills to be like, ‘here is my proof of employment and income, no don’t compare it to my W-2’.
That’s so based but I gotta admit I fear the IRS too much to go that far lol
Tips work out to more than $30/hr huh. Wonder if they were split with back of house or not?
Edit: Also the solution to the question of individual people getting less hours is to just make it a salaried position that pays out a fixed amount per month, so that everyone on average ends up working the same amount of dinner rushes/slow shifts etc.
Wonder if they were split with back of house
I think we all know the answer to this question.
Tips split with BOH absolutely would not average out over $30/hour for FOH in my opinion but I am only familiar with my state’s restaurant economy, not Colorado’s. Everybody having the same (better than average in this case) wage just makes it all the more easier to collectively bargain for a better one. At the very least, the restaurant industry needs “experiments” like this. I do think it’s a net positive for workers in the long game on the condition that this level of openness to change continues. Foundational changes like this set the precedent that you can make foundational changes like this.
Dear FOH if you want me to support tips, tip out BOH.
Lol if you’re making $30 an hour in fucking Colorado, you’re getting jack shit from me besides paying the bill.
If I had to guess, it’s missing context or straight up false reporting.
I don’t go out much, but when I do, I tip. I know the pay is shit, so I’ll do my part until wages get better. If I knew a place had the option of getting 30/ hour and wanted to go back to tips, I sure wouldn’t.
$30 an hour for a restaurant would be insanely high in my country, and our dollary-doos are only worth 2/3rds as much as US dollars, so this would be closer to $45 an hour for us. I can’t imagine that actually being sustainable in any way for the business, so I’m guessing they have a lot of strings attacked (like you have to work insane hours or lose other worker’s rights to make up for it.)
It could even be something that a lot of businesses do, where they still allow customers to tip, but don’t give that money to the employees. That could be what they’re arguing for.
EDIT: I do not know how much people are actually paid in the service industry in the US.
I live in the Denver area and make about $30 per hour and at 40 hours per week it’s enough to afford my own place, but I’m not living in luxury by any means. Rent and other living expenses are pretty high here.
My understanding is that the Casa Bonita workers aren’t able to get full time hours because the restaurant isn’t fully open yet.
this was back in july because they didn’t have tipping AND weren’t fully opened, making 30 an hour but just a couple days a week instead of the expected full week was pissing people off. not that tips would be the right solution
but i haven’t heard anything since so i don’t know how/if it’s settled. hell i don’t know if the place is fully open.
yall are underestimating how much some waiters make. especially if you are conventionally attractive.
it’s also kinda messed up to have people on a grading pay scale of how attractive they are
Yep which is a good thing. People pretend to hate tipping because of some foo pro-worker stance but it’s really because middle income people can’t stand the idea of unskilled labor making more than them and having to pay extra for their treats
No it’s because it’s an extremely anti-labor scab movement of Americans and other westoids. These people don’t want to pool tips with back of house, they want to gut the wages for everyone and keep all the tips for the conventionally attractive (white, cis) front of house workers. Otherwise they wouldn’t be using arguments like “we don’t have to pay taxes on tips” because that’s only true if you don’t pool/split tips.
You wouldn’t support pay discrimination based on politeness and conventional attractiveness, but tips come into the suggestion and suddenly you do
You’re all over this thread calling the workers scabs when the article says they were asking for a pooled-tip structure. At least read the thing before hurling insults at people
You are right, I read several comments in the thread stating the back-of-house wasn’t being included and just assumed they were right. I’ve deleted the comments and have now read the article. Tipping is still an anti-labor practice that employers love.
i half agree. black waiters make significantly less regardless of quality of service so theres clearly some downsides of tipping culture. pooling tips is a kinda solution. having a high hourly wage on top of tipping is ideal.
In those places the people who actually make the food don’t take home any tips and get paid just above minimum wage.
