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.
Here in Denmark a dish will usually be priced at between 1.5 to 7 times ( multiple star restaurants can sometimes go up to 10-15) the cost of the raw ingredients, which scales based off location/rent, price point and how many working hours you need to plan and produce any given dish. A mid-sized, mid-range restaurant in the city would have a factor of 4.38, fast food/cafeteria would be more like 1.5 - 2.5.
Margins are probably a lot thinner here, compared to the US, since wages are higher and tips are a smaller part of FoH wages (and they are often pooled/shared with BoH. at least the places I’ve worked) and the very high-end restaurants have a hard time staying afloat without massively exploiting free labor (stages, trainees, visiting chefs from other kitchens, unpaid overtime, expecting chefs to work on dishes on their own) yet they’re still mostly doing ok on cashflow once they find a niche or get some good press.
All this to say that the American service industry most likely contains a lot more boss-shaped pinatas filled with YOUR cash and y’all Yankees should start swinging bats.