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.
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”.
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.
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.
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
oh definitely fucked up, im just saying theres a lot of people who enjoy that perk, not that i think its right, especialy since the beauty standard is racist, ablelist, ect. trying to show why many people are against getting rid of tipping.
I think I’m about at that age where what little pretty privilege I had gets a surprise revoking (at least without excess makeup incantations), so I’m glad to pull that ladder up behind me. Actually this bad take is unnecessary, AI and posadism will tag team the economy. Don’t worry about it.
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
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.
Agreed, pooling tips should be legally required accross the board
Or, you know, just pay people properly in the first place. If you’re going to reach for legislation why target tips?
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.
Ayyy, no worries and I appreciate you acknowledging the mistake
I don’t really know enough about the issue to have a very strong opinion on it, I was mainly just annoyed that so few people in the thread seemed to have read the thing they were responding to, but I’m also guilty of that quite often on here! Do you know of anything I can read to get better informed?
I’ve worked at restaurants that did “pooled tips” that did not include boh in the pool FWTW.
In those places the people who actually make the food don’t take home any tips and get paid just above minimum wage.
Lmao, trying to spin this as bougie is hilarious.
Like Rachel from Friends…
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.
Dear FOH if you want me to support tips, tip out BOH.
Thanks, came here to say it.
Holy F $30/hr is a very nice wage. That’s livable with a side of moderate savings there. Take the damn win.
It’s been almost a decade since I lived in CO, but housing prices were out of control (even measured against the national increase. Bunch of people moved there in the 2010s.)
$30 is definitely good though I have to assume.
I always prefer asking “how much does the owner make per hour from the server’s labor?” Not saying like “don’t work unless you get 100% of the value you create!” But I just like to think of it that way (and remind others). I like to shift the focus from “wow that’s nice of them” to “wow they’re still stealing…”
Have you ever got an answer from that question? The responses I’ve received when asking similar things have always been runarounds like “well in the service industry the profit margins really are so narrow…”, but never any quantification of how narrow
You won’t get a straight answer but you can often ballpark it if you work there or know someone who does. I have friends at McDonalds and Dominoes, where the owners were making ~$50 and ~$80 per labor hour, respectively, iirc. That’s profit after all known non-labor expenses.
I make it a point to figure this out for every place I or a friend works at, and then make sure everyone who works there knows the real numbers. Because bourgeois fucks will act like money’s tight and lie to your face, so knowing the truth is necessary for convincing workers they can collectively bargain for more.
$50 per labor hour meaning, you have five front of house staff so five labor hours per hour, some number BoH another bunch of hours per hour, we’re talking up to a grand to the owner’s pocket per hour? Fuck, that is not a tight margin, fuck that
Yeah basically, not sure how well it translates to a sit-down restaurant, nor how that compares to other cities.
But even if the real number is half that for some reason (and I was already conservative in estimating the numbers I gave) that’s still considerably more than the 7.25-13 that fast food workers make.
it’s almost funny when they talk about money being tight after bragging about record profits
Yeah, that’s just them repeating capitalist rhetoric they hear in media (of all sorts) all the time.
Anyone who has access to the pricing for raw ingredients knows how that works. I was always told if some is under $50, double the price. If it’s like $100-300 1.5x price. If it’s more, 1.25x or 1.10x. Or ask the owner usually. (This was some absolutely scammy job years ago and honestly I think the starting markup was 5x but I can’t remember now. Been like 20 years)
(Speaking of my old old job as a far off, non-personal to now example): So you can kinda so the math on just sales you do if you know the company paid $10 and you sold 10 of them for $20 in a day. Plus you did labor repairing equipment which had a contract for repairs agreed upon between the companies worth 6 figures. They value that machine being operable for like 5 years enough to pay $200K (like $300K now days). How much does that mean your hours of labor are worth?
Gets kinda nebulous quickly… BUT you can always be absolutely assured you are still earning the owner profit otherwise you won’t have a job for much longer. And owners aren’t like “nice guys” who will pay you $20 out of $25/hr total value you might create and they pocket $5. Nah, they’re probably making another $20/hr off you AT FUCKING LEAST! Again, there is a lot of speculation in this stuff, but also I mean I’ve seen pricing myself. They try to obfuscate things but there is absolutely, once you know all the numbers like rent for storage, utilities, etc., some amount you cost per month for them to keep hired vs how much value you create and that equation is always unequal towards the owner and it will be a significant amount to justify the hire originally.
Here in Denmark a dish will usually be priced at between 1.5 to 7 times ( multiple star restaurants can sometimes go up to 10-15) the cost of the raw ingredients, which scales based off location/rent, price point and how many working hours you need to plan and produce any given dish. A mid-sized, mid-range restaurant in the city would have a factor of 4.38, fast food/cafeteria would be more like 1.5 - 2.5.
Margins are probably a lot thinner here, compared to the US, since wages are higher and tips are a smaller part of FoH wages (and they are often pooled/shared with BoH. at least the places I’ve worked) and the very high-end restaurants have a hard time staying afloat without massively exploiting free labor (stages, trainees, visiting chefs from other kitchens, unpaid overtime, expecting chefs to work on dishes on their own) yet they’re still mostly doing ok on cashflow once they find a niche or get some good press.
All this to say that the American service industry most likely contains a lot more boss-shaped pinatas filled with YOUR cash and y’all Yankees should start swinging bats.
Fucking 30$ an hour!? That’s amazing! That’s more than teachers make where I live…
Like, more than 30% more wow
Still not enough, but dang tbh
tbf teaching is around 40 hours a week (more if you include marking and prep but that’s not paid)
Teaching is at least 80hrs a week, teachers never get any peace
Extremely sus that this article doesn’t report on the number of signatures on the petition.
i’ve never worked a tipped job, but from the people i know who have, this is probably about what they were making already except more consistent and maybe slightly less depending on how pricey the food is
Ex ept if they’re paid in tips they don’t have to pay taxes on any of it if they don’t need to report it.
CC tips are absolutely taxed (restaurant is on the hook for this). Cash tips should be.
All tips are supposed to be taxed. That being said, every single one of my friends that have worked jobs that are primary tip-based would mention that they would hide some amount of the cash tips. This was to avoid taxes, and for the most part my friends would claim most of their cash tips while mentioning that if they were having a bad week or day they might hide more. I have been in restaurant and other service jobs which I was paid normal rates due to being either technically BOH or otherwise not a tip expected job. So in those cases I wouldn’t claim a random tip I would get since it was never more than $20. Also the servers didn’t have to split anything with BOH since BOH was paid at least $6.50/hr back in 2003 (which was like a dollar or so more than state/national min wage) and the servers were something like $2/hr or so with tips being of course the main source. Though they would give some to those of us that bused their tables quickly on busy nights to get them ready for a new person/group.
But I think that tipping should be completely something that is to show that the worker was in your opinion just worth more than whatever they made the time you interacted with them. As the idea of a tip (IMO) is just that, a more personal sign of appreciation for their labour even if they are being paid like any other worker. And yes, I believe that holds true for stuff like strippers or any other currently legal sex worker (and same goes for prostitutes if made legal and officially taxed).
I am from NC, and not the most high income areas while not being in the lowest either. But $30/hr is almost twice what I make in my non-tip-based job (I am at a pay-cap of $19.48/hr). That sounds like shit I wouldn’t start to see unless I climbed the latter a lot to get (and completely stop doing the actual stuff I am any good at). So I am guessing $30/hr where they are planning to open must be like getting less than $10/hr where I am when adjusting for living costs and all that. Otherwise it seems like a real strange hill to die on when it isn’t like the people coming into the place won’t still do it if the servers are just doing really well. Idk. I stand with the workers no matter what they do, but if they lose the $30/hr for tips-based and the people that come in do what so many do (which is just lord over the worker). Then it would be a real motherfucker.
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Taxes depend on states in the US. Im pretty sure that in california all tips arent taxed. No idea for colorado though.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you live in the US you must pay income tax and report on all tips or you are doing tax evasion. If you are photoshopping pay stubs you already know this to be true (don’t do this the employer sends a copy to the IRS you will go to jail)
Most restaurants don’t report their tips either, it’s good to find out at a new place whether you can cheat or not
If the restaurant isn’t reporting tips, they likely aren’t fairly pooling and splitting them either. If they’re willing to cheat the feds, they’re willing to cheat the dishwasher
The owner doesn’t split or pool tips pretty much ever.
Adding on to the chorus telling you that legally speaking, tips are required to be reported as income and taxed.
Now of course, many people don’t report their tips in spite of this requirement, and because of the nature of cash tips it is very rare that this requirement is ever enforced. So it is very unlikely that you will face any legal repercussions for not reporting your tips. However, choosing not to report can have other effects besides legal action. For example, if you lose your job and try to claim unemployment, the unemployment benefits you receive is usually calculated as a percentage of your average income from your most recent period of employment. So if you under-report your tips, that can have a significant impact on the unemployment benefits you are entitled to.
Right and its illegal to go over the speed limit.
It really just depends on where you work and your demographics.
Young black male in rural city? Lol you’re fucked. Attractive young white woman in dense urban center at trendy expensive restaurant? Absolutely crazy amounts of money.
I’ve known people who graduate, get a job in the field they wanted and then quit and went back to serving because they fell into the right demos and location.
The tipping floor is the lowest it can possibly be but the ceiling is extremely high. And it’s largely based off unfair reasons.
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I came in here upset to see anti-tipping discourse on my hexbear but then I saw they’re making 30/hour and if they’re not talking about cutting in BOH well… yeah not a good look. I wish I made that much.
I get where you’re coming from, but if they make more with tips shouldn’t we support them keeping tips?
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But the article literally talks about them asking for a pooled-tip structure and that they were being supported by the union. One of the workers says that the $30 an hour is a 40% pay cut
are they?
Do the workers making tips ever have any say in where the tips go? If the tips aren’t shared fairly or the BOH isn’t compensated comparatively then that is on the management, how could they be a scab in their position?
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My algorithm keeps recommending the new South Park season where it appears the main cast of children have been replaced by adult women of color wearing the same outfits. I used to watch SP but I do not want to know how awful this season is.
Heard thats a satire episode
Really got their finger on the pulse of American culture and deffinitly not just reactionary shitheads if they’re making a whole special about how underrepresented straight white males are in American media.
got their finger on the pulse of American culture
not just reactionary shitheads
It could be both. A lot of the culture is reactionary and shitty.
I’m sure they will “both sides” it like they always do.
I was ready to shit on it but I think they actually had an okay take, Kyle (who is usually more of the voice of the creators) mentioned increased representation was good, when it was actually done with care and not just lazy skintone swapping, he mentioned Miles Morales was great. But I think the special overall could give rhetorical fuel to reactionaries.
Your average reactionary South Park fan already had their opinion on representation in media and likely only heard that side of the episode.
They did lol
I hate watched it and shit was painful, finally got a laugh out of me 45 minutes in.
“One the one hand it’s nice for minorities when they see stories about people who look like them on TV but on the other hand white males never complained about representation when they went from 99% to 96% of characters on TV so I guess if you think representation is good you’re the same as a nazi. The important thing is to never firmly believe in anything or else you’re the real loser, regardless if that thing is good or bad.”
Second hand knowledge: they both sides it.
Unrelated to SP’s bad politics, I liked the character’s gender swapped designs.
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.
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?
Yes
“Kulaks are people who make my treats more expensive so they can afford to live above subsistence levels”
Work a kitchen, it’s because I’m bitter about the way I was treated not because I am upset about tipping making things more expensive. I straight up don’t eat out so it’s a non-issue from that end.
At the expense of the other workers who don’t get a living wage or tips
Damn I’m learning some things ITT and it’s not looking good for waiters. Being a waiter is still a valuable skill but not as useful and being able to cook food frfr.
Because wait staff can be (and are) paid less than minimum wage due to the tips.
It’s messed up that there are even exceptions to minimum wage. It also makes no sense where minimum wage is low that the kitchen staff can be on minimim wage while the wait staff are making much more on tips. You can have a restaurant with no waiters but you can’t have a restaurant with no cooks.
The whole system as it exists seems designed to retroactively prop up a nonsense tradition.
The whole system has roots in the reconstruction era as a means of not paying emancipated slaves a wage. Instead they were in many cases only paid 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.
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.
“the workers want it and therefor it is good and you are reactionary if you don’t support them!”
We also don’t even know if it’s the workers that want this. All we are being shown is a petition that has ~5k signatures on it, despite the restaurant only having 256 employees according to the article. And in the second to last line of the article, we are told this:
Of 256 employees, 93 were a part of the shift and only two said they were unhappy about it, management said at the time.
If we can only find 2 people that are upset with the policy despite having a petition with thousands of signatures, then I think it’s safe to conclude that the people supporting the petition and the people working at the restaurant don’t overlap very much.
Which makes sense, because if the workers were united on this issue and were serious about forcing their boss to make a change to employment policy, then they would be passing around union election cards instead of sharing a petition and getting signatures of people who don’t even work at the restaurant. A union has real leverage to force a business to make policy changes, a petition doesn’t.
It doesn’t make sense for workers to try to change a policy like this through a petition, so the only likely reason for a petition like this to exist is so that media outlets like this can have a pretext to write an article about how seemingly unpopular this policy is in order to manufacture consent against demands for similar policies in the wider industry. A petition is great for this kind of hit job, because it focuses solely on the apparent disapproval of whoever they could find that was willing to sign. A petition doesn’t give you any data on how many people approve of the new policy relative to the disapproval rate, a petition doesn’t give you any information on how many people declined to sign, a petition doesn’t give you information where this disapproval is coming from (such as from the workers themselves or some outside source), and as such writing an article about a petition doesn’t present you with any contradicting data that might undermine the narrative you’re trying to sell.
I am under no impression that this petition represents genuine grievances and demands from the workers themselves, and rather that it is likely the product of some astroturfing effort from other business owners and executives in the industry who have a vested interest in discouraging this policy from becoming commonplace/industry standard.
Excellent points!
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