The ability to afford adequate housing, food, and clothing. I'm not saying we should mandate people can afford a 1500 sq. ft. home, ribeye steaks every evening, and Ralph Lauren Polo threads, but how about at least a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment; nutritious, nourishing food; Walmart clothing at a minimum.
> What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant?
Removing the "tipping" system. Increase prices such that an employee can afford the above mentioned necessities.
> I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots.
I think the industry will go here no matter what changes we do or do not make to policy, business models, etc.
> But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different cognitive abilities, it is not like we can teach everyone to code. It will not work.
We either decide these people are expendable, or that they are human beings worthy of a baseline of a dignified life. I define a dignified life as the ability to have at least the minimums I described above.
There some restaurants that tried to go no-tipping, but I think it didn't work out for them because they had a hard time finding/retaining staff.
the largest harm of the tipping model is in states that do count tips towards minimum wage. the wage paid by employer may be under $3/h and the employee mostly survives off tips. this means that tips are only subsidizing the employer, because an increase in tips is matched by a deduction in the wage paid by the employer, to a limit.
there are some rare instances, mostly luxury dining, where tips can far outpace typical restaurant wages. in this context the employer can afford to massively increase wages. there have been arguments made that these tips pay for the quality of service, but there is no reason this incentive and expectation can’t come from the employer directly, and it would remove the uncertainty of irresponsible customers failing to tip.
in all contexts, switching from tips to a real wage has many benefits to the employee when wages are adjusted properly, no detriments to the customer, and only harms businesses that are currently exploitative and doing harm.
> “Andrew was very disappointed,” says an employee of Tarlow’s restaurant group, Marlow Collective, who asked to remain anonymous. “But when we went to non-tipping, we pretty much lost our entire staff that had been there for ten years. He wanted to make it work, but it just became really difficult.”
> ...
> But, it turned out, many front-of-house staffers were more concerned with making money than with maintaining the moral high ground. This February, Meyer admitted that he had lost 30 to 40 percent of his “legacy” staffers since 2015. (One Meyer employee told Grub last year that her wages dropped from $60,000 per year to $50,000 under the new policy.)
> ...
> Without widespread buy-in from other restaurants, it’s just too easy for front-of-house workers to leave to make more money elsewhere. “About 40 percent of our servers were like, ‘Hey, this is awesome, but I’m going to go to State Bird Provisions, where I can make 10 percent more,’” Vogler says. “And who doesn’t want to make 10 percent more? They’re not freedom fighters.”
To be sure, maybe they didn't do a good job implementing it. But the cases I've read about restaurants switching to no-tipping usually seem to run into problems with servers being able to earn more money with tips than without them.
I think perhaps part of the problem is that a uniform increase in prices will make people who would have tipped poorly decide not to go, and people who would have tipped generously now pay less. So before with the tipping model, the well-tippers were in effect subsidising the poor-tippers, but now the poor-tippers are gone so there is overall less revenue for the business and servers. But another issue is that they took some of the income earned from the higher prices and gave it to the kitchen staff, which would have been money that would have been available for the waitstaff.
[0]: https://www.grubstreet.com/2018/12/restaurant-tipping-return...
i doubt there is real effect on the orders that customers place, but nobody's publishing their books, so who can say. in a systemic change in which every restaurant transitions to an untipped system, there would be no concern about losing out to a restaurant that continues to lower prices by exploiting servers.
Sure, if every restaurant switched to no-tipping, then waitstaff couldn't simply switch to a restaurant that did tips. But I would suspect they would make less money overall.
Are restaurants without tipping losing out to a restaurant that is 'exploiting' servers if servers are choosing switch to that restaurant rather than stick with the restaurant with the 'non-exploitative' no-tipping model? I cannot see the logic in that. Are you saying servers who leave a no-tipping restaurant for a tipping restaurant are choosing to be exploited?
if the concern is that workers may be paid less, the solution is simply don't pay less.
The money is already there, and the current situation is that customers are literally giving most of it without obligation. It makes sense to formalize the relationship, and properly allocate responsibilities to the business owner.
The entire debate is a deflection of responsibility for employee compensation.
> This study examines the effects of such moves away from tipping on restaurant’s online customer ratings. The results indicate that (i) restaurants receive lower online customer ratings when they eliminate tipping, (ii) online customer ratings decline more when tipping is replaced with service-charges than when it is replaced with service-inclusive-pricing, and (iii) less expensive restaurants experience greater declines in online customer ratings when replacing tipping with either alternative than do more expensive restaurants.
> ...
> Given the already ubiquitous and increasing popularity of online reviews, and the influence that such e-word of mouth has been shown to have on consumers’ purchasing/patronage behaviors (see Kim, Li, and Brymer, 2016; Ong, 2012; Zhang, Ye, Law, and Li, 2010), our results also have important implications for restaurants’ bottom-line that warrant being underscored. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis (2003- 2009) of Yelp online reviews and revenue data for every restaurant in the city of Seattle Luca (2016) recently estimated that restaurateurs can expect a 9% increase in revenue for every one-star Yelp rating improvement. Thus, if the results of our study are shown to be reliable and Luca’s (2016) estimate generalizable then it follows that low and moderately priced restaurants that decide to replace voluntary tipping with either automatic service charges or service inclusive pricing can expect to experience a nontrivial loss in profits as a function of lower online satisfaction ratings.
The paper notes that raising prices whether through services charges or what will be a price increase for a significant percentage of the clientele:
> Additionally, tipping is a form of voluntary pricing and price discrimination that results in approximately 25 percent of customers tipping less than 15 percent of bill size and 65 percent of customers tipping less than 20 percent of bill size (Lynn, 2017a), so replacing tipping with service charges or service inclusive pricing will raise dining costs for a quarter to half of restaurant customers and this is likely to reduce the overall satisfaction of those customers.
One restaurant that had switched to no-tipping before abandoning had tip averages of 21%.[1] I don't know anybody who tips that much, but apparently they exist. But if you increase prices by 21% on all clientele, then the restaurant becomes more pricey compared to restaurants that do tipping. Someone who would have tipped 15% might just go to another restaurant and tip that much, whereas a particularly generous tipper who would have paid 25% to make the average about 20% between these two is now just paying that 21% price hike - that's an overall decline in revenue. And the restaurateur said his mistake was not raising prices high enough to cover both the waitstaff wages that they had been getting from tipping ($25-40/hr) and raises for the back-of-house staff; he says he should have raised them 40%! Perhaps he could have done so, but it seems likely he would have been doing less business and had to downsize.
But OK, let's assume that somehow restaurants earn the same amount of income as before with hiked prices and no tipping, and that extra income is paid to the staff. If any money goes to the back-of-house staff, that means that the waitstaff would be making less than they did before. Do you think it's reasonable for waiters to be making $25-40/h while the kitchen staff is making $13-20?[1] I don't particularly think it is, and if tipping culture eventually ends (which, make no mistake, I am no fan of tipping), we would see waitstaff being paid less because now they can't switch to a restaurant where they can make more than tips, but we might see kitchen staff make more. However, this would necessarily mean that waitstaff are making less money.
[0]: https://static.secure.website/wscfus/5261551/7004898/ijhm-ti... [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/15/478096516/wh...
I have no problem with raising back-of-house wages, they are typically undercompensated compared to front-of-house, even though the work is comparable and all of it counts towards the dining experience. Raising kitchen wages does not necessitate lowering server wages, and suggesting it does only encourages division and confuses the situation. It is worth noting that tip pooling with kitchen staff is standard practice in many restaurants despite being flat out illegal until recently, so the situation you fear already exists, and could be remedied by moving away from a tipping system to explicit wages.
Again, it is worth formalizing the relationship and clearly allocating responsibilities.
Then kitchen staff will continue to be paid poorly. Just understand that's the tradeoff.
> Raising kitchen wages does not necessitate lowering server wages
How?
> It is worth noting that tip pooling with kitchen staff is standard practice in many restaurants despite being flat out illegal until recently
It's still illegal in many states. Meyer, one of the restaurateurs who switched to no-tipping and back, is in New York, where it's illegal both to add a service charge and to collect part of the tips to share with kitchen staff. Switching to no-tipping allowed him to compensate the kitchen staff more fairly, at the expense of the departure of his entire waitstaff.
If it’s a tradeoff it’s only a tradeoff that management chooses to make.
>How?
How what? It’s a business operating within a market. They will do something.
None of this is a binary mechanistic outcome determined by a boolean of tipped or untipped service. The restaurant has a budget and they will spend money and set prices as they think best, and succeed or fail based on that. There is no law that dictates zero-sum competition between kitchen and server wages, and all else static! Clearly in a market in which tipping is not practiced, a business will behave differently than the current market, and employees will expect appropriate wages.
>meyer etc etc
this is still another case of an employer making administrative choices about how much to pay different workers, and workers reacting to those decisions. if the waitstaff were given an equivalent or better wage to their previous wage+tip compensation, they would have had no reason to depart. this was explicitly not the case: the servers left because the transition gave them a pay cut.
it makes no sense to blame tipping or not tipping for bad budgeting and failed wage negotiations. the issue is in the allocation, not the concept.
again, this is a case of employers deflecting responsibility for compensating their employees.
i am advocating that employers be held responsible for paying their employees. the current tipped service regime fails to attribute that responsibility to employers, and leaves employees vulnerable.
i have seen no-tip service implemented in a way that satisfied employees. i have seen also it done in a way that drove staff to quit, and in those cases the fault lay entirely with management trying to reduce compensation.
stop asking questions about a fantasy budget. i do not care. if tipped service was abolished tomorrow, employers would figure it out.
Have you seen no-tip service implemented with waitstaff earning as much as they did before?
> if tipped service was abolished tomorrow, employers would figure it out.
Of course they would figure it out if tipped service were abolished. But I am confident the outcome of whatever they figured out would result in lower take-home pay for waitstaff, as waitstaff would no longer be able to earn more money by switching to an establishment that allowed tips.
Yes. This entire thread is just me telling you repeatedly for twenty-four hours that equivalent compensation is the only thing that works.
If the choice was $10/hr + tips or $15/hr, I’d take the tips.
to me, this part sticks out like a sore thumb. a 1BR where? I make well above the median wage for my area and I can't afford a 1BR anywhere near the place I work. literally no one would consider me to be poor. a 1BR, coming with a private kitchen and bathroom, is a luxury for a single adult. it's not at all an efficient use of housing space.
a more reasonable threshold would be a private bedroom with space for a desk.
It's interesting to see how standards have shifted over time. Not too long ago, it was considered sufficient if people could afford their own room in a boarding house. Those frequently had shared bathroom and dining facilities, and provided nutritious and nourishing meals. That was considered a worthy, dignified life by a great many.
Boarding houses went away in no small part because they were zoned out of existence. Often on the grounds that they were an immoral existence and it was the duty of the best of us (read: richest) to mandate a correct social order for the lower classes.
I find this interesting because it implies that we're going to continue to have this problem - a lack of dignity - no matter what we do. You can already see the ratchet turning. There are people who earnestly believe that food isn't nutritious and nourishing unless it's Organic (by some definition) and thus that universal access to Organic food is a moral requirement.
Now, what does adequate mean? I guess a place to sleep, a place to clean oneself, food and clothing seems like a reasonable bar for a wage above poverty. Are there many full time jobs in the US that do not allow that?
> Removing the "tipping" system. Increase prices such that an employee can afford the above mentioned necessities.
Removing tipping and increasing prices beyond the tipping, it reduces to just increasing prices. I guess not very smart people create these enterprises, if only they hiked prices… And seriously, they definitely increases them, it is just a necessity. But I would not call this as a change in the model.
> I think the industry will go here no matter what changes we do or do not make to policy, business models, etc.
We do not have to necessary speed it up. People are already having difficult with keeping up with the changes.
> We either decide these people are expendable, or that they are human beings worthy of a baseline of a dignified life. I define a dignified life as the ability to have at least the minimums I described above.
Are there really only two options? Is not that a bit simplistic? And what does that even mean, do you think we should provide everyone with the job that ensures they have the mentioned stuff. What if they have different needs. And what if they do not qualify for any job, should we provide them with the exact stuff that people who work 40h a week get, or the equivalent in money? How is that fair for those who do these boring jobs.
I would say, a place where you don't have to share quarters with strangers, be exposed to violence, drugs, have your sleep interrupted, where the housing is stable enough that you don't need to leave work in the middle of the day to attend an emergency court petition to prevent your immediate eviction due to landlords non-payment of mortgage and interception of mailed eviction notifications, where you don't have to leave under cover of darkness with colleagues who know how to handle themselves as your bodyguards so that you can spend a month or two sleeping on a friends sofa while you try and wait for a room to open up in something resembling a half-way house for recently released prisoners.
Cos I mean, those were about the best conditions I could afford while working for a profitable multinational tech company while I was developing a key piece of the Internet infrastructure that everyone on this site uses daily (in a wealthy area of the UK).
I won't name the company, but it rhymes with "Clit Tricks"
> Are there really only two options? Is not that a bit simplistic? ... should we provide them with the exact stuff that people who work 40h a week get ... ?
Is _that_ not a bit simplistic? Is it really so difficult to imagine a world where working 40 hours a week is either a) dignified enough not to be totally demeaning and exploitative _and_ meaningful enough to carry some intrinsic reward, or b) pays noticeably more than the bare minimum required for an existence at least befitting the dignity of animals in a zoo, never mind human beings?
These poor countries don't have any special techniques or mystical cultural powers. For example, the fact that south Korea has adequate flood defences and the UK does not is not because Korean culture lends them a racial character uniquely cognizant of water management passed down from their ancestors over generations of rice cultivation or whatever... There is absolutely no reason the UK is unable to "throw money" at constructing flood defences (altering planning policy, etc.) if they were to so chose.
The idea is not to "escape the hellhole" but to transform it in to "not a hellhole", through the direct, rational application of readily available, and completely straight-forward policy mechanisms.
But maybe it's too difficult to use political policy as a tool to achieve desired outcomes and we should blame the victims, turning it in to a nebulous cultural or moral failing and then wait around for the culture to just spontaneously change itself, eh :)
Very many.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/minimum-wage-workers-cannot-...
There will always be service sector jobs, this is the argument luddites were having in 1815 (I don't want to get into this as it is distracting from my main point).
We should be ensuring that anyone putting in 40 hours a week should be able to support a family. The wealth is there to be able to create this society (not saying it's easy not saying there are not problems).
Look, I might be convinced that minimum wage is too low, though I'm much more inclined to leave that as a matter for the employee and employer to reach agreement on.
But if you have no marketable skills and the only work you can get is entry-level minimum wage, you have no business starting a family as the sole income-earner. None.
Restaurants are a part of the service sector. A service job does not imply that it is attractive. And they differ in requirements. The well paid ones get more and more complicated and hence, proportionally to the whole population, less and less people will be able to qualify for them.
Finding shelter is exponential Harder now than any time in my memory.
We have a homelessness problem that it unpresidented. I would bet more people are now than anytime in history. (Pioneers could camp when they were tired. Cavemen weren't ticketed for sleeping under a ledge.)
Hell--30 years ago certain states were still offering homesteads. There's not an inch of land in the USA that live for free. (BLM land requires you to move every two weeks. Only some BLM land us open to camping.)
Try taking a nap in your closest park, or open field. You will get poked by a angry cop. You will understand loitering/trespass laws innately.
People, especially in service jobs, are living on top of each other. Why was the Corona virus so prevelant in the hispanic communities?
As to your previous statement, "We all can't be Coders." I have personally know three older Programmers. Two died because they aged out of the industry, and became homeless. The other is currently being harassed in Richardson Bay by Sausalito cops, and the coast guard, over a dispute of the seaworthiness of his sailboat.
One was Jim Fox. A huge contributor to Word Star. He ended up in San Rafael wearing a fuzzy Penguin outfit begging. He died a few years ago.
You might be one of those Service applicants in a decade?
(I'm not going to debate this guy. My biggest worry post Covid is the huge increase in homelessness we are going to see. The government needs to open up any excess federal, state, and local to to free camping. We need to put up tent cities. I feel it's going to get very ugly.)
This is generally not possible at twice the cost. The robots generally suck and break down a lot. Now you've replaced a bunch of low-skilled, interchangeable staff who work like dogs with a fleet of mechanics and an engineering department.
Half of the McDonald's automated kiosks I see are broken - and it's usually the store's entire system down, for weeks or months on end. I went to Home Depot today to grab some WD-40, and when I went to do the self-checkout, each of the four stations had a clerk helping the customer "self" checkout. To circle back to McDonald's - it's always been a joke how difficult some fast food clerks find their POS systems - where does this fantasy come from that customers are going to be better at it?
When it is possible to automate a job away, it is desirable. It's good that raising labor costs drives technology development. The better technology we have, the more comfortable we can all be, and the less we have to work as a species.
> When it is possible to automate a job away, it is desirable. Yes, it reduces the cost (of the workforce). However, this change comes with a nontrivial social cost and a problem, what to do with the people that are not able to do more advanced stuff.
If you work full time as an adult and are Medicaid eligible, you’re being paid poverty wages.
> What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant?
Raise the prices.
It’s already happened anyway, the market has plenty of elasticity. Restauranteurs always whine about how impossible it is to raise prices, yet they seem to manage to do so just fine.
Fast service restaurants have already adapted. Five Guys or Chipotle cost more for a better product. McDonalds has to remind you on the wrapper that their burger contains beef.
What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant? I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots.
But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different cognitive abilities, it is not like we can teach everyone to code. It will not work.