Before I begin, I want you all to take a deep breath — especially my friends who have worked in the service industry.
Ready? Okay.
Is it feasible for restaurants and bars to price their goods where servers and bartenders made an actual, salaried wage instead of relying on tips or other gratuity to bring their pay in line with a normal living wage?
People’s tipping habits have always been a source of endless angst, amusement, scorn and praise — especially around January, when an Appleby’s server posted a receipt from a woman who justified crossing out the automatic gratuity and paid $0.00 because “I give GOD 10% — Why do you get 18%?” (We’ll leave the Appleby’s policy where tables of six or more have the 18 percent gratuity added on, and why the pastor decided to ignore it and pay her flat food and bev charges instead, out of the conversation. She’s been vilified enough. Maybe.)
Seriously think about this for a moment. Here’s how it could work — and it takes a bit of a leap for everyone involved.
First, we need to set a standard for what the wage would be. Servers generally make a base salary of $2.13 an hour, or somewhere thereabouts. It’s a bare minimum to keep the folks at the Labor Board and the IRS happy. The balance of a server’s pay comes from tips.
On a six-hour shift, let’s say our hypothetical server — we’ll call her Lydia — at our hypothetical restaurant — we’ll call it Devin’s Grill — had a total of 30 customers, across eighteen tables. (It’s a slow day at Devin’s.) This would be a typical American-fare restaurant, where the standard entree is $8.00. With a drink and a side, the average meal would be $12.50. Based on that average, and if every person tipped fifteen percent, Lydia would make $56.25 in tips, plus her $2.13 an hour, for a daily take of $69.03.
(I can see some of you already have your hands raised, and I know what some of your questions are. We’ll adjust these numbers in a second, but I’m trying to prove a theory here. Gimme a second.)
If we wanted to make a new pay scale, where tipping was not expected, Lydia would need to make $11.50 an hour. (I’ll let the waitstaff reading this swoon for a few moments at not getting a check that could do more than put half a tank of gas in their car. Moment’s over.) A nice thought, but to make this work, Devin’s would need to really change up their pricing to absorb that added labor cost. The simple answer would be to raise the price of the food twenty percent, to make for a uniform bump. So, your guest check at Devin’s of $12.50 would jump to $14.38.
But would that work from a management perspective? We would need to set a few ground rules. First, as a server, Lydia would come on board at $11.00 an hour. She would be trained for a full week, at a lower trainee rate, and have to pass a competency test shift before being put on the schedule as a full-rate server at Devin’s?
Meanwhile, there’s an incentive-based pay increase on the docket: if Lydia hits $200 in sales per hour, her hourly rate bumps up to $13. $400 in sales per hour means her hourly rate is $15. (This is all trackable through any modern Point Of Sale system, and is already a metric restaurant managers use to monitor sales.)
The downside: managers would be watching their roomflow like a hawk. If their number of customers dips below a certain amount, they would cut staff for the day. Tenure and skill level would dictate who stays on for the slow time, and who would go home. This already happens to a certain extent, but Lydia is far more motivated to stay on if she’s making $11 an hour with no customers.
Would restaurants go for it? Hard to tell. While they would have to report earnings in a method more consistent with non-service businesses, it would be easier to run reports to the IRS on a salary basis, rather than relying on the employee to accurately report how much they made in tips each shift. And, the old tipshare jealousy fights moments would be replaced with louder screams of “Quit stealing my tables!” and “Quit seating people in Lydia’s section, when I only have one table!”
Now, let’s get to those who are saying: “The baseline tip should be 25 percent of the check, not 15!” I agree. However, we need to look at the big picture. When you tally all of the people who stiff servers on tips on one end of the bell curve, and the big tippers on the other end of the scale, you’re looking at an average, for most table service, at 15 percent. (Can’t remember what industry source did the research — I’ll try to find it and follow-up.)
The other complaint I can hear from the voices of my friends and associates in my head (I carry you lot around in the spot of my brain where I usually stash the location of my car keys, and I’m sorry it’s so cramped) is the ability to reward proper service, and punish improper service. This is where communication, training and work ethic kicks in. If you had a bad dining experience at Devin’s, it is your duty to talk with a manager.
That manager needs to be able to sift out the ridiculous complaints from the legitimate ones, and hold the server, line cooks, and expo line staff accountable. (They’ll be making more money as well — that’s why the ticket bump was twenty percent and not fifteen.) If the problem was that the kitchen crashed, the server should not be the one held to the fire. That’s as much on the back of house, including the management. However, if the server was inattentive to the guests needs — beverage refills, inaccurate orders, poor table service — then their pay is docked, or they’re removed from the schedule. (At $11 an hour, the desire to get things right is a lot greater than at $2.13 an hour.)
On the other hand, if your service from Lydia was phenomenal, nothing is stopping you from tipping her additionally. That tip money is strictly your prerogative, but your conscience is clear because you know Lydia’s getting a fair wage, and not chained to the bargain basement of server salaries.
That’s my concept. I invite you, Intrepid Readers, to bat it around a bit. I have a lot of friends who have worked all sides of the service industry, front and back of the house. Would this plan work?
Recent Comments