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.
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?
Because wait staff can be (and are) paid less than minimum wage due to the tips.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
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.