251–260 of 961 posts
I’m sure it has nothing to do with the government paying people to sit at home - something NPR forgot to mention in their article.
It's hilarious that this perfectly rational and fact based remark is downvoted. This place has gone full blue anon.
I wonder if tipping took a huge hit in 2020. The kinds of people still eating in person at restaurants were often not paragons of conscientiousness in the first place. And I could see a lot of people cutting back on tipping when just patroning a place could feel like an act of charity in itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It used to be. When ordering food in a restaurant was a special thing for special occasions. It was expensive to eat out and the workers were compensated for it. Then we got to a place where food was supposed fast, cheap and accessible to everyone at any time. And suddenly you couldn't charge a lot for your food and worker wages stagnated. Sure more people work in the restaurant industry than they ever did before, bu…
There's something amusing to me about the idea of an industry that "used to be" sustainable. Guess it wasn't sustainable after all.
Wages/insurance/tips are an ongoing concern of food service work, but I want to set that aside and talk about the other half of the article. Customer entitlement is out of control and anybody who works with the general public will tell you it’s gotten even worse since the pandemic—and it wasn’t trending in the right direction before. Flight attendants, park rangers, government clerks, the anecdotes are everywhere, in…
> Customer entitlement is out of control It's not just customer entitlement. It's been a steadily rising thing throughout society for my whole life. People are less and less willing to accept responsibility for their choices, and more and more it's always someone else's fault. For example, a person who chose to go $300,000 into debt to go to Columbia film school, where the starting salary upon graduating is $30,000,…
We created a society where we tell people they should chase their dreams and anything is possible in America. Then, when they chase their dreams and fail we tell them how stupid they are that they did that and they should have done something more practical. I don’t think teenagers should be blamed for doing exactly what they were told to do and they’re right to be angry at the system.
The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
Honestly, as necessary as that is, it’s not a magic solution. People are quitting the restaurant industry in France too, despite having none of the tip silliness. It’s just that people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen
Restaurants have a lot of legal exceptions because you need people to work on sunday, vacations, weird schedules, etc.
So compared to other situations in the same country, it's not a good deal.
The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
That may be the case for some....but that is not the case for all. For one ancedote, my father in-law runs a restaurant with my aunt in-law (his sister). They are the only workers, and split the profits evenly. They are in the midwest (low taxes), and own the restaurant's property/building. They were able to completely shut down during COVID and restart back up, and have survived several economic downturns. They are…
The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
I think another is the response by the service industry to the requirements of the ACA. Everyone I know that works in a restaurant had their hours capped just below the line at which they'd have to be provided health insurance. Now they have multiple jobs. Juggling more than one job is a PITA, but even more so when your schedules are constantly shifting. These folks need full-time work with a predictable schedule, so they can do things like go to the dentist or take their kid to the zoo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe restaurants aren't a viable business? I know it sounds crazy because we've had them for so long, but maybe it's not sustainable to have so many of them? In any case, this seems like a great area to let the market figure it out. If restaurants go out of business the owners and employees will find something else to do.
> In any case, this seems like a great area to let the market figure it out. If restaurants go out of business the owners and employees will find something else to do. I'm not sure more corporate concentration would be a better situation.
The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
> Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. FYI, one of the reasons restaurants don't do this is the tax impacts. When someone tips 20%, there is no sales tax assessed on the tip — the full 20% goes to the worker. If you increase prices by 20%, that is subject to a sales tax (roughly 10% where I live), which amounts to a 1%-2% increase in the total…
I wonder what percentage of tips are still cash tips, which is the only case where you can get away with that. I imagine the percentage of tips that are on a credit card (or even app like Doordash/Seamless) vs. cash has been increasing over time, but I can't find solid numbers.
The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
> Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. FYI, one of the reasons restaurants don't do this is the tax impacts. When someone tips 20%, there is no sales tax assessed on the tip — the full 20% goes to the worker. If you increase prices by 20%, that is subject to a sales tax (roughly 10% where I live), which amounts to a 1%-2% increase in the total…