Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do workers who receive tips want it to go away? The friends I've known who worked jobs with tips seemed to think they would be paid less if tips were replaced with wage increases on the employer end; my understanding is that they made a significant amount of money in tips. Obviously this varies by individual, job, and establishment, though. There some restaurants that tried to go no-tipping, but I think it didn't wor…
everyone i know who has worked tipped and untipped service models preferred the untipped model for stability and the reduced interference of sadistic/irate/careless customers. in fact these people have been pretty instrumental in wider implementation as they have moved on to other work environments and advocated for that change. this is in a state that doesn’t count tips toward minimum wage. the largest harm of the t…
> “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.”
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> 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.)
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> 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...