eliminating tipping.
eater DC published an article recently about three D.C. restaurants that are eliminating tipping.
this is nothing new friends, restaurants across the country have been modifying their structure in order to maintain a strong team that is loyal and can afford to invest the time and energy it takes to have a strong family.
I attended a conference in 2019 in which the panelists said losing a server is a $1500 cost to the restaurant business, a general manager a $2500 hit.
restaurants are at a pivotal moment, as many of them have had to immediately modified their menus to dishes that travel well via third party delivery or pick up models. many restaurants have scaled back on their staff as dine in came to a screeching halt in March for most restaurants around the country. many operators are seeking approval by local municipalities to expand their dining room into the sidewalk and/or street to offer patio dining to guests who are comfortable dining at restaurants but want to be outdoors. this works for the summer and into the fall, but what about dining outdoors in the winter in Chicago or New York?
with the decrease in dine in sales, restaurateurs that are looking to weather the COVID storm are continually stretching their boundaries of creativity when it comes to maintaining their team and ensuring their health and safety.
Vince Dixon @ eater.com wrote, “The Case Against Tipping in America” stating that tipping encourages racism, sexism, harassment and exploitation. Servers in 43 states are paid minimum wage ($2.13 per hour at the time of his article) which forces them to rely on tips for a majority of their income. In New York City, Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group eliminated tipping in 2015.
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working to end the modern tipping system for years.
In a 2016 interview, Jayaraman found that most servers in New York City or D.C. are women often working for what amounts to $9 per hour at restaurants like IHOP or Applebees.
When you have a workforce that doesn’t work for you, and is firstly responsive to the consumer, that’s problematic. We hear from our partners all the time about how it leads to workers engaging in all kinds of non-malicious but less than ideal practices, like giving free drinks to people, and basically doing things that hurt the bottom line, because at the end of the day they don’t really work for the employer, they work for the customer.
Is COVID 19 the shake up in the restaurant industry that helps right this ship?
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