I can’t believe I’m siding with the South Park guys here
I can’t believe I’m siding with the South Park guys here
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.
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The servers have a genuine problem:
Restaurants have peak and off peak hours. Maybe between 5pm and 2am there’s two hours of dinner rush, a little break and an hour or so of late night pop. Maybe there’s five or six servers, a bartender and someone running seating or expo. Another poster brought up four tables an hour with $20 per table. Let’s say you got that relatively small section and that average tip works out. You come in at five, dinner picks up between six and eight, turn down the cut after dinner and there’s a late night pop at ten then you take a cut. That’s $240 for five hours of work.
Same situation but no tips and $30 hourly: you get $150 for that five hours and you draw the short straw and still take a post pop cut! What about when you end up taking the after dinner cut? That’s $90 bucks for working only the hard parts of the shift!
Let’s say you fight off the other servers and stay till two with the bartender: you get $270 but you have to do the closing work, you just worked nine hours and everything’s closed when you get out.
Restaurants have peak and off peak hours. Maybe between 5pm and 2am there’s two hours of dinner rush, a little break and an hour or so of late night pop.
Servers shouldn't make less if the restaurant is not as full. And if they really would be making more than $30 an hour on a tip model, the real problem is that the restaurant is pocketing the difference and not actually giving servers a fair cut of profits in hourly wages.
Let’s say you fight off the other servers
The "individualism" mindset of capitalism pits workers against each other, you shouldn't need to compete with coworkers for fair wages.
Their time used opposing hourly wages would be much better used getting the restaurant to increase their hourly rate. As long as servers are not making as much hourly as they would tipped, the restaurant is holding out on you, taking more than their fair share.
I agree that servers shouldn’t be making less with an empty house. The way they handle that now is by doing shift change before the rush and making cuts to keep the staff at the right size as the night goes on.
There are problems with that approach but it lets the servers figure out how to handle everything. The only requirement ought to be tip pooling and cutting in back of house in some small way.
Idk how you run a restaurant with hourly floor staff instead of tipped.
These just sounds like different degrees of very competitive remuneration. I'm not saying servers there don't deserve more, but it sounds like it's kinda in the same way that everyone deserves more. I will say this post pop cut business sounds like a contrivance to mask poor regulatory or work management practices, but the hourly rate isn't really the problem there
Restaurants make cuts because after the dinner rush there’s no work for servers. No need for five people on the floor when you only got three tables. Even if someone got $30 an hour for their side work that’s max $30 extra if they did everyone’s.
You could have a server who throws on a hoodie and apron and starts doing prep work after their rush, but uhh, no one wants to do that.
Is this in the US? Here as server you need an RSA certificate, equivalent to (the minimum) bartending qualification. So you'd have a 1030-3 shift, and someone rostered 3-8 that relieves the person behind the bar during the quiet afternoon period. If you wanted more money, you'd pick up splits.
I think the primary difference in the equivalent role between our countries is actually a contrivance of the tipping situation. Ive worked in hospitality in Aus, NZ and a short stint in Canada, and even with the existence of tipping culture in Canada, all roles I worked in were multifunction. I haven't worked in the US but there it seems like servers there ONLY serve, because 100% of the KPI's that impact on their remuneration are only related to serving. For that kind of arrangement here you'd be considered an independent subcontractor, not an employee. These sorts of strategies you described to snatch extra remuneration seems like the relationship of different collaborating capitalist entities with different objectives. It seems like a lot less hassle to work for someone when your objectives are somewhat aligned. At least your respective profit motives don't oppose eachother that way. If they want to profit off of the excess value of your labour, making the situation reliably equitable to you in order to keep you in that situation is generally in their interest
Yes, since the post is about a restaurant in the us I only commented about serving in the us.
I’m not sure where you’d put the cutoff for multifunction, servers in the us are expected to do a bunch of side work that could include putting away glassware, marrying and refilling condiments, making silverware and napkin setups, etc. servers in the us will famously only do their side work until they’re tipped out.
Part of the point I’m trying to make is that there’s an expectation of how things will be in a serving job and people set their expectations for the way they’ll be paid based on that. Serving in the us is already one of those jobs that have you running a checkbook out of a wad of cash anyway, so it’s not like someone looking at serving jobs is gonna do the slot machine eyes coming up dollar signs when they hear $30 an hour.
Like you’re saying, without significant changes to the way servers are scheduled, paid, work is broken up and, as a consequence, the way servers live and plan their lives, changes that allow for hourly pay will be face an uphill battle both with the workers and management.
I see your point, I disagree though about the perceived value of the competitive hourly wage when you remove the tipping context. It's a fairly normal occurence here for example to miss your hospitality worker family member at the holiday reunion because they're off working - not out of obligation, but because those shifts attract penalty rates by law so they're in high demand. The same is true to a lesser extent on weekends & after 7pm daily. It does mean that places close earlier at night and pay close attention when budgeting payroll though
Even with tipping some of the slower holiday shifts here are attractive to people. I used to work with a bartender who would always pick up the Christmas night shift. The volume was dogshit but with him and one person in the kitchen they’d clear tips like it was Friday.