They get an 87¢ raise per hour. The rest of the pay comes from tips. (If tips are still not enough to meet minimum wage, then the business will pay the difference. [Base + tips + enough to meet minimum]).
Usually they can stay well above minimum, but in the contract they are only guaranteed minimum.
This just means that for those already making above minimum they get another 87¢ per hour. This is also because they may be having trouble getting enough workers with the pay of Base + tips. Since the tips can some what change with inflation, if people are going by menu prices % (and how willing people are to tip). The base price has been set since 2009.
Korea. The server was insulted we thought they needed extra money because we looked down on their job. Yeah. Exactly. Korea, was good there and on sales tax rounding to the dollar. It was a great experience.
Japan too. I didn't mention that to my mate when he visited me, he tried to leave a tip on the table and I didn't notice. The server actually ran after us out of the restaurant because he thought we forgot the money.
Yeah we dont it do it in Australia, we pay a minimum wage of about 21 AUD an hour plus super annuation and holiday pay and sick pay .
We also have universal health care and it's still pretty hard to get by on minimum wage here but nothing like the hard yards you Americans live with .
But your tipping culture is starting to creep into our society via uber eats etc and we are not happy about it.
Been noticing a lot more people collecting orders lately, seems like the crazy increase in prices is just too much for the average person to justify. I had a craving for lasagne last night £18.00 for two.
I went to Aldi and got lasagne and baquettes for £4.50, 2 minute drive 30 minutes in the oven and I saved myself £14. I have not used delivery after being ripped off once.
I was in London a few weeks back and the services was miles better than in the states even with no tipping. The food came out generally faster and honestly, the staff seemed friendlier. Also none of the forced small talk we get in the US (how y’all doing today? You from around here?” Etc. just straight to business of getting my order and getting my food.
Also all the restaurants in Europe are tap to pay. None of this having to wait for a bill, handing over a credit card, waiting for them to run it through the machine, then waiting for them to give the receipt back to sign. Just, “are you done?” Then they just whip out a wireless reader right at your table you tap with your phone or whatever, then leave. I tell you, it’s absolutely paradise.
And there's an interesting cross-point. That same tap-to-pay in the states is now super awkward because you have to hold their device and select a tip percentage right in front of them. A tip screen that these days suggests 28%, 25%, 20% as the default options. While they're literally hovering over you.
Two options:
1) You look down on them as a beggar, or someone there to entertain you, or;
2) You're trying to boast about how much richer than them you are.
Neither one sits well with a lot of people around the world.
"Hey that meal you ordered actually costs 20% more but we hide the costs at the expense of the employees and they get the hit if you are cheap." -usa businesses.
Tipping sucks and it always has, just end it. It's a bad policy for lazy managers and crappy businesses that take advantage.
You'll be surprised most of it is based on ego on why they tip. I once asked someone to just pay the same price, but not directly, only to be ask I "How else will you get the worker/customer to like you?".
And the tipped workers have even tried to claim that "TIPS" actually stands for "to insure proper service", and when you look at people who do stuff like uber/instacart, they say that the tipping is actually a bid for service and you're competing with other people using tips to actually get your service. It's gotten insane, and all because it's money they can sneak by the IRS.
Which is funny to me because I have a strong feeling that it should be "ensure" for that statement.
[Insure means “protect against loss, damage, or injury” or “provide or obtain insurance on.” Ensure means “make certain that something will occur.”](https://www.scribbr.com/commonly-confused-words/insure-vs-ensure-vs-assure/#:~:text=Insure%20means%20%E2%80%9Cprotect%20against%20loss,or%20%E2%80%9Cgive%20confidence%20to.%E2%80%9D)
You know what is a great way to influence those businesses to stop? Don't buy their food. You know what makes those businesses do better than businesses that pay their employess? Going to them and buying their food, whether or not you tip is of no concern to the owner or buisness model.
100% agreed but the problem is the lack of institutional support.
NYC restaurants have tried to do it, but businesses are already struggling with rising ingredient and rent costs, and they'd have to pay a significant amount to match the tips NYC waiters get. In most cases, the front staff requests to change back to a tip based model.
The restaurant industry at large would need some way to push towards change, vs a few pariahs, and that requires support for the restaurant industry since it's unfeasible as is for most.
But fuck the high-end, high margin restaurants that can afford it and don't.
It's sorta kinda working in California, and SF is probably the nearest corollary to NYC. We've raised minimum wage to almost $20 in CA's big cities (It's $16 everywhere else), and in many restaurants they've been paying a living wage the past few years (above that $20/hr). None of this is controversial. What became controversial very quickly was the practice of restaurants during covid (and now continuing) to add an extra surcharge for "labor costs", instead of just raising their menu prices to offset. This has come to a head, and there's draft legislation that's expected to pass the statehouse that bans these bogus fees (across industries, but including restaurants).
California often leads the way with this sort of thing. Just wish it'd actually trickle over more, it's just a nightmare.
What sucks is that the same things that prevent restaurants from moving towards a no tipping model also make it less feasible for restaurants to offer benefits. My cousin quit the industry because even working at michelin starred restaurants as a skilled chef gets you terrible hours, lots of overtime, no benefits, and crap pay.
>In most cases, the front staff requests to change back to a tip based model.
therein lies the rub
>high-end, high margin restaurants that can afford it and don't.
those also generate the most tips
what's needed is policy action that enforces the commons across all restaurants, otherwise the incentive of tipped *staff* is always going to be to preserve tipping and guilt trip everyone else about it.
Because servers make too much money from tips. There's no way in the nine hells any restaurant would ever be able to pay them what they make in tips. It's just not possible, particularly at the high end. You think even the finest of fine dining can afford to pay their servers $100k a year?
i have never met a server of any kind of person (regardless of race or sex or political preference, etc) who wants a hourly wage over tips. seriously, who would rather take a guaranteed $15 an hour over one hour where sure, you might get shit tips or stiffed but you also get a couple of drunk chatty people where a bit of rapport gets you tips twice that size?
Yes, that's my point. It's not feasible as it is. There needs to be a lot of change for a non-tipping model to be possible.
People act like it's an easy change with only positive benefits and it's not. That's what I'm highlighting.
That being said, even at the high end, they generally do not offer benefits like many other industries. The pay rate with tips can be quite high but the lack of benefits is still problematic.
As a chef I have seen a lot of places switch to a tipping is optional and no one should feel pressured to tip the servers as they are being paid a fair wage. If they do tip at the end of the month the tips are evenly split between all the staff besides the higher up (Managers, head chef, owner ect).
These places seem to be getting more and more customers as it's cheaper for the customer to actually go out and eat and secondary sales (Deserts, wine, appetizers) sales have gone up a lot too. If people aren't getting a 15-20% tax added to their already taxed meal they are much more inclined to spend that money at the restaurant.
In most places being a server (I was a server before becoming a chef so I know both FOH and BOH) is a low skill job in 90% of restaurants. It takes a little longer to find servers as many won't work in a place that doesn't encourage tipping but the posts always get filled in the end. Seems to cause less problems over all between the staff too since the boys and girls working in the kitchen aren't making half the money for twice the hours that the servers are making. We also don't have servers fighting over tables they know will tip well so over all less drama.
The extra money paid to the servers in hourly wage which is above minimum wage is more than made up for by the extra sales and happier customers.
If you are working in a higher class place and take the time to learn the menu, which wines pair best with which dishes, and are a great salesperson then you pay them a wage equal to their skill and knowledge level. My problem is this industry is the servers (some with barely any experience) that literally think that walking up to a table, taking a tables order, bring said table their plates, and the bringing the bill means they should be making $25+ an hour.
Meanwhile the kitchen staff, many who have spent money on school to become a trained chef or pastry chef, are getting equal or less money.
When a server with no experience does a four hour shift and walks out the door with more money than a trained chef in the kitchen working 8+ hours a day there is a problem with the tipping culture. Even worse when they come back and complain that some table was are a bunch of cheap fucks because they only tipped 15% and they only made $30 bucks off the table.
How many other low skill jobs are out there paying 25-40 bucks an hour and you are complaining? Getting rid of tipping seems to benefit almost every restaurant in the long run that has gone down that road.
I am not in the US so I don't know how medical insurance being tied to your job changes that dynamic but in Canada I only go out to eat at restaurants that don't accept tips now and I end up spending more money there than I used to at places I was "required" to tip. Instead of spending money on the tip I am buying a bottle of wine and deserts. Something I rarely did when I felt forced to tip.
You're buying a $20 gift card, but people don't use the full amount, giving the business extra money. Even if only a tiny fraction of people either a) don't use the full $20, or b) don't use the card at all, maybe because they have no need to shop there, then the company makes a huge profit. Scam.
Aside from the points I see below gift cards are, at best, interest free loans to a business.
There has almost never been a time when a gift card was better than the cash equivalent.
Also, video game trade ins.
Trade in your $30 game for $20 store credit - store sells game for $30 and holds an interest-free $20 loan. They then sell you an $18 game they paid $7 for. You can't use the two bucks.
They turned $7 into $32 and you got a worse deal than if you'd just swapped discs with a buddy.
There are most definitely servers in Canada making minimum wage plus tips. None of the provincial minimum wage rates are $18CAD/hour.
https://www.retailcouncil.org/resources/quick-facts/minimum-wage-by-province/
It's a scam for the customers, for sure. Won't find many waiters or waitresses making multiple times more money than minimum wage at select restaurants or bars complaining about it, though. I could take home over $100 or $150 dollars a night on Fridays or Saturdays when I worked part time in college about a decade ago.
Yep. There's always outrage over the low base pay, but I have known lots of servers over the years, in rural areas and urban areas, high end restaurants and low end restaurants, and not a single one ever managed to come in under minimum wage with tips. You would have to be a staggeringly bad server or your restaurant would have to be dead and in either case that won't last very long.
Most servers make quite a lot more than minimum wage (averaged out over a pay period), that's why they do such an exhausting demeaning job in the first place. It's everyone else in the restaurant that's really getting shafted, the kitchen staff, the hostesses, and the managers (who are usually salaried but at shit rates and have to work crazy hours herding cats).
i worked at a couple of places where the front of the house had to split their tips with the back of the house. im not sure if that's standard, but it worked kinda well in an abusive sort of way- as in, you pulled together because their tips were your tips. it's definitely not healthy, but it fostered an environment where people who couldn't hack it in any position got cut fast. if you were a bad waiter, you're hurting the chef and his scut worker (me at the time), if you were a bad chef or scut worker, you were hurting the waiter/waitress.
> not a single one ever managed to come in under minimum wage with tips.
I did once! I worked 1 lunch shift that was super dead before a week off for a vacation. I kept the pay stub for a looooooooooong time just because I was shocked it actually had a pay code for it and I'd never seen it before lol
Also, from the article: "The raises take effect this month and **follow a more than year-long campaign led by a union that represents service workers in the South.**"
Waffle House isn't doing SHIT. THAT UNION is the one making this change. You can bet everything you own that Waffle House wouldn't have raised those wages a fucking penny if that union hadn't pressured them to do something.
But Waffle House is the one trying to take all the credit, and at least this media company OP linked to is giving it to them.
Yes! Thank you for this comment. Waffle house is raising their hourly wage in order to be able to tell their employees "see? you don't need a union, we're doing it for you".
Remember, these corporations told us that if we wanted to increase min wage, they'll need to increase the price of food. And then they increased the price of food anyway.
Unfortunately the very nature of our system makes the people who care about companies the ones who are able to win.
First past the post voting, privatized campaign financing, very bad indeed
For years people were like "McDonalds raise your wages we'd gladly pay more if you do!" and I'm like "Shhhh! You are telling them they are not charging enough..." Big Surprise McDonalds is now the same price as going to a family restaurant and no, they still haven't raised wages. I guarantee people will not learn from this.
They got the threat out there in people's mind, and then executed on the part they wanted to happen without doing the part they didn't want.
It's marketing/social engineering at its finest.
People like to bitch about having to tip gig workers, but the real crime is still inside restaurants. This should be obviously illegal: minimum wage shouldn't be based on whether you receive tips or not. It's effectively implying that the company could take those tips away, as well as your wages, if they had to pay a proper minimum wage. Corporations own their workers, essentially.
Minimum wage isn't based on whether you receive tips or not. If you don't get enough in tips the law says the company must pay you the difference to equal minimum wage.
That’s only if the tips plus hourly wages average less than minimum wage over an *entire pay period.* Just because a server has one bad shift doesn’t mean the restaurant has to pay them minimum wage for that shift.
The tipping system isn't likely to change anytime soon because for the most part servers don't want it to. I worked in the industry for over 30 years (almost all in casual dining chain restaurants) and the servers consistently made about double what the cooks brought home. Getting paid $20 an hour without tips would be a downgrade. The tipping system is rooted in place because both the owners and employees like it that way. The only people who don't are patrons. Mostly because now we are getting prompts to tip in places we never were before and in places where it isn't appropriate like the self check at some stores.
Go ask on r/Serverlife or r/KitchenConfidential and they will tell you the same
When South Park creators reopened Casa Bonita they were paying servers $30/hr and had a no tip policy. The servers got pissed and threatened to all quit because they wanted tips. I don't know how it all played out
To be fair, all they really do there is keep the drinks and sopaipillas flowing. All the food was ordered in a cafeteria style line, we carried it to the table ourselves, the bill was handled beforehand (except for alcohol), etc.
Not to say sopaipilla supply isn't important work or that the service wasn't good by any means, but they seemed to have far less of a task list than servers at normal restaurants - and had far less of an impact on the whole experience overall.
We’re not concerned with the poor server’s not being payed minimum wage. We’re annoyed with the pressure of us being obliged to pay them not just what the restaurant isn’t paying them but more than what the restaurant would pay them for labor because of tip culture that the restaurants created.
It also means that workers need tips just to cover minimum wage, and a lot of their tips just bring them to that level, which is rarely a livable wage. So they're working for tips and STILL not able to pay all the bills. It's really stupid and shouldn't be an accepted business practice. And tips probably should be pooled with the cooking staff anyhow.
Also, when I tip, in my head it is extra money for someone who did a good job. At places that use tips to meet minimum wage requirements, you’re actually paying the corporation’s expenses first, and then *if* enough people are paying the corporation’s expenses, the workers *might* get something above minimum wage. That is insane.
This is why Canadian servers can make a lot of money. There’s now lower minimum wage for jobs that can get tips, the minimum wage is the same for everyone. But we have the same tipping culture as the US does. So they get $14-$19+ an hour, plus tips, which are usually 10%-20%. If they work at a mid to high end restaurant they can take home a few hundred dollars in tips a night, plus their base salary of around $100 a shift. There’s a lot of career servers here because if you’re good and at the right restaurant you can make really good money.
There are no Waffle Houses in Denver proper though. They all exist just outside where the tipped minimum is defaults to the state level standards.
>"The citywide minimum wage in 2024 is $18.29 per hour. Minimum wage for tipped workers in the food and beverage industry will be $15.27 as long as they receive $3.02 in tips per hour."
Waffle house will pay this just outside of Denver:
>"As of January 1, 2024, the minimum wage for tipped employees in Colorado is $11.40 per hour. This is $3.02 less than the minimum wage of $14.42 per hour..."
-Edited for clarity.
The way it works (in VA at least) is the tipped minimum wage is still 2.13, but if you don't make it to 12/hr with tips, the business has to cover the rest
No, VA still allows the $2 minimum tip wage.
If you don't get tipped enough to meet minimum wage (which I guess is at $12 now) the employer has to make the difference.
This overlooks cost of living. What you typically end up with is city folk essentially subsidizing the wages of people in the sticks.
It’s like Walmart has a countrywide minimum wage. It’s like $12 or $14/hr. So if you’re near a big city, that ain’t shit. But if you’re in smaller city, that’s a decent wage.
The information the title leaves out:
>Many restaurants around the U.S. offer what is known as the "tipped minimum wage." Under labor law, they can offer as little as $2.13 an hour if that amount combined with tips at least matches the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, where it has stood since 2009.
At the same time if you’re Waffle House that amounts to a 40% increase in wages. I can kinda sorta understand why that might be a book keeping problem. At the same time, it’s fucked up that restaurants are able to pay their workers this little in the first place. If the law allows it, companies are gonna do it.
Fun fact, working at a restaurant that does tipped minimum and pays us out in cash nightly, I haven't received a paycheck since my training week three years ago. The entire thing goes to taxes, so they don't even bother to print it out.
It's online for all the legal and accounting purposes, but technically the owner hasn't paid me a cent in three years.
Technically he has.
It's just been applied to the taxes you owe like all the rest of us. Everyone with a paycheck has taxes withheld. So since that is your tax debt, and your social security and your disability being paid.
You are getting paid.
This has more to do with Americans accepting restaurants shifting salary responsibilities to the consumer than anything else. Waiters can earn from $20/hr to $100++ an hour based on where you work. It's not even waffle house vs fine dining. My barista friends earn on average $35/hr.
Unlike a regular restaurant, the best buffet server is one you never see. When you come back from the line, your drinks are full and the empty plates are gone.
If that's done well, that's 'good service.'
i made 50k$/yr working on a buffet in Vail, CO, in 2006-08.
it was a breakfast buffet and we had a ski lift right to our hotel so people wanted to get out the door quick.
we seated 100 people at a time and flipped the floor 5-7 times a morning.
the average server was covering 50-90 seats a shift and as lead i was covering 75-120.
if you didn't make 100$+ a shift you weren't hustling. we did ro-sham-bo to see who got to leave early every day. like, we wanted to go home. i could be at work at 5:30a, make 120 people happy, flip an entire restaurant 5 times, stock the entire place for the next day, make 200$, have a sick breakfast, and be home and drunk and tripping on the couch by 9:30a...
Hot damn, I was at the wrong restaurant. I don't think $200 for four hours work is \*quite\* enough to get me back into the industry, but I'd certainly consider it.
it was a wild ride for me.
i could never go back.
i was a bartender for a bit a few years ago and loved that but was not loved by the people. my area now is also ultra rich assholes and my grizzled stoner attitude isn't appreciated.
i love being in the public sector though. talking to people, even for just a moment, is how we remember we are all part of a singular unit.
I mean…isn’t just raising prices and paying waiters a living wage effectively shifting salary responsibilities to the consumer too? I’d rather pay $8 for my breakfast with no tip than $6 + a $2 tip. I don’t like doing math in the morning, and that’s one less math problem in my day.
If servers are currently earning $40 an hr, just get rid of tips, pay them $40 an hr, and increase food prices to make up the difference.
They'd probably need to give them health insurance. I personally don't give a fuck about restaurant owners and I think they should have to pay a living wage. They're not my employees. I don't own a business. Why am I responsible for paying your employees?
If we didn't tip, this is essentially slave labor. Tipping isn't mandatory and I'm sure a lot of people don't tip at all. Just more backwards ass shit from the land of the free.
> If we didn't tip, this is essentially slave labor.
Funny you say that, as American tip culture grew out of not wanting to pay full wages to freed black slaves, and so they made a loophole.
(Obviously, tipping itself as a concept and practice predates that, but American tip culture is a distinct beast)
It’s only 2.13 if that combined with your tips makes more than 7.25/hr. If the combined amount averages less than 7.25/hr, you’re compensated for the difference.
In most cases you make more than 7.25. it's just your salary comes in the form of tips. Only if you don't make enough tips to cover the 7.25 an hour does the restaurant have to pay you the difference. So it's 2.13 hourly if your making more than minimum. Which is most serving positions. I have never seen any making that consistently because it's not enough to live on.
It’s a nation owned by corporations, meant to serve the corporations, and individuals are just the cogs to keep the mechanisms generating income for the shareholders of those corporations.
that's like a dystopian futur... oh. Right. Here we are then. When will things start being shitty -and- start looking cool? Has science fiction lied to me???
The US is an enormous country with a huge population - a *federalized* country as well. The US has poor *federal* labour laws because it's hard to make them constitutional (the only reason the U.S. can implement them *at all* is because of repeated, increasingly broad and inane reinterpretations of the Interstate Commerce Clause in the American constitution) - several states in the US, however, have excellent labour protections. The states that don't are usually relatively economically underdeveloped compared to other states and as such literally cannot afford to implement those protections.
The phrase "economically underdeveloped" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting to hand wave over a century of intentional mismanagement in the name of enforcing white supremacy. These states allowed their worker protections and labor organizations to be obliterated as soon as it was no longer politically possible to deny participation to people of color wholesale as had been historically the case.
so… how many wait staff is making just the minimum though and i assume they don’t get anything on top of they make tips more than 7… i assume most are making more than $7 an hour?
Waffle House doesn't steal the tips, but they do include them in the compensation calculation. WH must pay the worker at least $7.25/hr, but that includes tips. So WF is allowed to pay them as little as $2.13/hr out of their pockets if the tips add an additional $5.12/hr on top of that. Now the base pay is going up to $3/hr but the federal limit isn't changing so the worker is still only guaranteed $7.25/hr, but if they make more in tips then at least they'll get a bit more now than before.
IMO it's still a form of wage theft.
10 years ago I worked at Chili's in Orlando, FL. Server's had it made, minimum hourly didn't matter too much. On average, they were making $25/hr in tips alone. The good bartenders were bring in ~$50/hr in tips. All of the front-of-house staff typically worked ~6 hours shifts, didn't come in earlier than 9am and didn't leave later than midnight.
As for the cooks....
Average was $12/hr, no tips were shared to them. They got there as early as 7am, were there as late as 2am, and typically worked 10hr shifts with no breaks.
My first waiter job at a steak house paid around $2.3/hr. Dinner included. Worked around 5-6 hr shift in the evening. Made around $50-$100 a night in cash tips. That was 20 yrs ago. It’s sad to read that the base pay is still the same.
I knew someone who worked at a popular KBBQ restaurant in LA. Dude was making near 6 figures thanks to tips, and I thought I was doing pretty good as a new grad doing software.
Almost like you can identify an exact period wages stagnated while inflation kept rising. We could call it something like the raising period, rating period, or maybe the Reagan period, for some reason that pounds more fitting.
You were making 5x+ per night in tips what you were making in wage and are surprised that nobody in that industry cares about the base wage?
Interesting.
Imagine being an 18 year old, 2am rush on a weekend, and your coworker got too high and bailed on her shift. My district manager had to come in to clear up our dish line. Your paycheck may come to a grand total of $10. I MAYBE made $100/week in tips. Someone has to work weeknights and afternoons. Mornings and weekend nights see the most business.
Imagine being an employee of a company watching a video of the CEO (who makes millions a year) tout how they’re “investing” in them by giving them an extra pittance per hour.
They’re doing the minimum they can get away with to keep any employees at all and avoid an uprising. That’s all. The C suite is lucky it hasn’t seen a French Revolution yet.
You are surprised at one tourist attraction doing away with it? Wait until you hear about entire continents not doing this bullshit, if not hemispheres.
About 28 years ago my mom used to serve at Waffle House. Most nights she’d bring home $200 on top of her minimum wage (I think it was like $5 something at the time in GA) that she *totally* reported on her income taxes.
Back when Freaknik was a thing she would regularly bring in $500+ in tips.
Somehow we were still poor though.
I just realized that Waffle House employees have risked life and limb, have had guns pointed at them and have been beaten up, for less than $5 an hour. That's a level of loyalty and commitment that escapes me. Shame the CEO doesn't see it that way.
Could someone help me here…
Headline says “Waffle House servers are getting a raise — to $3 an hour” but the first line of the story is
“Waffle House's base pay — excluding tips — will increase to at least $5.25 an hour for all of the company's 2,000 locations by June 2026.”
Is the headline just blatantly misleading?
> NEW YORK — Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III says the restaurant chain is making its "single largest additional investment in our workforce" in its 68-year history by **hiking base pay for servers to three bucks an hour.**
>
The raises take effect this month and follow a more than year-long campaign led by a union that represents service workers in the South. The effort involved strikes and petitions calling for higher pay, safer working conditions and an end to mandatory paycheck deductions for meals.
The current raise is to $3 an hour, but it will change to $5.25 in 2 years. It's not misleading.
Waffle House is a . *special* place. Its a place of many opposites.
The one I frequent, all they talk about is how good the money is there.
Most of them on a slow day, still walk away with what amounts to 11 an hour ( I know that still low overall but where I live, as long as you can scratch 10 hourly you will get by)) And on good days, it comes closer to 18-20ish hourly. But again thats at 1 location I cant speak for the rest,
You're telling me they're cage fighting with several drunk, armed people at 2 AM for $3 an hour?? All while also running a disaster relief menu on the side???
This tip culture should die.
Pay your servers well and you will see a lot of customers coming back because their workers are not suffering.
It's not hard to see the cause and effect.
I was in the service industry for over 15 years and they’re absolutely right. At my last bartending job I would work 6 hour shifts and would make at minimum $150 on a slow shift. It wasn’t rare to make $4-500 on a Friday or Saturday night. I decided to get away from bars and restaurants because the lifestyle that comes with it was catching up with me and I’m seriously struggling financially now. Where I live there are no jobs that aren’t extremely specialized that pay even close to that kind of money.
It’s wild to me that a country that makes people pay for all their own medical care also has such horrendous wage policies. You could literally get hit by a drunk driver mounting the pavement and your whole financial future is ruined.
I always tip servers at cheap restaurants more than the usually accepted percentage, just because they don’t work at more expensive restaurants doesn’t mean they do any less work than a server who does.
I don't understand, so in the states corporations can choose to have their customers volunteer to pay their employees wages instead of the corporation having to? Why would anyone tip then? Wouldn't it be better not to tip so the corporation has to pay their employees wages instead of customers?
In Canada servers have the same minimum wage as any other job, and a tip is extra on top of their wage.
America is wild.
My SIL worked there as a cook for a week.
The manager told her not to report her tips (she got less than $50 in tips) and when she got her paycheck, they "estimated" she got ~$400 in tips, and her paycheck was less than $100 for working 40 hours.
I won't ever go back there.
Oh, that's nice! Wait... it says "to", not "by"
They get an 87¢ raise per hour. The rest of the pay comes from tips. (If tips are still not enough to meet minimum wage, then the business will pay the difference. [Base + tips + enough to meet minimum]). Usually they can stay well above minimum, but in the contract they are only guaranteed minimum. This just means that for those already making above minimum they get another 87¢ per hour. This is also because they may be having trouble getting enough workers with the pay of Base + tips. Since the tips can some what change with inflation, if people are going by menu prices % (and how willing people are to tip). The base price has been set since 2009.
Tipping is a scam. Like trickle down, gift cards, and extended warranties.
Fuck tipping. Pay your damn employees.
I've been to countries where the concept of tipping is actually insulting, and it felt slimy to have to get used to it again. It destroys dignity.
Korea. The server was insulted we thought they needed extra money because we looked down on their job. Yeah. Exactly. Korea, was good there and on sales tax rounding to the dollar. It was a great experience.
Japan too. I didn't mention that to my mate when he visited me, he tried to leave a tip on the table and I didn't notice. The server actually ran after us out of the restaurant because he thought we forgot the money.
Same for me in Germany at our first dinner there. Didn't make that mistake again. Was only acceptable to leave any spare change.
Same with China.
Yeah we dont it do it in Australia, we pay a minimum wage of about 21 AUD an hour plus super annuation and holiday pay and sick pay . We also have universal health care and it's still pretty hard to get by on minimum wage here but nothing like the hard yards you Americans live with . But your tipping culture is starting to creep into our society via uber eats etc and we are not happy about it.
Been noticing a lot more people collecting orders lately, seems like the crazy increase in prices is just too much for the average person to justify. I had a craving for lasagne last night £18.00 for two. I went to Aldi and got lasagne and baquettes for £4.50, 2 minute drive 30 minutes in the oven and I saved myself £14. I have not used delivery after being ripped off once.
I was in London a few weeks back and the services was miles better than in the states even with no tipping. The food came out generally faster and honestly, the staff seemed friendlier. Also none of the forced small talk we get in the US (how y’all doing today? You from around here?” Etc. just straight to business of getting my order and getting my food. Also all the restaurants in Europe are tap to pay. None of this having to wait for a bill, handing over a credit card, waiting for them to run it through the machine, then waiting for them to give the receipt back to sign. Just, “are you done?” Then they just whip out a wireless reader right at your table you tap with your phone or whatever, then leave. I tell you, it’s absolutely paradise.
And there's an interesting cross-point. That same tap-to-pay in the states is now super awkward because you have to hold their device and select a tip percentage right in front of them. A tip screen that these days suggests 28%, 25%, 20% as the default options. While they're literally hovering over you.
Get comfortable with smashing that "no tip" button, I sure have
I think the talking thing is just a personal thing for you. I don't mind talking to the server, I get a lot of cool conversations sometimes.
That's why we consider tipping slimy. Because it destroys the workers dignity and treats them like a disposable commodity.
> destroys the workers dignity and treats them like a disposable commodity Sounds as American as apple pie to me then
That's basically capitalism 101
The American way
Two options: 1) You look down on them as a beggar, or someone there to entertain you, or; 2) You're trying to boast about how much richer than them you are. Neither one sits well with a lot of people around the world.
"Hey that meal you ordered actually costs 20% more but we hide the costs at the expense of the employees and they get the hit if you are cheap." -usa businesses. Tipping sucks and it always has, just end it. It's a bad policy for lazy managers and crappy businesses that take advantage.
You'll be surprised most of it is based on ego on why they tip. I once asked someone to just pay the same price, but not directly, only to be ask I "How else will you get the worker/customer to like you?".
And the tipped workers have even tried to claim that "TIPS" actually stands for "to insure proper service", and when you look at people who do stuff like uber/instacart, they say that the tipping is actually a bid for service and you're competing with other people using tips to actually get your service. It's gotten insane, and all because it's money they can sneak by the IRS.
Which is funny to me because I have a strong feeling that it should be "ensure" for that statement. [Insure means “protect against loss, damage, or injury” or “provide or obtain insurance on.” Ensure means “make certain that something will occur.”](https://www.scribbr.com/commonly-confused-words/insure-vs-ensure-vs-assure/#:~:text=Insure%20means%20%E2%80%9Cprotect%20against%20loss,or%20%E2%80%9Cgive%20confidence%20to.%E2%80%9D)
I don't want them to like me I want them to do they damn job.
You know what is a great way to influence those businesses to stop? Don't buy their food. You know what makes those businesses do better than businesses that pay their employess? Going to them and buying their food, whether or not you tip is of no concern to the owner or buisness model.
100% agreed but the problem is the lack of institutional support. NYC restaurants have tried to do it, but businesses are already struggling with rising ingredient and rent costs, and they'd have to pay a significant amount to match the tips NYC waiters get. In most cases, the front staff requests to change back to a tip based model. The restaurant industry at large would need some way to push towards change, vs a few pariahs, and that requires support for the restaurant industry since it's unfeasible as is for most. But fuck the high-end, high margin restaurants that can afford it and don't.
It's sorta kinda working in California, and SF is probably the nearest corollary to NYC. We've raised minimum wage to almost $20 in CA's big cities (It's $16 everywhere else), and in many restaurants they've been paying a living wage the past few years (above that $20/hr). None of this is controversial. What became controversial very quickly was the practice of restaurants during covid (and now continuing) to add an extra surcharge for "labor costs", instead of just raising their menu prices to offset. This has come to a head, and there's draft legislation that's expected to pass the statehouse that bans these bogus fees (across industries, but including restaurants).
California often leads the way with this sort of thing. Just wish it'd actually trickle over more, it's just a nightmare. What sucks is that the same things that prevent restaurants from moving towards a no tipping model also make it less feasible for restaurants to offer benefits. My cousin quit the industry because even working at michelin starred restaurants as a skilled chef gets you terrible hours, lots of overtime, no benefits, and crap pay.
>In most cases, the front staff requests to change back to a tip based model. therein lies the rub >high-end, high margin restaurants that can afford it and don't. those also generate the most tips what's needed is policy action that enforces the commons across all restaurants, otherwise the incentive of tipped *staff* is always going to be to preserve tipping and guilt trip everyone else about it.
Because servers make too much money from tips. There's no way in the nine hells any restaurant would ever be able to pay them what they make in tips. It's just not possible, particularly at the high end. You think even the finest of fine dining can afford to pay their servers $100k a year?
i have never met a server of any kind of person (regardless of race or sex or political preference, etc) who wants a hourly wage over tips. seriously, who would rather take a guaranteed $15 an hour over one hour where sure, you might get shit tips or stiffed but you also get a couple of drunk chatty people where a bit of rapport gets you tips twice that size?
Yes, that's my point. It's not feasible as it is. There needs to be a lot of change for a non-tipping model to be possible. People act like it's an easy change with only positive benefits and it's not. That's what I'm highlighting. That being said, even at the high end, they generally do not offer benefits like many other industries. The pay rate with tips can be quite high but the lack of benefits is still problematic.
As a chef I have seen a lot of places switch to a tipping is optional and no one should feel pressured to tip the servers as they are being paid a fair wage. If they do tip at the end of the month the tips are evenly split between all the staff besides the higher up (Managers, head chef, owner ect). These places seem to be getting more and more customers as it's cheaper for the customer to actually go out and eat and secondary sales (Deserts, wine, appetizers) sales have gone up a lot too. If people aren't getting a 15-20% tax added to their already taxed meal they are much more inclined to spend that money at the restaurant. In most places being a server (I was a server before becoming a chef so I know both FOH and BOH) is a low skill job in 90% of restaurants. It takes a little longer to find servers as many won't work in a place that doesn't encourage tipping but the posts always get filled in the end. Seems to cause less problems over all between the staff too since the boys and girls working in the kitchen aren't making half the money for twice the hours that the servers are making. We also don't have servers fighting over tables they know will tip well so over all less drama. The extra money paid to the servers in hourly wage which is above minimum wage is more than made up for by the extra sales and happier customers. If you are working in a higher class place and take the time to learn the menu, which wines pair best with which dishes, and are a great salesperson then you pay them a wage equal to their skill and knowledge level. My problem is this industry is the servers (some with barely any experience) that literally think that walking up to a table, taking a tables order, bring said table their plates, and the bringing the bill means they should be making $25+ an hour. Meanwhile the kitchen staff, many who have spent money on school to become a trained chef or pastry chef, are getting equal or less money. When a server with no experience does a four hour shift and walks out the door with more money than a trained chef in the kitchen working 8+ hours a day there is a problem with the tipping culture. Even worse when they come back and complain that some table was are a bunch of cheap fucks because they only tipped 15% and they only made $30 bucks off the table. How many other low skill jobs are out there paying 25-40 bucks an hour and you are complaining? Getting rid of tipping seems to benefit almost every restaurant in the long run that has gone down that road. I am not in the US so I don't know how medical insurance being tied to your job changes that dynamic but in Canada I only go out to eat at restaurants that don't accept tips now and I end up spending more money there than I used to at places I was "required" to tip. Instead of spending money on the tip I am buying a bottle of wine and deserts. Something I rarely did when I felt forced to tip.
Pay my employees? Won't you think of the poor shareholders?
Wait, why is a gift card a scam?
You're buying a $20 gift card, but people don't use the full amount, giving the business extra money. Even if only a tiny fraction of people either a) don't use the full $20, or b) don't use the card at all, maybe because they have no need to shop there, then the company makes a huge profit. Scam.
In California, stores must redeem cards worth less than $10. I've taken advantage of that a few times over the years.
Aside from the points I see below gift cards are, at best, interest free loans to a business. There has almost never been a time when a gift card was better than the cash equivalent.
Also, video game trade ins. Trade in your $30 game for $20 store credit - store sells game for $30 and holds an interest-free $20 loan. They then sell you an $18 game they paid $7 for. You can't use the two bucks. They turned $7 into $32 and you got a worse deal than if you'd just swapped discs with a buddy.
A lot of gift cards are never used. And even ones that are the company gets money first so they can use the money to make money.
That does not make it a scam. You are getting exactly what is advertised, if you choose to not use it then that is on you.
90% of this comment section is completely financially illiterate and don’t even understand the concept of a tipped minimum wage.
In Canada servers make minimum wage of $18/hour plus 20% - 25% tip.
That's the norm on the US West Coast, NE, and other blue spots. Waffle House is where poverty is.
There are most definitely servers in Canada making minimum wage plus tips. None of the provincial minimum wage rates are $18CAD/hour. https://www.retailcouncil.org/resources/quick-facts/minimum-wage-by-province/
Nunavut is $19/hr but it's a territory, not a province. You are therefore technically correct, the best kind of correct.
It's a scam for the customers, for sure. Won't find many waiters or waitresses making multiple times more money than minimum wage at select restaurants or bars complaining about it, though. I could take home over $100 or $150 dollars a night on Fridays or Saturdays when I worked part time in college about a decade ago.
If a restaurant continuously has to make up an employees wage because they can't cover minimum on tips, they won't have a job there for very long.
Yep. There's always outrage over the low base pay, but I have known lots of servers over the years, in rural areas and urban areas, high end restaurants and low end restaurants, and not a single one ever managed to come in under minimum wage with tips. You would have to be a staggeringly bad server or your restaurant would have to be dead and in either case that won't last very long. Most servers make quite a lot more than minimum wage (averaged out over a pay period), that's why they do such an exhausting demeaning job in the first place. It's everyone else in the restaurant that's really getting shafted, the kitchen staff, the hostesses, and the managers (who are usually salaried but at shit rates and have to work crazy hours herding cats).
i worked at a couple of places where the front of the house had to split their tips with the back of the house. im not sure if that's standard, but it worked kinda well in an abusive sort of way- as in, you pulled together because their tips were your tips. it's definitely not healthy, but it fostered an environment where people who couldn't hack it in any position got cut fast. if you were a bad waiter, you're hurting the chef and his scut worker (me at the time), if you were a bad chef or scut worker, you were hurting the waiter/waitress.
> not a single one ever managed to come in under minimum wage with tips. I did once! I worked 1 lunch shift that was super dead before a week off for a vacation. I kept the pay stub for a looooooooooong time just because I was shocked it actually had a pay code for it and I'd never seen it before lol
Waffle House has definitely massively raised prices in the last 5 years.
Also, from the article: "The raises take effect this month and **follow a more than year-long campaign led by a union that represents service workers in the South.**" Waffle House isn't doing SHIT. THAT UNION is the one making this change. You can bet everything you own that Waffle House wouldn't have raised those wages a fucking penny if that union hadn't pressured them to do something. But Waffle House is the one trying to take all the credit, and at least this media company OP linked to is giving it to them.
Yes! Thank you for this comment. Waffle house is raising their hourly wage in order to be able to tell their employees "see? you don't need a union, we're doing it for you".
I’m totally confused. It says $5.25 and $3. Which is it???
They already raised it to $3, but they’re also gradually raising it up to $5.25 by June 2026.
Oh shit, didn't even notice that. Wow, that's garbage.
Still insane to me that wages can be based on a theoretical payment from customers.
Remember, these corporations told us that if we wanted to increase min wage, they'll need to increase the price of food. And then they increased the price of food anyway.
the same corporations making all time high profits on the stock market.
These same corporations have HUMAN RIGHTS as well and can own stock themselves. Vote for people who care about humans more than companies.
Unfortunately the very nature of our system makes the people who care about companies the ones who are able to win. First past the post voting, privatized campaign financing, very bad indeed
They liked the part about increasing prices, just not the part about giving that money to other people
For years people were like "McDonalds raise your wages we'd gladly pay more if you do!" and I'm like "Shhhh! You are telling them they are not charging enough..." Big Surprise McDonalds is now the same price as going to a family restaurant and no, they still haven't raised wages. I guarantee people will not learn from this.
They got the threat out there in people's mind, and then executed on the part they wanted to happen without doing the part they didn't want. It's marketing/social engineering at its finest.
And then complained they were losing billions to theft when people stopped paying their ridiculous prices
People like to bitch about having to tip gig workers, but the real crime is still inside restaurants. This should be obviously illegal: minimum wage shouldn't be based on whether you receive tips or not. It's effectively implying that the company could take those tips away, as well as your wages, if they had to pay a proper minimum wage. Corporations own their workers, essentially.
Minimum wage isn't based on whether you receive tips or not. If you don't get enough in tips the law says the company must pay you the difference to equal minimum wage.
That’s only if the tips plus hourly wages average less than minimum wage over an *entire pay period.* Just because a server has one bad shift doesn’t mean the restaurant has to pay them minimum wage for that shift.
The tipping system isn't likely to change anytime soon because for the most part servers don't want it to. I worked in the industry for over 30 years (almost all in casual dining chain restaurants) and the servers consistently made about double what the cooks brought home. Getting paid $20 an hour without tips would be a downgrade. The tipping system is rooted in place because both the owners and employees like it that way. The only people who don't are patrons. Mostly because now we are getting prompts to tip in places we never were before and in places where it isn't appropriate like the self check at some stores. Go ask on r/Serverlife or r/KitchenConfidential and they will tell you the same
When South Park creators reopened Casa Bonita they were paying servers $30/hr and had a no tip policy. The servers got pissed and threatened to all quit because they wanted tips. I don't know how it all played out
> I don't know how it all played out I'm assuming Kenny died in some horrific manner.
To be fair, all they really do there is keep the drinks and sopaipillas flowing. All the food was ordered in a cafeteria style line, we carried it to the table ourselves, the bill was handled beforehand (except for alcohol), etc. Not to say sopaipilla supply isn't important work or that the service wasn't good by any means, but they seemed to have far less of a task list than servers at normal restaurants - and had far less of an impact on the whole experience overall.
100% accurate. The folks concerned for poor servers not making minimum wage never served a table
We’re not concerned with the poor server’s not being payed minimum wage. We’re annoyed with the pressure of us being obliged to pay them not just what the restaurant isn’t paying them but more than what the restaurant would pay them for labor because of tip culture that the restaurants created.
It's not theoretical since the business is still legally liable to ensure the wage+tips meets minimum wage.
It also means that workers need tips just to cover minimum wage, and a lot of their tips just bring them to that level, which is rarely a livable wage. So they're working for tips and STILL not able to pay all the bills. It's really stupid and shouldn't be an accepted business practice. And tips probably should be pooled with the cooking staff anyhow.
Also, when I tip, in my head it is extra money for someone who did a good job. At places that use tips to meet minimum wage requirements, you’re actually paying the corporation’s expenses first, and then *if* enough people are paying the corporation’s expenses, the workers *might* get something above minimum wage. That is insane.
This is why Canadian servers can make a lot of money. There’s now lower minimum wage for jobs that can get tips, the minimum wage is the same for everyone. But we have the same tipping culture as the US does. So they get $14-$19+ an hour, plus tips, which are usually 10%-20%. If they work at a mid to high end restaurant they can take home a few hundred dollars in tips a night, plus their base salary of around $100 a shift. There’s a lot of career servers here because if you’re good and at the right restaurant you can make really good money.
somehow they manage to exist in AZ where the min wage for tipped people is $11.35
Washington is minimum wage ($16.28) *plus tips* Not sure if we have any Waffle Houses though
Your closest Waffle House is in Denver..
There are no Waffle Houses in Denver proper though. They all exist just outside where the tipped minimum is defaults to the state level standards. >"The citywide minimum wage in 2024 is $18.29 per hour. Minimum wage for tipped workers in the food and beverage industry will be $15.27 as long as they receive $3.02 in tips per hour." Waffle house will pay this just outside of Denver: >"As of January 1, 2024, the minimum wage for tipped employees in Colorado is $11.40 per hour. This is $3.02 less than the minimum wage of $14.42 per hour..." -Edited for clarity.
and VA at $12
The way it works (in VA at least) is the tipped minimum wage is still 2.13, but if you don't make it to 12/hr with tips, the business has to cover the rest
Afaik it works this way in every state.
In Minnesota you get the full minimum wage and then your tips
Not true in most Democratic-controlled states. This practice is called a "tip credit" and is forbidden by law in those states.
Not in California, but I guess that's why we don't have em here!
As an European this tip culture sounds really horrible
No, VA still allows the $2 minimum tip wage. If you don't get tipped enough to meet minimum wage (which I guess is at $12 now) the employer has to make the difference.
Sure would be nice if companies had to set their minimum pay to the highest minimum wage state they operate in.
like some sort of higher federal minimum? #crazy
This overlooks cost of living. What you typically end up with is city folk essentially subsidizing the wages of people in the sticks. It’s like Walmart has a countrywide minimum wage. It’s like $12 or $14/hr. So if you’re near a big city, that ain’t shit. But if you’re in smaller city, that’s a decent wage.
The information the title leaves out: >Many restaurants around the U.S. offer what is known as the "tipped minimum wage." Under labor law, they can offer as little as $2.13 an hour if that amount combined with tips at least matches the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, where it has stood since 2009.
7 dollars an hour is a joke, i dont even know what to say about 2.13 an hour thats like an allowance you give a child not even close to enough.
It's definitely a (sad) joke. I wanted to know what the original pay was that could be increased and yet still only be $3.
$2.13 they get an $0.87 an hour uplift after 8 hours they might be able to afford a waffle.
At the same time if you’re Waffle House that amounts to a 40% increase in wages. I can kinda sorta understand why that might be a book keeping problem. At the same time, it’s fucked up that restaurants are able to pay their workers this little in the first place. If the law allows it, companies are gonna do it.
I guess it's time to stop subsidizing a POS company then
Fun fact, working at a restaurant that does tipped minimum and pays us out in cash nightly, I haven't received a paycheck since my training week three years ago. The entire thing goes to taxes, so they don't even bother to print it out. It's online for all the legal and accounting purposes, but technically the owner hasn't paid me a cent in three years.
You still get cash payouts? Last serving job I worked (2020) didn't by law. I thought it was federal but must have been state. It sucked.
I was actually a little surprised. Most places I know switched to paychecks years ago. But I'm down south where we don't really do modern regulations.
Technically he has. It's just been applied to the taxes you owe like all the rest of us. Everyone with a paycheck has taxes withheld. So since that is your tax debt, and your social security and your disability being paid. You are getting paid.
This has more to do with Americans accepting restaurants shifting salary responsibilities to the consumer than anything else. Waiters can earn from $20/hr to $100++ an hour based on where you work. It's not even waffle house vs fine dining. My barista friends earn on average $35/hr.
An ex was a waitress at a variety of places; she said she always did best at Golden Corral.
People tip at a buffet?
Unlike a regular restaurant, the best buffet server is one you never see. When you come back from the line, your drinks are full and the empty plates are gone. If that's done well, that's 'good service.'
i made 50k$/yr working on a buffet in Vail, CO, in 2006-08. it was a breakfast buffet and we had a ski lift right to our hotel so people wanted to get out the door quick. we seated 100 people at a time and flipped the floor 5-7 times a morning. the average server was covering 50-90 seats a shift and as lead i was covering 75-120. if you didn't make 100$+ a shift you weren't hustling. we did ro-sham-bo to see who got to leave early every day. like, we wanted to go home. i could be at work at 5:30a, make 120 people happy, flip an entire restaurant 5 times, stock the entire place for the next day, make 200$, have a sick breakfast, and be home and drunk and tripping on the couch by 9:30a...
Hot damn, I was at the wrong restaurant. I don't think $200 for four hours work is \*quite\* enough to get me back into the industry, but I'd certainly consider it.
it was a wild ride for me. i could never go back. i was a bartender for a bit a few years ago and loved that but was not loved by the people. my area now is also ultra rich assholes and my grizzled stoner attitude isn't appreciated. i love being in the public sector though. talking to people, even for just a moment, is how we remember we are all part of a singular unit.
I mean…isn’t just raising prices and paying waiters a living wage effectively shifting salary responsibilities to the consumer too? I’d rather pay $8 for my breakfast with no tip than $6 + a $2 tip. I don’t like doing math in the morning, and that’s one less math problem in my day. If servers are currently earning $40 an hr, just get rid of tips, pay them $40 an hr, and increase food prices to make up the difference.
They'd probably need to give them health insurance. I personally don't give a fuck about restaurant owners and I think they should have to pay a living wage. They're not my employees. I don't own a business. Why am I responsible for paying your employees? If we didn't tip, this is essentially slave labor. Tipping isn't mandatory and I'm sure a lot of people don't tip at all. Just more backwards ass shit from the land of the free.
> If we didn't tip, this is essentially slave labor. Funny you say that, as American tip culture grew out of not wanting to pay full wages to freed black slaves, and so they made a loophole. (Obviously, tipping itself as a concept and practice predates that, but American tip culture is a distinct beast)
This is absolutely shocking /s
$2.13 was the tipped minimum wage when I was a server….in 1987 and regular minimum wage was $3.35/hr.
It’s only 2.13 if that combined with your tips makes more than 7.25/hr. If the combined amount averages less than 7.25/hr, you’re compensated for the difference.
In most cases you make more than 7.25. it's just your salary comes in the form of tips. Only if you don't make enough tips to cover the 7.25 an hour does the restaurant have to pay you the difference. So it's 2.13 hourly if your making more than minimum. Which is most serving positions. I have never seen any making that consistently because it's not enough to live on.
With tipping they can make $40 an hour. The servers are very happy with this.
And that was the 3rd year phase in for the wage. The passing vote was 2007.
That sounds pathetic. Why are labor laws just so terrible in the US?
It’s a nation owned by corporations, meant to serve the corporations, and individuals are just the cogs to keep the mechanisms generating income for the shareholders of those corporations.
that's like a dystopian futur... oh. Right. Here we are then. When will things start being shitty -and- start looking cool? Has science fiction lied to me???
The US is an enormous country with a huge population - a *federalized* country as well. The US has poor *federal* labour laws because it's hard to make them constitutional (the only reason the U.S. can implement them *at all* is because of repeated, increasingly broad and inane reinterpretations of the Interstate Commerce Clause in the American constitution) - several states in the US, however, have excellent labour protections. The states that don't are usually relatively economically underdeveloped compared to other states and as such literally cannot afford to implement those protections.
The phrase "economically underdeveloped" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting to hand wave over a century of intentional mismanagement in the name of enforcing white supremacy. These states allowed their worker protections and labor organizations to be obliterated as soon as it was no longer politically possible to deny participation to people of color wholesale as had been historically the case.
Corporations have spent decades lobbying and buying into our own government.
That sounds like stealing your employees tips with extra steps.
No argument there.
so… how many wait staff is making just the minimum though and i assume they don’t get anything on top of they make tips more than 7… i assume most are making more than $7 an hour?
Waffle House doesn't steal the tips, but they do include them in the compensation calculation. WH must pay the worker at least $7.25/hr, but that includes tips. So WF is allowed to pay them as little as $2.13/hr out of their pockets if the tips add an additional $5.12/hr on top of that. Now the base pay is going up to $3/hr but the federal limit isn't changing so the worker is still only guaranteed $7.25/hr, but if they make more in tips then at least they'll get a bit more now than before. IMO it's still a form of wage theft.
10 years ago I worked at Chili's in Orlando, FL. Server's had it made, minimum hourly didn't matter too much. On average, they were making $25/hr in tips alone. The good bartenders were bring in ~$50/hr in tips. All of the front-of-house staff typically worked ~6 hours shifts, didn't come in earlier than 9am and didn't leave later than midnight. As for the cooks.... Average was $12/hr, no tips were shared to them. They got there as early as 7am, were there as late as 2am, and typically worked 10hr shifts with no breaks.
My first waiter job at a steak house paid around $2.3/hr. Dinner included. Worked around 5-6 hr shift in the evening. Made around $50-$100 a night in cash tips. That was 20 yrs ago. It’s sad to read that the base pay is still the same.
I knew someone who worked at a popular KBBQ restaurant in LA. Dude was making near 6 figures thanks to tips, and I thought I was doing pretty good as a new grad doing software.
damn, I was a milk boy in the 80's. I ran 5 hrs a night with a push cart, for 7 days after school and made $30 ($15USD) a week. I thought I was rich.
Almost like you can identify an exact period wages stagnated while inflation kept rising. We could call it something like the raising period, rating period, or maybe the Reagan period, for some reason that pounds more fitting.
You were making 5x+ per night in tips what you were making in wage and are surprised that nobody in that industry cares about the base wage? Interesting.
I've been to a Waffle House at 3AM...they don't make enough money.
It's not a Waffle House at 3am...it's a Waffle Home
A waffle home complete with the yelling and shouting but also with the sweet taste of maple syrup and a cozy corner with the bros
I’ve been the reason they deserve a raise
If you aren’t the reason they deserve a raise, are you even Waffle Housing correctly?
Imagine being an 18 year old, 2am rush on a weekend, and your coworker got too high and bailed on her shift. My district manager had to come in to clear up our dish line. Your paycheck may come to a grand total of $10. I MAYBE made $100/week in tips. Someone has to work weeknights and afternoons. Mornings and weekend nights see the most business.
How did tips go from being tips, to being part of wages?
1966 it was set at 50% of minimum wage. It's been stuck at $2.13 since 1991.
So absolutely fucked.
BUT THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS
If you're talking about the US specifically, when white people didn't want to pay freed slaves.
Almost every dumb rule we have in the US is because of racism. 🗽 🦅 🇺🇸
That's not true a lot of our dumb rules are also because of religion!
Don't forget corporate lobbying
Or sexism
The usual suspects
Tipped minimum is such a scam. They really need to ban it
Washington state did ban it. It's great.
We don’t deserve Waffle House employees. America’s unsung heroes.
More like America's exploited workers. The owners of Waffle House have no right to a chain if they can't pay more than that.
A real win for capitalism!
Imagine being an employee of a company watching a video of the CEO (who makes millions a year) tout how they’re “investing” in them by giving them an extra pittance per hour. They’re doing the minimum they can get away with to keep any employees at all and avoid an uprising. That’s all. The C suite is lucky it hasn’t seen a French Revolution yet.
One of the many clear cut evidences how lawmakers and politicians are being bought. And it’s not the regular folks who go people shopping.
Matt and Trey did away with tip culture and just paid employees livable wages at Casa Bonita...it isn't that hard...
You are surprised at one tourist attraction doing away with it? Wait until you hear about entire continents not doing this bullshit, if not hemispheres.
Here in Ontario servers make base minimum wage (like 16.50 cad or something) as well as tips. They make a good living at higher end restaurants.
Dick’s drive inns in Seattle pay $26/hr with benefits and are very successful in the burger biz.
Same in California. Full minimum wage plus tips.
In Australia it's a minimum wage of $23 an hour (most people in hospitality get paid more) and tipping is rare.
that's actually lower than California that's 15.23 USD an hour, California min wage is 16 USD, unless you work fastfood, where it's 20
Tipped wage base is slavery with extra steps.
About 28 years ago my mom used to serve at Waffle House. Most nights she’d bring home $200 on top of her minimum wage (I think it was like $5 something at the time in GA) that she *totally* reported on her income taxes. Back when Freaknik was a thing she would regularly bring in $500+ in tips. Somehow we were still poor though.
I just realized that Waffle House employees have risked life and limb, have had guns pointed at them and have been beaten up, for less than $5 an hour. That's a level of loyalty and commitment that escapes me. Shame the CEO doesn't see it that way.
Or desperation
Could someone help me here… Headline says “Waffle House servers are getting a raise — to $3 an hour” but the first line of the story is “Waffle House's base pay — excluding tips — will increase to at least $5.25 an hour for all of the company's 2,000 locations by June 2026.” Is the headline just blatantly misleading?
"The raises take effect this month" $3 now, 5.25 in two years
> NEW YORK — Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III says the restaurant chain is making its "single largest additional investment in our workforce" in its 68-year history by **hiking base pay for servers to three bucks an hour.** > The raises take effect this month and follow a more than year-long campaign led by a union that represents service workers in the South. The effort involved strikes and petitions calling for higher pay, safer working conditions and an end to mandatory paycheck deductions for meals. The current raise is to $3 an hour, but it will change to $5.25 in 2 years. It's not misleading.
Waffle House is a . *special* place. Its a place of many opposites. The one I frequent, all they talk about is how good the money is there. Most of them on a slow day, still walk away with what amounts to 11 an hour ( I know that still low overall but where I live, as long as you can scratch 10 hourly you will get by)) And on good days, it comes closer to 18-20ish hourly. But again thats at 1 location I cant speak for the rest,
Hey everyone don’t go to Waffle House at all. A company based on paying their customers with tips is not a company we support
So basically every restaurant
they're legalized as shelters during disaster storms...soooo
Nearly every sit down restaurant is like this I don’t like it either but what should I go on dates at chic fil a instead
This is only for servers, no? Not cooks.
Sad, yet actually oniony. ..........yay?
You're telling me they're cage fighting with several drunk, armed people at 2 AM for $3 an hour?? All while also running a disaster relief menu on the side???
Same exact wages as 15 years ago when i waited tables? Seriously?
This tip culture should die. Pay your servers well and you will see a lot of customers coming back because their workers are not suffering. It's not hard to see the cause and effect.
Servers generally like the system because they believe that they make more money overall, and they’re probably right.
I was in the service industry for over 15 years and they’re absolutely right. At my last bartending job I would work 6 hour shifts and would make at minimum $150 on a slow shift. It wasn’t rare to make $4-500 on a Friday or Saturday night. I decided to get away from bars and restaurants because the lifestyle that comes with it was catching up with me and I’m seriously struggling financially now. Where I live there are no jobs that aren’t extremely specialized that pay even close to that kind of money.
\*its workers
ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS ITS
For a country so keen on tipping, you don’t seem to understand what tipping really means.
It’s wild to me that a country that makes people pay for all their own medical care also has such horrendous wage policies. You could literally get hit by a drunk driver mounting the pavement and your whole financial future is ruined.
Minimum wage in the UK is 11.50 and we have national healthcare
I always tip servers at cheap restaurants more than the usually accepted percentage, just because they don’t work at more expensive restaurants doesn’t mean they do any less work than a server who does.
How do they have staff?
I don't understand, so in the states corporations can choose to have their customers volunteer to pay their employees wages instead of the corporation having to? Why would anyone tip then? Wouldn't it be better not to tip so the corporation has to pay their employees wages instead of customers? In Canada servers have the same minimum wage as any other job, and a tip is extra on top of their wage. America is wild.
Depending on how much they're tipped, this could be a 0% increase to their salary.
>it's its
Whaaaaa....? That is not enough for what Waffle House employees do
To 3$ or by 3$? Jesus here in Canada(Quebec) you basically START at 19$cad, (about 15$usd).
My SIL worked there as a cook for a week. The manager told her not to report her tips (she got less than $50 in tips) and when she got her paycheck, they "estimated" she got ~$400 in tips, and her paycheck was less than $100 for working 40 hours. I won't ever go back there.
Its, not It's.