There has been a growing movement to make $15 the minimum wage for all employees in any job. Currently the wait staff in restaurants can be paid much less than the federally mandated minimum wage because they supposedly make it up in tips. That is in addition to working conditions that are far worse than in many other professions and lacking many benefits that other people take for granted.
Stuart Varney is an extreme right-wing host on one of the Fox TV channels and he speculates that if the minimum wage is raised for wait staff, he might be inclined to not tip them at all or tip them less than the standard 15-20%.
While discussing new minimum wage laws, Varney accused the policies of strangling the economy and proposed taking the conservative fiscal fight right to the laborers.
“If I walk into a restaurant and I know the waiter or waitress is making $15 an hour, way more than they used to make the previous year, I am going to say, ‘wait a minute am I going to give you 20%, 15% or whatever?’” questioned Varney, whose punditry on Fox Business Network has made him a multi-millionaire.
Yes you should, because they are still struggling to make a living while you are not.
It is quite disgusting to see very wealthy people resenting the idea that the lives of those less well-off might be improving slightly. Varney is likely not stupid even if he says stupid things. Surely he must realize that wait staff also watch TV and read the news and that some of them will recognize him when he goes to their restaurant and will know his views. Surely he must also realize that the people working in restaurants have ways of retaliating against obnoxious people.
But you should not be nice to wait staff merely because you fear retaliation. You should be nice to them because it is the right thing to do. They work long hours at a tiring job for low pay. The least you could do is not add to their load.
How about a photo and his hometown?
There’s a scam in the UK called “tronc” which, in its dry definition sense, seems workable: “(in a hotel or restaurant) a common fund into which tips and service charges are paid for distribution to the staff.” So naturally, it’s abused, Members’ club backed by Lord Ashcroft seeks to cut staff’s basic pay (whilst this article is about a private members club, resturants &tc open to the public are also known absuers):
The service charge is typically automatically added to the bill, so this isn’t quite as abusive as it could be.
I partially side -- to my own amazement -- with Varney on this one, though for different reasons. The whole justification for tipping is that it makes up for a huge shortfall in the income of these employees; simultaneously, the existence of tipping is used to justify the awful base pay they recieve. Eliminate both. No tipping, no shortfall in wage to require tipping.
The only question is what the houly rate needs to be in order to achieve this. Oh and of course the rate would need to be continually adjusted in accordance with inflation, or perhaps some sort of ‘cost of living’ index. $15 / hr has achieved a sort of legendary status, but even if the figure was adopted as the start point, it would not stay at taht nice round figure for very long.
Waitstaff pay should not be dependent on the goodwill of customers. Tips should be eliminated as a form of compensation and proper pay standards instituted,
Why does there need to be a separate “service charge”? There’s a place for those kinds of things, in the ADVERTISED PRICE. Fees and surcharges applied after-the-fact are abusive bullshit and should be outlawed as fraud.
Give any resturaunt worker a choice between no tips or triple the current minimum wage, and it’s pretty fucking obvious what most of them would take.
I wrote against the tipping practice back in 2005 so I do not necessarily see tipping as a good thing but as an erratic method of cost shifting from the menu price.. If wait staff had decent wages plus benefits, then tipping can be done away with and some countries and a few restaurants in the US already do that.
Yes. This is precisely what is done here in France.
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No, not the “whole justification”, Why do we tip?:
Are we supposed to believe that Varney is a big tipper?
Because his generousity knows serious boundaries.
I’m with Varney, and Holms, also to my amazement. Pay the staff a decent wage, advertise the price, and I’ll pay it, or not. Japan have the right idea -- tipping there is practically an insult.