The exact mechanism of employee compensation here doesn't matter. Either the tech worker pays $30+6 tip for a meal and the server makes $10, or the tech worker pays $36 with no tip for a meal and the server is paid more and still makes $10, it doesn't matter. The point is that a restaurant needs a large number of rich clientele in order for the restaurants' employees to make a lot of money.
My problem is primarily when the restaurants use tipping as variable compensation where the minimum compensation is arguably lower than it should be. There should always be a sane minimum wage, and it seems absurd to me that there are places where 1. the minimum wage is not substantial enough to live on and 2. servers aren't entitled to it, and rely on tips to attain a wage they can survive on.
As such I really do prefer the model where the food covers all wages with no employees being deprived of minimum wages. If tipping is provided on top, great – it's nice to say thanks if it's culturally acceptable. On the other hand, it's not okay to have to depend on those tips.
This is an opinion, but even major cities with high living expenses where minimum wages are provided seem problematic. In my city we had a brief period where more than minimum wage was offered due to worker shortages, but those days are over. Now servers are being hired back at $15.50 per hour which is an insanely small amount to live on. Shifts are provided such that you can never be considered full-time, depriving you of various benefits many would consider essential.
Do tips _really_ make up for that? No health benefits, not enough hours to work in order to earn a reliable minimum income, no regular hours, etc. What a shitty deal.
Sure, it could motivate people to "do better", but that's not always an option and it means we've essentially got a meat-grinder of an occupation that churns out people in a cycle of exploitation. Why not do better?
My shittiest jobs were miserable but at least I was compensated well. And I could be pretty brain-dead to do it. Stacking wood for kilns, pushing it through machines, bundling it, etc. I made way more than today's minimum wage, got vacation time, health benefits, etc. doing that stuff, but I did it 15 years ago.
I get that margins are slim in the food industry so that isn't possible today. My point is more like, maybe we should collectively work towards rectifying that and consider what we've got today to be a problem.
Of course I'm open to being totally wrong. There are a lot of forces at work, I'm not all that smart, and I just don't like the idea of being a server and having that experience. I'd personally prefer to pay a little more to alleviate that, but I know many would prefer to pay even less still.
> There should always be a sane minimum wage, and it seems absurd to me that there are places where 1. the minimum wage is not substantial enough to live on and 2. servers aren't entitled to it, and rely on tips to attain a wage they can survive on.
If you look into the details of those minimum wage laws that have lower minimums for tipped workers, it usually turns out that if their wage + tips turn out to be less than the ordinary minimum wage, they’re still entitled to the ordinary minimum wage.
