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.
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.
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.
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.