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We need to talk about tipping.
It should be simple. Or it used to be. Eat at a restaurant — a sit-down, drive-thru or, Lord help us all, fast-casual — then, when the check arrives, look it over, pay it and be on our merry little way.
Increasingly, though, there’s confusion (at best) and outrage (just peek into a neighborhood Facebook group mid-service-fee meltdown). Tipping — by how much, when and whether itap already included in the total — has become a moving target. So letap try to figure this out, and then maybe we can all sit down for some sort of restaurant collective where we decide, once and for all, how we’re going to tip.
As far as I can tell, there are four ways of thinking about tipping.
- We’ve got the American free-for-all system of the diner decides, where everyone just picks a number and goes with it, with the expectation being around 20 percent. Here, restaurant owners pay certain employees less and diners subsidize their wages.
- A variant on that is the pre-suggested tip, which I’m seeing more and more. This is when that counter service spot flips the screen over to me and my options are 20, 25 or 30 percent gratuity for handing me a muffin.
- Next, there’s much of the rest of the world’s method of incorporating the cost of labor into the menu prices, thus shifting the burden of deciding how much the server should get paid for filling our water four times away from the customer and onto the business owner.
- And then we have that variant, which is also being used more and more, of adding a service fee (in my experience about 20 or 22 percent) onto the check in lieu of gratuity.
The problem ’t in any one of these methods; itap that they’re all being used at once, requiring a sort of super vigilance at the end of a meal that I just don’t have the strength to muster in my cheesecake coma.
The act of tipping for certain services is actually way more complicated than we have room for, but here’s the TLDR: American tipping has racist roots. The practice was pretty much unheard of until just after the Civil War, when it was essentially implemented as a way for employers to avoid paying Black workers a fair wage. With few job options, many formerly enslaved people became servants, waiters, railroad porters, bussers — or, the jobs we now associate with tip-dependency.
By design, the responsibility to pay these workers shifted from the employers, who were reluctant to pay Black laborers in the first place, to the whims of the customers. It became official in 1938 in the New Deal: employers of tipped employees would not have to pay them at the full minimum wage.
We’re one of the only countries in the world that has this sort of system, and Colorado’s current state law mandates that tipped workers receive $3.02 per hour below the minimum wage, which, at least compared to other states, is one of the lower tip credits, resulting in a higher hourly rate.
One of the problems with that system is that it creates wage disparities between workers in the front of the house (servers) and the back of the house (the people who make your food). As average check totals increase and we’re tipping a percentage on higher and higher numbers, that wage disparity between servers and cooks can also increase.
A quick example: Take a $100 check with a 20 percent tip that goes solely to the server. If the table is in and out in an hour, the server makes $20 plus $16.27 (Denver’s tipped minimum wage) for that single table, or $36.27, while a minimum-wage line cook would get only $19.29 for that hour.
Many restaurants have tried switching to service fee models, where that 20 percent (or so) is automatically added to your check. Hopefully, they’re using those fees to spread the money around and pay their staff more equitably, but there have been allegations of some restaurants not using it as intended.
Another concern with this practice is that American diners don’t expect this, and might inadvertently tip another 20 percent. It needs to be made very clear when the check is dropped that gratuity is already included, and sometimes it ’t. (Enter: Reddit rage threads.)
You could say itap on the diner to examine their restaurant bill as closely as an IRS document, but letap be real here. I probably shouldn’t have eaten that third piece of bread and then ordered the chocolate lava cake (but who ’t going to order the chocolate lava cake?) and I am just not in the proper headspace or stomachspace to be analyzing the check line-by-line.
I know that some people detest these included service fees, but I actually don’t mind them, so long as they’re brought to my attention. What I do mind is when I get those ludicrous suggested tips at fast-food or fast-casual spots. Can we all agree that 30 percent is not the standard tip for someone to hand me my premade sandwich? Thirty percent tips should be reserved for meals where the server is at least grabbing me a drink and clearing a plate, not handing me heat-lamp-languishing food in a 10-second interaction.
All in all, this is a whole lot of math to be doing at dinner.
So what do we do about it? Can we have one giant diners’ conference where we vote on this? Where we decide that no matter what, we will stick to a 15 to 25 percent range, but probably not if you’re just handing me that muffin? Or that we’re collectively OK with a service fee included, but for the love of xiao long bao, can you let us know when you drop the check and share it with the entire staff?
I guess until then, I’ll just round up and hope for the best.
