@JohnR1972: That's a well-presented video, and one I hadn't seen before. Thanks for sharing it!
Yes, interesting video!!
If you order delivery, the tip amount should be based on the distance from the restaurant. At least $1 per mile with a $5 minimum is fair.
If Amazon, USPS, Fedex etc can figure it out, then so can Grubhub and the others, though it is worth noting that Grubhub is a bit different as the customer is contracting out the driver, rather than contracting out the company. If an appropriate tip amount is known by drivers, Grubhub and others should know that and just pay drivers fairly.
As much as I can. Usually 20% or a little more. I'm a former waiter and know it's a hard job. Also, waiters now more than ever are stressed out, burnt out, and understaffed.
@sunnysideup - .They also use company vehicles and their employers pay for gas. Food delivery drivers put wear and tear on their own cars and pay for their own gas.
For sure. The IRS issues a standard mileage rate of use a car for business, and currently they've decided that it's 58.5 cents mile. Amazon and what not know what their vehicle cost and maintenance is like so they can fine tune wages accordingly. But anyway, since 58.5 cents per mile is the break even point for mileage of a car for business use, your initial figure of $1 per mile seems pretty fair as the final cost (though I don't know what kind of cut Grubhub takes).
Since Grubhub and stuff are tech companies, they should also be able to integrate data to further fine tune the prices - eg, city miles would cost more than highway miles and things like that. They probably already do this I'm guessing.
@sunnysideup - They found that people order more by keeping the prices lower while expecting them to tip than having higher prices and scaring away potential customers. It's the way the human brain works.
Unfortunate. If I had a lot of tech knowledge and a lot of cash sitting around, I'd start my own business that just pays drivers fairly with no tipping fuss. But it wouldn't probably wouldn't do well when customers see the initially lower Grubhub prices.
@sunnysideup - Companies like Grubhub has also been doing some shady stuff such as putting restaurants on their app without their permission and giving drivers a debit card to order and pay for the food. They've been sued to get those places off their app since restaurants sometimes takes the blame when the driver screws up. They also pirate their menus from the internet that are sometimes a couple years old and have outdated prices. Restaurants that are actually partnered with the delivery company has the orders sent them when placed. I refuse to do any place and pay orders.
@DaringSprinter You glossed over some things. A $5.00 that hour is not necessarily the ONLY to that hour, but the "tip credit" is there to meet the bare minimum wage. 🤦♂️ At some point a person who is working has to take stock of what they need to do to earn a living. Granted, many people are not capable of that. Yesterday I gave a homeless guy $10 just because he came up to me at a park and was friendly and obviously a little mentally ill. I wanted to give more but he informed me that he then needed to get high. Well, I tried. So getting back to the restaurant... Not all businesses are successful, but the ones that are will cover the costs underlying and leave enough profit to reward everybody. Is it different for a person who doesn't do any of the management but can only offer unskilled labor? No. If you can't make enough serving customers at a slow restaurant that gives you one measly customer per hour, you need to decide to move on. There are millions of homeless people, evidently, who have moved on. Others are savvy enough to put together a plan to sustain themselves. I don't know what else to say except that the minimum wage sounds good but it's actually pretty meaningless unless you have enough business to sustain it. And then what's the point? You would likely be at that point anyway in order to attract competent workers. I honestly think the minimum wage is a political thing that is meaningless in real life.
Tipping is yet another way that company owners engage in wage theft.
If your business model cannot pay your employees than your business is supposed to fail.
I go to fast food restaurants or go for takeout to avoid all this song and dance. It is super annoying that the price we see is not the price that we pay.
I used to tip heavily because I had a chip on my shoulder. I come from an ethnic background which has a considerable presence in anglophone countries and who are stereotyped as bad tippers. There have been times when the server has gasped when they saw my tip - they were not expecting that much, especially from me. And there have been times when I have observed the server sigh and take a breath before serving our table - where it was only people from my ethnicity. This is all before they see how much I am going to tip. I have seen baristas greet customers with a smile, but they barely greet me and carefully check how much I tipped.
Now, I don't care. People don't treat me better because I tip well. I am not going to make more friends by tipping well. So now it is standard 0-8 % for takeout and around 25% for sit down restaurants from me.
But honestly, I really wish tipping was outlawed. I would still be treated poorly, but at least I would not have the false expectation that it would change if I tip well.
Where I live, people serving food get payed a living wage. Tipping is not required, but people tell the waiter to round the number up or keep the change. Delivery services had a tough time once the government found out how they were treating delivery drivers and now have to pay them a living wage too.
If you can't afford to pay your employees a decent wage, your company has no right to exist. It exists by the grace of the employees coming to work each day, and without that, you can't do anything.
@tallteddy - They probably also charge more for the meal. We just do things differently in America.
In a prior life I worked in restaurants, most often as a cook but I’ve also worked as a dishwasher, baker, and waiting staff.
The tipping system is a mess. The cooks and the dishwashers make less than the waiting staff in most restaurants yet work very hard in uncomfortably hot conditions and are under just as much pressure to work fast. Tipping makes women wait staff more vulnerable to sexual harassment. Research has shown, for instance, that a woman waiting tables will get higher tips if they show more cleavage and that people of color generally are not tipped as well as their white counterparts.
Attempts to move away from this system have mostly failed. A few years ago the owner of a successful network of restaurants in New York decided to raise his prices so he could pay his staff better and get rid of the pay inequity between the kitchen and waiting staff. Several other restaurants both in New York and around the U.S. did the same thing. Almost all of them went back to the old system. There was pushback not only from the customers but also the waiting staff.
Here’s one article on that experiment:
https://www.eater.com/21398973/restaurant-no-tipping-movement-living-wage-future
Another from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/business/pandemic-restaurant-tipping.html
It’s possible that the pandemic may leave an opening for some change but there is an awful lot of inertia behind the current system.
I'm a tipped worker and I'm doing better than I've ever done with other types of work. I've worked in retail, manufacturing, construction, healthcare... My prospects were never pleasant until I wizened up and got a FAFSA loan to do a few months of massage school. I sat for the exam, did the fingerprint thing, and got my license. I spent several years learning and honing. Now I can afford to travel and cuddle! I started that gig at age 52. I wish I could go back to 1982 and grab myself by the shoulders and smack the hell out of that dumb kid that grew up to be me. And I would smack hard! I would go on and on back then about how unfairly the government was treating us by not ensuring a better wage environment. I realize today that it's not on the government to nanny everybody. Free will and agency need to be encouraged, rather than inculcating a resentment against society for not softening life. As soon as one decides they will be in charge of the outcome of their own life, the sooner life will reward them for their efforts.
@zacto 25% is still a good tip, because when I worked at a restaurant they told me that 18% was the average received. I also noticed that giving as good of a performance as possible doesn't necessarily adjust the amount of tip I receive - some people just have their minds made up.
I did receive better tips from women for whatever reason. I did try to treat customers that left outstanding tips regularly particularly well.
@UCpaaHVg6u0 Going on about the unfairness of this or that can be enlightening, but I suppose the better question is, what are we going to do about it?
Not to open up a Pandora’s box but what would one consider a living wage?
Never tip a food server less than $5.00 unless an egregious offense has been committed. This means I could order a muffin and a coffee for $7.00 and I'll pay $12.00 for it total. Otherwise it's at least 22% if they served me with a modicum of enthusiasm. On massages the rule is 15% to 20% of the RETAIL value of the massage. Few people follow this time in my new city of Flagstaff. Their intent is not to signal any dissatisfaction, so I still love them. Naturally if they were dissatisfied I would want to know and seek to correct it. The food servers I know would probably prefer to keep their cash tips rather than get a set hourly rate that is reported to Uncle Sam and state and city. Anybody here believe that they'll get $40/hr from the restauranteur? As it is now, a place an expensive menu can get servers who will compete, while in a no tipping environment they'll seek the cheapest workers, who will see little reason to smile for patrons who are demanding and insolent. I am slightly disgusted by the Euros who wryly slight Americans for our slaveholding past, as evidence of how badly workers have it here, while they recently divested their colonial holdings in Africa, and beggar the US for the umbrella of protection that NATO had afforded them for many decades.
@UCpaaHVg6u0:
You glossed over some things.
I simplified. For ease of understanding. And then I went to bed.
A $5.00 that hour is not necessarily the ONLY to that hour, but the "tip credit" is there to meet the bare minimum wage.
...Is this English?
You know that the tip credit is what the employer gets so the employer doesn't have to make up the difference between minimum wage and tipped minimum wage... right?
The employer has to meet the bare minimum wage, unless the employer is allowed to take a tip credit in which case the employer saves money.
In my example, if the worker makes no tips in an hour, the worker gets $7.25 (from the employer, who loses that $7.25). If the worker gets $5 in tips in that hour and the employer doesn't get a tip credit, the worker takes home $12.25 (and the employer loses $7.25). If the employer does get a tip credit, the worker gets $7.25 (and the employer is only out $2.25).
The employer gets to effectively take the amount of the tip credit away from the worker.
I don't know how much clearer this can be.
Yesterday I gave a homeless guy $10 just because he came up to me at a park and was friendly and obviously a little mentally ill. I wanted to give more but he informed me that he then needed to get high. Well, I tried.
Tried what? To get him a sandwich? He can get that for free (or for the cost of a sermon) at a shelter! What a homeless person needs is a place to live, and $10 isn't going to get him that. Heck, I worked with a homeless person, both of us earning the same wage, and the only reason I could afford an apartment while he couldn't was that I knew people willing to rent to me specifically for cheap (and I still couldn't afford food)! The most a homeless person can get for ten bucks is a little relief from pain.
I honestly think the minimum wage is a political thing that is meaningless in real life.
Right.
The federal minimum wage. A law telling American businesses to pay their workers at least $7.25 per hour. For those of you who were in your twenties a bit earlier than I was: imagine it's 1975 and the federal minimum wage is $1.34/hr.
That's meaningless in real life, is it? Hmm. Why?
Because no business in America would ever pay an employee that little, never mind less than that? They do, though.
Those of you who grew up in the '60s and '70s—can you imagine your young self trying to survive on $1.34 an hour? Or less? Can you imagine wage theft taking even more from your already small paycheck? Can you imagine people arguing that your boss should be free to pay you less than $1.34 an hour?
Imagine further that you're doing the work of two, three, or even four people.
For only $1.34 an hour.
And they want to pay you less.
They could afford to hire more employees to help you now, but they're not doing it. Do you really think they'll hire another person if they get to pay each of you $0.67 an hour, so they're not losing any money? Well, maybe. But could you live on that?
Could anyone live on that? And will any business ever stop wanting to pay you less, less, as little as they can?
Minimum wage, meaningless in America. Fascinating concept.
...Pardon my rant.
@Babichev: It's distressing how entrenched tipping is in the US.
I can understand the workers' reactions: when someone's waving free money in your face, it's tough to say, "I can't take that, it wouldn't be fair to the other employees—and we're all getting paid a decent wage now, so I can leave behind the mindset that says I'll starve without it."
And (unfortunately) I can understand why the businesses decided to take the difference between tipped minimum wage and minimum wage out of customers' pockets rather than their own... and why they cut wages overall. What company is willing to make less profit than previous just so that their employees can live decently comfortable lives? Even if they're still coming out ahead, they're not as ahead as they could be!
Were there but a way to get everyone to stop tipping all at once.
Service-inclusive pricing does look promising, though! I like the idea of getting paid a minimum for my work and then more, scaling with the quality of my work. Talk about incentive! Might help coworkers with less pride in their labor than me.
@Ironman294, I actually linked to the definition of "living wage" in an earlier post. To quote from the article (and link to it again):
"The living wage is the amount of income determined to provide a decent standard of living. It should pay for the cost of living in any location. It should also be adjusted to compensate for inflation. The purpose of a living wage is to make sure that all full-time workers have enough money to live above the federal poverty level."
Emphasis mine.
@DaringSprinter Nobody can say you're not smart and wise beyond your years but you also seem naive. I did live on minimum wage back in the 80s. In fact, I was only working part time. I stuck with it, didn't go back to drinking or drugging, and eventually I was hired full-time and had I stuck with that for the next thirty something years my stock would have bought two median priced houses today. All that for stacking paint cans and making deliveries. But today the problem is housing is way overpriced. I already said this and you didn't address it. The living wage is meaningless. It arbitrarily puts the onus on the employer to fix a problem not of his making. It's also a stupid assumption that a person has to live alone in an entire apartment. People have shared housing forever. I did rent a place in 1989 for $125 month in a rural hick town, took a bus to work that cost $15/mo, and my biggest expense was food. Today one needs to rent a room and share, or work two jobs and go without some basic things like a car. But forcing an employer to pay a burger flipper $25/hour so that their 40 hours a week can afford them their own apartment is stupid and unsustainable. The problem is that housing needs to be made more affordable according to what people are making. So we need to review the wastefulness and shortages in the process of housing people rather than put everything on the employer. Another example is medical care. It's been forced to be responsive to legal attacks to the point that defensive medicine significantly adds to costs. Regulation from states (Certificate of Need laws) in terms of allocating services within geographical areas has led to monopolistic practices today. These laws originally were supposed to protect from cutthroat competition among hospitals but later led to monopolies in an era of hospital consolidation. There are many examples of government and court cases driving up costs of basic necessities, but young idealists only see the need to be Robin Hood because all that wealth in the hands of so few must be wrong! But that wealth is called capital, and it works better in the hands of people who know how to manage it than in the custody of government or consumers, who feed it right back to the top anyway.
Rant over.
@UCpaaHVg6u0: I usually get called a cynic. Under the circumstances, I'll take "naive" as a compliment.
You lived on minimum wage in the '80s, you say? Well, let's take that minimum wage and translate it into what it would be today, adjusted for inflation.
1980 – $11.00 / hr 1981 – $10.77 / hr 1982 – $10.15 / hr 1983 – $09.83 / hr 1984 – $09.42 / hr 1985 – $09.10 / hr 1986 – $08.93 / hr 1987 – $08.62 / hr 1988 – $08.28 / hr 1989 – $07.90 / hr 1990 – $08.59 / hr
Fascinating. Whatever minimum wage you earned in the '80s was at least 65¢ more than minimum wage workers make today—at 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week, a minimum wage worker in 1989 took home $104 more a month than they would today.
Furthermore, the average poverty threshold for a nonfarm family of four persons was $29,846.83 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation). These days if a family of four makes above $27,750 a year they're above the poverty level: you must be $2096.83 poorer to be considered poor these days.
The median cost of a home in 1980 was $229,154.39 (adjusted for inflation), and today it's $428,700.00: $199,545.61 more! So yes: workers are making less and having to pay more.
Now let's look at businesses.
In 1989, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 61:1. In 2020, it was 351:1. Of course, this varies from business to business. But on average.
During the pandemic, we saw profits flying into the pocketbooks of already wealthy shareholders and executives, while workers... well, they were lucky to get anything.
Feel free to download and read this new report, which examines the pay practices and financial outcomes at some of the nation’s best-known companies in sectors spanning retail, delivery, fast food, hotels, and entertainment, or just read the article here: The 22 companies’ shareholders grew $1.5 trillion richer, while their 7 million workers (more than half of whom are nonwhite) received $27 billion in additional pay—less than 2% of shareholders’ gains.
Remind me again how important the shareholders are? What essential work they do that requires such exponential compensation?
"The living wage is meaningless," you said. "It arbitrarily puts the onus on the employer to fix a problem not of his making," you said. Hmm. I see. How unfair, I'm sure, to force someone making billions to give their workers a few million. Are you aware of the difference between a billion and a million? 1 million seconds is about 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years. Someone with more than a human lifetime in their pockets can afford to hand over a couple weeks. Oh, but how unfair to make them do it. After all, they earned it by building the business and then having other people do all the dirty work. Why should those people get more than a single day?
Actually, while we're being "fair," why should landlords be forced to reduce their rents? Why should hospitals be forced to lower their prices? Why should patients be allowed to sue when things go wrong, or pharmaceutical companies be required to charge only what the dying can afford?
Why not just allow the people with the money—who are obviously far more competent than you or I, because look, they've got money—to do whatever they want to the rest of us?
If the wealth would go right back to them anyway, why not hand it down and let it trickle up? It certainly isn't trickling down.
...Incidentally, I'm really enjoying this back and forth. Thanks for engaging with me: you have a sharp brain.
@DaringSprinter (and everyone else who basically said this) "Just a thought, but maybe if you can't pay your employees enough for them to live—really live, not just survive another day while slowly starving overall—maybe you shouldn't employ people."
I understand this thought, but it's very closed minded and doesn't see the big picture. Granted, I'm a libertarian and believe in people's freedom of choice over government regulation.
If you remove the freedom of choice and force "livable " wages (what is this REALLY?) you're really just squandering new business creation and further empowering big corporations. I don't know anyone who wants that. There are few businesses that can start out being able to afford high wage workers. They typically start out with cheap (ie, going, inexperienced, etc) labor and then grow to be able to afford higher wage labor. If you eliminate that freedom of choice (both from the business AND the employee's perspective. Maybe someone would rather make less working for a new business they're excited about than a big corporation. Why is it your business to tell them what they are allowed to agree to?), you're eliminating a lot of future possibility, job creation, industry competition, etc.
Remember that big corporations can afford higher pay if they need to (and can afford the technology for automation to eliminate more jobs), small businesses may not be able to yet. So the rule would inevitably mostly kill small and new businesses, which decreases competition and gives more control to the corporations, which also gives them more control over the work market, further reducing employees empowerment.
I think a lot of these ideas "sound" good, but at the end of the day, they actually only help the big corporations which most of us hate, and squander entrepreneurship and small business creation which will add to employment opportunities (and competition, which forces other businesses to up their game in what they offer). You have to be careful with government proposals and carefully analyze what unintended side effects it may cause.
Also, why are there so many adults trying to support families working minimum wage jobs? I know endless businesses with great pay and growth potential who can't find workers. There is a bigger problem at play here than wage. There are opportunities out there, but people aren't taking them... 🤔
Back on the subject at hand, I like tipping. As someone who is self-employed, it's so much more rewarding to see that tangible reward and feel somewhat in control of what you get (there's no controlling rude people). Not everyone likes that kind of work. They just want to work their hours and get something deposited in their account every two works. Neither is wrong, but there's nothing wrong with the tipping model and it can actually be good for the way some people like to work.
@DaringSprinter Who are the shareholders? Mostly it's people invested in mutual funds, people who work 9 to 5. They are generally saving for retirement in an era that is looking at Social Security about to go off a cliff.
You are making this comparison about what minimum wage is now but it's moot because hardly anybody earns minimum unless it's a few really bad days for tipped workers. Most tipped workers are there because with tips they exceed earnings compared to similarly skilled work. As I mentioned, I was part time when I made that rate. I picked up odd jobs elsewhere. The informal economy is still alive and well.
You keep dodging the main issue, and that is that Living Wage is pure political BS to appease guilty liberals. You are very smart, but you love liberal BS and so fall victim to this hoax. Embarrassing.
I suspect that you may eventually see the creators of these hoaxes for who they are, often recipients of the same sources of the largesse that you just denounced. Corporations love raising the minimum wage. It sweeps out the mom and pop businesses and creates more ready and willing workers who will sign on to their dead end careers in service work.
Tips are a restaurants way of paying people as little as possible. I don't know how prevalent this is but one person told me any tips they got reduced their base wage. So if for example they make 3.25 an hour and also make 3.25 an hour in tips they would get 0 dollars in pay and only get to keep the tips. It's disgusting.
I tip based on the service I get at restaurants. If the service is really bad then I leave a nickel. That is to show I didn’t forget the tip, it was to show I was very unhappy with the service, which I have only done a few times. I all ways do 20-25%, On a pizza-etc delivery I do 3-5 depending on how far they have to drive. When the food is really great, like a delicious steak I will ask for the manager and tell them to give the cook/chef my tip of 10 min., I have gave 20 a few times and of course also leave a tip for the waitress. I once had a waitress that appeared be pregnant and really busting her rear and I could tell she was really stressed but always put on a smile at every table she waited on, left her a 100 tip, only done that once.
Not tipping usually says more about the customer than the server. If the service is bad, complain to the manager.
I tip without regard to bra size or other irrelevant issues. Minimum $5 moi matter how small there bill, and usually a quarter of the bill of they did something nice, like grabbed a box for me. If they were outstanding and helped me pick out a great meal I also show extra appreciation. I see the wait staff as agents to my best dining experience. If they let me down I still respond to their need to earn a living. I might offer advice if it seems likely they'll be receptive.
@Mike403 Often people are uneducated about standard tipping protocols. In Philly, most people understood how the tip was derived from the retail value of the service rather than the discounted rate offered by the spa. Still, there was a wide disparity. When seniors tipped me $5 on an hour service, I never batted an eye. Kids out on the town at night often skipped out because, that's what they do. I used to work at this factory where my brother was an engineer. The new manager was this young guy brought up from the ranks of wage workers who ran the candy molding lines. He had a strong Pennsylvania Dutch background. They needed to go to Chicago to look at some equipment for the new molding line. Out at a very posh restaurant the bill was in the hundreds of dollars. This manager tipped $10. The head of the wait staff came out and asked him, "Sir! Was everything alright?" 😂 He was like, yeah there was no problem whatsoever. He just needed to learn a few of the ins and outs of doing business at that level.
A few points 1) employers should pay workers a real, actual living wage. If paying your workers a living wage instead of paying them slave wages leaves your company bankrupt, you did not have a viable business plan. If your business plan means taking from employees or having them depend on the government, you do not have a viable business plan. Shut down and go work for someone that does. That being said, I know most businesses that hire tipped employees screw them over. I always, no matter what tip a minimum of 30% and if my subtotal is low, yet they still put the work in, I tip 50%-100%. I am not rich, I am lower middle class, but my bank account is not the fault of the employee. Know better. Do better.