We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it.
It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage.
It’s a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us.
But there’s a growing movement to change it.
Owners don’t want to charge more for the food that people eat at Restaurants fearing it will tip the scale and less people will eat there, so they lowball the menu prices, and leave earning up to each individual server for each individual table instead of paying wait staff a living wage. This is further exacerbated by serving staff being allowed to be paid far less than the meager minimum wage in most, but not all (CA) states.
I don’t believe that’s really true. Don’t get me wrong, I know they’ll raise the food prices. But it’s not because they’re using lower wages to buy better ingredients. Don’t let them convince you paying people a liveable wage isn’t possible. Somehow other countries all around the world are able to do it just fine.