RTP-area local music and culture

[Chris Calloway <ifoufo AT yahoo.com>]

--- Matt <matt.kalb AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Say it ain't so.

Depends totally on the restaurant.

Visa/Mastercard charge 2.5 percent on sales, American
Express charges 4 percent (hence, fewer places are
going to do business with Amex). There is a sliding
scale based on total sales where those percentages go
down based on the merchant's credit rating and amount
of sales. But basically that amount need to be
somewhere on the order of a major department store
before the scale starts to slide. A business like
Amazon or other catalog sales pay very virtually no
card fees as they generate huge potentials for
revolving interest charges.

Whether a restaurant passes that charge along to
waits' tips is a matter or the individual restaurant.
Some restaurants make their waits pool all their tips
(been there), or make the waits "tip out" the kitchen
staff a percentage of total tips (been there, too).
You aren't likely to know what's going on at any
particular place. And any of these schemes are onerous
to the waits because the feds force a percentage of
sales to be deducted from waits' paychecks as a matter
of collecting income tax on *presumed tips* (been
there). See, if you don't leave a tip, the wait
actually *pays* to wait on you, because they are
liable for taxes on presumed tips.

I would think for must restaurants, the labor overhead
in trying to calculate deductions of pennies on the
dollar from waits' tips for credit card fees would be
a case of diminishing returns, so only the cheapest
cheapskates of restaurant managers would do it. Large
chains with more sophisticated automated order
management systems integrated with the payroll systems
might do it except that they probably pay
significantly less in credit card fees than mom and
pop restaurants. It's an edge case any way you look at
it. But I'm sure somebody somewhere does it. If it can
be done, somebody will do it, whether there is profit
in it or not. There are restaurants who charge
employees for all kinds of things for the privilege of
working there and get away with it. I've been in the
position of calming a sobbing working mom wait once
where her SOB of a manager made her cover a $100+ tab
that one of her tables skipped out on.

And I've found a some reluctance among some
restaurants employees to talk about it with customers,
as straight dope notes. There's this local noodle
shop. They have counter service. There is a "tip jar"
at the counter. They also take credit cards. Being of
the somewhat reluctant sort to tip for self-service, I
asked the counter person if I added a tip to the
credit slip, would she ever see it. She said she
would. I was kind of incredulous. I asked if this was
really the case. She admitted that no, she wouldn't,
but that it was OK because the management gave them
lots of free food. You never can tell what's going on
with your tips.

All of these scenarios are arguments for moving to the
service charge system. If such moves are made, I'd say
legislation is needed to make sure the service charges
actually go to the waits and not the house (or even
divided among the waits and other staff), as some
European waits have told me they never see anything
from the service charges under their system.

Like the guy in the straight dope was talking, it's
quibbling over pennies. Just tip 20% on the full
amount (and easy figure to compute) and everybody
should be as happy as they can be under whatever
circumstances exist. The straight dope advice was to
play to expectations for the sake of harmony, given
the marginal costs of not doing so.

Years ago, grocery stores used to have people to wheel
your cart out to your car and load the sacks in your
trunk. It was appropriate to tip those people. It must
have been a problem, because at some point, grocery
stores started putting up these "no tipping" signs at
the checkouts and in the parking lots for awhile and
gradually grocery stores ended the practice of "curb
service," first by having you drive around to a pickup
lane for loading service (all grocery stores for
awhile had these danger zones on the sidewalk out
front where the pickup lanes were with cars whipping
around and grocery carts had removeable numbers you
took with you to your car to identify your cart in the
pickup lane), and then by eliminating loading service
entirely. Grocery stores employed fewer baggers until
now you get to bag your own, and even check out your
own. Whether this is a good thing depends entirely on
how much you enjoy those self-service checkout
machines. Or not. I don't.

What should really happen is businesses should just
forget tipping AND service charges, reward employees
with a commission on sales above wages, jack the
prices to cover it, and perform some actual management
of quality function to make sure employees deliver
good service instead of making the arbitrary whims of
random cheapskate customers responsible for guiding
service quality via contentious practices. Then some
of these yahoos who demand all kinds of crazy
accomodations in restaurants might expect to shut the
fuck up. The whole practice of tipping is unpleasant
to begin with for customers anyway. Hopefully this
would not mean going the grocery store route of having
to serve yourself from the kitchen in every
restaurant. Seeing as how tipping is an entrenched and
purely social convention, though, I don't see how the
opportunity would ever happen for restaurants, though.

Maybe that's a good thing seeing as how the grocery
store example suggest that the elimination of tipping
doesn't so much lower the quality of service as
eliminate the opportunity of service, and employment,
altogether.

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