Went to a restaurant in LA today and when I got the check I noticed that it was a bit higher than it should be. Then I noticed this 18% service charge. So… We, as customers, need to help pay for their servers instead of the owners paying their servers a living wage. And on top of that they have suggested tip. I called bs on this. I will bet you that the servers do not see a dime of this 18% service charge. [deleted a word so it wasn’t a grammatical horror to read]
THIS^
pay them , what You want to … And increase the price on your menu … BUT DO NOT STICK 😞 YOUR CUSTOMER WITH A HIDDEN FEE …
Especially when we(customers) HAVE to pay tip 😉 … {{ Like 'TF was the person who came up with the hidden fee even thinking… 😞🤔 ? }}
flips table
Because they’re allowed not to do so. The answer is shitty yet simple.
Someone not tipping won’t change that either; all that will do is stiff a worker. This needs to be fixed by changing labor laws.
That’s entirely bullshit. A restaurant can absolutely pay a living wage and not do tips. Plenty of restaurants do it.
The simple fact is that servers don’t want that. They make more in tips.
I hear this repeated so often and it ignores one glaringly obvious fact, servers aren’t the ones making any decisions…literally anywhere. They are the absolute bottom rung of decision-making. It is most definitely the restaurants that are just fine paying as little as possible. Servers do love mandatory gratuity however. Working a party of 10 when only one person tips on their own meal can mess up your whole night.
That’s a good question, and the easy answer is ‘they should.’ As the commenter above you mentioned, they use it as a tactic to advertise the same (competitive to other local restaurants) price people are used to. A more transparent way of doing business would be raising the price of the menu items to compensate staff fairly. The restaurant owners/management fear that if they do this it would drive away customers who believe the food is overpriced and look to their competitors. It’s easy to say, ‘just pay the staff a fair wage,’ but not quite as easy in practice. Most restaurants are small businesses just barely scraping by. The OP is right to be annoyed, but as always, context and a basic understanding of a situation’s underlying principles make the easy answer difficult to implement.
I worked in restaurants for years and this is the correct answer. I also die a little inside at how many posts say to pay servers a living wage but then balk at the idea of paying extra for the meal. Where else would the money come from??! As you said, if they raise menu prices, their competition will undercut and do this. It would also affect takeout prices where tips are usually lower. People hate tipping and want a magic solution where waiters make more but also nobody’s charged more.
Because then they’d have to raise prices.
Especially nowadays with so many people looking up menu prices online before going somewhere, it’s a way to present your prices as lower than they actually are.
Because that’s not how it works in America. You know this. Don’t ask a question; it’s stupid. Declare your intention that it should be changed, and propose a way to do it.
If you actually care more than posting online, you can start a restaurant.
How come other countries can do it? Why not ours?
I posted because I want to drive discussions which lemmy sorely needs
I feel like there’s been plenty of discussion. Everyone knows it’s a problem.
It continues to happen because there’s no pressure to change it. Just discussions that fall into the abyss of the internet at this point, repeating things everyone already knows.
