Such bullshit. Put a price on your menu and let me pay and jesus let’s be done with it. Tip jar. Tip jars are preying on people’s guilt. They are offensive. Tip jars. Man.
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When I get a sandwich at Which Wich I always toss a couple of bucks in their tip jar. Because it’s a major chain I assume–possibly incorrectly–that the employees are paid the standard minimum wage, but most of them are also college students. They need all the help they can get.
What I learned from this: Tips remain a complete minefield that makes absolutely no sense.
They allow people to get ripped off by their employers and even people who live in tipping cultures can’t work out when to tip.
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It’s not even really about the tipping. It’s about the pettiness of being so god-damn embarrassed by the tweet that they called the owner, rather than simply just ignoring it. Had they done that, or had the owner stood by his employee - reprimanded the guy, maybe, but not fired him – neither the Milk Truck or the Wall St firm would be facing any of this PR flak right now.
It’s the petty, spitefulness of their actions that really gets me, rather than their unwillingness to tip.
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I’d be basically pro making tipping illegal, but that would require employees to be paid a living wage ($13? In NYC? Hilarious), something that understandably, a lot of restaurant and food truck owners don’t really want to do, because if they had to charge prices for their products that actually reflected the cost of these products, the customer would balk.
But as long as tipping isn’t outlawed, it is morally compulsory, even if it’s not particularly efficient or reliable.
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I have heard from employees at multiple places with tip jars that the tips didn’t actually go to the employees. Unfortunately, this is something I can only find out when I know someone who works at the place…
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True, and appalling story: decades ago a friend of mine worked at a movie theater where the owner used the “entertainment” exemption to justify paying employees the tipped staff wage. They were mostly kids working for spending money, and this was a small town where everyone knew each other, so no one was inclined to rat the guy out to the IRS, even though he deserved it in spades.
But now every time I go see a movie I’m always tempted to tell whoever’s working the ticket booth to keep the change.
Generally, any position that is tipped is tipped because the employees don’t make enough money WITHOUT the tips for it to be a viable job. At the grossest distortion, tipped positions can actually skirt around minimum wage laws because tips are considered an “expected” part of your income by the regulators, even if they aren’t so much because of D-bags like these.
I don’t understand why he had to be fired. Why did he? Do the rich customers own the restaurant?
I don’t understand. All I see is another story about how when rich people get their feelings hurt they have to be appeased.
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Thing is, all that has happened is that some company (reading their website, I’m still not sure exactly what it is they do) that no-one had heard of, now has a very visible profile of acting extraordinarily pettily, with no positives. I guess that it probably doesn’t matter to them, but I don’t get it.
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If someone upstairs had the common sense to just reply with a “Whoops, everyone thought that someone else got it”, and sent down a little money from petty cash, they would have turned that into a win for the company.
The problem with the modern elitist is that while pretending that they are better than everyone else, they also forget the thing called class that convinces everyone else that you really are.
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Oddly, Glass, Lewis and Co are an ‘Indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (“OTPP”)’
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I think one of the issues is that this was a huge order for a lot of people. It would’ve been nothing for them to drop a few bucks in the tip jar. That said, I don’t see them NOT dropping money in the tip jar as a terrible offense. If they felt it was not worth tipping then why did they get all embarrassed when they were “outed” for not tipping? They should’ve responded that it was a tip jar at a truck, not a waiter getting stiffed, and that should’ve been the end of it. But no, they got embarrassed at being perceived as cheap and got the guy fired. Now we all know they are cheap weasels. Great job internet!
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I don’t know. I don’t think customers would really balk if everything was 20% more expensive and tipping clearly banned. I think people might celebrate.
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$13 an hour? In NYC? Man, ouch.
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It’d take more than +20% to pay people a living wage. In NYC, for someone who makes, say, $13/hr, going from that to a living wage would be closer to a 100% increase (to ~$26/hr). That $10 for lunch just became $20. Since these suits had trouble parting with a measly 20% simply requested, I think they’d have a HUGE problem with double the price.
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Once on a Carnival Cruise I had gone to the sandwich counter so many times late in the service evening and seen the same hard-working guy working there, I came back the last night made my normal order and then handed him five bucks in appreciation. He was surprised and looked at me like I had a third eye, or I’d been the only person who’d ever done that.
Now I wish I’d given him more.
Slightly off-topic - but should every salary be a living wage? Should there be room for (even full-time) jobs that pay enough to help support students, second jobs, etc? Not trying to upset, yes, I’m commenting from a position of privilege because I am paid a good salary, yes I know some people have to try and live on minimum wage (or worse)…
There must be jobs (like this one, I guess), where if you paid all the employees $26 an hour the product would just be too expensive for anyone to buy, and the business wouldn’t be sustainable. How do you square that circle?
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What’s happening on Twitter (search @glasslewis) in response to this Boing Boing post is amusing me greatly.
Well you sure can tell who in this crowd has ever worked in food service and lived on the money
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