Do you mean the delivery drivers for delivery apps? We don’t use GrubHub or UberEats, but I know that they work for themselves.
The restaurants we use have their own drivers (cars have their own illuminated signage). Having worked as a bartender, I know some employees tip out and some pool, and some keep all for themselves. Just depends upon the establishment.
ETA: whelp. It helps to read slowly. I see that you mentioned the apps. 
We do that, too. When gas prices go up we add more to help the driver cover gas.
I’ve been wondering about this. Could a state create an emergency currency and require everyone in the state to accept it 1:1 with the USD?
The state would guarantee to buy it back in, say, three years, but until then it would be circulating in the the state economy, and presumably a lot would come back to the state in terms of tax payments anyway. As long as it remained a small enough part of the economy, it shouldn’t impact business’s ability to deal with out of state vendors. Maybe something that is just a money drain like WalMart, but even they have plenty of instate expenses (like wages) that they could use the state dollars for.
In all of those circumstances, it’s still a net benefit to the workers.
ETA: I’m not saying that to counter any point you made, just encouraging others to be generous regardless of the tipping system.
Pooling is fairly default, excepting places with small staff. It’s also generally a good thing.
Though pools at chain restaurants are often predatory.
Delivery drivers aren’t typically tipped workers or part of FOH/dining room staff. So they’re generally not eligible to participate in the tip pool, and it’d probably be pretty shit for then if they did. But most restaurants formats that focus on dining room service, and have a lot of tipped staff don’t have delivery. It’s not a very sustainable business outside of certain cities unless takeout is the bulk of the business.
But things are weird right now. If a place that usually doesn’t deliver is doing it due to covid. It’s probably waiters and bartenders doing the delivery.
And traditional take out options like pizza, Chinese, Indian or whatever are practically the only restaurants doing OK right now.
A lot of people are under the impression that tip pooling is bad for workers or unfair in some way. And take steps they assume will let a worker “keep the whole tip”.
This isn’t the case. Pooling flattens gender and racial disparities in tip level and income, and allows workers some level of wage stability. It insulates them from wage theft by employers. And workers at pooled establishments generally make more overall than at non-pooled establishments.
The other big thing people assume is that a cash tip is less likely to be garnished by an employer than a credit tip.
This is not the case. Cash is easy to grab, and there’s no record of it existing. Credit tips go through the credit companies, bank, etc so there is a record of them existing and it’s much easier to prove when tips have been stolen or get caught misappropriating them. The only times I’ve ever had an employer crib tips it was cash.
And kind of more importantly. If you think a restaurant is stealing from it’s employees. Why are you eating there?
In my experience, it is also used to spread the wealth to the Back of House staff and non-tipped employees like hosts.
This is typically illegal, at least as an imposed policy. And may not be the best thing for those workers. Hosts it varies. But kitchen workers are typically not classified as tipped workers, if tips passed over from FOH make up too much of their overall income they can be reclassified. Leading to lower overall wages, and loss of important labor rights.
On top of that the average incomes for FOH workers aren’t actually all that much better than BOH workers. It’s about $28k/year for the top 25% of wait staff and $36k/year for the top 25% of bartenders. But national averages sit at or below the poverty line.
So there’s not exactly a ton of money running around to flatten any disparity between the two teams.
Hosts are FOH workers and frequently do get a tipout of some sort from the pool. But they’re usually not paid as tipped workers, and keep their own tips rather than pooling them. Often enough, the host is a server pulling double duty. Or a manager who can not keep tips or participate in the pool. So it varies a hell of a lot.
But forcing FOH staff to tip out non tipped staff has been a common method for wage garnishment. And since BOH workers do not add to the total pool, or directly work in the dining room. But do draw off income. It’s generally considered a regulatory no no.
Technically management can not impose or mandate a pool, set the terms, or administer the money. Everything must be done by or with the consent of the workers receiving those tips.
In higher end places and more affluent areas, where FOH wages greatly exceed the average. It was once common to voluntarily send a portion of tips to the kitchen and workers outside the pool.
But as both the amount of tips, and the value of the overall incomes earned has fallen. The practice seems to have faded except in the very, very high end.
That’s where you get those high end, fine dining groups like Danny Meyers’ operation moving off tipping to a 20% service fee on every check.
By getting 20% on every check, no under tippers. And classifying no one as a tipped worker, and none of that money as tips. You escape the regulatory problem, and get enough money to not only pay people a living wage across the whole restaurant. But get them benefits and increase profit margins for ownership.
The problem is only the very highest end places, in the wealthiest areas have managed to make this work. Down market and in less affluent areas people are unwilling to pay the service fee, and most restaurants that it attempt it fail pretty fast.
The other problem is their customers keep suing them over it. Usually claiming they were unaware the service fee wasn’t going directly to FOH staff like a tip, despite it being printed all the fuck over.
Restaurants keep losing these lawsuits. As regulators and courts view this as too similar to wage garnishment. Even where restaurants win, the legal fees are too high and destabilizing. So most large groups that attempted this have since gone back to tipping.
It seems like a similar scheme is already operating in one town:
Also- whoever tweeted this, you called it:
Our state government has issued vouchers to unemployed people that are valid for restaurants only, either dine-in (with social distancing) or carryout. Local restaurants get a bump, and unemployed or underemployed people (who have had hours cut) get a reduction in their food bill.
To make an additional correlation with the experiences reported in the article, those are also the most likely people to sexually harass workers. Shocking, I know.
Sounds like it references both with the later rate where a smaller than average tip is reported.
I’ve seen other studies and articles reporting the same. Smaller tips on average and fewer tips overall. As well as higher occurrence of no tip.
It’s about what I’m hearing from friends still in the business and the accounts I service. Less business and worse business. Fewer checks, fewer people tipping at all, smaller tips. And when it comes to the restaurant both fewer purchases and smaller ones over all. People aren’t ordering multiple courses or drinks like they ordinarily would, and especially with take out orders it basically cuts your bar business to nil. People are more likely to grab a six pack at the store than order an equivalent amount of take out alcohol. Or linger to do so with onsite dining.
Sort of a confluence of every conceivable factor that can shrink tip income and restaurant margins.
Also horribly true.
Im a chef at a resort and conference center that is inside a gated residential community. We closed everything except a delivery and take out service in March. When we reopened indoor dining we instituted a strict mask policy. Based on the entitlement I’ve observed from our members in the past there have been little to no incidents of people refusing to wear them.
Same. If someone is going to brave the outdoors for us, we are going to give them hazard pay, full stop. I recognize it’s a privileged position to be able to do that in the first place, but I implore everyone who can tip more to do so. And don’t put more folks at risk by going in to a restaurant!
I’m sorry, this is fucked up.
So their only recourse is to raise prices and try to enforce a zero tipping policy? Talk about self-defeating.
Basically.
The issue with that is that customers generally won’t accept it.
The tip system in the US has kind of warped people’s impressions of the cost of a restaurant meal. People are insanely sensitive to the plate they’re used to getting for $25 most places being $30 at that one place (or $34 and $41, or $120 and $144 and so forth).
You can’t believe how many times I had people straight up yell at me that a plate of pasta “can’t” be thirty dollars while I was a bartender.
Additionally tipping gives people both a feeling of, and actual power over both the cost of the meal and service staff themselves. Customers in general love the base concept of tipping.
So what tends to happen is if one or two places stop tipping and just charge 20% more. People go to all the other places that don’t. And the non tipped places struggle, close, or go back to tipping.
It tends to work for a bit in affluent areas or major cities where the ethics initially attract business. But it never seems to last.
It should be a simple fix. Just charge that 20% extra that we’ve found over and over and over fixes everything. Do right by everyone. Tipping can fuck off. It just doesn’t tend to work.
As it stands the practice really only works out in places where a good portion of revenue comes from somewhere else. So tips can be ditched without raising prices much. Mostly hotels and resorts.
Until you get a critical mass of places going the no-tip route and the public gets used to it it’s not terribly workable. And that is probably not going to happen until we at least do away with the tipped minimum, and preferably ban tipping.
Not criticizing this study at all but it’s really disappointing that, this many months into the pandemic, we don’t have a lot more high-quality, data-driven studies that truly quantify the risks of different activities. For example, we STILL don’t know the relative risk of outdoor restaurant dining vs. indoor dining, which would be a very useful thing to know for guiding public policy. Is it half as risky? A tenth? What’s the riskier activity: eating on an outdoor patio on a sunny day or spending 20 minutes grocery shopping in a bodega that doesn’t have great ventilation? Thanks in part to a failure to pursue rigorous contact tracing nobody seems to be able to say.
This recently played out in LA country where a judge gave county officials an opportunity to present data showing that outdoor dining was an unacceptable risk, and they responded saying that the data didn’t exist. So the judge ruled in favor of the restaurants. (Current statewide stay-at-home orders override the ruling for the county, for now)
That’s exactly what I’m doing. Back in March, I took a vacation day, saw a movie (was almost alone in the theater) and had dinner at a sushi place. I haven’t eaten at a sit-down restaurant since. I’ve gotten takeout from my favorite sandwich shop and left a 100% tip, but otherwise, I stay home and only go out on grocery runs. Got my flu shot and will get the vaccine when it gets here.
I read about friends going out to eat. I guess because they want “normalcy” so badly. I just can’t.
But I think this might be huge:
The few times I am getting take out, I am tipping like 30%.
But that’s 30% of maybe a $30 check (two sandwiches) as opposed to 20% of $100 (two entrees, maybe an appetizer, a bottle of wine, coffee.)
So, I’m feeling generous, but they are losing 50% of my tip.
