higher wages for the servers... by the customers. Fnbs

Etterra , 10 months ago

The thing is, by paying for food we should be paying the employees - that’s how salaries work. But in an effort to out-compete each other in the razor-thin margin business that is most restaurants, they don’t want their menu prices to go up, because that discourages customer spending. So many restaurants use underhanded tactics to screw customers instead. Hidden menu prices, sneaky service fees, and begging for point-of-sale tips at places where they’re not getting paid shitty server salaries (like fast food).

superkret , 10 months ago

But for some reason, those menu prices still are higher than for example in Germany, where service charge isn’t a thing and tips are “round up so I don’t get small change back”.

Carighan , 10 months ago

Probably because in our atmosphere we more readily criticize bosses taking 90%+ off the top, while in the US it’s entirely normal that any increase in prices goes entirely into the manager pockets and the servers continue to be paid just enough to physically survive so they can show up for work again.

And sure, it happens a lot over here, too. But to a lesser degree, and not as readily. The base climate is different.

glimpseintotheshit , 10 months ago

I disagree. Those prices are pretty typical for most (proper) german restaurants and i would even say some of it is on the more affordable side. Also, while tipping culture isn’t what it is in the US, giving less than 10% will make the waiter almost certainly hate you.

That’s no excuse for that outrageous “service fee”, of course.

feifei , 10 months ago

Best to cook at home

eestileib , 10 months ago

That place is already out of my price range before the 18%!

FleetingTit , 10 months ago

Where the fuck did they come up with 18% being 20 odd dollars?

quicksand , 10 months ago

By using this little thing called arithmetic

FleetingTit , 10 months ago

Oh damn, sure. The total includes this bs charge. I’m stupid.

quicksand , 10 months ago

Sorry for the flip comment, but I couldn’t resist that dunk. I hope you’re having a good day

TheLobotomist , 10 months ago

The woman was cheap though

intensely_human , 10 months ago

They should serve something with her though. I never saw a woman so alone.

HughJanus , 10 months ago

If that 18% ain’t on the menu, I ain’t paying.

Fatbuddha , 10 months ago

Ok yeah what you are complaining about is valid but I can't get over the $22.50 for Kids Shells... Like a fucking a pasta serving for children?! This restaurant seems insane to begin with.

Edit: Realizing it looks like prices are a line off but still $16 for kids food?

Skyline969 , 10 months ago

Any auto-grat on a bill is an instant big fat 0 on the tip line for me. Fuck double dipping on customers subsidizing shitty wages. It shouldn’t even need to happen once. If the restaurant can’t pay a reasonable wage it shouldn’t be in business.

I would be completely okay with a restaurant charging a bit more for meals if they also had a “do not tip” policy. Wait staff should be expected to do their jobs, the restaurant should be expected to pay their employees. As a customer I should be expected to pay the restaurant, full stop.

RedAggroBest , 10 months ago

This isn’t an auto grat tho? This is them saying “You pay more so our employees get better pay, you pay exactly this much more for this effect”. Instead of them just cranking up prices like normal.

Y’all are bitching and moaning about a restaurant being honest instead of just fucking charging more.

TheSaneWriter , 10 months ago

This isn’t an auto-grat. The receipt explicitly says “This is not a tip or gratuity” and has a recommended tip line. This restaurant is either double-dipping to pay their employees less or scamming their customers.

magikfish , 10 months ago

If it’s not an auto-grat why not just raise the prices on the menu 18 percent instead of surprising customers at checkout. Setting prices to cover your business and staff is an important part of running any business. The way they’re doing it is intentianally deceptive. Even down to saying that this is so that they can pay staff instead of just advertising the actual prices in the menu.

Waldowal , 10 months ago

This isn’t an auto-grat situation though. This is the restaurant increasing their prices by 18%, then blaming it on the staff.

By not tipping, you’re just punishing the wait staff for the restaurant’s shitty behavior. Better to tip normally, then tell the restaurant you won’t be back until they get their heads out of their asses.

TheActualDevil , 10 months ago

Well, no. The service charge is there so the restaurant can use it to pay the wait staff if they don’t make enough in tips to equal minimum wage and they have to pay the difference. So if we tip, none of that money goes to the wait staff and goes entirely to the business. If they’re going to add a percentage charge to add to the base pay of their servers, then they should just pay them a living wage and not expect/encourage tipping. This is a business trying to take advantage of tipping culture and make a little bit more on top of their already established profits. I say we call their bluff and make them give that money to the staff.

Waldowal , 10 months ago

Well, no: dailymail.co.uk/…/Jon-Vinnys-sued-waiters-service…

FlowVoid , 10 months ago

It’s a service charge. That implies the money is going to the staff. So they are already getting approximately what they would have been tipped.

Now, maybe “service charge” is a lie and they aren’t actually seeing that money. But if so, then the waitstaff are complicit in that lie, because they handed it to me. And if I’m supposed to assume they are lying then I’m certainly not tipping them.

Waldowal , 10 months ago

It sort of is going to them, but not entirely. The restaurant is called Jon and Vinney’s. I linked to an article somewhere else in this post about them. The restaurant has explained that they do it because the minimum wage in Los Angeles is $16.04. Basically, as a way to be dicks about it, they decided to add the surcharge to the bill to point out very specifically to their customers how much more they have to pay so they can afford to pay their staff $16.04 / hr.

In their minds, they probably feel like they are villifying the government of CA, but, as you’ve noted, most people just confuse it as “auto-gratuity” and then stiff the wait staff out of extra money they would have otherwise gotten.

phillaholic , 10 months ago

I wouldn’t go back, but your anger is towards management not the worker. I’d still tip in this situation.

Cringedrif , 10 months ago

IMO I think the restaurant industry is backwards, why are we tipping at sit down places while fast food workers are making $14 to 16/hr? Makes more sense to pay those wages to a sitdown restaurant than a McD’s or BK.

malloc , 10 months ago

Name and shame. Fuck this place.

Also “kids shells” for $22? Please tell me this is not macaroni and cheese.

TheSaneWriter , 10 months ago

It’s almost certainly a Mac & Cheese variant. Stuff like this is why I heavily research restaurant prices before going out.

baked_tea , 10 months ago

Gem lettuce for $22? Wtf is the US smoking?

malloc , 10 months ago

Just Los Angeles things 🤷‍♂️

ZombiFrancis , 10 months ago

Since it is L.A. the markup is because of the volume of people willing/able to pay $22 for a kids Mac and cheese. At that point the tip is just mocking the workers of the restaurant.

arvere , 10 months ago

the most concerning part for me is the “LA woman” charge… is that just a restaurant?

Thorny_Thicket , 10 months ago

Those prices are about what I’d expect to pay at a restaurant here in Finland too, maybe a little more here but somehow they’re able to pay a living wage to the staff from that without extra “service charge” or tips.

rab , 10 months ago

You can also afford to buy a house. Finland best country

Amaltheamannen , 10 months ago

I’m sure it’s like every other country where a house out in the country is cheap but Helsinki is unaffordable.

Laser , 10 months ago

It’s the same here in Germany except for the cheap house in the country part.

rab , 10 months ago

Yeah don’t let that dude fool you, there are not really any first world countries where house in the country is cheap

matter , 10 months ago

What do you mean? A house in the city is almost always more expensive than a house in a rural area, in every country

rab , 10 months ago

Yeah that’s not what I meant, more like there are not many first world countries with affordable housing in any sense (like Germany and Canada)

matter , 10 months ago

It’s all relative but housing in Germany is pretty cheap as a percentage of income compared to most western countries

NathanielThomas , 10 months ago

Munich called and wants your claim laughed at

matter , 10 months ago

The place that, despite being by far the most expensive in Germany, has rents half those in London? Lower than Paris but with much higher wages? Thanks for proving my point.

NathanielThomas , 10 months ago

I want a cheap house overlooking Neuschwanstein Schloss, bitte

rab , 10 months ago

In canada, I make good money but will never afford a house except butt fuck nowhere Saskatchewan or Manitoba

My wife and I are actually hoping to permenantly relocate to Finland after many years of pondering. I am in IT so even Helsinki is affordable but we want to live in Vaasa

NathanielThomas , 10 months ago

You do have to live next to Russia though…

rab , 10 months ago

It’s a non issue, Finns won the winter war and were greatly outnumbered lol

uberrice , 10 months ago

I mean, that’s basically the way it works. Here it’s just ‘transparent’.

Want to pay workers more - food gets more expensive. It’s the same thing with America not adding sales tax to the sticker price. When I get something for 2 bucks in Europe, it’s 2 bucks including the vat. In America, it’s 2 bucks before vat.

But yeah, it’s probably not properly implemented and just a scheme to get more money out of people.

arsenick , 10 months ago

Except it’s contingent on people making purchases. If there is a slow day, you work the same amount of hours but earn less because your pay isn’t tied to how many hours you worked, but how many sales were made. By doing it this way, it takes the risk of running business off the owners shoulders and puts it on the workers instead.

uberrice , 10 months ago

What i meant is that, in a theoretical mathematically sound world, to support higher wages, you need higher prices. The service charge shouldn’t be put as a ‘bonus salary’ - basically the ‘service charge’ in most countries is included in the price of the food, and is paid out as the hourly wage to staff.

ThrowawayPermanente , 10 months ago

Wait a minute, are you suggesting restaurants are just normal businesses that can be run like any other? Because that’s heresy. Restaurants are Special, because Reasons.

notatoad , 10 months ago

This is the opposite of transparent. When I order food, I’m agreeing the pay the listed price for the item I ordered. Adding 18% on top of that when it comes time to pay is hiding that fee.

If they want to charge more, they should raise their prices

uberrice , 10 months ago

Well yeah, that was my point.

Americans for some reason love this 'low low price of x$ (+tax +tip +service charge +fuck you charge) thing. Here in Switzerland, it’s all in the price. Menu says 40 bucks, you pay 40 bucks. Tips are very voluntary and usually just a “round up” -> total is 57 - let’s make it 60.

My wife works in a restaurant and gets around 3.7k a month - the tips she gets add up to around 300-700, depending on the month. In the store she works, tips get handled as a pool where everyone gets their monthly share depending on hours worked (serving staff and kitchen) - so total tips x person hours / total hours by everyone.

It’s still a low wage (I make around than double her wage, but then again I’m an electrical engineer), but it is very livable - I lived on a lower wage alone comfortably when I was studying and only working 50%

maiskanzler , 10 months ago

Even if all the money does make into into the staff’s pockets, the owner still averts financial risk by making worker pay a function of sales. An employer must have higher business risks than their staff, because otherwise the staff wouldn’t need an employer anyways! This absolutely goes against the high risk - high reward scheme that is common place elsewhere. Want to earn more? Take a risky choice! Just want stable support for your life? Get employed and earn a regular wage.

jumperalex , 10 months ago

[face palm] that is an amazingly important point I hadn’t thought of / not heard discussed before, about the service fee vs actual increase hourly wages. I mean it’s totally obvious now that you said it.

And I really do agree with owners taking the risk if they want the reward. I will only say that there IS a place for balance, and reward for performance. I think the current tip system is tilted WAY WAY WAY too much to the server’s risk and needs to go away. I also think restaurant margins are actually too thin to go 100% wage based and put all that risk on the owners. I fear the bankruptcy churn in restaurants would be too much.

And yet it seems to work out in Europe so I’m probably wrong.

tony , 10 months ago

In Europe everyone charges what’s needed to pay the staff, with varying tip/no tip cultures. There’s no added risk. In the US unless everyone suddenly switched at once (eg. making tipping illegal overnight) then the restaurants that increased prices would be taking a financial risk because it might drive customers away.

In truth, food price probably works out about the same anyway… in the US the menu price has service charges tax and another 20% added on top of that for a tip. In Europe the price on the menu is what you pay. . it already includes everything except the tip, and tipping is voluntary for good service (depending on country, Europe isn’t one culture).

NathanielThomas , 10 months ago

I was in Germany in May and I didn’t tip at all for the first 2 weeks. Then I was having a conversation with my aunt and she said she leaves 10% and I began to feel bad about all the places I didn’t tip.

On my last night I took everybody out to dinner and it came out to 190 Euros, so 10% would be 19 Euros. But then I put down 250 Euros by mistake (not recognizing the right bills) and the server came up to me and said this is too much and he gives me back the money.

Nadalofsoccer , 10 months ago

Can anyone just fill a complain?

I have a feeling we don’t do enough.

It must be something to protest legally as a hidden fee or something. I would put money in a crowdfunding for cases like this.

Citizens against apathy or something.

K, just did my part gonna keep lingering.

PsychedSy , 10 months ago

The servers at a place that expensive make fucking bank. Looks like you do, too.

qyron , 10 months ago

Prices for food in a restaurant is not that hard to calculate: you figure the cost of one plate of food, multiply it by four and that is price to be charged before taxation.

One part is for the pantry. One part is for the kitchen staff. One part is for the room staff. One part is for the house.

Not hard to figure.

Drinks and beverages are basically all profit, unless you want to drink water with a refined meal (the healthiest/best option but most people won’t), so you will pay for a soft drink twice or triple what it costs you at the store and lets not start talking about wines, beers or, even worse, spirits.