This five-part piece by restaurateur Jay Porter on tipping and running a tipless restaurant is fascinating on its own, but also interestingly resonates with ongoing discussions of teacher compensation, particularly insofar as they're both jobs dominated by middle and working class women. Some choice tidbits:
Now, let’s say that on a typical shift, a restaurant sells $1000 in food and drink. It would be reasonable that, to make that revenue, a restaurant has 2 cooks who work 8 hours each, a dishwasher who works 8 hours, and two servers who work 6 hours each. We can extrapolate from standard industry models that, of the $1000 in sales, there will be $300 available to cover the 36 hours of labor. It just so happens that this math means that everyone in the house will make $8/hour, which is of course both minimum wage and a poverty wage. But that’s just how the pie divides.
And yet, wait! We’ve forgotten something. There are also 220 extra dollars paid by the guests as tips. (This 22% is typical for restaurants like ours in San Diego — the exact amount will change with restaurant style and location.) This tip money could add another $6/hour to everyone’s wage, getting everyone up to $14/hr. While $14/hr isn’t enough to live well in San Diego, it starts approaching realistic money.
However, to give the tip money to every worker would be illegal. The law is historically very clear — the $220 in tips belongs to the two servers only, and cannot be distributed to any other employees. So, the two servers make a total of about $26/hour each, while everyone else in the restaurant is stuck at $8/hour. ...
One night a few months into the Linkery’s existence, I asked our best server about a table of high-maintenance guests who had just left the restaurant. Specifically, I was curious, given how demanding they were, if this group had tipped high or tipped low.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never look at the tips until the end of the night. It basically always evens out, if one table tips low, someone else tips high. You always make about the same percentage of sales.”
Another of our better servers joined the conversation to say that she did the same thing. Because, she said, “there’s too much to think about already. You have to not think about the money so you can take care of your tables.”
I wasn’t expecting this attitude from high-performing servers; I had accepted on faith that it was only the tips that motivated them to do good work. Now curious, I started an informal study of our team, watching how they handled the tipping part of the job over the weeks and months. Without exception, the best servers never talked about their tips — as far as I could tell, they never even thought about their tips — until after their shift was over. The best performers were fully engaged with simultaneously filling the needs of 25 people in a busy, crowded restaurant. It’s a complex job and they brought their full selves to it.
Meanwhile, I found that if a server did talk about tips during service, that server would invariably be among our weaker team members. Which made sense once I understood it — how can you be thinking about your guests’ needs when you’re thinking about your money? By raising the thought tips during service, these poor performers were, I think, subconsciously trying to bring their coworkers down to their level. The better servers would have none of it — they would reliably decline to take the bait of discussing money instead of hospitality. ...
Lastly, if she instead focuses her attention on increasing her section size — something which can be done in many ways, from coaxing/bullying the host or swooping in on tables, to emphasizing to the shift manager that it would save labor costs, or even telling a manager that the server next to them is overloaded and should cede some of his section — our server could bump her section from five, to say, eight tables, increasing the number of guests she serves in a night from 40 to 64. If she maximizes her section size, this will at some point stretch her to a point where her guests start getting poor service and are unable to purchase as much as they want. Let’s that happens here: sales per guest drops to $22 (a huge drop from the business’ point of view), tip percentage drops to 19%, and guests are less excited to return. This is a nightmare scenario for the business, and also lousy for the guests, but our server’s income before tip out has risen to $268, by far her highest yet. By pushing number of guests to the maximum possible, she’s made a raise of $58 on the night. ...
I began to notice that his hostility was not the frustration of a consumer who’d paid for a faulty product — we would occasionally encounter that kind of frustration, and this was different. No, this anger was much more evocative of a man betrayed. As we watched the scene repeat, I started to draw assocations with certain cultural archetypes — the rage of a man who finds out he’s been cuckolded, or the man whose lover tells him she’s always faked her orgasms. In time I drew the conclusion that our tipping ritual is only nominally a business arrangement. Under the surface, it is much more a convention about sex and power. ...
To sum up: I’m proposing that tipping allows us to assign women a role where any sexuality they display can be attributed not to their desires but instead to their greed for money. In doing so, we both dehumanize and desexualize women, in large numbers. We do this to shield ourselves from the cultural memory of a time not too long ago, when virile women called the shots and nobody was too concerned if your wife was getting around. (Because she was.) (Maybe she still is.) ...
I don’t see how anyone can defend a method of compensation that has as a primary function ensuring poorer treatment for every person who isn’t a adult white male. But apparently it’s important to us as a culture, that every time a nonwhite person, or a woman, or a teenager or an old person, goes into a restaurant, they be reminded that they just don’t matter as much as white men. Perhaps it’s because we’ve outlawed overt racism in our daily life, that we love the way tipping puts its boot on the neck of the outsider and reminds her who’s still in charge. ...
That made it all clear. She, like some other patrons, felt the burden of having to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Obviously, some people like that role, and some people don’t, but at the very least our culture has trained diners that it is their job. When you go to restaurants, you are responsible for rewarding and punishing your server.
This certainly doesn't prove that all monetary incentives don't work, just that tipping is a particularly bad system. But our new "scientific" teacher evaluation systems share a lot of the same characteristics, including, most importantly a strong disincentive toward serving disadvantaged children.
A very, very strong disincentive. Don't kid yourself.
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