Moral of the story: Do your excessive tips in cash without cringy fanfare.<p>Its humans in a barrel at the bottom, they’ll always pull each other down if you provide transparency.
US tipping culture is just awful. For anyone that comes with „yeah but you can show appreciation towards the servers“. When was the last time you tipped your plumber, mechanic, cashier, programmer, nurse or lawyer?
> After getting the tip, however, Brandt said her manager told her that she and the other servers who worked the party couldn’t keep all of it. Instead, they would have to split it among the bartenders, cooks and food runners, something that had never happened before, Brandt said. Normally, 7 percent of a server’s food-and-beverage sales at Oven & Tap are automatically deducted from their paychecks to pay those people, while tips are left untouched, her lawyer, Bill Horton, told The Washington Post.<p>I could understand the difficulty in handling this as a manager. Sure the other staff should be happy for the waiters receiving the tip, but in actuality there would likely be hostility among the rest of the staff that's likely paid less and have harder jobs.<p>She ended up being fired for going back to the person who gave the tip and telling him she was unable to keep it. Firing her was an over-reaction, but a restaurant should have a policy where the waiters should not be allowed to discuss tips with customers. It would avoid confronting customers about tip amounts or being pushy.
I very much enjoy Bentonville for mountain biking. I was just there Friday because there was a nice 72 degree day.<p>Oven and Tap _was_ one my favorite restaurants. The food _was_ amazing and it is a nice classy atmosphere, but until they apologize for taking legal action against a waitress for telling the truth, I'll be voting with my dollar.<p>The restaurant is so in the wrong here. They want it both ways: to short change their waiters by deducting 7% of their wage from their paychecks, and to seize tips. Unfortunately this is common practice, but it needs to be eliminated completely.
<p><pre><code> “ Normally, 7 percent of a server’s food-and-beverage sales at Oven & Tap are automatically deducted out of their paychecks to pay those people, while tips are left untouched, her lawyer”
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This is nuts, this can’t be normal. They deduct wages based on sales? So sell more, get paid less!?<p>Edit: As someone outside the US (in the UK) it’s seeing stuff like this that makes me realise how the “gig culture” type statups took off over there and have spread around the world. This would literally not be legal in the UK.
I think this is nuts. First you need tips to survive if you work in restaurants because the owners pay too little, then the owners take the tips and distribute them around. What's the next level? Make tipping mandatory? May as well put it in the price.<p>Just ban tipping and pay the employees a fair wage. Will be better and less stressful for all parties. Customers, employees and owners.
Tipping incentivises so many bad things, from these power dynamics where one benevolent human gets to look good and the receiver of alms is tugging their forelock in gratitude, to piss-poor wages and unequal distribution of money to those working, to 20% of turnover being completely off the books, and on top of that making a big fucking deal about a tip, the irony of rewarding a server while being self-serving!<p>All the rolling eyes I can muster while recoiling from this postmodern-Dickensian paradise.
> the restaurant normally takes a cut of servers’ credit card tips to divvy among other employees<p>This is the problem.<p>Management should not handle tips -- it should be done among the workers themselves. Some places split the tips with the back staff e.g. kitchen and porters.<p>Once management have collected the tips -- there is too much incentive to keep some of it. Staff will not know how much the tip "pool" is. The transparency is lost and thus trust or accountability.
"I wanted to do good, but I did not want to make noise, because I felt noise does not do good" I once read.<p>So the owner is seen as evil, the woman is fired, the co-workers are destabilized by their own unluckiness and the termination of their colleague...<p>I do not understand this fallacy to make a large tip and to advertise it: noise in the restaurant, video to the rest of the world... just to show off!
I think the person made the $4,400 tip didn't understand that the waitress was not the only one served them, not even the one contributed the most of the labor. Just imagine how other workers would think to let the the waitress alone take out the big tip.