This Is What Happens When Restaurants Ditch Tipping

In this week’s episode of BITE, we discuss tipping’s racist origins and uncertain future.

Sean Locke Photography/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

We’re excited to present another episode of Bite, our new food politics podcast. Listen to all of our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS.

Is this the end of tipping?

When Danny Meyer, owner of revered eateries like Gramercy Tavern and The Modern in New York, announced last year that he’d abolish the practice at his businesses, he helped spark a national conversation about whether paying a gratuity at a restaurant still makes sense. Along with several other renowned chefs, Meyer has revealed the ugly truth about the practice, which until recently was rarely talked about: that tips create a disparity between different employees, are fairly unregulated and easy to exploit, and are inconsistent and leave servers at the whims of customers rather than the employer.

Oh, yeah—and tipping has roots in racism.

In this week’s episode of Bite, author and labor organizer Saru Jayaraman tells to us more about tipping’s disturbing origins. Jayaraman isn’t against gratuities, per se, but she feels strongly that the “tipped minimum wage”—the lower wage that restaurant workers take home in all but nine states—has got to go. This lower wage hasn’t increased since the early ’90s—the nineties—and it forces a staggering number of the nation’s 11 million restaurant workers to rely on food stamps.

California is one of the few states where tipped workers earn the full state minimum wage. But even so, some entrepreneurs there think tipping is unfair. Andrew Hoffman, co-owner of Berkeley’s The Advocate and Comal restaurants, says the practice favors front-of-the-house employees.

“There’s nothing that we sell that isn’t the product of all of that collective work,” he says. “Yes, the bartender that night made the drink, but who stocked the liquor when it came in? Who washed the glasses when it was done? A restaurant is a collaboration. It’s a team sport.”

“A restaurant is a collaboration. It’s a team sport.”

Hoffman got rid of tipping and now includes a 20 percent automatic service charge on his customer’s bills instead, which he uses to balance out the pay across the restaurant.

But not everyone has been happy with their no-tipping experiments—in fact, some restaurateurs are returning to a traditional gratuity model. Tune in to our latest episode to hear more.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate