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>Then kitchen staff will continue to be paid poorly. Just understand that's the tradeoff.

If it’s a tradeoff it’s only a tradeoff that management chooses to make.

>How?

How what? It’s a business operating within a market. They will do something.

None of this is a binary mechanistic outcome determined by a boolean of tipped or untipped service. The restaurant has a budget and they will spend money and set prices as they think best, and succeed or fail based on that. There is no law that dictates zero-sum competition between kitchen and server wages, and all else static! Clearly in a market in which tipping is not practiced, a business will behave differently than the current market, and employees will expect appropriate wages.

>meyer etc etc

this is still another case of an employer making administrative choices about how much to pay different workers, and workers reacting to those decisions. if the waitstaff were given an equivalent or better wage to their previous wage+tip compensation, they would have had no reason to depart. this was explicitly not the case: the servers left because the transition gave them a pay cut.

it makes no sense to blame tipping or not tipping for bad budgeting and failed wage negotiations. the issue is in the allocation, not the concept.

again, this is a case of employers deflecting responsibility for compensating their employees.




If you're making the same amount of money as you did before, and you're paying the kitchen staff more, how are you going to pay waitstaff more?


the economic calculus of a restaurant does not massively change based on a switch from tipped service to untipped service. there is still money coming in and food going out.

i am advocating that employers be held responsible for paying their employees. the current tipped service regime fails to attribute that responsibility to employers, and leaves employees vulnerable.

i have seen no-tip service implemented in a way that satisfied employees. i have seen also it done in a way that drove staff to quit, and in those cases the fault lay entirely with management trying to reduce compensation.

stop asking questions about a fantasy budget. i do not care. if tipped service was abolished tomorrow, employers would figure it out.


> i have seen no-tip service implemented in a way that satisfied employees.

Have you seen no-tip service implemented with waitstaff earning as much as they did before?

> if tipped service was abolished tomorrow, employers would figure it out.

Of course they would figure it out if tipped service were abolished. But I am confident the outcome of whatever they figured out would result in lower take-home pay for waitstaff, as waitstaff would no longer be able to earn more money by switching to an establishment that allowed tips.


>Have you seen no-tip service implemented with waitstaff earning as much as they did before?

Yes. This entire thread is just me telling you repeatedly for twenty-four hours that equivalent compensation is the only thing that works.


I don't doubt that equivalent compensation is necessary to get waitstaff to stay. I do doubt that it's possible for a restaurant to switch to no-tipping, offer equivalent compensation, and pay the kitchen staff more equitably.


oh well in that case i guess we'd better just cut to the chase, expropriate the owners and collectivize




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