Could this be the tipping point?
Bar Marco, a restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pa., has followed the footsteps of eateries in New York, San Francisco and Kentucky and has done away with tips.
Starting April 1, all employees will receive a $35,000 salary, health benefits as well as shares in the business, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. Staff will work a maximum of 40 to 44 hours a week, have 10 paid vacation days and get two days and one night off a week. Any tips that are left to the servers will go to charity.
The average tipped worker is notoriously low paid. For example, the base rate for tipped workers in Pennsylvania can be as low as $2.83 an hour. And a report from the White House says that the average hourly wages for workers in occupations where tipping is widespread (i.e. servers, hospitality industry, taxi drivers) are nearly 40 percent lower than overall average hourly wages. These workers are also twice as likely to experience poverty, with servers almost three times as likely to be in poverty.
Tips can also vary drastically between servers. According to a Freakonomics podcast, studies show that “blonde, attractive, slender, large-breasted waitresses in their 30s” consistently receive more gratuity than servers who are a different race or look different.
The biggest opponents of tipping also wonder why it’s up to diners to make up for a waiter or waitress’ meager paycheck — especially since the custom is practically unheard of in most countries. “Why is it our responsibility to pay the restaurant’s employees humanely?” says comedian Adam Conover in a recent video from College Humor (see below). “Why don’t they just pay [servers] a normal amount of money, and make the food more expensive?”
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The announcement of Bar Marco’s wage change has been widely praised since the story broke (and led to a flood in job applications). Critics have argued that the staff is actually getting shortchanged since it’s possible they could earn more if they received tips. But kitchen worker Csilla Thackray worked out that the change means an additional $400 a month in her pocket. “It’s a huge increase,” she says to Business Insider. “It means that I no longer have to live with that constant fear of running out of money.”
To make up for the salary hike, diners at Bar Marco can expect some higher prices on the menu, and its 10-seat wine room will go from two seatings a night to open reservations, according to the Post-Gazette. CNN reports that the business will also save money by buying whole animals instead of individual cuts and make their own sausages and pickled vegetables.
“We’ve done a year’s worth of homework for this,” co-owner Bobby Fry tells the Pittsburgh CityPaper of his three-year-old restaurant. “Our greatest risk is that we do not take care of the people who make Bar Marco so special.”
For restaurants that can afford to put more money into wages, it seems like a noble model to follow. As it turns out, perhaps the best tip is no tip at all.
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Tag: restaurant
Meet the Restauranteur Who Pays Her Employees a True Living Wage
Now this is a true example of thinking globally and acting locally.
A recent broadcast from NPR’s “All Things Considered” tells the story of Srirupa Dasgupta, a woman who came to America in the 1980s from India, built a thriving career in the tech industry and then left it all behind for something very different.
In 2010, inspired to give back to Lancaster, Penn.’s large refugee community, she started a catering service called Upohar to help her neighbors find work and get ahead. In April, she expanded Upohar into a restaurant. Dasgupta hired workers from from Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, paying them twice the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
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In the video below, Dasgupta explains how the name for the restaurant (which means “gift” in Bengali) came about. “I conceived it as a gift for the employees, as they get an opportunity to work, do something they enjoy, and earn living wages,” she says. “[It’s] a gift to the community…all this unusual food from different parts of the world that’s not available anywhere else but here.” (The eatery’s rotating buffet features vegan and vegetarian food from South Asia, Middle East, North and Central Africa, the restaurant says.)
She adds, quite poignantly, “It also has turned out to be a gift to myself.” Dasgupta’s employees — people who have had to rebuild their lives from scratch and leave loved ones behind — have helped her gain a different perspective on life. As Dasgupta says, when she compares her problems to her employees’, “suddenly your problems just don’t seem that big anymore.”
If only all restaurant owners could be like this.
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The Restaurant That Serves a Second Chance to Kids Who Need It Most
A hot, new restaurant is coming to downtown Dallas early next year. But Café Momentum does more than just serve food.
As Good News Network reports, the nonprofit restaurant will be staffed by boys and young men that have served time at the Dallas County juvenile detention center.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the new restaurant will allow 30 to 35 formerly incarcerated youths to take part in a 12-month internship that pays $10 an hour (well-above state minimum wage), learning the ins and outs of the restaurant business, such as food preparation, assisting chefs, waiting tables, and washing dishes. They interns will also take classes on financial literacy, anger management, art and social media.
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The Café Momentum program started off as a pop-up restaurant concept in 2011, and more than 40 dinners have been held since. These once-monthly events are held in restaurants around the city, where patrons dine on a gourmet meal designed by a popular chef, with food prepared and served by the formerly incarcerated youths. CS Monitor notes that Café Momentum’s dinners usually sell out — bringing in $8,000 to $10,000 each in ticket sales and donations.
The program is so much more than giving these kids a job; it’s an opportunity for them to stay out of the prison system. Co-founder Chad Houser (who will also serve as executive chef at the new permanent restaurant) says in the video below that while the recidivism rate for juvenile offenders in the state of Texas is 47 percent, of the 160 kids he’s worked in the last three years, their recidivism rate is only 11 percent.
“[This] means that in a little over three years we’ve saved Dallas county taxpayers almost $8 million,” Houser says. “That’s almost $130 million in deferred in lifetime savings from keeping them away from being career criminals. Think about all the lives that could be changed, all the good that could be done in this community with that money.”
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How a Man With Down Syndrome Made This Establishment the “World’s Friendliest Restaurant”
Tim Harris has Down Syndrome. He also owns and operates his own restaurant, Tim’s Place in Albuquerque, which is known around town as the “world’s friendliest restaurant.” It’s easy to see why. “We serve breakfast, lunch and hugs,” Tim said in a video created by AOL (although just last week the restaurant also started serving dinner). “The hugs are the best part.” Every morning, Harris gets up at 5:30 a.m. and literally dances his way to work. Every customer who comes through the doors at Tim’s Place is greeted by the hands-on owner, who introduces himself and pulls them into a big hug. In Harris’s eyes, it’s the hugs that make the place special. “The hugs are way more important than the food,” he says. When he was a kid, Harris told his mom and dad, Keith and Jeannie, that he wanted to run a restaurant. As he got older, his parents recognized that this was a dream that wasn’t going away. Now, Tim’s Place is a family affair. Harris’s dad helped him get the business started, and his older brother Dan is the restaurant’s operations manager. As far as the family knows, Harris is the only person with Down syndrome to run a restaurant in the U.S., but they hope he won’t be the last. “I did not let my disability crush my dreams,” Harris says. “People with disabilities, they can do anything they set their mind to. We’re a gift to the world.”
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