AWvsCBsteeeerike3 wrote:1. Regardless, for people working at a higher volume (possibly without the volume) lower cost venue, like a pub with $5 hamburgers and $2 beers or a Mexican joint with $6 all you can eat tacos and $1 margaritas, it seems like you'd have to do a lot of business or rely on people ot tip more than 20%.
This is a get what you pay for kind of deal, tip-wise, and a hey-if-you-want-to-earn-more-you've-gotta-EARN-more kind of deal for the server. The server at the $5 burger joint does not have the knowledge of the server at the $40 entree joint. The former cannot talk to you about the difference between the $32 carafe of California pinot noir that's meh; the seamless organically-grown $43 bottle of pinot from OR; the complex $67 bottle of Austrian pinot; and the $85 bottle of pinot nero from Alto Adige and make sure you get the one that's best for you. The burger joint waitress can't do that. If (s)he could, (s)he'd be marketable to a better restaurant and could make a lot more scratch.
I know the whole [expletive] foodie culture nowadays, everyone's an expert. But really, the servers in good places are experts. They have somewhere between a billion and a trillion times more food and beverage knowledge than even the best home cooks/oenophiles. They've stood in the kitchen with the chef explaining it, then tasted it and asked questions about technique, method, ingredients so that they understand it. They've spent countless hours at wine tastings taking notes and asking brand reps and distributor's reps questions about wine and spirits. A good server is crucial to a good restaurant experience, because they can ask the right questions and give the right answers. Talking to them is like talking to a lobby concierge in a city you're un- or semi-familiar with. They'll help you have a good time. The $5 burger waitress might do that, but mostly (s)he's just bringing you food and cleaning up the table after.
Haltz is spot on on page 1 here, re margins/pricing/etc. At the place I'm partner in, if we put a 20% service charge on everything, and shared that between the kitchen staff and FOH staff like they do at some other places, I'd have a few issues:
1. payroll tax goes way up--potentially threefold. The IRS made some changes this year: auto gratuities are now a service charge. They must be reported and they are subject to payroll tax. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all money should be like this. Well, it's not. And our business model is set up for the way the world works, not the way people outside the industry think it should work (sorry, Yelpers.) We don't even put auto-grats on large tables anymore.
2. my A-grade servers, if we go to service charge, are out the door to find a job at a place where there's no service charge. They will not make as much money under a salaried system even if they're making $20/hour. The best server at our place works 4 nights/week, from roughly 4pm-11pm. 28 hours. And makes $800-$1K/week in tips. He could work more--another 50% roughly in hours, covering six nights a week--for the same $800 (except it's less because there are no cash tips hiding from Uncle Sam) or he could work the same 28 hours and make $560 instead of $800-1000. While reducing his quality of life because he has just one day off/week.
3. chef has to either jack up the prices of the food or cut corners on the quality going into the food to maintain a good food cost because of #1 above eating into profit. The customer pays more for the same or gets less for the same.
4. Also as a result of #1 above. We try to keep our wine list lean and mean, inventive with very good stuff at very good values. We mark our wine up 50% over cost--industry standard is 100%. There are a lot of reasons we sell it low, but nutshell: it's good for us. We have a growing rep as a place to get good value on a bottle of wine. I ask the servers to ask all our first-time guests how they heard about us and we frequently enough get "from a friend who said you have a good wine program." This model puts butts in seats and pushes our RevPASH up. If we were a 20% service charge resto and our payroll taxes increased two- or three-fold, that business model would go out the window and we'd lose our rep as a place in a competitive Chicago market with great wine values. We'd have to charge the same as everyone else.
