Need this nationwide. I hate having fees added on to the price of what I’m ordering.
Only fees that are entirely optional — like leaving a tip for staff — can be left out of the posted price.
Wrong move. They should have outlawed tipping too. No more hiring for shit wages and leaving adequate compensation up to chance. Bump up the menu price and pay your staff an enticing salary.
Agreed. I hate tipping. Some tippers will hate for tipping to go away because they can use their charisma to make a lot of money. More power to them but tipping is just a way for these businesses to keep their labor low. Many other countries don’t have tipping and can still have restaurants. For some reason the US needs tipping to be able to have restaurants.
Some tippers will hate for tipping to go away because they can use their charisma to make a lot of money
The funny thing is even if restaurants are forced to pay a living wage and not have tips as a subsidy, these servers would actually still be able to do that. Maybe not AS much as before, but between that and an actual living wage is bet they still would come out ahead lol
Agreed, but overall a good move to address separate and much simpler issue of predatory pricing (for the customer)
Heading to mother’s day lunch right now, set menu for $89 per person. Except it’s a 10% surcharge on Sundays, the only day that mother’s day is, so that price isnt really true at all.
This in Aus which I’d normally argue has better common-sense policies such as requiring sales tax in the menu price
I’m not a California resident but once on a visit I ate at a place. Paid the bill. No tip. Left. The shopkeeper chased me on the street to catch up and ask why I didn’t tip, and wasn’t the food good, etc. Embarrassed, I was with a friend who is a resident… I told her yes it was fine. “Then why no tip?!” Internally: Because it’s a tip? I didnt get some kind of exceptional service there. If anything they left us alone really. So what was I tipping for exactly? why not just charge a different price, etc. Externally: “Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t know”
Yeah, but you know how the system works, so you intentionally stiffed someone out of their income. Regardless of if the system is correct or just it exists and you don’t get to just opt out without being a gigantic asshole.
Ok… Thanks for your input I guess, but as a European, the practice of tipping isn’t ingrained in my culture as it may be in yours. Frankly, I find it bizarre and from the outside I also see many in your own culture find it bizarre also. If not downright predatory of businesses on customers.
Why not? If the waitron is counting on an “optional” tip and doesn’t get it, maybe they have more incentive to insist on fair pay or move along. … that’s what I say to myself , anyway, as I’m leaving the tip
If I go to McDonald’s and they serve me food. I don’t tip them. the same thing happened at that smaller restaurant. If all they did is walk the food to my table and that’s it, then why am I tipping some percent extra for them to walk the plates 3 meters (~15 feet)?
You don’t need to ban tipping. Several countries don’t have a tipping culture and that’s because the waiters are paid adequately for their work. Tipping is seen as a bonus after exceptionally good service.
The US should raise the minimum wage for restaurant workers and not make it the customer’s responsibility to make sure the waiter can pay their rent.
Do it like in Europe. Prices are all inclusive, any kind of tip is just a thank you for outstanding service, and not a necessity so the waitress won’t starve.
It is a sales business with service, like buying clothes. Can you imagine having to tip the salesperson in a boutique?
It really depends on the country. France and Belgium, as you wrote. Germany, they expect a tip and look at you angry if you don’t. Italy, they add a service charge at the end that is nowhete advertised. Turkey, they invent a random price at the end, complaints only taken if you’re local. (I’m slightly exaggerating)
In Germany it’s typical to do so just to make the change easier, you might catch an angry glance by making them make small change.
Italy will list a coperto or servizio on the menu.
It’s common place in London to include a 12.5% service charge on the bill now. But it’s not mandatory. You can literally just be like “please remove the service charge”.
It’s kind of interesting because as an American it’s like I get to witness the invention of service charges in real time. If you hear employee complaints or warnings from people online they’ll say “the restaurant puts it into a common pool and only pays the employees a small portion of it” or “if you want to tip the staff, remove the charge and leave them cash” or “the business isn’t legally required to share any of the service charge with the employee”.
It’s like you get to see the UK go through all the bad phases of tipping culture before we get to the version we have in the US while everyone knows the winning move is to just not start down the tipping path in the first place.
I was just in a smaller city in Germany and flew back to the US after that. I look German and speak German. When paying with card, Germany felt exactly like the US. At every restaurant, the tip request automatically came up within the thing used to process your card, just like in the US.
Italy, they add a service charge at the end that is nowhete advertised.
It’s called the Pane & Coperto (or just Coperto Fee) and typically amounts to a cover charge to enter, regardless of what you order.
Honestly not the worst way to run a restaurant, given that every table costs some baseline amount of labor and resources to tend.
It should just be included in the price. Not hidden as well as they can. It is just used scam tourists by lowering base price but increasing coperto
In Belgium and in France tips are expected but they are a bonus, not to have a living wage though.
Same in colombia. The price advertised is the price you pay. No need to calculate the tax in your head in the grocery store, just add everything and you’re golden.
We need European pricing where the price is the price. I would go as far as making asking for a tip illegal too. Have restaurants put on their menu that prices include the tip. Raise minimum wage for restaurant workers.
And not just for restaurants, everything, from airline tickets to concert tickets, etc.
I think clear signage and message on the bill indicating “tipping is optional, service charges is included in the menu price” should suffice.
Making tipping illegal goes too far, but I am okay with implementing it for couple decades, in order to correct a bad habit.
OP said “asking for a tip”. If I want to tip a particularly good server experience, everyone should be free to do so. But asking for it, and it comes to mind those places that explicitly stipulate that 10% is minimum mandatory tipping, should be illegal. That’s a hidden fee, not a tip.
Agreed. Though I was at the UPS store and they had a tip jar.
I was like: who the heck tips at the UPS store?
UPS: “We noticed you didn’t tip. Would be a shame if your package didn’t… Make it.”
People can’t let go of tipping. A few restaurants near me tried it and ended up closing.
Tipping isn’t just a part of culture but it also breaks up the spend for the consumer. You commit to a $15 burger now, then the $3 of tip later. Integrating the tips with the cost makes it seem like everything is more expensive and also makes it not optional for how much you give.
Which is why it needs to be a law all restaurants must follow, instead of a few trying.
…That’s why people don’t like the service fees, etc. It’s difficult to know, as a consumer, how much you’re actually being asked to spend. If you’re rich, haha who cares? Everybody else has to do this thing called “budgeting.”
Weave backed ourselves into a corner for tipping. Restaurants may be convinced to pay a livable wage. But they’re never going to pay the servers what they can actually make in tips.
I was about 5 years into IT, My girlfriend was waiting tables at Ruby Tuesday. Most days she made more than I did. And depending on how bad they ‘adjusted’ their tax claims …
That said, some days she did basically pay to work there.
I suspect if you ask the vast majority of wait staff if they would like to be paid and livable wage or continue a tip-based system they want to stay tip based.
I think that’s very dependent on age. When I was in my early twenties, an inconsistent gig with the potential for high tips was very appealing. When I got into my late twenties/early thirties I moved over to events and catering because they offered a high hourly wage with predictable(ish) hours. If the restaurants pay well enough they’ll be able to find people.
The real problem will be vacation towns. There are some places where most of the restaurants and bars close in the off-season. The staff will work their asses off through the spring and summer, then use their tips to live the rest of the year. For some of these towns, even if the restaurant staff wanted to pick up a job in the off-season, they’d need to drive two hours just to find a part-time gig at Target. I really want tipping to end, but I’m not sure what would happen to these places. The seasonal restaurants could pay more, but I’m not sure they could offer enough to subsidize their staff for half the year.
How’s that any different? You’d get fewer takers for a seasonal job, so shouldn’t pay go up? Just like they now get disproportionate tips, shouldn’t they get a disproportionate living wage?
I’m not sure it will scale properly. Tipping might outpace sales in towns like that, and I’m not really sure what the economics are in maintaining seasonal restaurant. And if there are fewer takers for seasonal jobs, the employers could pay more theoretically, but in the restaurant industry, fewer servers means slower service. Slower service means fewer sales, fewer sales means less profit, and less profit means lower pay. I think places like this would require a UBI program to maintain how they currently operate without tips.
It’s also really hard work. Waiting tables at a busy restaurant was by far the most mentally exhausting job I’ve ever had.
Good for her, but arguably it’s not supposed to be a high paying job. A living wage, sure, but higher than a job that you presumably studied for and required relatively uncommon knowledge seems wrong.
So I guess the answer is no, we wouldn’t expect restaurants to work out how much people get paid in tips and match it, it would be a liveable wage and if the current workers don’t like it they would leave.
I don’t know that your girlfriend getting bankrolled is common across the industry either, tips rely on high traffic and customers with big pockets. Most wait staff don’t brag about how rich they are.
But they’re never going to pay the servers what they can actually make in tips
Im not sure I believe that. I mean, I’ve also known people who said the same things, so clearly there are people who really make out. However I suspect this is highly variable and there are even more just scraping by. I’m sure it greatly depend on the restaurant and the clientele, as well as the actual effort, and I’m sure it highly depends on looks. That 18yr old hottie at the local hot spot may rake it in, but the elderly matron at the local diner works just as hard but with less opportunity
Everyone talks about tips being a reward for good service but tips are almost never proportional to service
One step closer to the fucking common sense of the rest of the world where the price you see for something is the price you actually pay. Nobody cares about a number that’s mathematically related to the price they have to pay, just tell me.
Great, now do tipping next.
Article is about California, where tipped employees must be paid minimum wage same as everyone else
“If it’s in the core price of the menu, there will be a pullback” in patrons’ spending, she told NPR shortly before the attorney general released the guidelines. "There are some people, I think, that are hoping that the restaurants will just absorb that cost, because we’ve seen people say, ‘Oh, it’s too expensive with the service charge.’ "
If you add bullshit charges that are not added into the price on the menu, I don’t return ever. So you may lose a couple patrons initially but they’ll be back once they understand that is the general price. You will also get me back since there is no more possibility of bullshit charges.
Oh, so you mean people won’t order your food if they know what the real price is? Well… fuck you
More that sticker shock will keep people from ordering an appetizer with a main meal if everything is $2-3 more expensive than when they last visited
unless it’s previously posted clearly to see before I order, I’d just walk out and not pay, because that is otherwise called “fraud.”
They do post it but it is in small print on a random ass part of the menu. Not technically fraud but absolutely bullshit.
I’d really love it if they did like some countries and added the sales tax(es) to the sticker price in stores too
There are a lot of things I wished they did similar to other countries such as VAT. Hiding all these fees seems deceptive from both the business and the govt sneaking in their taxes.
Fees are predatory on people who are swayed by lower advertised cost. Basically, they are extorting the way many people’s brains work. It’s just another way to keep the not rich from ever catching up. Not just in dollars, but time. If you try to price compare, you have to sink a ton of time into uncovering all the fees. The rich just don’t have to worry about that. So it ends up as a time tax.
It’s called a Bait and Switch and is a form of Fraud.
It’s just that in the US, the grey area between Fraud and “Sharp business practice” is legally way broader than the rest of the Developed World.
Kudos to California to have forces some clarification on at least this one form of misrepresentation/false-advertising/fraud.
I agree that these fees are bad and I hate them, but couldn’t you make the opposite argument that they serve as a (money) tax on the rich? Poor people will take the time to shop around for the best deal, whereas rich people will simply pay whatever for the product they want. Therefore hidden fees disproportionately are paid by the rich.
Genuinely poor people rarelly have the time to shop around.
Yeah how is this not me paying for everyone else’s guac at Chipotle when I don’t want it?
Because you knew your “friends” are like that and went anyway. If I’m travelling to x for the first time, how would I know? If I can avoid it by staying at x+1, how should I even find that out without checking total prices everywhere? Since it’s not covered in pricing comparisons, I’d need to go through the motions for every possibility
No, it’s always taking advantage of the ignorant or the hurried, regardless whether they can afford it. I shouldn’t require extra steps to avoid being ripped off
This might be a weird question but when people tip for a good service, what exactly is good service?
If I go to a restaurant I expect them to take my order, bring me the food and when I’m done bring me the check. That’s it. I want nothing else from them. Should I tip them for not spitting in my food or not stumbling and throwing it all over my clothes?
If I go to a restaurant I expect them to take my order, bring me the food and when I’m done bring me the check. That’s it.
I’ve been to a Michelin Star restaurant where a pair of waiters were constantly hovering over your table to clean it and refill drinks and offer provide conversation.
The chef comes by and makes a presentation of every dish (the bananas foster was practically a magic act, the way they assembled the meal and then light it on fire). The staff practically wingman for you, if you’ve got a date. Everyone is beautiful and charming.
But that was something like $300/person just for the table, with 20% gratuity as a fixed fee on the final bill.
There are lots of restaurants that don’t charge through the nose for the meal but offer comparable service. Charming friendly waiters who weedle your favorite food and give excellent recommendations. Staff that sing or make clever jokes or entertain small children or share a cocktail with you at the table. I know a few high end restaurants in Houston that will try to pouch waiters from one another because they’re friends with particularly wealthy regulars.
You see less of that now (at least in the states) because individual waiters are expected to cover more tables, turnover is more important than relationship building, and the quality of food has taken a real nosedive as we replace professional chefs with meals made in microwaves.
Now a tip is much more like a Coperto - a cover charge for seating - than gratuity for exceptional service.
As a mildly introverted person, this sounds like hell. I’d pay a tax to be left alone
A good waiter who earns his tip will have the skill to recognize that you want to be left alone, and will serve you quickly and efficiently and unobtrusively. Good waitstaff will quickly figure out what each patron needs in order to have an excellent dining experience, and then will deliver that.
Oh wow that sounds awful. I already don’t like when they come check on me mid-meal about wether the food is good or do I need anything.
Maybe eating out isn’t for everyone…
Eating out in Korea is great.
You need more water? They either have a fridge of jugs, or a water dispenser.
Side dishes are help-yourself; you just go up and get them. Unlimited and free.
The person who makes the food is sometimes the person who brings it to you.
No tipping, no tax added to the price you see on the menu, and no stupid prices like $19.99 instead of $20.00.
And even after all that, the prices are still cheaper than the bare menu prices for me back in Canada.
Sounds great!
I’m happy with the service at the local Burger King and sushi buffet.
For me it usually about timeliness (I don’t know if that’s a word but it makes sense to me) and if our drinks a nearing empty they ask if we would like another rather than having to spend five mins trying to flag some one done.
Simply doing the job quickly and professionally which for me makes my meal a little bit better. Also this is much more achievable for the staff if the restaurant has enough staff.
My tip heavily depends on how full my water glass is kept and how long my dishes sit in front of me before they’re cleared.
I don’t need chit chat or being flirted with, I just need my meal in a prompt and courteous manner, that’s worthy of 15-20% IMO.
Why is the price you put on a full water glass dependent on whether you got an expensive steak vs a cheaper pasta dish though? This is why percentages are so dumb.
It’s representative of the service ime.
Friendly, prompt with explanations for delays and either a remedy or some form of alleviation of the disappointment, good recommendations/feedback on food, etc. a big one for me personally is coming over only when you notice something is needed (drink low, people looking around, etc )
I’ll tip if someone does those kinds of things as it’s going above the basics I normally require
Once again, most of that is bare minimum expectation.
It would be the bare minimum expectation in some idealized world, but in the real world, it isn’t.
Good service is anything outside what you just said. Did you need to ask for any changes/ substitutions? Did you have an allergy they had to accommodate? Are you on a rush and they brought it out quickly for you? Are you splitting the bill? Are there children in your party? Did anyone leave a mess or did a drink spill? Were they extra helpful with recommendations? All these merit a tip. If they do exactly as you said and you were an easy customer, no tip needed (assuming you’re in a country where tipping isn’t customary)
Minnesota is currently working on a similar law to stop surcharges and just have a final price.
I realize when I go out for a special event, like I did Friday night to see Harry Connick, Jr. play with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall that I wasn’t going to quibble about costs.
However, after the non-optional 18% “gratuity”, they also had an additional “server” tip field. Ha, GFY, bitches!
At that point just increase the price of menu items and pay people what their worth instead of lying about the final bill
What are you, French or something?
If only Americans rioted like the French.
4oz smashed patty $17
Add bun $1
Add cheese $2-$4
Add $1: lettuce, tomato, onion
Add $3: grilled onion, any sauce
Add $7: sauteed onionz melted cheese, sauce +bechamel, fried egg, kimchi
Add $17: salmon
My new favorite is a hotel tax I just saw today which conveniently isn’t included in the room rate.
This has been the case forever. Itemizing receipts for hotels is always a pain and at least my company’s expense tool has buttons for more than 7 different tax fields each night. It’s like filling out a whole spreadsheet it the nightly rate varies.
Unfortunately, govt is the cause of that, not the solution. Taxes are always separate since they vary by location and are defined by the local govt. but yes it’s also a problem when that local govt wants to join in on fleecing the tourists, and it’s by convention not part of the price
Yeah. It would be really convenient to calculate if the hotels just stood around in one spot for years so the taxes didn’t change every time someone got a room, but with them constantly on the move who could predict anything?
On the tipping subject… it is just another way the well off designed long ago, to reinforce that the working class worked for them. Originally it was the business owner that they were targeting, to make sure they stayed dependent on the good graces of the elite. After all, back then most businesses were mom and pop shops. Now it is just out of controll, and used to increase profit margins as well as extract more cash from people who have trouble realizing the full cost.
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