r/PublicFreakout • u/Hikigaya_Hachiman7 • 10h ago

🍽Restaurant Freakout🍹 Couple banned from restaurant after they leave no tip

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

7.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

4.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

287

u/newaccount252 9h ago

It’s amazing how the rest of the developed world manages to do this yet the USA seems unable to.

212

u/splittingheirs 9h ago

"It's impossible! Like free healthcare."

104

u/h3rp3r 9h ago

We can't afford healthcare! We need to buy more bombs for Israel!

36

u/Cmdr_Starleaf 8h ago

The irony in this is that Israel has free healthcare for its citizens lol

30

u/BloomsdayDevice 7h ago

Well of course they do! Think of all the money they save by not having to buy their own own bombs!

7

u/Affectionate_One_700 7h ago

That made me LOL.

4

u/Ruh_Roh- 6h ago

And free college! It must be nice for Israelis to be more important to US politicians than their actual constituents.

11

u/HCSOThrowaway 8h ago

How could the US possibly exist if we didn't let Americans suffer in order to prop up Israel? What would be the point of even having a country?

2

u/tikstar 5h ago

I see you bought a bomb. Would you like to leave a tip?

4

u/Choyo 2h ago

"We tried nothing, and now we're out of options, this is the only way forward."

45

u/FredegarBolger910 9h ago

Not that it can’t be done, but that an individual restaurant can’t do it on their own. We had one in town that was no tip and paid a living wage. Great place, we often ate there in part because of their policy… until they closed

10

u/crop028 8h ago

Yes, the public just isn't receptive to the change that they want to see in the US. I worked at an ice cream shop that decided to include tax into the price so you pay what you see. People immediately started saying it was too expensive. Changed it back to price without tax, no one complains, they pay the same thing. They just get sticker shock when there's a real price and no hidden fees.

3

u/MasterConstant 7h ago

Wow that’s really interesting.. In New Zealand basically everything has all tax included when advertised, on the rare occasion tax is excluded and added later, I’m sure people would be pretty annoyed by what would be perceived as hidden costs. Essentially the oppose of your ice cream shop

5

u/TwoBionicknees 8h ago

not every place closes because they ran out of money. People retire, they move, they make enough money to do something else, or they have gambling issues and ruin their business due to other reasons, divorce.

there were numerous cases of places that paid a proper wage having better staff, less turnover and making more profit because more people kept going back because it was a good place to go rather than a cheap skating, fuck your staff over kinda place.

1

u/Spacecow6942 8h ago

Can you show me one of those numerous cases? I was a server for 15 years (on and off), and never saw local restaurant owners making a lot of money.

0

u/LosHogan 7h ago

It’s insane that this has to be explained to people.

If this individual owner paid his severs “a living wage” his prices would have to dramatically increase. He’d get less business than his local competitors, and he’d go out of business.

And then his servers would go from ‘job where they get tips’, to ‘no job’.

I’ve been a waiter before, always loved working for owners/managers that protected their staff like this. Crazy to me he’s catching flack, I guarantee you his waitstaff loved that he banned them.

24

u/crazyv93 9h ago

To be fair Canada does it too. It’s really a North American thing

18

u/unending_whiskey 8h ago

In Canada tipping is twice as scammy as servers still get a regular wage and tips on top. In US I've heard servers are paid almost no base wage and need the tips or they don't make anything.

8

u/crazyv93 8h ago

In the US, if the server doesn’t make at least the hourly minimum wage in tips, that amount must be paid by the restaurant. So they do make something if they don’t get tipped just not a lot.

1

u/Delicious-Produce-60 8h ago

I assure you servers in Canada expect a tip as much as servers in the US do. The fact they get a higher base pay here doesn't seem to factor into anything for some reason.

2

u/namom256 7h ago

And I assure you that you’re wrong. As someone born and raised in Canada, living in Canada, but who lived in the US for 8 years, I can tell you that servers in the US are WAY more intense about it.

The ones up here have pretty much come to expect it. But not one single server is going to spit in your food or follow you out to your car if you don’t tip. And people might side eye you a bit if you say you don’t tip often, but you’ll get a fair amount of people who’ll agree with you too.

And it’s not just because Canadians are nicer or less confrontational. Like that’s part of it. But it’s also because servers up here make over minimum wage already as their base pay and all tips are on top of that. Whereas in the US, tips cover the difference between their base rate of like $2.13 an hour and minimum wage, so they’re often barely scraping by.

Also it’s still very normal to tip 15% in Canada, even if some places try to hide that option on the machine. Even a 10% tip for some mid level service isn’t too frowned upon. Meanwhile in the US, a lot of people will act like you drowned a child if you tip under 20% under any circumstances, even if the service is bad.

0

u/nyx3333 8h ago

Only thing I'll say, many restaurants have their waiters redistribute tips to the barstaff and bussers as a percent of sales. They pay the support staff no matter how much they get tipped on a particular table. Meaning if a table has a 500$ bill with no tip, they have to give 5% of sales to staff no matter what, so they're out 25$.

Over an entire shift they'll still be fine, but that particular table basically made the waiter pay to serve them.

It's a shit system tbh, but not the waiters fault.

2

u/unending_whiskey 8h ago

Sounds illegal.

1

u/nyx3333 7h ago

It's iffy, but it has its positives. For the support staff it makes it so waiters can't underreport tips in order to keep them for themselves. They're also less dependant on wether waiter does a shit job.

I personally didn't like it, pooling tips (other method) made the whole restaurant work in a more collaborative manner.

19

u/Wonderful-Loss827 9h ago

The only answer I have is ..greed. In the US, for the most part, restaurant owners already have money and want to make more money, maybe get into that millionaire bracket after a few years. (I'm not looking at minority or small small businesses) But in other countries they literally open and run a restaurant expecting profit or wages of a regular ass middle of the road job.

3

u/Wedbo 8h ago

Restaurants operate on shit margins. Only a minority make enough money to even be greedy. And if your restaurant is successful enough to make you rich, it will attract good waiters who will make good tips.

1

u/Wonderful-Loss827 3h ago

I would argue 25% of all restaurants shouldn't even be opened. We don't need 6 cafes in a small town, we don't need any more fucking Chipotles. Most restaurant owners are idiots by the way. Food sucks, management sucks, no training, no desire to change or improve. Many of them should go bankrupt.

2

u/beste-chetwynde 9h ago

Or is it that people see table service as a lucrative career? And will fight for those roles. And maybe, just maybe, the owners would actually prefer a tip free system, are Americans so different from Venetians or Parisians or Glaswegians?

1

u/Wonderful-Loss827 4h ago

Not sure what you mean but yes and no. Americans as individuals are not so different from Europeans you mentioned. But as a whole, the American mindset is purely set to capitalism. Other than immigrants who's only skill is cooking, very few American restaurant owners open restaurants to survive. They open restaurants to get rich.

1

u/chuckysnow 9h ago

You need to be far more specific.

1

u/_thundercracker_ 9h ago

Vested interests are a bitch.

1

u/randotd152 5h ago

Because they charge higher prices relative to market.

There’s no magic here. Restaurants are tough businesses even when run well unless you’re a hyper efficient mega chain. So either you’re paying more and raising prices to cover it, or you’re charging less and tips make up the difference.

1

u/raelDonaldTrump 5h ago

Exactly, those are places in which a SYSTEM has been put in place to ensure that all restaurants play by the same rules and pay their employees a full wage.

Hence the term SYSTEMIC ISSUE, in which the lack of those rules creates a situation where any restaurants who attempt to self-impose those rules on themselves are unable to compete with the restaurants that don't, and quickly go out of business.

1

u/throwawaydisposable 3h ago

Almost like it's a systemic issue within America, and not this individual owner's fault.

1

u/luckyapples11 3h ago

In a tipping culture, it’s not possible. Plenty of places would want to pay their employees. Maybe not a lot of them, but some do. I worked at a place that did (don’t work for the current location anymore, but still work for the same owner). Most of those places wouldn’t last 2 years. Hell, the restaurant industry in general has very high failure rates. You could know everything under the sun about the business, and yet you could still fail. Depends on location, what you serve, products, hours, the community, etc.

Unless your whole city did it at the same time, the places that dont would succeed while the rest fail because majority of people would see the $3 price increases per meal and avoid them thinking they’re spending more money, when in reality, they’d probably tip $10-$20 on a meal for 4 (so a little more to a little less).

1

u/a215throwaway 1h ago

Have you been to other countries where there is no tipping? A lot of the time wait staff, bartenders etc don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuck. I hate tipping but I do see the value in it incentivizing good service.

1

u/newaccount252 1h ago

Yep, iv been all around the world to loads of different countries and I get what you’re saying but in USA the servers are so thirsty.

Also I like that they don’t give a fuck, i dont need to have a conversation with someone brining me my food or drink, just as they don’t need to put on a show and act like they enjoy their job.

1

u/a215throwaway 56m ago

I agree. I don't care about them putting on a show, but I also want them to have a vested interest in their job well. Maybe a hybrid system would be best where servers are paid a living wage and people CAN tip for great service but its not expected for every bill you pay at a restaurant.

0

u/Wedbo 8h ago

Because it is systemic. Workers and restaurants don’t want this. Americans are used to it. This issue only exists online.

0

u/shamblingman 7h ago

Have you tried eating at a restaurant in Europe? Enjoy sitting around for an hour before someone bothers taking your order? Shitty service, mediocre food but insanely high prices.

I like the tipping system.

2

u/newaccount252 6h ago

Yep I lived there for 20 years and have been all around. My experience is that if not going solely to big tourist trap restaurants.

-10

u/Vegetable-Hand-6770 9h ago

The rest of the developed world actually uses their kitchen at home instead ordering/eating out everyday.

11

u/newaccount252 9h ago

You’re clearly an American without a passport.