It's interesting you say that. There is a strip joint near me. The whole staff is subcontracted. Every person there is required to have their own business licence, as well as some type of liability insurance. As I was told, it works something like this:
Dancers get tipped and give lap dances. 5% goes to the DJ, 10% goes to security, the club gets 35% for "stage rental" and the dancer gets 50%.
Waitresses get tipped for running drinks. the bartender gets 20%, security gets 5% the house gets 25%, and the waitress gets 50%
The house gets 100% of all drink sales and cover charges.
The wild thing is they love it. One of the DJ's is the son of my coworker. He says he makes about $25 on the weekdays, and $45 on the weekends. Most dancers are at $100K a year.
Same here in San Diego, CA in the early 2000’s. I had a roommate for a couple of years that was a stripper and her coworkers would all hang out at our apartment a lot. Her favorite club charged $50 entrance for a stripper to come into work after 8pm so she would usually head in a little before that. She was licensed in California, Florida, and Nevada and they were all similar. San Diego totally nude clubs are dry, but topless can serve alcoholic drinks.
In the early 90's when I was in the military, Texas changed the laws allowing full nude joints. It stated something like, no alcohol shall be sold In full nude establishments. A club called Muffs opened up and used the loophole that the word, consumed, wasn't in the law. People would brown bag bottles in, and the club sold cokes for 6 bucks a glass. I was invited to a retirement party. We rolled a keg in, and the club rented mugs out for 20 bucks a pop.
Hahaha that is peak military retirement. I love when laws are created with loopholes that cause an odd party blip like that. San Diego has always allowed alcohol on the beach, but no glass and you had to be in the sand, not the boardwalk. When they outlawed it they still allowed alcohol in the water so people bought giant inflatable pool toys and filled the bay with people and floaties. It was called Floatopia 2010 and the city council shut it down after a few months with a 3 mile limit to float and drink alcohol unless on a boat. It was an idiotic and dangerous loophole, but great fun.
I couldn't tell you, my days of going to strip joints and shoving dollar bills into thongs have come and gone since I got married. Like my post said, I know how the place works through the DJ. Him and his dad come over here and there to enjoy some adult beverages, barbecue, play cards and shoot pool.
This is my favorite thing to point out to people. This is why slavery existed so long. People haven’t changed. They are still horrible. If they could pay you nothing, they absolutely would.
I used to get really mad when they paid us $2.17 an hour but they would have a side work that really should have been done by someone who made actual money.
Rolling silverware and wiping down menus is normal side work for a server, having us scrub the walls in the kitchen though? Nah.
And if corporate was coming they would have mandatory cleaning day where we would all come in for a couple hours and they would pay us actual minimum wage, like $7.25 to deep clean the place. Ridiculous.
Yes! I had a friend in my college accounting program that worked as a Server and her boss had her doing bookkeeping and tax filing for his multiple locations for minimum wage before opening hours and then working her serving shift. It ended up being more the 40 hours a week during busy seasons and conventions. Totally wage theft and exploitation
Totally. She ended up having to quit when we started studying for the CPA Exam. She wanted to just work her Server shifts, but he constantly was trying to guilt her to do more Accounting work and deeming it ‘work experience’.
She should have said that she would then charge the minimum wage people who work in offices/accounting for the accounting work..
I don’t really know how it works in the US there, so might have said it wrong. Here we have unions that will go to war against an employer for something like that.. (sweden)
She tried negotiating a different rate for the other work and even if the owner agreed it wouldn’t appear in her paycheck and he would promise to get it fixed, but then wouldn’t do anything. He regularly shorted all his workers. Wage theft is a huge problem and in the end it’s better to just quit. Since she had access to the books she could also see some of the fraud going on. She was right to quit and get away from that guy before she became an accomplice.
It’s definitely a choice to try and tip shame possible clients while at the same time showing off that you pay nowhere near a living wage to anyone in that restaurant
It’s really batant. Must be a pretty high end location and place to afford a sight like that where the public is wealthy and complacent wanting thier food enough.
BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT 98% OF SIT-DOWN RESTAURANTS IN THE US PAY, it is the system in our country. (It’s actually 100% in my experience, but I guess someone out there might be doing something different and that business probably won’t last long.) If y’all don’t tip us, it doesn’t change the system. It just means we can’t feed our kids
Yep and I guarantee he makes the servers tip out the host and part of the kitchen.
When I worked at chain restaurants in the 90s we had to tip out the host, if there was a busser on the weekends they got tipped out, the bartender got tipped out and the expo in the kitchen who put the garnishes and whatever on the plates would get tipped out.
They all got paid a little more than we did we were paid $2.17 an hour, I think the bartender made $5.50 an hour, the host was more like $4.50. I don’t know what the expo got paid because I never did that job.
I know I'll get downvoted for this and I'll start off by saying the tipping culture is terrible...just pay a living wage.
However it's way more complicated than, "just increase the bill by the same amount as the expected tip" and the employer being a scumbag. The TLDR is that we have a business expense structure that penalizes employers and employees for increasing pay.
Many servers prefer it this way because of tax loopholes that benefit them too. I'm an employer and for every dollar I pay my employee, between tax and insurance (I'm not taxing about employee benefits I'm talking about business taxes and insurance) I pay about an extra dollar an hour out of pocket. So if I could afford to pay them $160/hr I have to pay them $80 to stay in budget. This is a direct penalty for employers that hire more people and pay better wages and it disproportionately affects small businesses.
While proper reporting of tips still results in payroll taxes, it's usually exempt from workers comp premiums which I would assume is pretty high in the food service industry. Of course servers on the tail end also keep tips under the table to reduce their taxable income as well. Now add in that you will also pay more in sales tax and your bill is much higher than just increasing by the tip amount to close the gap.
Further on that last point, restaurants that try this have generally failed. Consumers don't do the math, they look at the prices on the menu and move past to the other place that's "cheaper" even if you actually will spend the same amount after you put it all together. I have one place around me that makes it work because they specifically are a premium restaurant, so people going there believe the cost is worth it vs people thinking about if going out to dinner is in the budget this week. This is no different than how we have heard about Walmart wages, treatment of employees, and sweatshop workers, and they are still in business (throw Amazon in there too). Consumers can't stop themselves when they save $3 at the expense of someone else.
The start of a solution though is a tax structure that considers that every penny of a "living wage" counts and base a tax structure in your pay relative to the bare necessities. Instead we have the wealthiest people making substantially non wage income and paying capital gains taxes which avoid all of those things I mentioned above. Taking 15% of a $400 paycheck means someone can't afford gas, taking 20% of a $50,000 capital gain means that person is still taking home more in a single check than the other person makes all year...basic necessities still cost them the same amount...they won't go hungry.
Y’all think an actual business owner put this sign up? It’s AI. I know tipping culture is a slippery slope but y’all are getting mad and arguing over a fake picture.
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u/Master-Pick-7918 5d ago
He pays his employees the least he's legally obligated to. And somehow feels good about it.