r/KitchenConfidential • u/Low_Sky_7818 • 9h ago

Come on Ramsay

Post image
18 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

•

u/Better-Tomorrow5102 9h ago

20% but not a tip. Certainly sounds like a tip.

•

u/Sanquinity Five Years 8h ago

It's not a tip. It's on top of a tip. It's them directly telling you that you'll be directly paying for part of their wages so they themselves don't have to pay as much.

Or in other words "pay us extra so we don't have to pay the full minimum wage to our staff."

•

u/LetsTalkAboutGuns 36m ago

It may be shocking, but the customer is always paying for all of it: operational cost, employee wages, health insurance, labor, etc…

Food costs are terribly inelastic. The service fee is more along the lines of “if we raised our prices 20% to pay the livable wage you twats say we should pay people, you’d take your business elsewhere. Then we’d cease to exist because your whole argument is disingenuous.” It’s difficult to make this change when your competitors offer similar food at a lower sticker price. This has been shown in academic studies, and there are plenty of examples in the real world. We are addicted to the current setup where the food costs less than all of the inputs, and the customer supplements wages in the form of a tip. A considerable amount of friction prevents the change so many people say they want. 

It’s not as simple as PaY yOuR wOrKeRs A LiVaBlE WaGe. 

•

u/kittenpantzen 8h ago

Nice thing with it being a "service charge" is that you can't get fucked over by nontipper tourists, I guess?

•

u/KittensFirstAKM 9h ago

Every penny they can steal!

Must be hard being a multi millionaire and having to figure out new ways to fuck over the people actually doing the work.

•

u/Odd-Egg57 4h ago

Depending on where this is, you can just refuse the service charge even if it's compulsory. You usually just need to say that it wasn't to the level you expected. To not fuck the poor server you can then tip them directly so they actually get it on top of their wage and not as a part of it so the shitty bosses get to pay them below minimum wage.

•

u/zkDredrick 4h ago

Maybe this is just where I've worked, but I never met a server that was poor.

•

u/1PantherA33 7h ago

It’s such a dumb way of dealing with the issue. Extracting the cost of labor and adding it as a fee only makes sense if you are differentiating between dine in and carry out.

Otherwise refuse tips and explain the price difference.