18 ms·

Tipping on a digital device (iPad register) also doesn't make sense because the tip money is going straight to the bank account the owner connected to the point

Tipping on a digital device (iPad register) also doesn't make sense because the tip money is going straight to the bank account the owner connected to the point of sale software.

EpicEng 8y ago
It goes to the workers though. Are you claiming that the owners are not distributing them back?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Are they? Why do you expect they do?
  - tedunangst 8y ago
    All the servers I know seem to expect credit card tips to eventually appear on their paycheck.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >Why do you expect they do? Because they almost always do and it's illegal for the owners to keep it?
- DtnB 8y ago
  Not the parent but: I would imply exactly such a thing. Just like how, in some/most states you are supposed to pay a tipped employee minimum wage if they don't make the equivalent in tips. As far as I can tell from having worked in food service: that payout never happens.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    I was a waiter for years. I personally never made under min, but I knew people who did. They got paid. I also got paid every cent of every cc tip. What are you basing this on?
    - DtnB 8y ago
      worked BOH for years, had friends in FOH of many small restaurants and bars for years. Saw all sorts of shady stuff.
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        Sure, and murder is still a thing even though we have laws against it. All laws are broken by some people, but the matter at hand isn't "does this ever happen?", it's "does this happen so often as to constitute a massive and consistent pattern of wage theft?"
        DtnB 8y ago
        From another comment: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-with-wage-theft-lawsuits_us_59136869e4b0d928baa249b7 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-w... https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-restaurant-industry/ https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-r... https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year-survey-data-show-millions-of-workers-are-paid-less-than-the-minimum-wage-at-significant-cost-to-taxpayers-and-state-economies/ https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro... https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-pay-more-500000-wage-theft-violations https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-p... https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-steal-from-workers-wage-theft https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-ste...
  - berbec 8y ago
    I owned two Domino's pizzas for 15 years. I paid every cent in credit card tips to the employee, and never passed along the transaction fees. There were routinely thousands in tips weekly and I never even thought of keeping any of it. I started at the store answering the phones and did years of delivering. I understand tip money is the difference between eating and going hungry.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    What you've described is a state crime, a federal crime, and a violation of several different state and federal labor laws. Easily a dime worth of prison time, plus criminal fines, plus civil penalties, plus having to pay out the stolen tips to your employees with treble damages for the intentional tort you've comitted. Not really worth it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the calculus is so bad that it's extremely rare to happen at scale. Especially if there's a digital trail run by a third party...
    - justin66 8y ago
      It happens all the time. Connie Schultz won a Pulitzer for writing about this, among other things: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/connie-schultz https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/connie-schultz I can understand why you might think it never happens if you are completely ignorant of the facts on the ground but nevertheless familiar with the criminal and civil sanctions involved. It's about lack of enforcement.
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        I see a short article about a few dinner parties this author attended wherein the owners were keeping the tip. Am I missing the real data here? Is the real story somewhere else? That's a far cry from "this happens _all_ the time."
      - tedunangst 8y ago
        Weird how the proof that owners are pocketing credit card tips is a story about someone stealing cash from the tip jar.
        justin66 8y ago
        It has been years since I read her series of articles on the topic of tipping, although I remember it being influential at the time. It's possible I linked to the wrong thing, but in my defense I didn't realize that my post would be required to rise to the level of mathematical proof. Ahem.
    - 8y ago
  - siruncledrew 8y ago
    This is my personal experience from having worked in a restaurant when I was 17: the owner would "pool" the total tips for the night and then distribute them to the workers before we went home. The owner said pooling would keep the tips distribution "fair" because some workers wouldn't get a chance to wait tables if they had to handle takeouts behind the register for most of a shift. However, pretty quickly us workers discovered the math wasn't adding up. We would pool $300 of tips for the night and only have $200 equally distributed to us. When we asked the owner, he would say something like "you must have added wrong" or "the receipts only show $200", which was bullshit. After that happened, us workers made it a point to always make up an excuse to the customers why we couldn't handle electronic tips, and then immediately pocket the cash tips and split them ourselves. Fortunately, most of us left before the owner caught on to the point of becoming confrontational (it was a short job before university). Moral of the story is some guy in his mid-40s, who made enough money to drive a BMW, felt that he could deceive some young kids because he had the chance. In hindsight, now I know more about things like labor laws and enforcement hotlines, but at the time most of us were also being paid under the table (which we didn't even understand because this was our first real job) and were scared of having to face the IRS and lose the money we made.
i88y6 8y ago
That was the first thing I asked the barista once I became a regular and tipped Them: do you actually get these tips? She reassured me they did. What bothers me is the ACH networks still get their cut of the tip (assuming they get a percentage of sale and not a flat rate). No visa, you don't need 5% of the waitress hard work.
- ballenf 8y ago
  If it makes you feel better, you paid Visa not the waitress. You just subtracted that amount from what you left the waitress.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  You could choose to ditch the credit cards and just go cash only. Of course, you'd have to deal with your customers spending significantly less money. Plus you'd have to deal with the extra security costs of collecting, storing, and moving that money to the bank. The reason that vendors accept credit cards is because it's usually worth the additional costs. If you don't think your credit card processor is worth the cost, try dropping them and seeing how it affects your sales. In some instances, vendors have dropped processors entirely (like Amex and Discover) without noticeably impacting their bottom line.

Tipping on a digital device (iPad register) also doesn't make sense because the tip money is going straight to the bank account the owner connected to the point of sale software.

EpicEng 8y ago

It goes to the workers though. Are you claiming that the owners are not distributing them back?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Are they? Why do you expect they do?
- tedunangst 8y ago
  All the servers I know seem to expect credit card tips to eventually appear on their paycheck.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >Why do you expect they do? Because they almost always do and it's illegal for the owners to keep it?
DtnB 8y ago
Not the parent but: I would imply exactly such a thing. Just like how, in some/most states you are supposed to pay a tipped employee minimum wage if they don't make the equivalent in tips. As far as I can tell from having worked in food service: that payout never happens.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  I was a waiter for years. I personally never made under min, but I knew people who did. They got paid. I also got paid every cent of every cc tip. What are you basing this on?
  - DtnB 8y ago
    worked BOH for years, had friends in FOH of many small restaurants and bars for years. Saw all sorts of shady stuff.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Sure, and murder is still a thing even though we have laws against it. All laws are broken by some people, but the matter at hand isn't "does this ever happen?", it's "does this happen so often as to constitute a massive and consistent pattern of wage theft?"
      - DtnB 8y ago
        From another comment: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-with-wage-theft-lawsuits_us_59136869e4b0d928baa249b7 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-w... https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-restaurant-industry/ https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-r... https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year-survey-data-show-millions-of-workers-are-paid-less-than-the-minimum-wage-at-significant-cost-to-taxpayers-and-state-economies/ https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro... https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-pay-more-500000-wage-theft-violations https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-p... https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-steal-from-workers-wage-theft https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-ste...
- berbec 8y ago
  I owned two Domino's pizzas for 15 years. I paid every cent in credit card tips to the employee, and never passed along the transaction fees. There were routinely thousands in tips weekly and I never even thought of keeping any of it. I started at the store answering the phones and did years of delivering. I understand tip money is the difference between eating and going hungry.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  What you've described is a state crime, a federal crime, and a violation of several different state and federal labor laws. Easily a dime worth of prison time, plus criminal fines, plus civil penalties, plus having to pay out the stolen tips to your employees with treble damages for the intentional tort you've comitted. Not really worth it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the calculus is so bad that it's extremely rare to happen at scale. Especially if there's a digital trail run by a third party...
  - justin66 8y ago
    It happens all the time. Connie Schultz won a Pulitzer for writing about this, among other things: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/connie-schultz https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/connie-schultz I can understand why you might think it never happens if you are completely ignorant of the facts on the ground but nevertheless familiar with the criminal and civil sanctions involved. It's about lack of enforcement.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      I see a short article about a few dinner parties this author attended wherein the owners were keeping the tip. Am I missing the real data here? Is the real story somewhere else? That's a far cry from "this happens _all_ the time."
    - tedunangst 8y ago
      Weird how the proof that owners are pocketing credit card tips is a story about someone stealing cash from the tip jar.
      - justin66 8y ago
        It has been years since I read her series of articles on the topic of tipping, although I remember it being influential at the time. It's possible I linked to the wrong thing, but in my defense I didn't realize that my post would be required to rise to the level of mathematical proof. Ahem.
  - 8y ago
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  This is my personal experience from having worked in a restaurant when I was 17: the owner would "pool" the total tips for the night and then distribute them to the workers before we went home. The owner said pooling would keep the tips distribution "fair" because some workers wouldn't get a chance to wait tables if they had to handle takeouts behind the register for most of a shift. However, pretty quickly us workers discovered the math wasn't adding up. We would pool $300 of tips for the night and only have $200 equally distributed to us. When we asked the owner, he would say something like "you must have added wrong" or "the receipts only show $200", which was bullshit. After that happened, us workers made it a point to always make up an excuse to the customers why we couldn't handle electronic tips, and then immediately pocket the cash tips and split them ourselves. Fortunately, most of us left before the owner caught on to the point of becoming confrontational (it was a short job before university). Moral of the story is some guy in his mid-40s, who made enough money to drive a BMW, felt that he could deceive some young kids because he had the chance. In hindsight, now I know more about things like labor laws and enforcement hotlines, but at the time most of us were also being paid under the table (which we didn't even understand because this was our first real job) and were scared of having to face the IRS and lose the money we made.

i88y6 8y ago

That was the first thing I asked the barista once I became a regular and tipped Them: do you actually get these tips? She reassured me they did. What bothers me is the ACH networks still get their cut of the tip (assuming they get a percentage of sale and not a flat rate). No visa, you don't need 5% of the waitress hard work.

ballenf 8y ago
If it makes you feel better, you paid Visa not the waitress. You just subtracted that amount from what you left the waitress.
gamblor956 8y ago
You could choose to ditch the credit cards and just go cash only. Of course, you'd have to deal with your customers spending significantly less money. Plus you'd have to deal with the extra security costs of collecting, storing, and moving that money to the bank. The reason that vendors accept credit cards is because it's usually worth the additional costs. If you don't think your credit card processor is worth the cost, try dropping them and seeing how it affects your sales. In some instances, vendors have dropped processors entirely (like Amex and Discover) without noticeably impacting their bottom line.