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A good salary in the UK is any over £40,000 and not all service workers are paid the minimum. Minimum wage in the UK works out At £15k-20k per year so yeah, not

A good salary in the UK is any over £40,000 and not all service workers are paid the minimum. Minimum wage in the UK works out At £15k-20k per year so yeah, not a good salary but a lot better than the $3 an hour I’ve heard US restaurant workers get per hour. If you have to rely on the enforced generosity of customers so your staff can afford to live you don’t have a viable business in my opinion, and that seems to be the model in the US. If memory serves tipping used to be heavily frowned upon in the US until the Great Depression.

tptacek 6y ago
No, servers in the US do not make $3/hr; they're required to make minimum wage and have a starting backstop wage (that's the $3 you hear about), and make as much more than minimum as their tips allow. Of course, the US minimum wage is much too low to live on in most urban areas, so the minimum wage part is cold comfort. But servers in $$/$$$/$$$$ restaurants make substantially more than minimum wage in tips. By OpenTable's scale, a $$$ is ~$40/customer; a 4-top would be ~$32 in tips, a normal table is turned in 1.5 hours or so, and you serve multiple tables simultaneously. You can work out a rough range of outcomes in your head. Service staff come in an hour or so early and may stay a bit later to close out, and that brings the average down, as does sharing, splitting, or pooling, where that's allowed to happen, but it's still much higher than minimum wage. Obviously, this applies to higher-end restaurants. But then, higher-end restaurants are where the "no tipping" movement is happening.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  Yes I’ve heard this argument before as well and understand that’s why tipping is still pervasive however most restaurants aren’t $$$+ meaning most service workers don’t earn this amount and it still requires customers to pay more at their own “choosing” for the staff to have a liveable income. I was once chased out of a restaurant in New York and forced to tip 10% after they got both our orders wrong, what they did eventually serve us was cold, the staff were very rude (apparently he couldn’t understand our accent - I’m from the UK south and basically have zero accent) and the toilets hadn’t been cleaned in what looked like forever. Yet apparently I still had to tip or he would called the police. This place was rated as $$$.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Tipping isn't legally required, so this story doesn't make much sense.
    - simonbarker87 6y ago
      Well it doesn’t make the story less true, it just means the waiter lied to two tourists and used the threat of police to get what he wanted. Further evidence that US tipping culture should be abolished.
      - jolux 6y ago
        You thought that tipping was mandatory?

tptacek 6y ago

No, servers in the US do not make $3/hr; they're required to make minimum wage and have a starting backstop wage (that's the $3 you hear about), and make as much more than minimum as their tips allow. Of course, the US minimum wage is much too low to live on in most urban areas, so the minimum wage part is cold comfort. But servers in $$/$$$/$$$$ restaurants make substantially more than minimum wage in tips. By OpenTable's scale, a $$$ is ~$40/customer; a 4-top would be ~$32 in tips, a normal table is turned in 1.5 hours or so, and you serve multiple tables simultaneously. You can work out a rough range of outcomes in your head. Service staff come in an hour or so early and may stay a bit later to close out, and that brings the average down, as does sharing, splitting, or pooling, where that's allowed to happen, but it's still much higher than minimum wage. Obviously, this applies to higher-end restaurants. But then, higher-end restaurants are where the "no tipping" movement is happening.

simonbarker87 6y ago
Yes I’ve heard this argument before as well and understand that’s why tipping is still pervasive however most restaurants aren’t $$$+ meaning most service workers don’t earn this amount and it still requires customers to pay more at their own “choosing” for the staff to have a liveable income. I was once chased out of a restaurant in New York and forced to tip 10% after they got both our orders wrong, what they did eventually serve us was cold, the staff were very rude (apparently he couldn’t understand our accent - I’m from the UK south and basically have zero accent) and the toilets hadn’t been cleaned in what looked like forever. Yet apparently I still had to tip or he would called the police. This place was rated as $$$.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Tipping isn't legally required, so this story doesn't make much sense.
  - simonbarker87 6y ago
    Well it doesn’t make the story less true, it just means the waiter lied to two tourists and used the threat of police to get what he wanted. Further evidence that US tipping culture should be abolished.
    - jolux 6y ago
      You thought that tipping was mandatory?