4 ms·
What Are Restaurant Service Charges For?
- ggm 3y agoThe article makes it clear they're a mechanistic contrivance for a restaurant owner to bypass legal constraint on tips, and increase profit in a cut-throat industry. The food industry at all levels exemplifies why organised labour is so important, and regulation. Food is front-and-center a health related concern, mishandling has consequence. Yet, we treat people in the food chain as the lowest of the low, marginalise every player from migrant labour picking it, through migrant labour cutting it's throat, to truckers delivering it, and then the people who prepare it and serve it for us to eat. But service charges are NOT the answer, no matter how ubiquitous they are. The article is right: they aren't going away. The problem here includes that for restaurants all to re-price food upward to pay living wages and extract viable profit would be collusive behaviour or, undermined by the same migrant labour focussed illegal economy undermining it. It's the restaurant version of CAP theory. Have yummy, cheap and safe, pick any.. one? It's a stretch to say you can even get 2. Normally I write on this kind of thing "oh this is a US centric problem" but although tipping, tip culture, the dependency on migrant labour in the food chain is really at the extreme in the US, it's by no means exclusively a US problem. Orwell wrote "down and out in Paris and London" about (in part, not in whole) almost the same suite of problems in the 30s, in Europe. Nobody wanted to fix the kitchen hot-mess then, or now, anywhere.