That’s a good question, and the easy answer is ‘they should.’ As the commenter above you mentioned, they use it as a tactic to advertise the same (competitive to other local restaurants) price people are used to. A more transparent way of doing business would be raising the price of the menu items to compensate staff fairly. The restaurant owners/management fear that if they do this it would drive away customers who believe the food is overpriced and look to their competitors. It’s easy to say, ‘just pay the staff a fair wage,’ but not quite as easy in practice. Most restaurants are small businesses just barely scraping by. The OP is right to be annoyed, but as always, context and a basic understanding of a situation’s underlying principles make the easy answer difficult to implement.
Comment on higher wages for the servers... by the customers. Fnbs
Jackolantern@lemmy.world 10 months agoWhy don’t the restaurants just pay actual living wage then?
redlink64@reddthat.com 10 months ago
GizmoLion@kbin.social 10 months ago
Put a banner outside saying "no gratuity necessary, the price you see is the price you pay!" and watch what happens.
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If I share the little green pieces of paper, I can afford a used Toyota. If I keep them all to myself, I can buy a new Cadillac.
Can’t hear them crying over a V8 exhaust right?
LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because they’re allowed not to do so. The answer is shitty yet simple.
Someone not tipping won’t change that either; all that will do is stiff a worker. This needs to be fixed by changing labor laws.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s entirely bullshit. A restaurant can absolutely pay a living wage and not do tips. Plenty of restaurants do it.
The simple fact is that servers don’t want that. They make more in tips.
LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world 10 months ago
… I didn’t say they can’t do so. I said they’re allowed not to. Since it’s allowed, that’s what they do.
Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social 10 months ago
Because then they'd have to raise prices.
Especially nowadays with so many people looking up menu prices online before going somewhere, it's a way to present your prices as lower than they actually are.
DONTBANTHISACCOUNT@kbin.social 10 months ago
It sounds like a hidden fee to me... Which is like lying to someone .. anyways at least that's what it looks like to me if not Fraud
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Because that’s not how it works in America. You know this. Don’t ask a question; it’s stupid. Declare your intention that it should be changed, and propose a way to do it.
If you actually care more than posting online, you can start a restaurant.
Jackolantern@lemmy.world 10 months ago
How come other countries can do it? Why not ours?
I posted because I want to drive discussions which lemmy sorely needs
AnonTwo@kbin.social 10 months ago
I feel like there's been plenty of discussion. Everyone knows it's a problem.
It continues to happen because there's no pressure to change it. Just discussions that fall into the abyss of the internet at this point, repeating things everyone already knows.
wjrii@kbin.social 10 months ago
Part of the reason there's less pressure to change it than you might imagine is that we now have a hundred years of cultural inertia working on, yes, the customers and restaurants, but also on the waitstaff labor pool. At this point, the Americans who seek work as waiters are generally the ones who feel they work with the system and even turn it to their advantage. It's far from all, of course, but the "best" servers at most restaurants probably feel like they're going to make more working the customers than negotiating with their bosses.
So, you've got restaurants keeping their list-prices low and a built-in workforce motivator, customers who expect friendly service and accept that they're culturally responsible for the staff's pay, and servers who stay at the job because they feel like they'll make more than the restaurant would be willing to pay as a "fair" wage (and they're probably right). Now, it's full-on bizarre that we have taken an entry level service job and made it an exercise in theatrical entrepreneurship, and it says some unsettling things about the underlying social order in the US, but I'm not sure that at the nuts-and-bolts level, it's as broken as the people like to imagine.
TheMauveAvenger@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Is that really what Lemmy needs? Discussion on a topic that’s been hashed out a million times before? It would be more productive to talk about the weather than to keep circling the drain on this shit ad nauseam.
outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
Because liberal mystification with fancy-sounding concepts made to make you feel dumb do you don’t realize it’s just creative surplus labor value expropriation
DONTBANTHISACCOUNT@kbin.social 10 months ago
THIS^
pay them , what You want to ... And increase the price on your menu ... BUT DO NOT STICK 😞 YOUR CUSTOMER WITH A HIDDEN FEE
flips table
ediculous@feddit.nl 10 months ago
Someone needs to ban this account.
DONTBANTHISACCOUNT@kbin.social 10 months ago
No no no no... Someone needs to unban free speech; at the very least on the ethernet
Ya kno what I mean ?