Then it becomes a competition not in who can provide the best service to customers, but in who is able to look the best to the boss. If that means being fast and efficient, and not minding if you step on customers’ toes, then the customer experience will falter.
the restaurant asked employees to sign new contracts that offered hourly wages for servers and bartenders of $30 an hour, according to Axios Denver. The new contract said they would no longer receive tips to supplement their wages
The article doesn’t say anywhere that they can get promotions. It seems to indicate that all servers are $30/hr and that no other levels exist to ascend to.
In other jobs a promotion comes with more/different work, added responsibility. Would that be the case with “good waiters” vs “bad waiters”? I suppose on some level you could have the good ones handle more tables at the same time than the bad ones, but there’s a lot in that job that doesn’t scale that way.
There are plenty of service jobs that don’t involve tipping which manage to have a hierarchy of staff without it getting overly complicated. It would be a change in how we approach situations where we’re extremely used to tipping, but I don’t think there’s any actual barrier to doing so. Pay staff the equivalent of what they make with tipping today, raise the price of the service/good, and just completely eliminate tipping. Then we can stop being the weird country that expects to tip in every situation.
