We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it.
It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage.
It’s a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us.
But there’s a growing movement to change it.
It always amazes me how business owners are portrayed as greedy monsters instead of the pants pissing cowards they most likely are. If you need to raise the prices of your products to give your employees good wages, do it. And customers need to understand that better paid employees means higher prices.
That’s the thing. They don’t need to raise the prices to be able to give good wages, they just bribed all the politiciants to make restaurants to be excluded from minium wage requirement to able to pocket all the money themselves.
You make it sound like they’re pocketing millions a week, when the typical profit margins for restaurants are less than 5% and max out at 10%.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-restaurant-assn/summary?&id=D000000150&topnumcycle=A speaks for itself.
Fifty seven million over 22 years is pretty tame. Especially considering that the National Restaurant Association has forty thousand members. It would have only taken about seventy dollars a year per member to get to that total.
First of all, OpenSecrets only list public money as dark money is by definition not known. Secondly, they literally have the best deal possible so they have no reason to spend more money now. They are the only sector that has an exemption from minimum wage laws.
Whatever way you may want to present it they have enough money to pay fair wages. And if they didn’t they should close as not viable business venture.