re: CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack, bans tipping

Strak house

Them selling that suit gets them that.....

Whatever is takds

Are you having a stroke?

quote:

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sometimes 500 a night. This is especially true if you have been there a while and have built a solid base of regulars

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Why do you think a restaurant might have regulars? Is it because people love the waiters so much that they go to the restaurant just to bask in the waiters personality? No, they go there for the food. The waiter may be making $500 on a good night but the guy cooking your food is only making $75. What is his incentive to do a good job? I will go out on a limb and say the breakdown of enjoyment of a dining experience is not 85% waitstaff/15% food quality.
This guy is trying to even out the playing field and I think this is a good thing.

After reading this thread I am guessing most of you have never waited tables before. I waited tables in college 6-8 years ago and I still have nightmares about it.

It's a job that sounds easy on the surface, and if you have tables that are respectful and have realistic expectations on what kind of service they will get, its an easy job.

The hard part is dealing with tables full of whining complainers who are literally looking for any reason at all to complain so they either don't have to tip you or they can get comped food from the manager.

Dealing with the latter can be a nightmare. And based on this thread and other posts I have seen on the OT a lot of you probably fall into that category.

I had a good base of regulars I built up over the years. A lot of them become my regulars because they saw how shitty I was being treated my another table and felt sympathy for me, and told me "If I were you I wouldn't have been able to handle that and I would have gone off on them".

Not having to work on tips would make waiting on those whiny complainy tables easier, but on the flipside it would eliminate the tables who rewarded you for good service with a high tip.

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I don't understand why there is an additional 10% increase on top of what it used to cost to eat and tip. This sounds like he is just hiking prices and hiding it behind a progressive idea (at least for in the U.S.) I wouldn't mind paying more and knowing tip was already included but I wouldn't want to see an additional 10% hike on top of that, not unless there was an increase in service or food quality.

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What they say...
"In an ideal world, eliminating tipping would be an easy matter of moving money from one bucket to another, with restaurants simply having to raise menu prices by 15 to 20 percent to make up for what patrons would have left as a gratuity. But it’s likely that USHG’s prices will go up even higher. "The average person is going to do the math and say I was going to pay A plus B anyway," Meyer explained of his reasoning. "In our case, it’s going to be A plus B plus C, because in addition to the 20 percent you would’ve tipped, we’re also trying to right what has been a labor of wrong, and that’s going to cost a couple more points on top of that. So it’s riskier, what we’re trying to do."

I'm not a operations guy or an accountant, but my guess the real reason for the additional 10% is to cover the extra payroll tax that they will have to pay.

And you are correct, this is mostly a feel good progressive BS. It's also about Danny Meyer creating his legacy. This non-tipping ban will fail for most of his restaurants, but that won't matter because he tried and his heart was in the right place. Yet they will declare it a victory and a great first step to righting the wrongs of the evil tipping system.