re: Has 20% become the new standard for tipping?

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Obviously, they would incorporate labor costs into the price of the food. I would prefer that, because at least the menu would reflect the actual cost of the food.

The customer then knows the actual price, and the waiter isn't dependent on the goodwill of the customers. Meanwhile, the restaurant breaks even. Seems like a win-win-win.

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until the restaurant closes b/c people won't pay the increased costs

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Those are the restaurants that go under after a few months anyways. Bye.

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In 2016, when the Danish restaurateur Claus Meyer opened his new-Nordic restaurant Agern inside New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, he decided that, in adherence to Danish tradition, the restaurant would not accept gratuities. Instead, Meyer set Agern’s prices high enough to be able to pay employees a living wage and provide them with benefits such as health insurance, matching 401(k)s, and paid parental leave—practices that are all but unheard of in the restaurant industry. Earlier this month, though, Meyer announced that Agern would abandon that so-called hospitality-included model in favor of a traditional tipping system, and that menu prices would decrease accordingly. In an e-mail, he told me that he felt that the policy had alienated certain diners and driven away needed business. “The wellbeing of our staff remains crucial to our corporate mission,” Meyer wrote, emphasizing that the restaurant’s progressive employee benefits would remain in place.

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Meyer is not the first restaurant owner who has tried, and failed, to challenge the American tipping custom. Over the past five years, dozens of restaurants have experimented with alternatives, including the popular Seattle restaurants Dahlia Lounge and the Walrus and the Carpenter; Bar Agricole, in San Francisco; and eleven New York restaurants in Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. (A Reddit thread on the subject lists more than two hundred establishments in North America that do not currently accept tips.) In the past two years, though, many have quietly returned to accepting gratuities. The casual-dining chain Joe’s Crab Shack tried eliminating tipping at eighteen of its locations in 2015, only to restore the practice at fourteen of them half a year later. Bar Agricole has reinstated tipping, as have Le Pigeon and Little Bird, in Portland, Oregon. In New York, David Chang opened Momofuku Nishi as a gratuity-free establishment, in January, 2016, but by the time summer came around he had decided to accept tips. Tom Colicchio also experimented with a gratuity-included model during lunch services at Craft, but he gave it up after a year. Some restaurant owners have cited trouble attracting and retaining front-of-house staff as the reason for their change of course, but the most common explanation has been the same as Claus Meyer’s: losing tips meant losing business.

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The good servers that make good tips(because they bust their arse)...would quit and find another job if they were given an hourly wage. 

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Go up 10% on prices

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