Restaurant Marketing: Is tipping your waiter a thing of the past?

Is Tipping Your Waiter A Thing Of The Past?

Restaurants remove tipping from menu. A restaurant owner in New York is eliminating all tipping.

Restaurant tipping is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. It is customary practice to tip your waiter, 15% being the standard tip. However, for many, the practice can be a bit unsettling, as a forced tip may not reflect your satisfaction with the service.

However, new trends in restaurant marketing may begin to change the old protocol. Prompted by a new trend in minimum wage proposals in major cities, an increasing number of restaurants are experimenting with no-tipping policies as a way to counterbalance against rising labor costs. Specifically, Danny Meyers is experimenting with new restaurant marketing by doing away with tips.

A standard revised restaurant marketing model includes raising prices on average 20%, which helps do away with the disparity between what servers make and what -let’s say- bus boys, for example, make. This way, there is more equality for what everyone earns. It has long been assumed that people may make more on tips because of attributes not associated directly with how well a job they did serving your food. Perhaps the person was more attractive, or was better at small talk, merits that have little to do with the actual service or quality of the food. Now, with this new trend in dining, people can be paid more for their actual worth than superficial measures of how well you liked them.

It is going to be interesting to see how restaurant patrons respond to this new payment scale. Will they see the value in paying the increased fees to offset the inequity of the existing payment system? This remains to be seen. However, what does seem to be certain is that, in this ever-evolving economy, trends such as this will become a necessity, as we search for a more effective way to divide the wealth.

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