Restaurant tipping: Will ‘gratuity included’ survive the pandemic?
The “No Tipping” movement has clearly arrived at a tipping point, said Kathryn Campo Bowen in Eater.com. In mid-July, when onetime leader of the cause Danny Meyer announced that he was ending his five-year “Hospitality Included” experiment at his New York City restaurants, the score was clear: “Tipping won, and decisively.” Four years after a national American Express survey found that nearly half of all restaurants had established or planned to implement a no-tipping policy, Meyer’s surrender seemed to complete a widespread retreat driven by necessity. The elimination of tipping is supposed to close the compensation gap between waitstaff and kitchen employees, but customers had balked at higher menu prices, and servers had walked out on the reformers in droves. Still, the need to address restaurant pay practices “has never been more urgent.”
And No Tipping is far from dead, said Priya Krishna in The New York Times. Scattered restaurants around the country adopted the practice this year because the pandemic revealed a need for more-livable wages. In Great Barrington, Mass., the Prairie Whale reopened with a new 3 percent service charge to boost kitchen-staff pay. In Seattle, Musang ended tipping and reduced staff to raise hourly wages from $25 to $30. The movement’s broader fate may depend on policymakers, said Rachel Sugar in NYMag.com. Meyer has joined other prominent restaurateurs in a broad push for “One Fair Wage” and an end to minimum wages for tipped workers that start at $2.13 an hour. Joe Biden backs ending the tiered federal minimum wage, too. But only Congress can make the change.