You are correct. Restaurant servers are paid just over $2 an hour with the expectation they will make enough in tips to earn minimum wage. And even minimum wage is not considered a living wage. The $2 per hour is seen by most restaurant people as being just a way to cover taxes. In fact, in particularly busy times, on pay day, employees will owe the restaurant money on payday to cover their tax liability.
I disagree with this. In Minnesota they make the minimum wage, which is nearly $10/hr. plus tips and I've never heard any of my server/bartender friends owing the restaurant money for taxes, even when they were exempt from minimum wage laws. They'd quit in a heartbeat! They make very good money in tips, far above an hourly minimum wage and most of them work part time hours. If you are a server not able to average $10+/hour in tips alone, you need to find a new restaurant. If you wait 4 tables per hour with a $30 tab (which is very low) and only get 15% (which is again, on the low side) you will make $18/hr. in tips, plus your hourly wage.
I wonder if that's because of the American mentality (from an outsidsr's observation anyway) that paying for service via tipping ensures that your servers work harder. I always get the impression that most Americans think if there was no tipping then the servers wouldn't care and wouldn't do their job well, and that you the customer would be let down. By servers I mean on a cruise, in a restaurant, wherever.
So people want the ability to threaten to not pay it to 'entice' the server to work harder.
Does that make sense? I could be totally wrong as it's just an observation from comments I read and discussions I've had while travelling in the US.
No, that's not how tipping is viewed in America, at least that's not how I was raised and I've never heard of anyone I know viewing it that way. It's not seen as a threat, it's a positive thing, viewed as a reward, a thank you and it's one that the consumer can increase or decrease based on the level of service. Here's a different way of looking at it.
Lets say we have two servers working in the same MDR on a cruise.
Server 1 greets customers with a smile, shows them kindness throughout their meal, checks on them after their food arrives to make sure everything is good, fills their drinks, clears dirty dishes when they are done, interacts with your family, etc.
Server 2 treats customers like they are a bother, is visibly annoyed when he/she finds out one of your children has an allergy, doesn't bring water even after you ask and never checks on you after your food comes.
Server 1 sees this this lack of service, apologizes and brings you extra bread and napkins and fills your water while
server 2 is busy talking with another employee on the other side of the MDR.
In this scenario, in a non-tipping culture, server 1 and server 2 would make the same amount of money. In a tipping culture, I could thank server 1 for making our experience more pleasant and treating us so well by tipping him/her extra whereas server 2, I could reduce the tip amount. In my views, server 1 is working harder and treating people with kindness and therefore,
deserves to make more than server 2. I actually believe it would be unfair to pay them the same when one is working twice as hard as the other. So the idea that a tipping culture is founded on the premise that consumers can dangle money in front of hard working employees and threaten them with loss of wages if they don't dance is just not accurate. A tipping culture is founded on the principals that those who work harder deserve to earn more and in tipped positions, that is what happens.
