What's included?
Also, a starchy chronicle.
Anthony asked me to write about no-tipping restaurants, partly because when the world was young and I still ran a restaurant, back in 2013, our restaurant stopped accepting tips and switched to all-inclusive pricing. We did this knowing full well it was a foolhardy and difficult thing to do, but it was also clearly the right thing to do. This piece in the New Yorker provides a sense of just how difficult it can be to make this change, and also happens to be a great summary of the many column inches written about this subject to date. I agree with everything that’s said in the New Yorker piece and all the writing that led up to it, but I also think two key points have been largely overlooked.
The first is that tipping impedes the professionalization of the hospitality industry and alters how servers view themselves and their work. Tipping supports the idea that hospitality is subservience rather than a skill. It creates the impression that servers essentially pander to clients (as we might say about partners at law firms, I-bankers, or Hollywood agents), and the variable and arbitrary nature of being paid in tips contributes to the widespread exclusion of hospitality from the field of professions. By making it harder for servers to view what they do as a vocation or an avocation, the tipping system just makes the psychological shackles stronger. This is a real, needless, human cost.
I’m not the first person to point this out - Danny Meyer’s chief culture officer has spoken about it, and so has Jay Porter, a Bay Area restaurateur (whose record of his experiences with all-inclusive pricing was a major influence on our decision way back when), but it’s telling that the people writing about this are restaurateurs. Journalists and the otherwise thorough Reddit discussion of the subject are largely silent on the topic.
The second issue is that tipping causes restaurants to put a price on their product of 15-20% less than what it actually costs to produce.
We literally erase the work of half the staff from the stated value of the meal. I can’t decide if I find this unusual for very late capitalism. The labor of the people who make our phones in China or our clothes in Vietnam is technically priced into what we pay for those things but they are effectively erased from our experience of their work, kept out of sight and out of mind, with results that have been well documented if rarely acted upon. Perhaps it’s only my having been part of the hospitality industry that makes the erasure of service teams feel more immediate, or perhaps it’s the fact that we actually see and speak to the servers we tip.
The tipping vs. no-tipping conversation is essentially an argument about how to slice a pie that’s too small. This 2017 piece about the USHG’s experience implementing all-inclusive pricing suggests their junior cooks make $38-40k a year (my estimate) - barely above the 2018 living wage of $36,308 for NYC (the Union Square Hospitality Group is Danny Meyer’s company and one of the leading restaurant groups in NYC, if not the country). One front of house staffer reported a $10,000 drop in annual earnings from $60k to $50k after hospitality-included (their relentlessly cheerful name for the scheme) was implemented. These numbers are more humane but far from comfortable, and the USHG experienced greatly accelerated turnover because so many people in the front-of-house found they were making less than before. Junior cooks, on the other hand, reported merely minimal increases in their actual pay, which raises the question of where the $10,000 from that server’s paycheck went.
Part of the answer is probably that the USHG is now paying managers, on the floor and in the kitchen, better. This isn’t as horrific as it sounds, because in tipping restaurants salaried managers often make less than the tipped and hourly staff they manage. Another part of the answer is that there are probably quite a few people at the USHG who were making substantially less than $50k a year, and those people are getting paid more now as well, even if it’s not anything like enough. For perspective: the MIT Living Wage Calculator lists a typical annual salary of $24,535 for people working full time in “food preparation & serving related” jobs in NYC - ⅔ of a living wage. And the last part of the answer is that some of that $10k just went… away. Prices went up so revenue fell. One of the most iconic and beloved restaurants in America, catering mostly to people near the top of the economic heap, saw business go through the floor because they tried to raise their prices enough to pay their workers as they should have.
This problem isn’t going to be solved by redistributing revenue that used to be labelled tips - it won’t be solved by anything short of a major recalibration of our expectations about restaurant pricing. To the degree that tipped pricing maintains the illusion that we’re paying enough for our food, it’s actively delaying change.
I’m not suggesting that all-inclusive pricing is a bad idea. I actually think it’s typical of the peculiar idealism of restaurants that individual actors are trying to do right on the human scale even when faced with an extinction level threats from the broader economy. But maybe all that ink should have been spilled about the bigger problem instead.
If you might be willing to have a short (~15 minutes) phone call to tell me about what, when, and how you read, and why you read this of all the gigabytes of text on the internet, I would love to hear from you. This goes triple if we currently don’t know each other very well. If you’re in NYC and want to chat in person, coffee’s on me.
As always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers - this doesn’t happen without you.
Some people take pictures of dogs. Some people take pictures of cats. I mostly take pictures of people eating, but sometimes I take pictures of bread.
20% rye, 80% white, 85% hydration. 3 hours in bulk, retarded in shape overnight and baked straight from the retard. It’s a formula.
Thank you for reading an alpha issue of let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. If you’re enjoying - or not enjoying - this newsletter, do drop me a line! I am looking for all the feedback I can get, and I love requests for essays about specific topics.
And if you’ve read all the way down here looking for the bit where I write about the problems of cooking at home today, I’m impressed by your thoroughness and excellent memory and I’m sorry to disappoint - I haven’t forgotten, and that piece is still coming.
best,
tw