Tipping Policies Are the Customer's Business

Like it or not — and most of us lean toward not — the majority of American restaurants rely on their customers to subsidize servers' wages.

We call this subsidy a tip.

By federal law, restaurants are allowed to pay servers as little as $2.13 an hour. Our tips are supposed to bring them up to at least minimum wage.

Last year, Congress raised the hourly minimum wage for the first time in 10 years. That increase — from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour — is to be implemented in increments over a two-year period. By next July, a full-time hourly wage earner will gross a whopping $15,080 a year. That's before taxes and usually without health care. Not a living wage. Think of it as a barely-staying-alive wage.

No worker in America is more vulnerable than the one who has to depend on tips to make even minimum wage.

Ideally, good restaurant service leaves customers glowing with gratitude and willing to leave a 20 percent tip on top of the money they already have to pay for the food. Talk to any server who isn't working at an upscale restaurant, though, and reality holds less luster. He probably will tell you the average tip is between 10 and 15 percent. On a good day.

What servers won't tell you, unless you ask, is whether they get to keep the full amount of tips left on credit cards.

Sadly, this is an increasingly urgent question to ask. In northern Ohio, for example, it should be on the tip of any tongue dining at Yours Truly restaurants, where management recently decided that servers should help cover the processing fees charged by credit card companies. Depending on which card is used, servers lose 1 to 3 percent of every tip not paid in cash. That adds up for people making so little.

As the company's president, Larry Shibley, put it to me: "It's totally fair. Why should I pay the service charge on their tips? It was an overly fair practice of subsidizing tips."

Times are tough, he said. "Our bottom line is going away. We're only breaking even."

I'm sure that most Yours Truly employees would love to say they are breaking even this year — or any year, for that matter.

I'm also pretty sure that, despite Shibley's claims otherwise, most Yours Truly customers would appreciate knowing that the tipping policy has changed.

"I don't really think that's necessary," Shibley said. "This is between us and our employees."

Now see, that's exactly the kind of attitude that gets customers riled up. You can't demand that we subsidize your employees' wages and then get testy when we insist on a few ground rules. Every last cent of our tip is meant to go to the person who waits on us. Period. And we deserve to know if management has decided otherwise.

Shibley said "lots of other restaurants" are doing this now. Well, Yours Truly isn't supposed to be like other restaurants. At least that's the claim on its Web site, which boasts of striving for "open, honest, and fair communication" and insists that, while "financial strength is always within sight and a priority, the bottom line is not our top goal."

He said the new tipping policy came through employee consensus. This is apparently news to all of the servers I talked to, who said they were told, not asked. Shibley also said that some of his full-time servers make up to $200 a day, but he couldn't tell me how many. He also couldn't explain the formula used to calculate the deduction from credit card tips.

He did, however, assure me that some employees get health care, and all of them can order free meals off a limited menu and keep all of their cash tips.

All of that is good, but Shibley needs to revisit his own Web site, where Yours Truly makes this promise under the heading "Do the Right Thing":

"We're comfortable with the thought of today's actions being tomorrow's headlines. If we cringe at the thought of one of our actions being tomorrow's headlines, we need to give that action some more thought."

Time to put on that thinking cap.

At the very least, Yours Truly should post signs about the new policy so that customers know to leave their tips in cash.

Otherwise, Yours Truly is not so truly ours. And that truly would be a shame.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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