Shortly before opening, Casa Bonita’s new owners Matt Stone and Trey Parker decided to eliminate tipping and instead pay workers a flat wage of $30 per hour.
Now I could be wrong, but getting a an hourly wage as a restaurant worker is FAR better than relying on tips. I feel like either workers in this situation are too obsessed with tips or there’s huge context missing.
Have you ever got an answer from that question? The responses I’ve received when asking similar things have always been runarounds like “well in the service industry the profit margins really are so narrow…”, but never any quantification of how narrow
You won’t get a straight answer but you can often ballpark it if you work there or know someone who does. I have friends at McDonalds and Dominoes, where the owners were making ~$50 and ~$80 per labor hour, respectively, iirc. That’s profit after all known non-labor expenses.
I make it a point to figure this out for every place I or a friend works at, and then make sure everyone who works there knows the real numbers. Because bourgeois fucks will act like money’s tight and lie to your face, so knowing the truth is necessary for convincing workers they can collectively bargain for more.
$50 per labor hour meaning, you have five front of house staff so five labor hours per hour, some number BoH another bunch of hours per hour, we’re talking up to a grand to the owner’s pocket per hour? Fuck, that is not a tight margin, fuck that
Yeah basically, not sure how well it translates to a sit-down restaurant, nor how that compares to other cities.
But even if the real number is half that for some reason (and I was already conservative in estimating the numbers I gave) that’s still considerably more than the 7.25-13 that fast food workers make.
it’s almost funny when they talk about money being tight after bragging about record profits
Yeah, that’s just them repeating capitalist rhetoric they hear in media (of all sorts) all the time.
Anyone who has access to the pricing for raw ingredients knows how that works. I was always told if some is under $50, double the price. If it’s like $100-300 1.5x price. If it’s more, 1.25x or 1.10x. Or ask the owner usually. (This was some absolutely scammy job years ago and honestly I think the starting markup was 5x but I can’t remember now. Been like 20 years)
(Speaking of my old old job as a far off, non-personal to now example): So you can kinda so the math on just sales you do if you know the company paid $10 and you sold 10 of them for $20 in a day. Plus you did labor repairing equipment which had a contract for repairs agreed upon between the companies worth 6 figures. They value that machine being operable for like 5 years enough to pay $200K (like $300K now days). How much does that mean your hours of labor are worth?
Gets kinda nebulous quickly… BUT you can always be absolutely assured you are still earning the owner profit otherwise you won’t have a job for much longer. And owners aren’t like “nice guys” who will pay you $20 out of $25/hr total value you might create and they pocket $5. Nah, they’re probably making another $20/hr off you AT FUCKING LEAST! Again, there is a lot of speculation in this stuff, but also I mean I’ve seen pricing myself. They try to obfuscate things but there is absolutely, once you know all the numbers like rent for storage, utilities, etc., some amount you cost per month for them to keep hired vs how much value you create and that equation is always unequal towards the owner and it will be a significant amount to justify the hire originally.
Here in Denmark a dish will usually be priced at between 1.5 to 7 times ( multiple star restaurants can sometimes go up to 10-15) the cost of the raw ingredients, which scales based off location/rent, price point and how many working hours you need to plan and produce any given dish. A mid-sized, mid-range restaurant in the city would have a factor of 4.38, fast food/cafeteria would be more like 1.5 - 2.5.
Margins are probably a lot thinner here, compared to the US, since wages are higher and tips are a smaller part of FoH wages (and they are often pooled/shared with BoH. at least the places I’ve worked) and the very high-end restaurants have a hard time staying afloat without massively exploiting free labor (stages, trainees, visiting chefs from other kitchens, unpaid overtime, expecting chefs to work on dishes on their own) yet they’re still mostly doing ok on cashflow once they find a niche or get some good press.
All this to say that the American service industry most likely contains a lot more boss-shaped pinatas filled with YOUR cash and y’all Yankees should start swinging bats.