LAT: Some restaurants face pressure to trim menus and staffs under California's wage hike

You could not have said it better . I am %100 Ok with it .

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One of my favorite local pizza places switched to a no-tipping plan and is already paying its workers $15-25 plus benefits.

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Worth every penny to keep GOOD help .They are the ones keeping business alive .

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completely concur with your posts, emglow.

also, i believe, that since the wage increases will be implemented in a gradual and predictable fashion, the owners will have plenty of time to actually readjust other parts of their business:
from rent to menu to how they are using their square footage to hours of operation to methods of food preparation to build outs to maintenance of the interior spaces
and on
and on

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Restaurants have few good ways to deal with increasing labor costs other than raising prices. They can’t lower the rent. Higher labor costs make expanding hours even less likely to succeed.

One place I know eliminated table service and switched to an order-at-the-counter model. I guess it didn’t work out since they ended up closing.

Another is to completely redo the restaurant, new name, style of service, menu, etc. to a more casual style, maybe less of a restaurant and more of a bar. Or sell the place to someone else who plans to do that.

i’ve seen restaurants that were under price pressure, especially under pressure during their lunch service, actually choose to RAISE their prices and offer a more costly upscale lunch.
i was one of the customers that started going there more often because the upscale lunch is much more appealing to me and therefore made it worth the increased price and the longer drive.
as it turned out they DID FINE.
i was far from the only person who felt the way i did.
they get fewer customers than they did before, but those customers are spending more money.

the restaurants across the street chose to maintain their low prices, but limit their lunch offerings and reduce the hours that they were open for lunch.
they ALSO are doing fine.
they have picked off some of the price-sensitive customers from their competitors who chose not to compete on price.

the smart owners will figure things out.
there are a lot of variables that can be adjusted and there are a lot of customers that have varying preferences.

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ok, blackave,
you have an opinion about what tipped employees DESERVE.

the nature of tipping is such that you can control how much you tip.
so your problem is what??

out of curiosity, how is YOUR level of compensation determined?
do you imagine all the investors and customers of your employer would vote that they feel that you DESERVE being paid what you are paid?

at least, for tipped servers, the CUSTOMER actually, to a large extent, makes the call.
it can be argued that the CUSTOMER would know the MOST about what is and isn’t DESERVED and, in the end, the customer pays the bulk of this compensation.

I think you misread my comment above. I was looking at the issue from the perspective of an owner/operator of essentially your neighborhood full service restaurant.

The thrust of my posting was that increased costs will likely have an adverse impact on full service restaurants (other than perhaps the high end) resulting in decreased employment, price hikes, staff reduction, staff hour reduction, implementation of more mechanical solutions to control costs, etc.

I pointed out that California, unlike most other states, does not permit the owner to offset the hourly wage paid by tips received. In other words, in CA, each tipped employee is guaranteed the minimum wage plus all tips he or she receives (less whatever the tipped employee pays out to bus people, etc., but this is strictly between the tipped employee and the busser). The net effect of the right to offset a portion of the tipped employee’s earnings in those states allowing an offset is to reduce the tipped employee’s earnings by the amount of the offset (in other words, if the state’s minimum wage for tipped employees is $3.00 per hour and for untipped employees it is $10.00 per hour, then the employer pays his tipped employees $3.00 per hour but must make up any shortages if the tipped employee $3.00 wage per hour plus tips do not exceed the $10.00 minimum wage per hour for each hour worked.

The customer makes the call first and foremost whether or not to go to a particular restaurant. If the owner has been forced to raise prices or impose charges or policies objectionable to the customer, then the patron may well go elsewhere…and the tipped employee suffers by not getting a tip (and may also suffer a reduction in hours worked) and the owner suffers a reduction in income in a business that others have pointed out has slim profit margins.

Although I do not think your question is relevant, my compensation depended on performance.

It didn’t work at these Costa Mesa Restaurants.

guess we’ll have to revisit in 2-3 years when everyone has to raise their prices.

When Blöm and Howarth announced plans to open Restaurant Marin, they said it would offer European-style service. But eliminating tipping meant raising menu prices to offset higher wages. Blöm and Howarth felt they were taking the bull by the horns by raising wages to $15 an hour – well ahead of the 2022 state mandate.

A month into the change, they said no servers had quit. And most were actually working even harder because they were working as a team for Arc, not themselves, the couple had said.

But, as it turns out, some diners were not prepared for the sticker shock.

20% service charge with no tip line on the bill seems to be working fine at Comal in Berkeley. The place is packed all the time.

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[quote=“Ns1, post:12, topic:2974”]
this will never fly from a legal/tax perspective.
[/quote] Not to mention lawsuits, when Workers’ Comp insurance doesn’t want to cover the injury of an independent.

[quote=“honkman, post:32, topic:2974”]
but even the best server can’t “save” a restaurant if the food is not consistently good for regulars.
[/quote] And vice versa. If a restaurant has untrained or disgruntled servers it transfers to the customers and can ruin a dining experience. As shown by the slams on Yelp. I think what @westsidegal is saying, is servers are on the front lines. If something goes wrong with the food, it’s the server’s tip that is effected, not the cooks pay.

With that said. BOH is an under-appreciated and underpaid demographic, and should not be making less than servers.

I’m glad I only eat at restaurants and don’t own one.

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