http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/11/pf/joes-crab-shack-no-tipping/index.html

Wave of the future, or just an attempt to get in all the cheapskates?

I am pasting a paper I wrote for my English course...I am not a high school kid, I am a grown adult. I think it explains things for those who don't understand the "no-tipping" craze.

Don’t Keep the Change!

I tip well. I leave the appropriate 20% tip, sometimes more. I like having the advantage of giving a few extra dollars when service is extraordinary. I have never tipped under 15%; I am a server and I know how far that extra few dollars goes. Also, I like having the option to award a person who did an awesome job. If it wasn’t illegal I would probably tip my professors, my doctor, and maybe my neighborhood police officer. When people go out of their way to make sure that I am comfortable and safe, they deserve a little something extra.
Many restaurants are foolishly changing their tipping policy to no-tipping. In those establishments the servers will receive minimum wage and some restaurants will pay up to $15 an hour. That is less than half of what a server usually would make. There is still no talk of benefits.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 4,488,100 servers employed in 2013 (Department of Labor). Compare that to the 3.1 million teachers, and you begin to understand just how many servers there are roaming around the United States. There is rumored to be a servers union, though I have never been asked to join. The regulations on paying tipped employees must be vague, because some establishments pay out the waitress or waiter cash at the end of the shift, and some put all wages on a paycheck. If there is regulation I have yet to see it. The only rule that I could find, is that the restaurant has to pay a server minimum wage if they don’t make that in tips. The restaurants got away with paying tipped staff $2.15 an hour for many years, however, the hourly wage was only recently raised to $5 an hour for tipped employees. This is what set the restaurant owners off.
They had to come up with a way to pay the servers $5 an hour and they came up with a solution. No tips. A good server on a busy night can make more than $40 an hour. The stars have to align to make this happen, but when it does it makes all the other not-so-good nights worth it.
What about that union for tipped employees? Where are they in this fight? (I couldn’t find much in my internet searching.) Can you imagine if the teacher’s pay was cut in half? There would be a strike. There should be a strike. Where is the picket line? Where is the press? No one is paying any attention to the pay decrease for 4.5 million people? The only time people will notice is when the price of their burger goes up. It is unjust and altogether wrong.
The restaurant owners have had their way for long enough and we keep giving them more power. They paid their staff peanuts for years and now that they have to pay a tiny bit more they decide the system doesn’t work.
One of the reasons for the tip-shift is that they feel the back-of-the-house staff (cooks and dishwashers) aren’t paid enough. The cooks, who actually make the food, only make minimum wage or a little more. The restaurant wants to pay them out of the tips rather than pay them a living wage. There is no law saying that the restaurant can’t pay them more. Why don’t they pay them more? No one is stopping them from paying these college educated culinary professionals more money.
“Joining a budding national trend, renowned restaurateur Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group last week announced that he will eliminate formal tipping at his restaurants starting in 2016. Meyer stated that the new policy, aptly named “Hospitality Included,” is meant to better compensate “back of house” staff, who are legally restricted from receiving tips, and to make the dining experience less complicated for diners.”(Shaw)
The tipping policy is too complicated for the average diner to understand, I get it now.
Complicated or not this is a career for servers, chefs, sous chefs, sommeliers, and managers as well. People have made a choice to support themselves by doing this job. Who gets to decide one day that they don’t want to pay them the same way or amount anymore? Restaurant owners? Managers? Politicians? This hardly seems right 4.5 million people’s livelihood hangs in the balance here.
The customer will pay the “tip” somehow. A restaurant will not just start paying employees more without making up that money somewhere. They will shut down if they start paying half the staff $10 more an hour. The cost will be paid in the form of an administrative fee or higher prices of food. The customer will still be paying about the same amount of money to go out to eat, but the choice of who the money goes to is taken away. The 20% tip that would have been left for the waitress is now tacked onto the price of your steak. The $20 sirloin you always get is now $24, and that $4 goes to pay for the service and other things. There will be a surplus of funds, and then the restaurant decides how to spend that.
The only reason I can think of to disrupt the current tipping policy, is that restaurant operators see how much the good servers make and they see opportunity. They feel they should decide how much the servers make. Also, they need to find a way to pay the cooks more without spending more. (By the way-there is a cook shortage in the city of Chicago.) “Everybody works for me,” said Cohen. “I should be the one to pay them.”(Judkis) This is from a Washington Post article, they were interviewing a restaurant owner who changed to no tipping. She now pays her servers $15 an hour in downtown New York. A living wage, so she says. They also tack on a 20% administrative fee to every check to make up for the hourly rate hike and pay the kitchen staff. This only benefits her, and her servers make what most McDonalds employees make. There is no incentive to do a great job, I am sure the servers do just that.
It is not like the servers of the world are rolling in money. We are not out buying properties and cars. The servers struggle to get by, just like everyone else. When a server gets off work at midnight, the last thing they would do is check how the markets in Japan are doing. They aren’t booking a vacation to Fiji anytime soon. The few extra dollars they make go to splurging on a cab home rather than the train.
I am sure I make more money than the managers at my restaurant, and I am positive I make more than the chefs and cooks. I don’t receive year-end bonuses or benefits, and in January when the restaurant is a ghost-town they win the war of the wages Servers come to work, work long shifts (most get no breaks), we smile, explain the food, and sell the bottles of wine. We are compensated for what we sell, like any sales job. We should be.
Some people don’t think this is fair. This is what the no-tip movement is based on, that the wealth should be spread around. Isn’t that communism or is it socialism?
The policy would never change if the restaurants were going to have to pay money out of their own pocket. So the customers will pay the same amount altogether, but the restaurant gets to divvy out who it goes to. The only people this hurts are the servers, all 4.5 million of us. The customers will eventually feel the hurt too. Their favorite server that used to take such good care of them will have left to work at the T-Mobile store, on commission.