Banning Tipping Made Me More Money, Claims Owner Of Closed San Diego Restaurant
After he banned tipping in his San Diego restaurant, The Linkery owner Jay Porter said his staff gave better service and he made more money. He made the claim in a widely shared Slate article posted on Wednesday.
But there’s a problem. For one thing, The Linkery didn’t actually ban tipping. He explained that for six years, he added an automatic 18 percent service charge to each bill.
Erm, a service charge by any other name is still a tip. All he did was remove the option for customers to tip a liked server more or a disliked server less. Fine, since we want to be all equal and all. But it’s still a tip.
So why does he claim he banned tipping? Aha. Apparently in California if you change the name from tip to service charge then you can exploit some kind of legal loophole to take away some of the server’s gratuity.
Here’s a key quote from the Slate version of his story: “By replacing tipping with a service charge, we were legally able to redirect about a quarter of that revenue to the kitchen.”
Oh.
You might ask why he didn’t just give the kitchen staff a raise out of his own pocket if he was making more money. Actually, I think we’ve identified WHY Porter was making more money.
If indeed he was.
You see, there’s another problem.
In a similar “I banned tipping” article last week in Quartz, Porter said he closed The Linkery this summer to move to San Francisco.
And maybe he did. I don’t know how you folks do it out there in California. Maybe you guys just can’t stand prosperity.
But where I come from, a successful restaurant doesn’t close and relocate hundreds of miles away from its clientele.
So there’s a credibility issue.
On the face of it, Jay Porter’s argument sounds logical. Servers give better service to everyone because they’re no longer paying more attention to people likely to be better tippers.
That isn’t my experience in Europe. But I’ll humor him and pretend to believe that it could have worked out that way in San Diego.
But if you’re going to claim that banning tipping made your restaurant more money, I need to see two things:
- Your restaurant needs to actually be open with some customers in it.
- You need to pay your kitchen help out of your own pocket, instead of cutting into the server’s piece of the pie.
In other words, I’m calling B.S. on this story. Jay Porter’s The Linkery restaurant didn’t ban tips. He renamed them to intercept some of the money.
His argument for banning tipping makes me very uneasy.
