I was recently paying my bill at a restaurant and doing the awkward “was-there-service-included?” routine when the waiter interjected: “We don’t get any of that. In fact, that service charge makes it worse because it means people don’t ever tip us.” I gave the waiter the £10 I had in my pocket and vowed never to go back.
That day I was a customer, but on other days I am a waitress. The £10 tip I gave was more than a third of what I get paid for a standard four-hour shift. It is about 5% of the £212 set menu at Le Gavroche, Michel Roux Jr’s Michelin-starred restaurant that last week admitted to pocketing 100% of service charge as revenue.
As a customer that makes me angry because, like the HMRC and 61% of the public, I assume that service charge goes straight to staff. Why shouldn’t I? Service charge is added onto my bill separately, is optional, and is not taxable. Pocketing that charge, no matter how legal or “transparent”, feels like false advertising at best, and daylight robbery at worst.
But as somebody who is also a waitress, the idea of a customer thinking they are giving me a top-up because my salary isn’t already enough to live on, but that money instead going to the people who aren’t willing to pay me a decent wage, is painful.
As a waitress, I get paid £7.25 an hour, 5p more than the minimum wage. I get paid less than the minimum income standard, which is what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests is required to “live to an adequate level”. It is £2.50 an hour less than the London living wage, the amount that I would need to earn to not be in-work poverty. In short, my wage as a waitress is not enough to provide me with a basic standard of living.
And my job is hard. On a busy day, I am juggling anywhere up to 30 orders in my head at a time. Alongside the manual effort of being on my feet for 12 hours, carrying crates and stacking plates, I am constantly having to make calculations. I have to know when each order will be in the kitchen, and how long that leaves me to clean up after the table of eight in the corner, all while understanding that table 44 wants to pay now, and if they do a runner it’ll be my wages it comes out of.
I’ll be watching the clock in case a customer comes in, a minute before closing, demanding to be seated – their reason being that they’ve only just finished work. They won’t realise that what I am doing is work too.
Of course, it’s all part of my job, and there are elements of my job that I love. I get to change my hours, which gives me the flexibility to do other stuff. Sometimes I don’t work Mondays. And when I work a double shift, I do it in the knowledge that I will be surrounded by people, which is sort of like seeing people in the evening anyway.
But while some romanticise the aspects of my work that they feel make it different to a “real” job with “real” concerns, I am in fact a real person. I need to make ends meet and, while my three-hour lunch break in the middle of a double shift might look like a luxury, in reality it is spent trying to avoid spending money because, as was once pointed out to me, a coffee is a third of my hourly wage.
That’s where tips come in. I wish we didn’t have to rely on them: they make our lives unstable and they turn a lot of what makes my job enjoyable into a crude, transactional performance. But the reality is that our employers don’t pay us enough, and customers are the people that make this career financially viable.
The worst thing about Roux’s decision last week, is by now promising to mark on bills and menus that no further payment was needed, while leaving it open, in theory, for customers to leave a tip, the move is likely to deter that option for many. In a world where our employers don’t pay us enough to live on, the least resturants can do is to allow waiting staff to benefit from the good grace of other humans.
