Management decisions

I work at a very exclusive restaurant, in which has recently gone from being private to now open to the public. Since we are now open to the public I am witnessing more and more extreme changes taking place. Having worked in the food and beverage industry for the past 5 years at previous private clubs, some of these changes came as quite a surprise. First came the uniforms; our tuxedo outfits were replaced with more casual pants and button down shirts. This was a slightly minor change compared to the change us employees are dealing with now. Management decided to banish the automatic 15% gratuity that went on each bill, as well as the tip pool that was split between all of the servers and bartenders during each shift. This means that diners, including members of the club and the public, can now leave whatever tip amount they please, and each employee makes their own gratuity during their shift.

I know this system works in most well establish public restaurants but this restaurant is neither well established with the public yet because it hasn’t been fully advertised everywhere, nor even intended to be a fully public restaurant because the members still have to pay their monthly premium and take priority when they want to use the restaurant for private use. The difference is, members have a certain expectation when they walk into the dining room, and the club is known to have met that expectation in service for the past few decades. My point is, most private clubs have automatic gratuity as a way to ensure that they are confident in giving members the best service possible, and although the restaurant is now open to the public, a majority of our customers continue to be the club’s members. I can see how management decided to banish it because they didn’t want to turn off the public when they received their bill and noticed the 15% already added on. But, in my opinion people are fully aware when they make reservations that although it is a public restaurant; it is part of a prestigious world famous business, they aren’t just going to their local burger joint.

Since the automatic gratuity is gone, so is the tip pool, which puts even more of a damper on my paycheck. Some people believed that ridding our system of the tip pool would weed out the slackers that would come to work and stand around, yet still receive a large check due to the split gratuity. Since I am a bartender often times the bar is slow so I help out the servers by bringing food out with them, or assisting them in general.

Before the tip pool was taken away, everyone was more than happy to help out other servers while we had some down time, because whether we were helping a customer or doing side work we were still making a chunk of from the gratuity pool that would go straight into our check. Since our cheapest entrée is roughly 28$, you can only imagine the advantage of having a tip pool on a busy night. Without it employees are much more reluctant to help each other out because when we do we are not earning anything extra for it, just our hourly wage.

So in reality, ridding the tip pool isn’t weeding out any slackers, if anything it is creating more people who do only what they can for their own customers, and nothing above and beyond for their fellow employees.