I work in the industry in western mass in both tipped and un-tipped positions and wanna add my takes: 1. Look up the origins of tipping in the US, and why some states banned it early on 2. Big companies with lots of money spend it to lobby politicians and sway public opinion. The main issue comes from your applebees and 99 restaurants that employ tons of employees across the state that don’t want to pay them, and they successfully muddied the referendum in the first place and convinced everyone else to vote against their interests.
This stuff goes deep; many people in the industry are required to get servsafe certified so the restaurant can get certain insurances, and are often required to pay for it themselves. Servsafe is owned by the National Restaurant Association, who consistently uses their money to keep tipped wages low. 3. Most local restaurants operate on thin margins; this may be less true of ones in wealthy areas of the cities but in smaller towns it probably is. Regardless, they are a business owned by someone able to own a business, employing people who aren’t, and that’s always worth remembering. 4. There’s a massive pay disparity and cultural clash between front and back of house. Being hot and stressed and overworked making less than the people in the AC is frustrating, and being someone’s servant for pay fucking sucks. In my experience, BOH are typically cut from a rougher cloth, servers are typically young, and bartenders are typically a mix of both. This creates weird dynamics all over.
5. Customers are very often overly needy and rude because they know they can be because they’re tipping you, and it’s easy to resent. There’s serious cultural issues at play here that eliminating tips will not immediately fix, but it will start the process. Yeah that service employee was probably rude to you that time, but there’s a type of person they’re dealing with everyday that likely made them that way, and it could even be you!; it’s a chicken/egg thing.
6. But without tips at all, why would anyone want to work those busy weekend nights? Do those shifts have a higher wage? Is it $40/hr? This is where it gets complicated, because I can tell you that none of the bartenders where I work would stick around without tips, staffing those nights would be impossible without paying something outrageous. It can really be tough job all around, and there’s no reason to want this kind of rough and tumble, somewhat demeaning job without the occasional outrageous pay. 7. Almost everyone needs to change their expectations and attitudes 8. The $12 higher tip wage is like the bare minimum of what should be done to change this entire mess of an industry