If you work in food service....(Offensive)

::::$12.50 an hour probably sounds like a lot, but once you tax it, a single person living on about $400 in the hand a week, well, that's not much to live on! Especially when you're looking at around $150 a week just for your share of rent in a shared home, and it costs between $80 and $100 to fill an average car with fuel. Power, phone bills, food, clothing, insurances, and so on and so forth, to be somehow paid with the remainder... ::::::

Wow....I work in an office and I'm only making 9.50 an hour, and I have a family to raise... I'm totally getting ripped off and need to move wherever you are. I wish I made 12.50 an hour--that would be an awesome job to have!

The person who stated $12.50 lives in New Zeland (so it's around $6.25 American) Our dollar is about half what it is elsewhere in the world right now...especially in the UK, the rest of Europe and NZ.

So there...that's my converse point of view.

I was Googling trying to figure out what to do with a zero dollar check, and this thread came up and I actually joined this community specifically (although it isn't going to hurt me to track weight loss either) so I could post on here and say...

I LIKE the tipping system!

For the past 8 years it has paid my bills. It's bought the rent at my art studio, a lot of nice clothes, a motorcycle and two scooters, and countless other crap I've spent my money on over the years, and now that I'm a "grownup", it's helping me save to invest in more lucrative ventures. I no longer want to wait tables, but my experience doing it has shown me that I want to own restaurants. Yeah I'm not rich but I'm doing a LOT better financially than any of my friends in other unskilled labor jobs. People I know in retail struggle to make ends meet and have debt and certainly no savings. I have savings.

I don't WANT to make $12.50 an hour. I don't even want to make American minimum wage, which is here I think is $7.55. You know why? Because if I did, it would be on the news and word would get out that server wage had been raised, the tipping standard would change, and I'd end up making a fraction of what I do now.

Think about it- today I came in at noon, worked hard to get all my sidework done so I could leave just as I got cut, and left about 5:00 pm. I worked through the lunch rush and picked up all the spare tables that came through the door in the downtime, after the other lunch waiters left. I made $77. That's $15.40 an hour, plus about a dollar an hour I'll get off my check. So I made roughly $16 an hour today. If I chose to pick up shifts I could get 40 hours a week making similar "wage". I've worked at many different kinds of restaurants and I have NEVER made less than $13 an hour or so, usually a lot more, unless it's a restaurant that's failing or just starting out. On busy days at my current job it's $20+. Sometimes a lot of people request off and I have to work doubles where a lot of the time is by myself with the manager just helping me- if this happens when an event is going on in the area, I can make $300 to $400 in a 14 hour shift.

And that's cash every shift!

How does this break down? My current job is at a coffeehouse/cafe, nothing fancy, just really popular. Yeah the tips aren't huge, but there are a lot of them. The average one person check is about $10, most tables are two or three people. People tip larger percentages on smaller checks (because most folks feel like a jerk leaving like $1.12 even if it's 20%). So let's say for every $10 (one person), I ring it, I make $2.50. This is all AVERAGE- some people stiff you and some people are just very generous. But today, if the average proved absolutely true, I'd only have to wait on 31 people over a five hour period to make $16 an hour. Think about people who work at very upscale restaurants- if my average ticket is $10, theirs is more like $50. This means they make five times as much money as me. I know people who have houses and cars paid for in full because they wait tables at a 5 star restaurant. If you're serving $40 filet mignons to millionaires, would you rather make tips or make minimum wage?

Unskilled labor is just a silly term to mean a job you didn't have to go to college to get. Don't be offended by it, it actually takes a lot of skill to be a good waiter. All restaurants have training programs and in addition it takes years of experience to become truly good at it. A lot of people I wait on I can tell think I'm an idiot and I just walked off the street and started bringing them pancakes and lattes...this is fine by me. They know nothing about me and may never see me again, and the $2 they leave on the table is building me a better life. In fact I probably make more money than a lot of them!

Sure some people suck and tip badly. It's taken me many years but I have finally come to a place where it just slides off my shoulders. Today a table of two women were accidentally overlooked by the waiter overseeing their section and had to wait 10 minutes for service. They flagged me down, I apologized profusely and did everything I could to make up for the mistake- made them a priority over all my other tables though they weren't even mine to begin with. I offered to have the manager comp their meal but they insisted on paying it. I was polite and empathetic and gave them the absolute best service I could give. The one paying the bill wrote "NO TIP!!" on the tip section of her credit card receipt. I laughed and told them to have a good day as they left. This is part of waiting tables. That lady was just a witch. There are thousands of them in the world. Ignorant, cruel people. Who cares? If you can't take crap like this with a grain of salt, go make $8 an hour folding sweaters or alphabetizing DVDs.

For unskilled labor, food service IMO is by far where it's at. Tip-based that is. I've worked retail and I've worked at places like Jamba Juice and whatnot and it feels like jail. Not allowed to leave the register, have to ask for a bathroom break. And the worst, no matter how hard you work, how much you put into an act of customer service, you will still make nothing more than your measly hourly wage that you have to wait two weeks for. Waiting tables, you can do and go wherever in the building you want as long as your tables are okay or you don't have any...this is very important to me in a job. I am not a cubicle kind of person. If I want to step outside and check out the snowfall or step into the back to text message someone, I like being respected enough to do so.

I don't want to do this forever, but I am so grateful it's the "field" I got into when I was 18 and felt worthless because I had no interest in anything with job security and pension. My money from waiting tables has allowed me to travel, to give me a small taste of luxuries, to educate me in people and the way they work. I gain genuine pleasure in serving someone- I understand it's up to me whether or not they leave this place happy, and I take that responsibility seriously. Because if I just complained about it all day, I would simply lose hope. You will NEVER run out of things to complain about in the service industry, you see the worst in people. So why even start? Make today a good day and put that $200 you just made Saturday night into a high interest savings account so you can become something great when you're ready to.

So there...that's my converse point of view.

,,, Why should the customer be paying your wage? ...

You're kidding, right? Customers pay all wages. In most other jobs the customer pays the till - the mgmt./owner takes the till and pays costs/expenses/wages/taxes and keeps the remainder as profit - but that money that pays the wages still came from the customer. No customer = no wages. That's how every business works, the only thing diff about the tipping game is that the customer pays the server DIRECTLY.