WATCH: ‘Today’ is Tone Deaf to What the Great Tipping Debate is Actually About
The no-tipping debate has made quite a few headlines this week. Gabriel Stulman announced that he’d reinstate tipping at his West Village restaurant Fedora after a four month experiment. Joe’s Crab Shack, too, is going back to a tipping model. On the other side of the debate, Danny Meyer‘s restaurant The Modern has seen higher profits than ever since they started “Hospitality Included.”
This morning, Today decided to weigh in on the topic. Like Eric Ripert and several other chefs and restaurateurs, they all agree that tipping is necessary, but when they talk about it it doesn’t seem like they know what everyone is debating.
Katie Couric said, “I don’t trust management to pass on the money, except if it’s Danny Meyer and it gets a lot of publicity.” Huh? This actually isn’t really one of the issues with hospitality included. Far more often, management is withholding tips from servers, not wages. If management isn’t going to pass on the money, what makes Couric think they were passing on the tip money?
Carson Daly said, “If you’ve ever worked in the service industry, you understand the importance” of tips. Of course. That’s the problem. Matt Lauer has said on Today (quite a few times) that he’s a generous tipper, and that’s great. The problem is that not everyone is like that. We’ve all heard stories of customers who leave nasty notes instead of cash, or those people who tip only a few dollars on a hundreds-of-dollars bill. Couric recounted a story of a customer leaving her 25 cents. She said she chased him out to his car. Tipping for good service is a great idea in theory, but that’s not really what a tip has become. The minimum wage is much, much lower for servers in restaurants than in other industries, which means that a server’s income is left largely in the hands of customers. Since not everyone tips well, this is hugely problematic.
Tamron Hall chimed in with, “I was a waitress for eleven days.” Interesting, Tamron, but not at all relevant. Thank you for sharing.
Savannah Guthrie said that she “just resist[s] change.” True, and that’s where the issue lies. As Danny Meyer said, with the current American menu structure, we have trouble not seeing the $20 chicken entree as $20. We genuinely look at tips as coming out of a separate pocket. When that entree appears as $24 instead, we don’t realize it’s actually the same as before. Stulman’s reason for going back to a tipping model is that customers were ordering less food when they saw the higher menu prices.
The debate is important, but the hosts totally missed the point. Watch the video here:
[image via screengrab]
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