Quote:
Originally Posted by dw1
It is surprising that are using a restaurant to make your point. In most states restaurants are permitted to pay servers significantly below minimum wage because "you can make it up in tips" (which rarely happens) and most employees have little or no medical coverage.
In my experience, it is has also been not uncommon for the support personnel (dishwashers, busboys, etc.) to be recent immigrants because the pay is so small - minimum wage at best. This is not a recent thing, but goes back to at least the 1970's (and historically well before that.)
Quite some time ago I worked in a restaurant and in a warehouse. I would take the warehouse job hands down, as I believe would many others.
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If you're making less than min. wage as a server, you either suck or need to find a better place to work. I did it 25 yrs ago, made plenty more than min wage, I wasn't even one of the big earners (the attractive female servers usually were) and it was not an expensive restaurant. Dishwashers are often immigrants because the job requires nothing more than the ability to stand on your feet for a long time. You can do it with bare minimum or even no English ability, you don't interact with customers and it's just a no-skill job. I did it as well and even got a small tip payout each night.
If you figure an avg. tip amount of 15%, it's not hard to do the math to see what kind of rev you need to ring up per shift to make $XX. So if the place is so low priced that there's no chance of your ringing up $1000 in rev. per shift, you need to find a more expensive place to be a server.