Leather Storrs: How a Minimum Wage Increase Could Affect the Restaurant Industry

Leather Storrs: How a Minimum Wage Increase Could Affect the Restaurant Industry

In a busy restaurant, with an average check over $30 per person, servers earn three to four times as much as the cooks. This has always been a bone of contention in American restaurants. The cats out front come in pretty, fold some napkins, talk to the folks and walk with a stack. The dogs in back get… dogged. But as the threat of a significant increase to the minimum wage moves from “if” towards “when”, it’s time to move from abstract to solution.

First, some disclaimers:

I could never do what servers do. The idea of being trapped into courtesy leaves me cold.

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Sh%t rolls downhill, meaning that waiters are often the recipients of a customer’s bad day, or life.

Good service saves a bad meal, while the reverse is rarely true. 

Exceptional service makes a good restaurant great.

But all that being said doesn’t change the fact that should the status quo remain, when the minimum wage bumps 50%, the difference between the front and back will jump to a multiplier of five. This seems fundamentally untenable. If the resentment doesn’t deflate the kitchen, the inability to live above the poverty line certainly will.

There must be change, but it won’t be painless. The boldest option floating around is to increase prices 15-20% and do away with tipping altogether. Wages for the entire staff would be increased across the board. The primary danger of this method is that it assumes a base line of income. Should a restaurant have a quiet night (or month), the owner is still on the hook for a hefty payroll without the benefit of cash to meet it. Further, customers unaware of the policy might feel sticker shock or resentment at the idea that proper service is a given. 

Same goes for the idea of an 18% automatic “service charge." But while this policy also removes the customer’s option to reward or punish service, it has the benefit of protecting the restaurant from the inevitable dips and swirls of erratic business. The service charge would be divided among the staff, at the discretion of the owners. 

Both of these techniques would affect the quality of service in a restaurant, most likely in a negative way. Excellent servers will jump to restaurants that remain committed to the existing formula. And those restaurants would benefit doubly: they would present exceptional service and their prices would seem to be 20% lower than their competitors. However, those restaurants might lose talented cooks to other shops practicing a more dynamic rewards program. Pick your poison.

Of course, there will be no wholesale change in the industry. Different houses will implement different formulas and the result will be confusion. But there is a silver lining. If servers can’t live nicely off of their gratuities, then a bunch of liberal arts majors are gonna go back to school, return to the Oboe or finally finish that novel. In the mean-time, buy the kitchen a six-pack.

Leather Storrs is an Oregon native who has served 20 years in professional kitchens. He owns a piece of two area restaurants: Noble Rot and Nobleoni at Oregon College of Art and Craft, where he yells and waves arms. He quietly admits to having been a newspaper critic in Austin, Texas and Portland.