A small but growing number of restaurants in the United States are choosing to ban tipping in favour of paying staff higher, stable wages, though the transition has presented significant economic challenges for many establishments.
In San Francisco, wine waiter Caroline Kraetzer now earns $40 (£30) an hour working at La Cigale. This is double the average salary for service staff in the city, supported by the restaurant’s set menu price of $140 (£100) per person.
La Cigale operates on a strict no-tipping policy, telling its diners, “What you see is what you pay. We do not accept tips, your kind words and return visits will suffice”.
Kraetzer expressed relief at no longer being “reliant on the generosity of strangers to pay the bills,” pointing out that under traditional models, waitstaff often earn only the minimum wage during the hours spent preparing before service and closing after guests leave, reports BBC.
On the US East Coast, Rachel Miller, the chef and owner of the French-Vietnamese restaurant Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn, Massachusetts, implemented a tip-free model five years ago upon reopening after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Miller was motivated by a desire to establish equity for her kitchen staff. She noted that kitchen workers, who are often the least visible, were taking home only a fraction of what front-of-house staff earned in tips for the same hours.
Miller described it as “deeply unsettling” that customers, consciously or unconsciously, tipped differently based on gender, race, or sexuality, with white male staff receiving higher tips.
To fund higher wages, Nightshade Noodle Bar increased its prices, with tasting menus now starting from $102 (£75) for seven courses before 18:00, and $126 (£92) for nine courses.
“Our prices are higher than a comparable restaurant’s because they carry the full cost of paying people properly,” Miller said, adding that her staff turnover has reduced significantly since the change.
However, the tipless model has not succeeded everywhere. Talulla, a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eliminated tips in 2020 but reverted to the traditional model in September last year.
Co-owner Danielle Ayer explained that while they attempted to sustain the model by raising menu prices by 23 per cent, they could only do so through the winter months. Ayer noted that “operating a non-tipped restaurant is more expensive overall” because tips do not count as restaurant revenue, whereas higher menu prices do, thereby increasing the establishment’s sales tax burden.
William Michael Lynn, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University and author of The Psychology of Tipping, explained that consumers often struggle with the mathematics of tipless dining.
“Higher menu prices make dining out seem more expensive because people do not adequately take into account that they are no longer tipping,” Lynn said, noting that this leads to lower demand.
He also highlighted the difficulty of attracting and retaining waitstaff who prefer the potential high earnings of a gratuity system.
Despite growing “tipping fatigue” among customers, Lynn believes tipping will not be widely eliminated soon as the economic disadvantages of doing so outweigh the benefits.
Despite these hurdles, some long-term pioneers continue to thrive. In New York, the vegetarian restaurant Dirt Candy banned tipping in 2015. Chef and owner Amanda Cohen now pays her staff approximately $30 an hour, noting that customers are often “pleasantly surprised when they realise they don’t have to tip 20 per cent on top”.
The stability of the model was also praised by filmmaker Cassidy Van der Kamp, whose YouTube documentary Tipless was inspired by her experience working at a tip-free restaurant in Oakland, California.
Van der Kamp’s pay rose from $10 an hour plus tips to a stable $21 per hour. “I had stability for the first time as I knew what I was earning… and I didn’t need to look at a low tip and think what did I do wrong?” she said.
