Kempczinski also noted that in many states, sit-down restaurants are allowed to pay servers as little as $2.13 per hour, a federal minimum set in 1991, with tips making up the rest of their pay.
“So right now, there’s an uneven playing field. If you are a restaurant that allows tips or has tips as part of your equation, you’re essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor and you’re getting an extra benefit from no taxes on tips,” Kempczinski said.
Wild. To think, McDonald’s CEO raging at how messed up the tipping industry is.
Makes sense, he can complain because fast food employees don’t get tips so he’s seen as being understanding while shitting on other restaurants. Win/win for him
local fast food chains around here have started asking for tips even at the drive through, before you get your food.
Boycott them entirely
Actual insanity
He’s only mad that he has to pay so much. He doesn’t think tipping is bad. He only thinks it’s unfair that he doesn’t benefit from it.
He’s not mad about tipping. He’s mad that his business has to pay taxes on revenue that pays wages.
Lol he’s mad that he cant get his customers to pay his labor costs. But also, my fellow Americans. Stop going out to eat! Especially if it is a tip establishment. Christmas is canceled yall. We need to go cold turkey on all the stuff our society tricked you into wanting/needing. We need to pull back on discretionary spending so much CEOs will throw themselves out their office windows.
Do we get to bring our own stick?
I got some cherry wood and linseed oil laying around as well as access to lathe, could make a real nice stick.
Yes, and sticks will also be available for purchase at cost + 5%.
First of all, fuck tipping and “tipping culture”.
But, this asshat just wants to make restaurant service more expensive to justify the exorbitant prices they’ve been charging for shitty fast food.
He hears the complaints about McD’s prices and so he wants the decent restaurant’s prices to be higher to make his look cheap.
Broken clock.
I hate to ever agree with McDonald’s on anything, but…
Kempczinski also noted that in many states, sit-down restaurants are allowed to pay servers as little as $2.13 per hour, a federal minimum set in 1991, with tips making up the rest of their pay.
FFS. Burn the restaurant industry down if this is how they’re doing it.
Anyone who patronizes a place like that should know how workers are paid, and then not go there again.
Honestly Im for it.
I worked as a bus boy, trying to become a server in college. Much of my job was cleaning up and bringing out food, doing whatever the server was doing except taking orders. Never did get to work as a server.
And I got paid min wage with the expectations that I get tipped out by servers. And often, they’d get $500 a night and hand me a $5.
Just an fyi, $2.13 isn’t all people get paid in food service industries. It’s part of something called “tip credit.” The national or state minimum wage remains the absolute minimum. What this means is that your tips supplement the restaurant’s duties to pay you minimum wage.
If you make at least minimum wage at the end of your pay period, factoring in tips, then the restaurant doesn’t have to pay you more. If you make less with your tips, the restaurant is financially responsible to make you whole.
This is one of the reasons that tip-pooling should be illegal as well.
It also needs to be pointed out this is a legal requirement, but it doesn’t always happen. If they don’t make up this difference it’s one form of wage theft, the most common form of theft in the US.
If you make less with your tips, the restaurant
is financially responsible to make you whole.fires you the next week, in practice.isn’t all people get paid in food service industries.
Of course, but we all know that tipping is used pretty much everywhere to make up for poor wages. The vast majority of the industry does this, and it should be dismantled and rebuilt, so people are treated (and paid) as people!
As an ex service employee who had tips split and didn’t know about tip credit yet, I know that the options are to either get paid as a person, or treated as a person. The number of people who told me that they didn’t “do tips” but were willing to give me a high five as a substitute was as understandable as it was upsetting.
I’m sorry you went through that. The entire pay model is crap. The industry needs to scrap it and start over. It’s unbelievable, actually.
The good thing is, there are plenty of examples around the world (outside of North America) where service workers are treated and paid like people!
This is so bavkwards to me. I’d rather work somewhere where the patron can buy my labor directly, without the capital class taking a cut.
You’d rather pay the owner $20 so she can pay me $15 than pay me $20 directly, and you think that’s better for the workers?
Because restaurant patrons pay the wages of workers no matter what. The only question is whether the owners take a cut first or not. I’d prefer not, but what do I know? I’m just a career waitress.
I’d rather work somewhere where the patron can buy my labor directly
Ma’am, nobody should be paying a 30% tip for someone to pour a drink, or walk an order up to your table, simply because the employer isn’t paying a fair wage.
Restaurants should pay people like every other business, and kill tipping culture.
But what I do know? I’m just the customer who decides where my money goes.
It’s appreciable to want to be compensated directly, however that means not all servers are compensated equally for their time. Instead of a division between labour and ownership, tipping allows division to fester between labourers.
A few places in my area have removed gratuities and raised staff compensation, and the workers there enjoy not only feeling on par with their coworkers, but also the stability of having a consistent and predictable income.
That said, it’s understandable why changing the gratuity policy might seem offensive if your example of wait staff pocketing 75% of the revenue is anywhere close to accurate. I wouldn’t want it changed either.
Unfortunately I also agree with McDonoteats as well
What’s the average hourly rate for a McDonald’s employee?
Depends on your area. Near me it starts at 15 an hour.
But mcdonalds is consistently the lowest paying of all the fast food companies. The taco bell down the street was paying $15 when McDicks was paying 10. Now T Bell is up to 20 or 22, and Mc is still at 15.
11-13. 13 if your a manager.
Whatever it is, it’s too low. The micromanaging there is insane.
$15 an hour average in my state. Then again, the minimum wage is $14.
In before he pushes for ALL restaurant staff to be tipped so he can pay his employees less.
I think this is actually a play in the other direction. Make everyone else come up to their mimimim wage and tax tips. It’s a business decision to make a walled garden that is hard to achieve. McDonald’s can survive it but many other food options will have to close, driving more people to McDonald’s.
If they can’t pay minimum wage then they weren’t a functioning business to begin with. Tipped employees aren’t just paid $2/hour, they are still legally required to make minimum wage. If the tips don’t bring them up to minimum wage the restaurant has to cover the difference.
Yes, I know this, though a lot of businesses don’t actually do that.
That’s not my point though, limiting your competition by raising expenses to a higher level for smaller businesses would help McDonalds. There isn’t much hope for him to get the minimum wage lowered to make it “fair”, what CEO of such a public company would want to make that stand. By pointing out the unfairness would be to make it more expensive for his competition that don’t have to play by the same rules would help McDonald’s by hurting the local Mom and Pop or smaller restaurant chains. by hurting his competition. He gets to appear to take the high road by pointing out others should be held to the same higher standards and do the right thing. McDonald’s is already making it work at the higher wage because of how big they are, but their competition for food options probably won’t be able to do the same.
This is similar to how WalMart, Home Depot and etc expanded back in the day. Pay more, lower operating costs per sqft of retail space and less expensive prices than the mom and pops. This runs the smaller competition out of business because they can’t keep up and now WalMart/Home Depot or whatever has a much bigger piece of the local market as there are few options for consumers to spend their money with.
Mcdonald’s has gotten much more expensive in the last several years while also losing customers but he can’t lower expenses so he is trying to raise the operating costs for everyone else since he knows McDonald’s can survive for longer at the higher expense then almost anyone else.
Excellent points. Thank you for sharing! :-)
I understand you’re point, what I was calling out is that what McDonald’s suggests technically shouldn’t be a new burden on restaurants, but you’re probably right that it would be because how broken tipping is in America.
Also, this approach is actually the opposite of what Walmart did to expand. Walmart used its large size to force better wholesale deals and/or operate at a loss to undercut prices that mom and pop stores couldn’t compete with. Walmart is known for cheaper prices than the competition.
McDonald’s approach is more like regulatory capture. Once youre a big player you try to get more burdensome laws passed that make it harder for new competition and/or smaller businesses to thrive. Currently we’re seeing similar things in the online space with things like age verification laws.
I was going to write out a whole spiel that hardly anybody would read to completion, then realized I could simplify it so easily: The audacity of these McBitches.
Why?
They’re not wrong. A server make $2 an hour, with the idea of being offset by tips to meet minimum wage.
Again, I had written a long wall of text, trying to touch on all the points before I decided to simply. I won’t be rewriting it all, but the main points are:
- If McD’s wanted servers, they can have them and then they would get any supposed benefits of having wait staff. 2. If there was so much as a penny extra profit to be made from this, McDs would be doing it. You’d have to be willfully ignorant to believe otherwise. 3. Servers make federal minimum wage (not the $2 quoted) at a minimum. Yes, bad/illegal bosses exist, but that’s a separate issue. If they don’t make up for the deficit with tips, the business is on the hook for making up the difference. The truth is though, it’s rarely needed because they tend to make pretty decent money via the tips. 4. Whether customers pay the employees directly (via tips) or indirectly, they’re still paying. The employers like McDs are not charities that are literally giving away free employee work, they’re building that cost into the products and services they offer, which are then paid by customers. 5. And this is the biggest one: Large corporations and ultra wealthy literally make a sport out of shirking their tax responsibilities, so given all the other points are basically moot, the sheer audacity of making an argument about taxes benefits for small businesses and workers is something else.
And to be clear, I’m not advocating for tipping culture or tip-based wages, since a lot of people (not necessarily you) seem to have reading comprehension problems.
Can’t even remember the last time I ate food from that shit hole
