More venting, this about restaurants.....

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Originally Posted by jockeys

I have seen it in action, and it actually makes you throw up, not the other way around.

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This is not personal to you, but reading some of your testimonials did make me lose another bit of the little confidence I had left in the good of mankind.

Next time I'm in the US I'll make sure to tell the staff I am a good tipper (which I am), even though I have a f'ed up accent. That was a valuable lesson you handed out there. ;)

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Originally Posted by LX_Emergency

That might be true in the states. I'll definately take your word for it. However over here minimum wage is a legal minimum. By law you actually CAN'T pay less than that. So servers always make at LEAST that. I've worked plenty of minimum wage jobs so I don't feel sorry for them at all.

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That is true here also, except that there are actually two legal minimum wages. One for tip earners, and one for non tip earners. Then there are a variety of regulations assuring that only people working in certain areas can be paid at the lower tip earner rate.

To complicate matters further, those wages are set at a federal level, however each state has the right to set a higher minimum wage. Some do, some don't.

So, you might have breakfast in Idaho, where they observe only the federal minimum wages, and your waiter is paid $2.50/hour because of the reduced minimum wage for tip earners, (this is only a fraction of the the poverty level without a lot of money from tips), and then you could cross the border into Oregon for lunch, where the is a state imposed minimum wage of something like $8.50/hour, and tip earners are paid the same wage as non-tip earners.