Thread: More venting, this about restaurants.....

Originally Posted by jockeys

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

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.

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.

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.