Do not write me an essay about your restaurant’s compensation decisions
Plus: a way to get a free subscription to my paid Substack content, a cautionary tale, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you. Please make sure you read the fifth item; it’s a request that’s very important to me and one I hope you’ll seriously consider.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Do not write me an essay about your restaurant’s compensation decisions
Dear restaurateurs of America,
I get that it’s stylish to have a lot of thoughts about tips. And I get the case against tipping, though I do not make it myself. What I don’t get is the impulse to write me an essay about your establishment’s internal compensation and HR policies.
Look, there are two good ways to handle this. One is to maintain the status quo: lower food prices, nominal wages, and tips. This has the advantage of being the default expectation. It is also what many servers themselves prefer—I know I did, back when I was able to make $20-50 an hour waiting tables while home from college for the summer. There was no other way for me to make that kind of money at that age, and tipped work remains uniquely lucrative for many people today. (I always liked Ron Paul’s idea to exempt tips from income taxes altogether.)
The second good option is a straightforward change. Raise your prices to give your employees better wages and benefits and then stop accepting tips. How should you communicate this to customers so everyone is on the same page? With a line or two on your menu and bill that might say—and this is just off the top of my head, you understand—something like: “We have raised our prices to give our employees better wages and benefits. We do not accept tips.”
There is, unfortunately, a third way to handle this, and it’s the way too many restaurants have chosen: oversharing. Telling me the whole inner workings of your business and all the justice feelings in your heart. Adding surcharges explicitly earmarked for insurance or back of house staff pay or vacation time or whatever. Spelling out at obnoxious length how Committed to Our Workers’ Welfare your restaurant is when I’m literally just trying to have some fries and a cocktail.
Here are a few examples friends have sent my way because they know I have a bee in my bonnet about this:
Now, I have no objection to the goals here, even if I doubt that jettisoning tipping is the best way to achieve them. Give the wait staff vacation days! Pay the line cooks and dishwashers more! Offer insurance! All of this sounds great to me.
But just work these costs into the prices like you do every other cost. I don’t need to see your business plan. I’m not an investor; I’m here for lunch. Charge more for my fries and be done with it.
Of course, there’s a reason these details make it into the menu. There’s a reason you’re not writing to me about the cost of lettuce. I know why there’s no “we had to reupholster the booths” surcharge. I realize no restaurant is announcing an extra 20 percent for a new grill. All that stuff just goes silently into the price—where it belongs.
Only the add-ons that make management look good get surcharge and essay status. It’s the street-corner prayer and glum-faced fasting of the restaurant industry, transparent preening that may be even more obnoxious than the lingering QR codes.
2. What I'm reading this week
Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty, by Ephraim Radner (forthcoming in March). Just getting into this to review at CT later this month.
3. A recommendation
Read this thought-provoking Twitter thread about the recent issue with Google’s AI image generator. (It was programmed not to make images of all-white or all-male groups of people and ended up generating obviously ahistorical pictures, like a female pope and Native American women as U.S. senators in the 1800s.)
The main takeaway here, the thread argues, is not about the “woke” politics of Google employees. It’s that this is a “major demonstration of someone giving [generative AI] a set of instructions and the results being totally not at all what they predicted.”
Google probably “didn’t want pictures of people doing universal activities (e.g. walking a dog) to always be white,” which is reasonable enough. But they didn’t think through the implications of the rule they set to avoid that outcome, and in addition to diverse pet owners, they got diverse Nazi soldiers in 1943.
This should be a cautionary tale, to say the least.
4. Recent work
Bonnie Kristian with Christianity Today | The Common Good (radio show)
Where’s that line, anyway? | The Bulletin (podcast episode)
Hell Is a World Without You revisits early 2000s youth group | Christianity Today (unlocked link)
Don’t overexpose kids to mental health experts. Or rule them out completely. | Christianity Today (unlocked link)
Putin’s losses, Washington’s ambitions | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
Those of you who know me in real life may be aware that I’ve long supported a missionary named Mark (not his real name due to security concerns), who is from India and serves in China.
Backing Mark’s work is probably the single best thing I do with my money: He quite literally cares for the sick, the orphan, the prisoner. He ministers on college campuses, using his English fluency as an entry point to build relationships and share the gospel with students. He visits a leper colony, bringing supplies and helping with tasks, like cutting their fingernails, that they can no longer do for themselves. He’s involved with the underground church and is a consummate host for locals and Western visitors alike.
Mark was stuck in India for a couple years because of China’s pandemic restrictions. He’s now back in China and re-establishing his ministry. Particularly because his home church isn’t able to support him right now, he needs more monthly income to get things up and running again.
So here’s my proposal for you: If you are willing to commit to sending Mark at least $20 a month for at least a year—or a one-time gift of at least $240—reply to this email and I will give you a U.S. mailing address to send your checks.
Send me verification (a screenshot or photo) of your giving, and to thank you, I will give you a free one-year subscription to my paid content here on Substack.
Logistics: You can likely automate giving in your banking app. If you are already a paid subscriber, I believe I can still extend your subscription by a year. If you only read me in the Substack app, are not a subscriber, or for whatever reason haven’t received this as an email, leave a comment or tweet at me or something, and we’ll figure it out.
That said, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the owners here. You're getting essays because the alternative is having long conversations with diners, over and over, or -- worse -- forcing wait staff to explain their compensation structure to diners, over and over. Maybe this is a transitional period and in five years more folks will understand what they're getting without the fuss.
I can tell you that when I worked briefly for tips in my mid-30s, they were functionally tax exempt.