Businesses passing along their costs to customers

I have no quarrel with rewarding servers with a little extra cash for providing good service. But I must confess that I’ve long had a hazy understanding about why tipping even exists.

In my youth I was naive enough to not tip at all. In my late teens and in college, I simply went to the restaurant, ordered my food and then parted. This led me to be regarded as a cheapskate, but nobody accused me, at least not to my face.

Somehow I became more worldly afterward.

My old fishing buddy had a similar attitude, and it was in 1976 at the Golden Grill in Seney that he told me after a terrific breakfast that it was so good he left a quarter on the table for a tip.

I began to think more about leaving tips when I learned the sad news that waiters and waitresses didn’t even make minimum wage, and it was because they counted on tips to make up that difference.

I hear tell the system really came into its own in the 1920s, before FDR and his progressive socialists implemented the minimum wage. Restaurants were permitted to pay so low and servers were encouraged to depend more on those tips.

On the plus side, waiters and waitresses were given incentives to do a good job in making the customer happy. On the negative side, restaurant owners were able to pass along some their costs to the customers rather than absorbing payroll costs themselves. Another negative factor was the possibility that customers not satisfied with the quality of the meal might take out their anger by leaving a poor or no tip at all, even if the server did his or her job well.

Don’t get me wrong. I side heavily with the server — under appreciated and too often the victims of arrogance and abuse from their bosses and clients.

So it really wasn’t all that surprising to me that during the pandemic, restaurants found it more difficult to find quality help. I so often have noticed over the past few years that signs at eateries are almost begging people to sign on for work.

Moreover, it’s the “service” field of work that is plagued by not enough people willing to toil in jobs that don’t pay well and are filled with so much stress.

A friend from my days at the Albion Evening Recorder told me his wife who was a waitress at a popular local eatery, made a pretty good haul in tips, especially on weekends in a place that served alcohol. Yet she gave up that job not long afterward to do something else.

It’s not just restaurants.

Those who provided services such as gas station jockeys and milk man delivery these days are only memories. Those who serve us too often are looked down on as lower class, because they are servants.

Now I hear tell fast food joints are going to be handled entirely by automated machines that don’t get sick, take vacations or talk back to the boss.

We’ve been warned about automation for a long time. We’ve seen it happen in plenty of areas, most insidiously at grocery stores that pay you nothing to scan and pay for your purchases at the machines on your own. This, not all that long away from of prospects that teenagers no longer carry your bags to your car.

I have come to the conclusion that businesses are cutting costs by passing along to consumers. Yet the best way to avoid economic recession or depression is to put money into the hands of the middle and lower classes because they will spend it rather than send it to off-shore tax havens or buy yachts.