Rod and Karen discuss baking muffins with Leila, gerrymandering backfires, Oath keeper quits, West Point concussions, GOP liars get caught in the parking lot, Fast Food desert study, office meltdowns, gay husband, street harassment, Volkswagen cheating, Anthony Mackie, Rushcard issues, Joe Biden, Lil Wayne sextape, plane violence, the first couple sing to Usher, sex robots, tipping racism, black site for Chicago PD, black motorist killed by police, BallerAlert, pastor kills man during service, Bernie Sanders stan attacks Muslim woman and sword ratchetness.
Rod and Karen discuss listener feedback.
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I would like to sincerely apologize for not taking you seriously Rod. I laughed and mocked you. But I have seen the light. Free Bobby Shmurder. What is happening to this brother is an injustice. Who will they lock up next? Fetty Wap? The Migos? Where will it end? LA Reid ought to be ashamed of himself for not bailing out boy out. He had no problem making money off of Bobby. Now he can’t help a brotha out. But are we really surprised that LA Reid is a snake in the grass? Where do you think his ex wife Peeples learned how to be shady in business. From him! LA Reid is treating Bobby worse that Peeples treated TLC.
Free Bobby!!!
Rod and Karen, I really loved what you had to say about tipping and wages paid to servers and bartenders. What I did not know is that front-of-house servers (FOH) were asked to pool tips and share them with back-of-house (BOH) workers, who are paid a full base wage by comparison. The idea of pooling tips isn’t new, but generally that’s if everyone is getting paid the same, and I’d understand that if it were just servers–that’s how I understood it to be done at Starbucks, where I worked (and even we made the full Federal minimum wage). The idea that servers making the tipped Fed minimum would then have to share those tips with BOH workers–making 4 to 6 times or more what the FOH makes in base wages–is ridiculous on its face.
As for the idea of tipping itself: it’s not that it’s wrong, but the way it’s done here is. The consumer is, in fact, subsidizing the restaurant’s profit margins. That’s why you won’t see most restaurant chains do away with tipping unless laws are changed–they benefit from paying all these servers $2.13/hr, not having to cover anything except for, maybe, workers comp, and more than likely pay less in Federal/State taxes as a result. How else can Red Lobster and Olive Garden get away with Endless Pasta and All-You-Can-Eat Crab Legs specials? They don’t have to pay the person serving you the food that much, and they’re counting on you, the consumer, to cover the rest of the gap–not that the establishment cares whether you do so. Just so that they don’t have to.
There’s a lot of commentary out there about why tipping is “an integral part of the dining experience‖that, according to Daniel Levenson Wilk, who wrote for Al Jazeera, arguing that eliminating tips wouldn’t make things fairer for workers.
That’s true: eliminating tips by themselves wouldn’t; paying them a fair, full wage + benefits would, and also would eliminate all the socio-political bullshit that, to me, makes the dining experience a pain in the ass for many. It would require workers to fucking do their jobs without regard to how much more or less they can make by service to certain customers; it no longer allows the consumer to subsidize the restaurant, or arbitrarily determine an individual’s pay for that night; and it would cut down on racial and sexual discrimination from either side, including eliminating these passive-aggressive tip notes on receipts. The diners get to eat, the servers get to serve, and nobody’s thinking about how much money to add or deduct on the tip line.
Seems to me that most people arguing in favor of continuing this unfair system are people who either never had to work in foodservice for a living, or people who don’t care about and/or have no respect for those workers and enjoy the intrinsic benefit of making somebody “earn their pay†by serving them for 45 minutes. A server’s wages should not be dependent on it, and restaurant businesses should not ask the consumer to subsidize the responsibility of making sure those servers are paid fairly. Essentially, we must get rid of theâ€tipped minimum†wage: change that law, and make all service jobs subject to the standard Federal minimum at $7.25 or whatever the state/local minimum is, and cut this bullshit out.