
Restaurants are figuring out how to do without servers - jasondc
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/dining/san-francisco-restaurants-service.html
======
Androider
I'd prefer a serverless restaurant even if the price was exactly the same as
with the full-service.

It's like the difference between an old-style Taxi and an Uber, with the
latter you just get up and go when you're done. The whole dance of flagging
down the server to request the bill, get the bill, oops the server disappeared
before you could pull out your card, wait for 10 minutes while they are off
exploring Narnia in the kitchen cupboards. Finally they come to take the card
and disappear again, what should have taken 30 seconds is now at 15 min+, hope
you're not missing your show... ah, finally they're back! Now try to figure
out the tip line, with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to
centigrade in your head while your house is burning down.

Waitstaff-less high-end restaurants expand the audience and frequency of
visits of people who can now enjoy these better-than-Chipotle dining
experiences. Much like Uber, which doesn't only cannibalize existing providers
but actually creates a whole new category of short rides that you would never
have previously considered using a Taxi for.

~~~
67_45
This is not a substantive comment to make but calculating a tip is very easy.
15 percent of course is that standard amount. That is 10 percent plus 5
percent. Finding ten percent is as easy as moving the decimal over one place.
If the bill is 15.69 ten percent of that is one dollar and 56 cents. Call it
1.50. we know that five percent is half of ten, so just divide that number in
half and add it. So half of 1.50 is .75 and 1.50 plus .75 is 2.25. it's very
easy.

~~~
hsitz
Maybe it's because I'm in the 50+ age category, but I think tips are confusing
for a different reason. Yes, of course, it's trivial to calculate a percentage
of an amount. The confusion is in deciding what percentage to give.

15% - 20% is standard, and always has been, for a full service, sit down
restaurant. The tip makes some sense, based on the service given to you, some
level of tip being roughly commensurate with the amount of service.

But what percentage am I supposed to tip in a restaurant where I order at a
counter, bus my own table, and merely have someone bring the order to my
table? (FWIW, some McDonalds now do this, yet nobody would ever tip at
McDonalds.) What about if they come around and fill my water? What if I order
at a counter but they still bus my table?

Moreover, in many places (coffee shops, ice cream shops) there is no wait
service at all, the person at the counter merely draws a coffee or scoops some
ice cream, yet tips are apparently still expected. Am I really supposed to tip
15% just for someone to scoop me an ice cream cone? Which leads me to another
question that has bothered me since way back in the day: Why are bartenders
tipped so richly simply for pouring a drink?

15-20% has long been standard for full-service. For lesser service I don't
understand why anybody would be expected to tip the same amount. Am I missing
something? I gather the younger generation might not think of things in these
terms, but why not?

~~~
ryandrake
I’m surprised that you are 50+ and are saying 15-20% “has always” been the
standard for sit down full service. I am 40+ and distinctly remember when it
was 10%. Then little by little it seemed to morph into 10-15%, then 10%ers
were seen as cheap and it was 15%. Then some restaurants would “suggest”
15-18%. Now, just yesterday I was in a restaurant where they pre-calculated
18%, 19%, and 20%. It’s been inflating all my life, for no logical,
discernible reason.

~~~
baby
Simpler: never tip a percentage. Tip a fixed amount. It makes no sense to me
to pay more because I ordered a more expensive dish.

~~~
paulddraper
That's like saying a real estate agent should make $8k regardless of what
property they sell.

You could argue that, but only by ignoring practical matters of effort/level
of service/value that attends a different price.

~~~
Latteland
The fact that real estate agents are paid by percentage is the most ridiculous
thing ever. I'm done with that. Pay 60k commission sales fee on your million
dollar house? Houses sell in one week or less where I live. There's literally
no reason to pay that money.

------
grellas
_On July 1, the minimum wage in San Francisco will hit $15 an hour, following
incremental raises from $10.74 in 2014. The city also requires employers with
at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the
Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave._

If a local government dictates that your base wage rate for a labor-intensive
industry has to increase by 40% within less than a 5-year period and, on top
of that, further dictates that you as an employer must provide those same
employees with above-average health benefits together with paid leave of
varying types above and beyond what market norms have been, well, at the end
of that process, you are obviously having to pay a hell of a lot more for
those employees than you did just a few years back, perhaps as much as 50%
more.

Real wage increases tie to rising productivity. I well remember representing
highly-talented UNIX engineers during the early 1990s who were earning around
$60K per year (adjusting for inflation alone, that number would still not be
in the six-figure range today). Today, engineers of that caliber easily
command six-figure salaries plus great perks. The best of them easily command
$250k+ salaries. For employers trying to find such engineers, they have to
open their wallets big time and, yet, they do. Why? Because, if you are a
Google or a Facebook or a Twitter or an Apple, or any other preeminent company
needing the services of such engineers, you are not trying to eliminate those
positions simply because they cost a lot more today than they did in the early
1990s. You are desperately trying to _add_ such people to your payroll because
of _what they can do for you_. The changing tech world has magnified the
productivity and value of what such engineers can do and therefore the
salaries and perks they can command are far higher. But this is _market-based_
and justified because the profits you can earn as an employer are also much
higher owing to their work. The engineers of the early 1990s were just as
talented as those today but their value was relatively less to employers than
is the value of their counterparts today. Their productivity has vastly
increased. Hence, so has their compensation.

Compare that to what the city officials in San Francisco are doing with
waiters and similar restaurant staff. Essentially, they have decreed (in the
name of worker protection) that the cost to the employer of such employees
shall increase by 50% or more over a short period when nothing whatever has
occurred to increase their productivity. I went years working my way through
school doing such work and it is very hard work indeed. The people doing it
earn every penny. Yet those who did it 5 years ago at considerably less cost
to the employer than those who do it today worked just as hard as their
counterparts today. If those doing such work today are doing the same work,
and their productivity has not materially increased, yet they are getting paid
50% more, something has to give.

This article basically dances around the obvious by tying the discussion to
the considerable expense of living in SF and to collateral issues affecting
the city's living environment. In doing so, it does not discuss the obvious:
when supply and demand dictates what people will do, and you arbitrarily raise
the cost of something, it will affect demand by lessening it.

That is why SF restaurants are moving to less labor-dependent models of doing
business. Not all will do so but the laws of supply and demand have given them
an incentive to do so and it should surprise no one that a good number of them
are adapting.

Perhaps this is all worth it because those who are now working as waitstaff in
SF restaurants are doing much better financially and this is worth the trade
off. But no one should pretend that this does not come at a price, perhaps a
very high one, for those whose jobs have vanished along with the new business
models. (By "new" here, I mean not that no one has had self-serve models
before, which they obviously have, but "new" in the sense that restaurants
that would before have never considered such models are now adopting them).

~~~
sonnyblarney
Minimum wage laws are absolutely necessary otherwise they'd pay $1 an hour and
you'd see the '25 cent store' instead of the dollar store and people living in
huts.

But - as you rightly point out - a 33% jump in a short period is stupid.

It would be nice if min wage were tied to some kind of economic indicator.

But good comment.

~~~
austenallred
You really think people would work for $1/hr in San Francisco?

~~~
sonnyblarney
People will ultimately work for their minimum survivable wage and economies
will adjust to support ever decreasing wages among a subset of the population.

People live in favelas in Rio. They live in tiny, one room flats in Hong Kong
without plumbing in deplorable conditions. They live in 'work camps' in Dubai
without any rights at all.

 _And they work hard_.

Of course 'people in SF' would do the same.

Don't think you're exempt - you would do the same if your skills were
commoditized and you had no recourse.

Your salary has nothing to do with how skilled you are, how hard you work, or
how much value you can provide. It's entirely a function of 'power' relative
to your employer. So even if you are a full-on genius, and can speak 10
languages, code in 10 languages and have a PhD in AI - you will earn next to
nothing if those things are common and your skills are a commodity.

In any given economy, a good chunk of people have commodity skills, i.e.
manual labour or not much more. This bar is getting higher. Way back before
minimum wage we (and without knowing you, there's a very high chance this
applies to your ancestors as well) survived on next to nothing - and probably
worked hard. Land owners, mine owners, factory owners would leverage and
leverage and leverage to make sure the workers had 'only enough barely
survive' \- after all - every additional penny to workers would have been
simply charity, in the raw economic sense.

So - all modern and civilized economies have 'minimum wage' and/or collective
bargaining for some groups. Minimum wage and unions were essential to bringing
civilizations out of the dark ages. Some caveats to that would be a very high
social security system with gracious benefits - i.e. the government gives you
a 'job' which is 'not doing anything' which would set a floor for wages
obviously. Or an economy in which there were very few people with commodity
skills and 'everyone' was somehow empowered a little bit against everyone else
(like 'equality and diversity in skill set' kind of thing), which is not very
common.

Because of the imbalance of power - we have no choice but to have minimum
wage, or something like it - and it's also generally why we don't need such
things in areas wherein people are not commoditized.

The really interesting paradox is that the 'minimum survivable wage' for any
individual is _not the profit maximizing wage_ for employers in the long run!

In the 'short run' employers save money / increase profits by cutting wages.
But - those people can then 'spend less' and it hurts the economy, which hurts
business!

Henry Ford realized this pragmatically. He realized that if he wanted to sell
a 'model T' to 'everyone' and his own factory workers could literally not
afford one, then few people would be able to buy his cars, ergo, his business
model was not going to work! So he paid his employees more than the short-run
minimum requirement.

This requires a fairly enlightened strategy on the part of employers -
moreover - it requires kind of a common buy-in by most employers, which is
like a strategy game:

> If all employers pay subsistence wages - then they all kind of lose because
> nobody can afford to buy the crap they make in their factories.

> If all employers pay some difficult-to-calculate wage higher than
> subsistence, like a minimum wage ... well, everyone is better off.

> But - if most employers pay this 'decent wage' but _some_ employers 'cheat'
> and pay much less, well, those 'cheating' employers can benefit quite a lot,
> and get rich of a system by sneaking off surpluses from a system they are
> not paying into. Kind of like 'not paying taxes'. But of course - every
> employer is under constant pressure to keep wages down - and they have no
> formal pressure, like a taxation agency or regulatory body, to keep them
> from doing otherwise. So of course we're going to have low wages without
> regulation.

The minimum wage is actually economically rational from a practical, surplus
sharing perspective (you could say 'socialist' or 'communitarian'), but even
if you want to look at it more from a 'free market' perspective, minimum wage
could be argued to be the wage at which the economy (including employers and
shareholders) maximally benefit in the long run ... but it's just simply
impossible to get 'all business' to intelligently collude and set this wage
because they are all competing more or less on short-run business cycles, and
have great incentive to cheat. Hence regulation.

As for SF, especially the increasing ratio of undocumented workers who have no
access to social services, yes, they will work for next to nothing - the
minimum that will allow them to survive.

SF would form favelas just like in Brazil, and there's absolutely no economic
reason why it wouldn't - only regulatory policies etc. keep it from that i.e.
wages, rights, services, etc. etc...

FYI - this partly why having a lot of undocumented folks in the economy is a
really bad idea. For a host of other reasons well. If you're going to have
people participating in the economy - give them full rights. But that kind of
means 'open borders' \- which you can't have ... (ie can't have open borders
and social welfare at the same time). A much better solution would be to have
'reasonably effective border control', close unprofitable factories/businesses
in the US and move them to Mexico so that entire communities of regular people
can aspire to a higher standard of living, safety, civility etc.. That's a
much better win for everyone.

~~~
Semirhage
_People will ultimately work for their minimum survivable wage and economies
will adjust to support ever decreasing wages among a subset of the population.
People live in favelas in Rio. They live in tiny, one room flats in Hong Kong
without plumbing in deplorable conditions. They live in 'work camps' in Dubai
without any rights at all. And they work hard._

You just used examples of places for which a tiny one-room flat is an
improvement over previous conditions. If you think a favela is bad, try being
a peasant on a working farm.

The idea that people used to life in, for example, Texas or London will get
used to a similar lifestyle which represents a massive downgrade is
ridiculous. Historically people started overthrowing governments and sending
people to guillotines for more modest losses. You’d have riots in SF if the
options were “work for $1” or “starve.”

I think minimum wage laws are a good idea too, but your argument is bizarre.

~~~
sonnyblarney
"Historically people started overthrowing governments and sending people to
guillotines for more modest losses. You’d have riots in SF if the options were
“work for $1” or “starve.”"

YES. And what would those riots be for: MORE WAGES. Basically a minimum wage
or collective bargaining. Hence my point of why minimum wage has to exist!

Using an externalized or non-market function like _rioting_ to achieve wage
increase, is the same as _voting_ to require minimum wage etc:

\--> You literally just made my argument for me <\--

"Texas or London will get used to a similar lifestyle which represents a
massive downgrade is ridiculous."

People have no choice but to accept the economic conditions they face.

This is 'reality' , it's not 'bizarre' at all.

My argument is nothing but basic, classical economics. It's not even an
argument, more so an explanation. Nothing new.

If people have to work for 'next to nothing or die' \- what do you think they
will do?

Die? Or work like a slave? The later in most cases.

It's economic reality.

I think what would happen in London/SF/Texas is that irregular workers would
probably move in and form the basis of this ever lowering economy, and
empowered citizens would be much less likely to fall - but they definitely
could. And that includes you, and me, if we didn't have access to family,
social services, minimum wages etc..

~~~
Semirhage
_People have no choice but to accept the economic conditions they face._

My whole point is that as I said, people don’t just accept, they riot and
revolt. I agree with minimum wage laws, but not because of some hyper-extreme
scenario in which San Franciscans are working and living like Brazilians in
favelas. Frankly we shouldn’t need to resort to that kind of hyperbole to make
the case for a living wage.

If you want to see what happens, even in traditionally poor places when people
face a “fight or die impoverished” scenario, see Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. People
were willing to face tanks and bombs with their bare hands because the
alternative was to starve. I think you underestimate the potential
belligerence of the average American if faced with a similar scenario.

The larger issue though is that riot, abject poverty, and revolt aren’t
actually the foundation of a minimum wage. Fairness, and Econ 101 are, and
there’s no need to get so far out there as to divert the debate away from
present conditions to extreme hypotheticals.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Yes, of course people would revolt, I fully agree.

Of course American citizens would revolt and demand non-market interventions,
like minimum wage etc..

Without non-market interventions, they would be serfs, is my point.

------
ademup
I'm happy to see servers go. If "Include wait staff?" were a selectable
checkbox on my dining experience, I would opt out every...single...time. I
prefer to eat out as often as possible, and although I have had many wonderful
experiences with talented wait staff, most act as gatekeepers between me and
the food; me and payment; me and the real problem-solver. Servers often poorly
represent the wishes of the establishment's owner, let alone the chef's. Good
servers can certainly make an otherwise weak experience "fine", but they more
often make decent experiences less-good.

------
SurrealSoul
I'm sorry, but as someone who pays the majority of a resturant waiter's salary
via tipping, I don't think it's an issue of the restaurant saving the
$5.50/hr.

I have never seen an article hype up the McDonald experience so much.

[Side tangent, I hate the concept of waiters. If I am having a romantic dinner
with my wife, I would much rather get her a cup of water than have someone
butt into our conversation]

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Go to dinner in Europe. The wait staff is paid a humane wage and they won’t
bother you at all unless you wave them over. This was my experience across
Germany, Poland, and Italy, so I assume it’s a continental preference. YMMV.

~~~
adventured
Wait staff in the US earn more than wait staff in Germany, France, and Italy.
Your supposed humane wage is less humane than the US wages being paid. The
cost of living is also higher in Germany and France than in the US.

Median waiter pay in the US: $20,820; mean: $25,280 (per the BLS).

Mean waiter pay in Germany (the median is always lower): $16,500 to $18,000
(depending on your source). Germany pays atrocious waiter wages.

The US pays about 40-50% more at the mean for its waiters, while having a
lower cost of living. If the German mean is that low, I hate to see the median
($14k?).

The French average at near $21,000 is about 16% below the US average, and is
barely above their required minimums:

"French waiters are paid, on average, 1,495 euros [$1,749] a month, only a
shade more than the statutory minimum wage, and they usually expect some sort
of tip. "

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
europe-28793677](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28793677)

~~~
rdm_blackhole
I am French so I can respond to your comment.

In France, tipping is not mandatory and if I do it I usually leave 1 or 2
euros in change.

Waiters in France do not have to pay for their own health insurance.

They can actually afford to go to the doctor and get help if they need it. No
risk of medical bankruptcy here.

Waiters get paid the minimum wage in low-end restaurants but make more money
in the upscale ones.

Waiters dont need to rely on the patrons' generosity to pay their bills.

------
ulfw
Tips are about the dumbest American tradition I have seen. (Yes I know they
exist world wide, but wayyyyy less commonly).

So if I buy a $20 meal, I pay the waiter $3 to take my order, go to the
kitchen, tell the chefs, go pick up the order, put it on my table and later
take my credit card when I flag him down to pay. This should be included in
the price. But hey. Whatever. $3. Fine.

Now when I go to a fancier restaurant and order the same amount of food, where
the waiter does the exact same job of taking an order, putting it on the table
and comes back later to take my credit card I suddenly have to pay him say
$20? Why? How on earth has his job changed in any way shape or form to earn so
much more money than the previous restaurant's waiter for the exact same
amount of work?

I really do not get it.

If anything, the Chefs and Sous Chefs should be tipped and should earn more at
fancier restaurants because food preparation there often takes longer, is a
more intricate affair and often needs more skills and experience. Not the
waiting staff.

~~~
Double_a_92
The consulting and presentation in a fancy restaurant is harder. E.g. with a
bottle of while.

In a normal restaurant you might just a bottle put on your table.

In a fancy they tell you about the wine. They have to hold the bottle right.
You get to try a sip of it first,...

~~~
ulfw
That is true. If you ordered wine.

Still gotta pay way more for when you just order a meal.

~~~
Double_a_92
It's probably still valid for a normal meal.

You can get reccomandations, they tell you what fits good togheter... They
have to serve it probably in some special way (that we don't even notice).
Idk.

Just because most people don't notice or appreciate the added service, it
doesn't mean that it's not there.

But yes, mandatory tips in general are stupid. It's the employers duty to pay
their stuff a fair "base" salary. Tips should be additional income for
extraordinary skill.

------
SilasX
Kind of inflammatory way to phrase it[2], but to save you the time:
restaurants are shifting to models that use less waitstaff, closer to fast
casual. In the first example, they say that runners bring the food but you
have to fetch your own water and go to a counter for each wine glass; sadly,
it was ambiguous on how orders are placed.

This is kind of to-be-expected as the wage/cost-of-living ratio dips too low
so that lower-labor models are preferred. [1].

My peeve about these kinds of models is the ambiguity of the tipping
situation; it's obviously not full service, but it's not zero either. And
places like Super Duper are _zero_ service (you stand in line, fetch your
order, and bus your table) but still guilt you into tipping. I don't know the
amount for "this satisfies the standard expectation".

[1] If you automatically say "lol pay them more", it's not that simple: higher
prices and you'll scare off too many customers -- into fast casual and home
cooking -- to cover overhead. Take lower profits and it may not pay enough to
be worth the investment.

[2] Edit: original version was something like “... putting diners to work”.

~~~
CodeCube
My rule for tipping is:

\- someone takes my order, and busses my table: "full tip" (whatever that
means to you)

\- I stand in line to place the order, but someone busses my table: "50% tip"

\- I stand in line to place the order, then bus my own table: "Look in the
mirror, and shoot myself some finger guns"

~~~
paulie_a
Is 50% a typo? Because for 50% I better have gotten at least a handjob.

~~~
SilasX
I think they mean 50% of the full, reference tip amount. If the full tip is
20%, then 50% there means 10% of the bill.

~~~
CodeCube
Yes this is what I meant :) apologies for the ambiguity

------
cm2012
On a side note, the ordering kiosks in McDonalds are the best thing ever.
Customizing an order is way less error prone this way than verbally. And the
line is always shorter.

~~~
niftich
I've found the kiosks to be laggy and inconsistent in accepting touch input;
any orders that have multiple different items take longer for me to key in at
the kiosk than to verbally express at the counter.

But having the ability to customize items to your exact specifications is very
nice; reminds me of the old Burger King wrappers that had icons for
ingredients around the edges, with the intention of their inclusion or
omission for custom orders being marked, but it's a practice I've never
observed being used.

The McDonalds in-app ordering and pickup is a superior experience to the
kiosk, but it needs location to be on.

~~~
DrScump

      The McDonalds in-app ordering and pickup is a superior experience
    

... If you don't mind the fact that they _suck all your private Contacts_
information off you device and _track everywhere you travel_. Is it worth it?
Really?

------
Scramblejams
I eat at Outback and I &$@! hate their tablets.

Who are all these people in this thread who don’t value a server’s knowledge
and flexibility? It’s as if they’ve never been infuriated by an IVR system and
cannot imagine that kind of horror landing in their restaurant booth when all
they’re looking to do is enjoy themselves.

Sometimes you want recommendations that come with more details than what the
web guy baked into the hero piece. Sometimes you want something prepared a
certain way, and the UI isn’t going to be up to it. Good luck getting that
through an abused table tablet.

So some servers underachieve. Fine. I still want one.

~~~
theNJR
You really need a waiter to recommend things at Outback ...

Even at a local restaurant a waiters recommendation is always biased. I'd
rather integrate reviews into the system.

~~~
Scramblejams
Sometimes they'll get an unusually good cut of something and a good server
will tell you. Reviews won't. (Nor will they help much at a restaurant that
frequently changes its menu. And if the restaurant is responsible for the
review system, invariably a bunch will end up hiding the negative reviews and
flagging the customers who leave them, with predictable consequences.
Seriously, reviews you're reading on the restaurant tablet are going to be
somewhere between useless and a disaster that starts Twitter wars.)

But getting back to my Outback example. Did you know if they pan sear your
filet they do it with a weight on top of it? I didn't until a server told me,
and gave me the option to skip the weight. (Much better result, by the way,
even if it does take longer.)

And did you know at Outback if they wood fire your filet they don't use a
weight, but instead of the 17 spice seasoning they use in pan searing, they
switch to salt and pepper? I didn't until a server told me, and gave me the
option to go wood-fired plus 17 spice seasoning, which is a terrific combo.

Drawing a larger point, computer people would rather deal with computers. I
get it. But there's a whole world of possibilities out there you miss when
instead of building relationships with the people you meet casually around you
(like wait staff), you instead constrain yourself to the choices made
available to you through silicon and Javascript.

------
CompelTechnic
There sure is a lot of righteous indignation in this thread. I am eager to see
the fallout of the imminent minimum wage increase (hopefully not too much
human suffering). With the similar event that happened in Seattle recently,
the initial government-funded study of the outcome came back with results
favoring the conservative opinion. Naturally, the liberal local government
quashed this study and performed another. Similarly, if you google "Seattle
minimum wage study" the results are a mixed bag, and more informed by opinion
than data.

Take everything you read with a grain of salt, and stick to first-hand data as
much as possible.

Here is a good, minimally biased (although by a libertarian-leaning economist)
synopsis of the initial results:
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/seattle-
minimum-wage-study.html)

------
Simulacra
I would prefer a server-less restaurant just so I don't have to worry about
tipping. Reduction or elimination in wait staff may just appeal to the anti-
tipping segment, which could have the intriguing result of increasing sales...

------
kennon42
My initial thought was that this was yet another post about serverless!

~~~
davidcamel
Similarly, I read the headline and thought, "What kinds of workloads do
restaurants run on servers?". Oh boy.

~~~
jaxtellerSoA
Same, I was like "All they need is a POS system. Why would they need server
infrastructure?"

------
ctdonath
Minimum wage is debtor's prison redux: if you don't produce enough, you're not
allowed to produce anything at all.

And some jobs just don't entail that much productivity.

------
cbhl
I feel like this is the logical conclusion of a living wage.

If we pay everyone enough to make a living wage, then it should cost the same
for me to grab my own menu, utensils and water bottles as it would for a
server to do so.

Honestly, the high cost of renting in SF has already made the "move to
California and bus tables to get by while auditioning for movie / working on
startup" dream impossible. This is just a side effect of the bureaucracy and
housing policies here.

~~~
int3
> If we pay everyone enough to make a living wage, then it should cost the
> same for me to grab my own menu, utensils and water bottles as it would for
> a server to do so.

I don't see how that follows. The opportunity cost per unit time for a skilled
worker is typically greater than the living wage.

------
shah_s
Am I missing something? Plenty of restaurants have self serve policies.

~~~
ProfessorLayton
I guess what's missing is that many of these self-serve restaurants with $22
pan roasted salmon or whatever still have 20% tip preselected on the payment
screen.

~~~
NullPrefix
To tip the chef?

~~~
paulie_a
I assume that the chef is paid from the 22 dollars the customer paid.

------
thiscatis
How is this new. Have the authors ever been in a British (gastro)pub? Order at
the bar mate. Also, no silly tipping rules.

------
vertexFarm
Housing costs in places with good economies and lots of jobs are getting
absolutely ridiculous compared to the median wage.

I guess people are supposed to look at less glamorous cities, but if everyone
affected by this did that then they would probably run out of opportunities,
fill up, and have housing prices shoot up as well. Something's gotta give
here. There's a real disconnect between the prices and the ability to pay. Who
is paying for these things? People with lots of generational wealth? People
with upper-middle class jobs yet no savings and razor-thin margins due to
living expenses? That's so shitty.

~~~
sonnyblarney
It has to do with artificially low interest rates.

The Fed should have been bumping them up years ago, forcing liquidity into
other parts of the system.

It would be better if there was a more natural way to set rates.

Also - it has to do with perpetually extending our visibility into our
economic future, i.e. as loan times get longer and longer - the lenders win as
housing prices go up.

If everyone had the same term mortgage, and it was fixed - this issue would
not cause problems for for housing inflation.

But as we go collectively from 25 years to 50 years to 75 years ... well,
housing prices go up.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _It has to do with artificially low interest rates_

It's predominantly a supply problem. Interest rates are low across the
country, yet San Francisco is in a unique situation.

~~~
throwaway2048
Out of control real estate prices are a problem across most of the usa,
although particularly accute in SF.

------
gnicholas
Another approach: in Menlo Park, a restaurant offers workers a crash pad where
they can sleep during the week.

[https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/06/14/menlo-park-
resta...](https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/06/14/menlo-park-restaurateur-
offers-local-housing-to-workers)

~~~
toomanybeersies
Luxury, I used to have to sleep in the storeroom if I had a double shift and
didn't want to go home.

------
rhc2104
Note that in SF, waitstaff earn minimum wage plus tips- they do not earn a far
lower hourly wage like many other parts of America.

~~~
s73v3r_
Which is as it should be. The concept of a "tipped wage" is absurd on it's
face.

------
adityapurwa
In Indonesia tipping is not common, and I am glad that it is not. Mostly
because I see that everyone here seems to be confused too on how much we
should tip. Most restaurant here would have you choose your own table, then
the waiter will give you the menu and leave you to choose, then you call them
again to submit your menu, then the menu will be delivered to your table.
(Other restaurant is like McDonalds I suppose, you go to the counter, choose
and pay and got table number, sit and have the food delivered to you). It is a
standard work that of course they were paid to do, and I dont think tipping is
healthy, why would they hate me if i didnt tip them? Why would I tip them for
doing their already paid job? Why would my colleague got better tip than me
when im serving them? It ended up with so many speculations on people, which
is not healthy (my opinion). If i want to tip, i usually just let them take
the changes.

------
thisrod
In the eastern hemisphere, this kind of place is called an Australian style
cafe.

Old joke: some Australians take a taxi from LAX to their hotel. As they get
out, the driver asks, "Your tip?" "Our tip is, live somewhere with a minimum
wage, mate!"

------
chobytes
Serverless has gone too far

------
orionblastar
This is why there are smartphone apps for various resteraunts. You order your
tood and pay for it ahead of time and it is there waiting for you.

First it was pizza places and now it is McDonalds and others.

Wife and I went to a Wendys and nobody answered the drive through system. We
only wanted small frosties so we went home without them. Other cars got mad
that they were not taking drove through orders.

These jobs are not 15 dollars an hour, but a lot of workers don't deserve that
and will be replaced with competent workers or computers or kiosks or an app.

------
kevin_b_er
I figured this was coming. Under living-wage isn't sustainable and that's how
restaurants were operating while still making thin margins.

Except because everyone is too price sensitive with a race to the bottom on
pricing, customer service is no longer valued. So we do away with customer
service to keep the pricing the same rather than raise prices.

------
ksec
>Can’t Afford Waiters. So They’re Putting Diners to Work. The city offers a
case study of how high housing costs alter the economics of everything else,
including restaurant service.

Well not really housing but property market. Don't know why they "discover" it
now. Well it has been going on in some places for well over a decade.

------
logfromblammo
Is it just me, or does it feel like restaurant service staff provide less
_service_ than they used to? They're often spread out over too many tables,
and it seems like their role is scripted rather than adaptive. The chain
restaurant dining experience just seems very hollow now.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I'm always bemused when walking into a nearly empty chain restaurant and the
greeter has to struggle with where to seat you.

~~~
paulie_a
I was told I needed to download an app at one Chicago restaurant to get a
table. It was nearly empty but the app said 20 minutes... It is a very well
known place. I was also told by the bartender he is not going to get me a beer
and a server will be around at some point. I got my beer eventually. But after
waiting for a table for 40 minutes I just left without even paying, no one
seemed interested in cashing me out. I literally had better service at the
Chicago DMV.

~~~
logfromblammo
It's all part of the script. They insert an artificial expectation that one
must wait to be seated to manufacture a sense of popularity, trendiness, and
exclusivity.

Sounds like another Chicago restaurant that I visited once. Once. That
establishment remains to this day the only place where I have ever left a
$0.02 tip--worst service I have ever experienced as a restaurant customer.

------
TipVFL
"Inside these restaurants, it’s evident that the forces making this one of the
most expensive cities in America are subtly altering the economics of
everything. Commercial rents have gone up. Labor costs have soared. And
restaurant workers, many of them priced out by the expense of housing, have
been moving away."

I feel like so much of this could be fixed if we had a highly regulated
housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for everyone. It's hard to
imagine that this housing bubble can last much longer, it's distorting
everything to such an extreme already.

The cost of housing doesn't have to keep increasing, just look at Germany:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-w...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-
worlds-best-run-economy-home-prices-just-keep-falling-because-thats-what-home-
prices-are-supposed-to-do/#55ef61506ad0)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> * a highly regulated housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for
> everyone*

The former has a terrible track record of leading to the latter, particularly
in America (where housing is treated as a proxy for savings).

Regarding Germany: "During the current real-estate cycle, i.e., from 2009 to
2017, house prices have risen 80% in large metropolitan areas (A cities) and
c. 60% in B and C cities. In 2017, the number of newly completed residential
units looks likely to have risen to more than 300,000 for the first time in
the current cycle; in 2018, it might climb to 335,000. However, assuming that
there is demand for at least 350,000 new apartments, the gap between supply
and demand should continue to widen in both years. As demand remains high,
upward price pressure will continue. This suggests that prices and rents will
rise further in all major cities. Overvaluations are rising, and the risk of a
price bubble on the German housing market is increasing. The price uptrend is
likely to continue for several years to come, at least in most major cities in
Germany" [1].

[1] [https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-
PROD/PROD000000000046...](https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-
PROD/PROD0000000000460528/The_German_housing_market_in_2018.pdf)

~~~
stevenwoo
What do you think of this proposal in the UK? London seems to have a similar
problem to what we are seeing in US cities now but I don't know if causes are
similar.

[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/25/home-
ownersh...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/25/home-ownership-
out-of-reach-for-2-million-uk-families-says-thinktank)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
"Stronger role for councils" reminds me of New York's community boards. The
latter are churches of NIMBYism. (They also advocate for subsidized housing.
But in other neighborhoods.)

London's solution is the same as Manhattan's: build more. Case in point: my
Flatiron neighborhood. Our building is upper-middle income, except for a few
higher-end flats. Let's call the average rent $3,000.

Luxury building opens; prices at $5,000. Not enough biters. $4,000. Highest-
priced tenants in my building moved. Our building had to drop rents to (a)
attract replacement tenants and (b) compete with the luxury building, which
now wicks off the highest-earning renters.

------
Simulacra
I wonder if some of these establishments truly can't afford it, or they don't
want to. It would seem MBA 101 to always reduce costs, and increases profits.

------
vidanay
I've been in a half dozen restaurants of this style....in Manchester UK,
London, and Frankfurt DE. I had no problem with the style of service.

------
RickJWagner
This is why $15 is not a sound idea.

We need 'small jobs'. They're an important part of the ecosystem.

------
baby
While McDonalds has figured out how to have waiters bring you the food to your
table here in France.

------
codewritinfool
Literal serverless architecture.

------
emilfihlman
This is pretty standard in most of Finland

~~~
8xde0wcNwpslOw
I don't agree. Restaurants have servers as usual.

------
bwbw223
We need SaaS for restaurants...

------
sonnyblarney
"San Francisco Restaurants Can’t Afford Waiters."

Uhhhh. No - that is really the wrong way to say it. There's a supply/demand
mismatch obviously.

Clearly the wealthy residents of SF simply don't want to pay ... for some
reason.

I think there is something sneaky going on - when I lived in SF, restaurant
prices were disturbingly cheap. As a Canadian, I'm used to not very good
prices. But in SF, I couldn't grasp it. I know that they employ a lot of
undocumented labour, and I suggest this might have something to do with it -
i.e. - a resto starts employing undocumented workers in the back simply to
'stay alive' \- but then it forces other restaurants into the same competitive
bind. And then they start moving into other jobs - forcing those layers of the
value chain to have 'real wages' that are under minimum wage.

This is effectively what has happened in farming - and the same thing could be
hitting restaurants - it's one of the more pernicious aspects of irregular
immigration and employment.

~~~
efficax
SF is full of rich people but it also has a normal share of middle and lower
income residents. As high rents eat up more and more of their budgets, they
have less and less money left over for other things, like dining out. If the
restaurants raised their prices to pay a better wage, then only the rich could
afford to eat at the restaurants, and there not being enough rich people, they
would go out of business. Maybe the Bay area should be forced to feel the
effects of its insane housing market in this way, but the individual
restaurant owners aren't going to respond to these pressures by going out of
business, they're going to try and reduce costs so they can keep prices low.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
Yes but their response is to create demand for a foreign, undocumented
underclass in place of raising wages for native workers. In fact that impulse
is part of what makes it so that the Bay doesn't have enough people who make
enough to eat out enough to support business. Ending our reliance on a captive
labor force will raise prices but it'll raise wages too.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Yes, that's it.

It's nice that we can provide employment to people, and I understand the
argument of 'jobs for things American's won't do anyhow' \- but there are
better ways to move civilization along.

Make sure workers are documented, have decent conditions, minimum wage and
some kind of healthcare.

The factories and farms that are not sustainable will move to places like
Mexico where jobs will be created to help entire communities and families live
well - not just those who risk an illegal life in the USA.

Young Mexicans don't want to join cartels, people would rather a 'decent job
with respectable pay' any day. A well run Toyota factory could provide such a
powerful economic basis for the community and allow them to re-take control of
their communities.

There's no reason for strife and struggle in 2018, we have all the knowledge
and technology for everyone to be 'ok' \- we can't blame it on the Gods for
famine and disaster anymore, it's 100% all on us! We have to organize
ourselves conscientiously.

------
abritinthebay
“Specific SF restaurants are too cheap to pay proper wages to their staff”
would be a more correct title.

This is not a general problem in SF.

------
pandasun
San Francisco has the world's richest companies, but you can't even walk the
street without running into a several homeless people every single block. Go
figure, very 'progressive'.

~~~
woah
Many of the most self righteous progressives in California have made a few
million off their ramshackle bungalows and would like to keep the housing
prices sky high. Incredibly, they argue that increasing supply would make
prices higher, even though the past 40 years have conclusively disproven that,
to their great enrichment.

~~~
abritinthebay
NIMBY’s _are not_ Progressive.

They’re practically the definition of Conservative. There’s just this wildly
mistaken belief that CA (and SF in particular) is populated by ultra-left
people.

The Bay is centrist _at best_.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>The Bay is centrist at best.

If SF is centrist I want less than nothing to do with the whatever is left of
it.

I'm sure if you want to pick and choose an issue to use as your measuring
stick you will find that a substantial chunk of people in SF do not have a far
left position on an issue when a far left of center position hurts them
personally. However, justifying exceptions to the rule when the rule is not in
your self interest is pretty common. Fiscal conservatives don't complain when
the government pisses money away on things they like. Commies will gladly
redistribute all the wealth that isn't their personal wealth. Few people are
so dedicated to their beliefs that they advocate against their own self
interest.

Edit: Is it the slight against SF or the observation about humanity that
people don't like?

~~~
drb91
SF is conservative in some ways, liberal in others, just like.... everything.
However, if you look at the money in the area, it’s not hard to see how the
culture will eventually clash with leftists.

------
crankylinuxuser
Sure, whatever. Cause $2.35/hr is just sooooooo expensive. So we sucker diners
to do our labor for us, and , 'pass on the savings' HAH.

Try, "Nobody wants or can afford to do the work for such a pittance, so nobody
does." I hope those businesses that do this die. Then again, won't really need
hope. New restaurants easily die within 1 year. Good riddance.

~~~
s73v3r_
Agree with the sentiment, but in California servers make the regular minimum
wage. There is no special "tipped wage" like there is in other parts of the
country.

