With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/364562
bcbusiness.ca to need the tip motivation to provide quality service. "What do I do if I go into a department store like the Bay and I don't get good service?" he says. "I might speak with my feet and not walk back in, or I might say something to the manager. It's their job to make sure you're being properly serviced. But in the restaurants, if you don't do a good job, the customer takes away from your salary." Of course, there's an argument to be made that, unlike the service they expect from a bank teller or a depart- ment store clerk, diners expect restau- rant staff to elevate their experience to something beyond the routine. "Cus- tomers are willing to pay gratuities well above average because they want to be treated special," says von Schellwitz. "A good server is also a good sales per- son—someone who knows how to pro- vide the guest with what they want at their particular price point. And career servers pride themselves in being able to deliver that." While he admits that great service may be a small motivator for a better tip, Bruce McAdams thinks the rela- tionship between tipping and service isn't as strong as we'd like to think. In 2012, McAdams and his research partner, Mike Massow, surveyed 50 restaurant owners about tipping cul- ture. McAdams says the results show we're creatures of habit—those of us who tip 15 per cent will almost always tip 15 per cent, whether or not the service was adequate. And, he adds, many servers often believe they can judge whether a table will tip well or not—and they compensate their ser- vice accordingly. "The business own- ers we interviewed all admitted that servers sometimes feel they're going to get a good tip from a table of busi- ness people, and if there's a single parent with two screaming kids, they may assume they're not—and they're not going to get as good service," he says. "The owner is allowing the server to dictate who should get good service based on their income. Servers can become almost mercenary: they're not working for the best interest of the organization; they're working for their own best interest." At Smoke 'N Water, Jones will be charging slightly more for food (though not outrageously so for a resort—burg- ers run $16; nearby they range from $9 to $15), and paying an hourly wage along with a revenue-sharing plan that includes staff in both the front and back of house: 15 per cent of gross sales will be divvied up proportionately, based on amount of hours worked. (If some- one does insist on leaving a tip, it will be donated to charity.) While it's still early days in the business—he opened June 2—he figures the total compensa- tion should work out to between $20 to $24 an hour for servers, with back-of- house (namely cooks and dishwashers) receiving between $16 and $18. Staff will also receive health benefits. Jones says that servers have told him that, under the old model, they made less—around $16 an hour. But the real winners are the back-of-house staff, who earned around $10.50 an hour—and rarely benefitted from more than a small percentage of tips. "There's typically a huge disparity between front and back of house," says Jones. "If you knew somebody bcbuSineSS.ca September 2014 BCBusiness 57 "There's typically a huge disparity between front and back of house.... If you knew somebody was making three times more than you're making for doing about the same work, how would you feel as a human being? A social change needs to take place in the service industry in North America" —David Jones, Smoke 'N Water owner