PORTRAIT: ADAM BLASBERG
Most of us wage slaves don't think too
much about how much money we're going
to earn today. It's roughly the same as it
was yesterday, and about the same as it will
be tomorrow, next week—and the way the
economy's going, for several years to come.
Not so for those in the restaurant biz.
Your purposefully friendly waiter relies on
that great variable, the customer tip, for
upwards of 50 per cent of his income. On
a good night, it can mean a healthy chunk
of change—but on a bad night (it's raining,
skin int tourists, a slow kitchen), he's going
home with barely minimum wage.
For David Jones, a novice restaurateur
in Parksville, that didn't seem right. The
former prison counsellor had an interest
in social justice as well as food, and saw
great inequalities within the indus-
try—especially between the "front
of the house" sta (servers) and the
"back of the house" sta (cooks and
dishwashers). So when he opened
his new restaurant, Smoke 'N Water,
last November, there would be no
tipping allowed: servers would
get paid $20 to $24 an hour, with
back-of-house personnel receiving
between $16 and $18.
As Anicka Quin explains in her
story, "The Tipping Point" (p. 52),
the no-tipping idea isn't new: restau-
rants in California, New York and
Ohio have successfully followed this
model for upwards of two decades,
while several countries (Australia
and Japan, to name a couple) have
avoided gratuities entirely. Yet while
tipping is an ingrained part of North
American culture—this idea that you
pay for the service you get—reality
rarely lines up with the ideal. Tips, as much
as anything else, are a function of customer
habit, or what kind of mood they're in or
how bad their math skills are. It rarely has
anything to do with actual service.
I, for one, have never worked in the ser-
vice industry, but I do think a server's pay
should re ect the work that they do and
what the market will bear for their services—
and not rely so heavily on the vagaries of
human behaviour.
C O N T R I B U T O R S
Matt O'Grady, Editor-in-Chief
mogrady@canadawide.com / @BCBusiness
editor'sdesk
Y
Illustrator Nolan Pelletier is
behind the drawings in "A Brand
New Ball Game" (p. 42). "It's a
fun challenge creating a series
of images with a consistent
style and tone, " he says. In his
spare time, you can nd Pelletier
with his cat Snoopy in his
Toronto home. The Connecticut
native has contributed
illustrations to The New Yorker
and The New York Times.
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12 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER 2014
New associate editor (and
Abbotsford native) Trevor
Melanson joined BCBusiness
in July after three years in The
Big Smoke. "While Toronto is
the better city after midnight, for
most of the day nothing beats
beautiful Vancouver, " he says. A
former online editor at Canadian
Business and part-time professor
at Humber College, Melanson
has written for such outlets as
The Globe and Mail and CBC.ca.
Tip of the Iceberg?
N E X T M O N T H
Entrepreneur of the Year
The 21st annual EY awards
for entrepreneurial
excellence. Who will
come out on top?
