BCBusiness

56 BCBusiness JunE 2016 Columbia Restaurant and Foodservices Association."They like tipping. Without tips, the business owner will face higher operating expenses and usually have to raise prices." Jones now says that dropping the no- tipping policy was really about costs. "Food costs jumped horrišcally in the summer of '14, and I simply wasn't charging enough for my meals. I raised my prices 15 per cent when I needed to raise them about 25 per cent across the board, which is what Danny Meyer did in New York." As for customers, he estimates 95 per cent loved the model. "They felt relief at the end of the meal instead of stress in having to šgure out the amount to tip." The no-tipping policy has been endorsed by the likes of celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain, and Jones believes it makes for a more sta- ble career path. Wherever no tipping is found in the world, there are career servers, he notes. People are more likely to choose serving as a career if they are able to make a decent wage of $18-$22 an hour, and there's improved teamwork—when tips are involved, servers who work three to four hours a shift make a signišcant amount more than the cooks who work 8¡10 hours a day, which creates division and jeal- ousy between front and back of house. No other business or industry allows their employees to control 18 per cent or more of the company's income with the company having virtually no say in how it is distributed, he points out. Nor does the system benešt servers, he believes. Banks categorize them as commission sales people so getting a loan for a car or a house or a credit card is di¢cult if not impossible. Yet workers love tips, says Ian Tostenson. "It's their incentive. A good server can earn $200-$300 dollars per shift. That's $40 an hour over six hours, not including the hourly wage. Even if the tips are half that, you still have an e¤ective rate of 20 dollars per hour plus wages." Mark von Schellwitz, western vice-president of Restaurants Canada, agrees. Servers are motivated by tips and make a very good living from their gratuity income, he says. He believes many career servers would no longer be willing to work as serv- ers if they couldn't earn tips even with a higher wage, making recruitment and retention of good servers more di¢cult. "Based on Smoke 'N Water's short-lived experiment with a no-tip- ping policy, it does not appear tipping culture in North America will change dramatically anytime soon." But Jones says he'd like to try again. He still believes no tipping is the way forward, especially in the new world of a $15 minimum wage. Since Portland, Oregon, approved a higher minimum wage in February, he expects more restaurants there to switch to the no- tipping model. "It's the only healthy and functional business model for the industry," he says. "I'm giving some real thought to having another go with it, especially if a few other restaurants in the province would jump on board. I would go back in a heartbeat." J a r g o n W a t c h "Silos stie communication and prevent teams from working together" (Forbes, Jan. 22, 2016) a silo can be used to keep grain or ballistic missiles–and, since 1988, information. that is when a u.s. organizational development consultant, Phil Ensor, coined the phrase "func- tional silo syndrome" to describe hierarchical organizational structures in the manufacturing industry. He wrote: "Communication is heavily top-down–on the vertical axis. little is shared on the horizontal axis, partly because each function develops its own special language and set of buzzwords." unlike many business buzzwords, silo has been adopted by It instead of the other way around, to describe systems or departments that do not interact with others. si•lo [from siros: corn pit]

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