How to Tip Your Server Like You Really Mean It

"Hi, how is everyone doing? Will we be starting with appetizers tonight? Have y'all had a chance to look at the drink menu?"

I have spent the last 10 months working as a server at a sushi restaurant in Buckhead. We are known for sake bombs.

When people find out about my part-time job, they always have a lot of questions for me. The most difficult question to answer, though: "How much are you paid?" Technically, I am entitled to the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. In practice, my wages are extremely variable. According to the Department of Labor, because servers are "tipped employees," or employees who "customarily and regularly receive more than $30 per month in tips," my Georgia employer is only responsible for a minimum required cash wage of $2.13 per hour.

The difference of $5.12 per hour comes from customers. I am essentially paid in tips. At the end of the night, servers calculate their total sales and are required by management to "tip out" based on this figure. In other words, servers don't keep all of the tips they make, but instead must redistribute some of their earnings to kitchen staff, the hostess, the bus boys and maybe the bartender. For me, this means that I keep approximately 80 percent of my tips (depending, again, on how high my tips were with respect to my sales).

Here is a simple example of how this works. Pretend you are a single person eating at my restaurant. Let's say you order two specialty sushi rolls and two beers on draft for a total cost of $30, including tax. You pay in cash and leave a $5 bill on the table for a tip. At the end of the night, based on your $30 check, the kitchen staff are entitled to $0.68 (2.25 percent), the hostess to $0.30 (1 percent) and the bus boy to approximately $0.15. So, from your $5 tip, I will keep $3.87, or about 77 percent. Five dollars on a $30 check is fairly standard. It comes out to just over 16 percent. (As a rule of thumb, if you want to give a moderate tip in Georgia, leave cash equal to double the sales tax on your check.)

Let's say that you were absent-minded (or vindictive) and did not leave a tip. I did not only lose your tip. Remember that I "tip out" at the end of the night based on total sales, not on tips. In other words, I not only failed to make money, but I lost $1.13 because I bothered to serve your table.

Thus, it is possible to take home less than minimum wage at the end of the night. If this happens, of course, the discrepancy will come back in my pay check at the end of the month (less Social Security and taxes). This does happen occasionally. For example, because of a bad tip night, I took home $40 for eight hours of work on the Fourth of July. Because eight hours times the federal minimum wage of $7.25 is $58, my employer then owed me $18 for this shift.

On a busy night in the restaurant, I can make up to $25 per hour. More generally, I can depend on about $85 on a week night and $130 on a weekend or $15-20 per hour (the difference made up in alcohol). My average tip is 22 percent. Serving is hardly a career option I would like to pursue after I graduate from Emory, but I do earn in excess of minimum wage. But then again, my experience is atypical for a server working in Georgia: My restaurant has a loyal clientele, we are located in an affluent Atlanta business district and I'm a chatty college girl with a knack for flattery.

I come into this discussion from a place of relative privilege. To begin with, I only work part-time and often less. If I have a few consecutive $60 nights, or if I don't have time to take on a shift, my parents can step in to help me cover my basic expenses. Most of my coworkers don't have a parent or a spouse who can be a stop gap if things go wrong. For example, last month one of my coworkers' car broke down. The associated costs were more than he could afford and since then he has been unable to make repairs and has been taking MARTA to work.

Restaurant employees are some of the hardest working people I have ever encountered. Restaurants are high-stress environments. The back of a restaurant is a hot, frantic place filled with the sounds of sizzling food, the clatter of dishes and the back-and-forth shouting of cooks and wait staff in many different languages (at my restaurant, these are English, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese and an Indonesian dialect). Customers' orders and extra requests send me running all night in an Euler circuit around the floor; a six-hour shift is a workout. Although servers tend to be an extroverted bunch, it's hard to be unremittingly cheerful when confronted by the inevitable demanding or petty customer.

People employed by the restaurant industry are disproportionately the working poor. More significantly, these people are disproportionately immigrants and racial minorities. According to the Center for American Progress and the Restaurant Opportunities Center, ​a not-for-profit organization working to improve wages and working conditions for the nation's low wage restaurant workforce, 40 percent of tipped workers are people of color and 23 percent are immigrants, compared to respective rates of 33 and 16 percent in the general workforce. Moreover, over 50 percent of tipped workers with incomes below the poverty line are racial minorities.

I am writing this article to inform you, potential Georgia restaurant patron, that a vulnerable and hard-working population is at your mercy. The Georgia General Assembly has allowed service industry employers to shift the burden of employee wages onto customers. As a result, servers are dependent on your largesse for their livelihood. It is essential that consumers understand wage laws and the concept of tipping. Tipping is not merely a courtesy, but a custom assumed by state and federal governments.

The next time you eat at a restaurant, spare a thought for your server. Poor college student that I am, I try to figure in a 20-25 percent tip for good service on top of menu item prices in deciding whether I can afford to eat out. If your server is rude or makes a mistake, either look past it or complain to the management – don't take it out on their tip.

– By Rebecca Berge

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