Wages will certainly not adjust if tipping went away, there would just be less workers willing to take those roles.
Guess what happens when there are fewer workers willing to work in a role…?
And restaurants will have no trouble paying it because they will be able to raise their prices when there are no tips. It’s like not like that $100 + $20 tip meal is going to move to being a $100 meal. It’s going to become a $120 meal. There will still be the same amount of money sloshing around in the system. All you are really doing is changing how it is accounted for.
Of course, that does put more control in the hands of the restaurant. Now it is their revenue, not yours. A restaurant taking what was a $40 per hour, tip in, job and trying to squeeze it to $35 per hour and keeping $5 for themselves is a real possibly, just like I told in an early comment. It is always best to be the one in control. More revenue beats less revenue.
Workers can get tipped and be paid fairly. It’s not a zero-sum game.
You’re limited by what the customer is willing to spend, and they are only going to spend so much. That is zero-sum.
Restaurant margins are already basically zero, so there is no capacity to pay workers more without raising prices. That isn’t going to happen without tips taking the squeeze. That $120 meal above is not going transform into a $144 receipt.
Higher wages and less tips, or a lower wage and more tips. Pick your poison. Of course, if you are the server, more tips is the way to go. It gives you the control, not the restaurant. And if you are unscrupulous, which I do not condone but seems to be the norm, it is easy to hide from the government. That’s a huge additional pay bump.
You are ignoring a variety of important factors in the assertion.
That is true. I completely missed the most obvious part: You are going to ask other servers what the tips are like before you even consider taking the job. So if a restaurant struggles to attract the right clientele, you’re not going to sign on in the first place.
Remember, at a good restaurant it is a $80-100k per year job (FTE). We’re not talking about hopeless souls here. We’re talking about top people who are highly intelligent and are especially skilled in dealing with people.
Who needs to drive this is restaurant workers getting together and collectivizing to have bargaining power over restaurant owners.
You want the largest benefactor of this system to be the one who brings the uprising? Methinks you’ve not thought this through.
Restaurants are most likely to lead the charge. They are highly incentivized to see that money become their revenue. And, indeed, many individual restaurants have tried (and failed, unsurprisingly) to do exactly that. A concerted effort by the entire restaurant industry, however, would no doubt be illegal.