Reply to Initiative 77 -- Tipped Wage Vote in DC

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[quote=Anonymous]Let the people the initiative is trying to "help" vote on it. I have been working in restaurant business ca 20 years and I oppose it. There are other ways to help us. What about offering retirement or other benefits. Right now we have free food and plenty of unpaid vacation time. My schedule is also pretty flexible which is nice.
I read the article, but it was too much reading for me personally. I didn't even find the place where they talked about giving some of the tips or service charge to the back of the house for fairness. This article seemed to be about servers making more. We already make $12.50 per hour, and if somebody wants to help, then please enforce the minimum wage. I know my employer makes up the difference, but I think he hardly ever has to do it for servers. It's my job to budget properly for slow season's and busy seasons.
We have hard time finding servers in DC even though many places hire you without experience. It's not because they wouldn't make money, but because DC has highly educated people who didn't go to school to become servers. And ofcourse we have some who are not, but some of them need help finding the industry and/or some encouragement. This is one of industries that you can enter with no experience. I know I did, and we do give almost all a chance to try out. I'm not sure if it's going to stay so open to all if the owner has to pay more for a worker. 
Nobody seems to know how the industry would change exactly. There's a lot of guessing and both sides have brought up some watered-down arguments. I almost got side-tracked by them. I really want to see more examples of what might happen or has  happened if it passes or at least some educated guesses. And also, can we go back if it ends up being worse than it is now?
We put up with harassment to the point because "customers come first" and it can be very subtle. I don't want to put up with it. I wish my boss had a way to deal with it promptly. That's the help we need. I'm not saying putting up with harassment for tips doesn't happen, but an harassing customer (often tipsy) is a pain and can scare away other tipping customers. I usually want them to go - hell with the tips from them.
I think increased prices will cause customers to go out to eat less or they will spend less. Hot water with lemon, free bread, free wifi are already the usual requests at our full service restaurant.
This is only about DC, right? Too many tourist who don't know about tipping. I can have family of 4 spend $150 and leave me $0 right after they say how great everything was. We need help with that. I'm not saying I deserve to be tipped at all times. Plenty of time when I mess up, but that's not one of those times. 
Sorry, English is not my first language. Thank you.[/quote]

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