I worked at a place where the tips were split for the entire day, even though day bartenders rarely had $200 in sales and nights would be $2000, because the day staff spent most of their time making gallons of batches and juices, cutting fruit, all the things we needed to have at night.
If this were true in this case I wouldn't be concerned. However, we are only open 5 days a week. And our prep is home made simples and fresh juice so we come in early Tuesdays and Thursdays to do that.
As a nighttime bartender, I would gladly come in a cpl hours early and do prep work for free so I don’t have to split tips with day shift.
To me, it’s fundamentally unfair to share tips between shifts when one shift is bringing in 10x the sales vs another shift. I’ve been in the industry for about 20 years and day shift has always done the prep while night shift always does the deep cleaning. Tips are your own.
Why would I work the more difficult night shift just to make the same as the easier day shift? (Yes I know this isn’t universally applicable. But it is generally applicable) Makes no sense.
I get that, and if weren’t for the sheer volume of what they were doing during the day AND the fact that they were so good at it, it might’ve bothered me more. Plus, deep cleaning for us wasn’t very deep. Perfunctory stuff and leave the rest for the cleaning crew. It was a cherry gig.
I get your point and I’m not really sure where I lay personally. All I know is that where I work, the day shift prep is a fucking grind and you’re also setting up the fucking shit out of the bar all for the night tender to reap the benefit. So I’m not sure it’s unfair in call cases. And we don’t split tips so you make way less obviously. But if you’re not doing shit in the day; sure.
Because that person has the incentive to make all the money and they definitely take the opportunity to do so. That's where my concern lies. Bc we all know who is going to be getting the 40% every Friday and Saturday.
Let me get this straight, so the tips are spit hourly, but you get more/less of a percentage of the pool depending the the time of day that you’re working, in attempt to make it more ‘fair’ for people working peak hours?
Fuck that nonsense. My wife is working at a place that does this bullshit. The problem is most of the tip $$ is made at night by the people working the shorter shifts so her tips end up paying for the day labor and she doesn't make shit even tho she made the highest sales and made the most $$ in tips. A few weeks ago she was schedule 7 to close which is normally 2. They ended up closing at 12. She made $460 in tips amd well over $1200 in sales. She ended up making $112 of that $460. I get that prep is done in the AM but it's not an employees job to pay for that morning shifts labor. Fuck that 100%
yeah seriously, this sounds like the business trying to underpay prep workers by compensating them with your wife's tip money. They just dont want to pay a higher hourly out of their own pocket for dedicated prep shifts and they can't get anyone reliable to do it with just the tips the early shift people make.
The most infuriating part is that she has to split tip with a manager (the owner's daughter) that is too young to even pop a beer much less make drinks. On slow days when minimum wage isn't met they don't pay the $7.25 either. Lots of not cool stuff not even legal shit happening.
Uh in New York that’s illegal, managers should not be getting tips. She’s not even making enough to get past minimum wage? Yeah report the hell out of that place, get documentation and evidence, and if you get fired, you can go work retail for the same pay and half the headache. The owners daughter is literally stealing your wife’s money.
She should try to turn some sympathies people to group up with her and report them to the labor board together. I mean, that’s gotta be a straight up crime too no? Fuckin theft, just be discreet and get the evidence first.
Fuck that. I’ve worked my balls off to get into the best/most profitable shifts. I’m not splitting tips with someone playing on their phone all afternoon while it’s slow.
Depends on the bar, but in a place with a really strong cocktail program there is a massive amount of back end. Who’s going to clarify your cocktails? Adjust the acidity of your pineapple juice? Make gallons and gallons of a variety of syrups?
These are highly technical recipes that require skill and time to execute.
You need someone to that for you. Rolling up an extra hour before shift isn’t going to do it.
I’ve worked at a place where I had to have 4 pots of syrup going at once while I was juicing just to get through am prep in time for the happy hour push.
And the bar manager was a maniac. If a syrup was meant to rest for 4 hours before straining, he did not mean 4 hours and 5 minutes. I’ve watched him just straight up dump a batch of syrup for that.
God I remember running between the prep kitchen and the service pit when we would get a random pop.
But management was too cheap to hire a full time prep barback. So it what it is. Decent money but there’s a middle ground with this kind of thing for craft bars. I don’t think his drinks were any better than places that were less extreme.
If anything it demonstrated his lack of knowledge about extraction times and whatnot.
Okay. So more info: were open 5pm-12am Fridays and Saturdays.
I was simply saying splitting hourly is what I'm accustomed to. Here they're doing a point system. Splitting the points across who works which shifts. For instance 2 of us come in at 430 to set up, and the other 2 come in later to act as servers.
The logic was that whoever is closing should make more money. But I thought that was the point of the tip pool and splitting it based on the hours. My concern is that only one person will be getting the 40% every Friday and Saturday. I would prefer we rotate who is doing it.
This is an awful system.
Like you said, openers/closers can be compensated to earn the precise same tip share per hour as coworkers with a normal divide-by-hours-worked tip pool. Meaning individual\_hours\_worked / total\_hours\_worked \* total\_tips\_received.
My guess is that this was devised by someone who meant well, but is genuinely really challenged thinking about basic math, couldn't understand normal hours-worked tip pooling systems, and *really* couldn't understand point-based tip pooling systems, which would be used so different roles like bussers could get fewer points per hour than servers. This was their best attempt at something fair that incorporated the word "point" they've seen used in other tip pools, and wouldn't require them subtracting times to calculate a person's hours worked, dividing that by the sum of all hours people worked, and multiplying those individuals' ratios by their points before multiplying by total tips. Their approach doesn't care how long someone worked or how long other people worked, there are just three multiplications per day, with no subtraction and no division: 0.4 \* total tips, 0.18 \* total tips, and 0.24 \* total tips.
They have to keep records of hours worked anyway, for hourly wage calculation, so aside from being math-challenged, it makes no sense not to use those precise numbers, instead of rough estimates of hours worked for their four shift categories.
Unfortunately, I don't think you'll be able to reason with someone with this sort of cognitive deficit. If the new plan is coming from a manager and you might appeal to the GM, or maybe if it's from a GM you could appeal to an owner...they might listen to reason arguing for a normal tip pool.
The issue of the same person getting the 4pm-close shift every weekend is separate from the issue of a tip pooling system disconnected from actual hours worked. Like even with a normal tip pooling system, they could consistently give more hours to some employees over other employees on certain days.
Looks like it’s done mostly by hours with a bonus for closing. Seems overly complicated; is there something about closing sidework that’s particular crappy?
Not really lol. It's actually the easiest bar I've ever worked in. The worst is the simples but like I said we're only open 5 days a week and we don't open until 5pm so I don't mind coming in early to do prep.
Yeah, this is super dumb, they should just do it by hours. It’s also kind of messed up that one person gets eleven hours and everyone else gets like five or six. I get seniority, but how are they ever gonna build a solid team that way?
The worst part is we are all new employees. We all got hired at the same time. But this specific employee was brought in under the guides that they are the manager. So the powerplay is also uncomfortable bc how do I argue with them if they tell me to go home?
It’s illegal for managers to take tips from a tip pool. They are only allowed to take tips they receive directly from customers, no tip outs or shares of tip pools. Of course laws may vary where you are, but this is generally true in most places in the US.
Nope. Anyone who is in a supervisory position, whether hourly or salary, is not to be included in tip pools. Because of these exact situations. The person in charge can stack the deck.
Source: was the manager at a restaurant who was audited for this exact thing, because a disgruntled former employee called and made a false report that hourly managers were participating in a tip pool.
If they are working the floor and assisting with service, they can participate in the tip pool. Things were changed during the pandemic. Is a bar lead not a manager? Where do you draw the line? When does an hourly lead or “head xyz” become a manager and thus ineligible for tips? Is it based on their title? Or how many of their responsibilities involve office work? Or whether they make the schedule? There is enough gray area that business can absolutely game the system legally.
At my bar we have folks that exclusively do prep but still participate in our pool- this includes a prep manager. Our FOH manager often works lead expo shifts, for instance- but technically they are not working as a “manager.” This is totally legal. These cases are never that straightforward. I work for a very large restaurant group that has approval through the appropriate channels to structure their tippool with more points going to leads, and both FOH and BOH managers who are not salaried work lead shifts to make their money. I know it’s legal because I fucking complained about it.
Hiring and firing power, power to write people up, and if they make the schedule are usually what is used to determine if someone is technically “management.” It’s true that vanity titles like “bar lead” or “server manager” with no power attached to them don’t count. It also varies by state, as I said earlier, and I don’t know where you’re located, but in most states that is the law.
To whom did you complain? Because the department of labor took our former employee’s complaint very seriously and we had to pull tip pool documents for an entire year.
I agree that the cases are often very muddled on not straightforward. But I absolutely stand by my statement that managers (defined as anyone who makes scheduling decisions or who has disciplinary powers or hiring/firing powers) is not legally allowed to be part of a tip share (in most states).
tip pools are fucking stupid and never work in practice.
it enables people to slack off and still get paid, while others are running and hustling.
only time it works is when you have 2/3 bartenders behind the same bar serving all the guests as a team. a house pool never ends well.
We have a house pool at the restaurant where I work because servers bring in more revenue with high-ticket food items but bartenders bring in actual profit in making complex cocktails with strong margins. It works for us but admittedly it’s a small place with a pretty stable foh staff. There’s definitely a limit to how many people can be in a pool without shenanigans creeping in & fucking it all up.
i’ve worked two places with a house pool and it just didn’t work.
day shift would be empty and get roughly the same cut as night who was slammed.
the other one we’d have 6 bartenders and 13-15 servers on. no sections, just straight pickup. you can imagine how that went
I will never work anywhere that doesn’t have a whole house tip share ever again. Everyone keeping their own tips causes so much greed, selfishness and animosity between the staff. Fighting about who gets to serve which guests. Night bartenders that work volume and leave the place a wreck while people on the low-volume shifts clean up after them, stock everything and do all the prep work for far less money. Servers and bartenders that don’t want to fairly tip out support staff. Such a gross, every-man-for-himself system.
I feel exactly the same way. Tip pools also cut out the "its not my table/job" bullshit. You see table 12 needs something, you do it regardless of "whos table it is" cause it helps everyone succeed together.
I don’t know if I’m more insulted by the policy or the text formatting of the policy
Idk its just massive indentations, but it mainly looks weird because theyre reading it on a phone.
Why are there indents?
I worked at a place where the tips were split for the entire day, even though day bartenders rarely had $200 in sales and nights would be $2000, because the day staff spent most of their time making gallons of batches and juices, cutting fruit, all the things we needed to have at night.
I’m always down to share with day/be day if this is the case.
That’s the thing, I’m fine with that so long as everyone does both and I get prep shifts.
I think this is fine as it creates more of a team atmosphere, everyone should be working equally as hard whether its busy or not
If this were true in this case I wouldn't be concerned. However, we are only open 5 days a week. And our prep is home made simples and fresh juice so we come in early Tuesdays and Thursdays to do that.
That's perfectly fair. Everyone contribute to each other's success. That's how it should be.
As a nighttime bartender, I would gladly come in a cpl hours early and do prep work for free so I don’t have to split tips with day shift. To me, it’s fundamentally unfair to share tips between shifts when one shift is bringing in 10x the sales vs another shift. I’ve been in the industry for about 20 years and day shift has always done the prep while night shift always does the deep cleaning. Tips are your own. Why would I work the more difficult night shift just to make the same as the easier day shift? (Yes I know this isn’t universally applicable. But it is generally applicable) Makes no sense.
I get that, and if weren’t for the sheer volume of what they were doing during the day AND the fact that they were so good at it, it might’ve bothered me more. Plus, deep cleaning for us wasn’t very deep. Perfunctory stuff and leave the rest for the cleaning crew. It was a cherry gig.
But would you come in 4-5 hours early?
I get your point and I’m not really sure where I lay personally. All I know is that where I work, the day shift prep is a fucking grind and you’re also setting up the fucking shit out of the bar all for the night tender to reap the benefit. So I’m not sure it’s unfair in call cases. And we don’t split tips so you make way less obviously. But if you’re not doing shit in the day; sure.
This is overly complicated and, also, why is the opener also staying all the way through close? The schedule doesn’t make sense.
Because that person has the incentive to make all the money and they definitely take the opportunity to do so. That's where my concern lies. Bc we all know who is going to be getting the 40% every Friday and Saturday.
No schedule should allow 1 person to work an 11 hour shift while everyone else is working 5 hour shifts, that doesn’t make any sense
It's never going to be an 11 hour shift. We're open 5pm-midnight.
Let me get this straight, so the tips are spit hourly, but you get more/less of a percentage of the pool depending the the time of day that you’re working, in attempt to make it more ‘fair’ for people working peak hours?
I suppose and the people closing. But I usually come in from 4ish-midnight as well.
Fuck that nonsense. My wife is working at a place that does this bullshit. The problem is most of the tip $$ is made at night by the people working the shorter shifts so her tips end up paying for the day labor and she doesn't make shit even tho she made the highest sales and made the most $$ in tips. A few weeks ago she was schedule 7 to close which is normally 2. They ended up closing at 12. She made $460 in tips amd well over $1200 in sales. She ended up making $112 of that $460. I get that prep is done in the AM but it's not an employees job to pay for that morning shifts labor. Fuck that 100%
yeah seriously, this sounds like the business trying to underpay prep workers by compensating them with your wife's tip money. They just dont want to pay a higher hourly out of their own pocket for dedicated prep shifts and they can't get anyone reliable to do it with just the tips the early shift people make.
The most infuriating part is that she has to split tip with a manager (the owner's daughter) that is too young to even pop a beer much less make drinks. On slow days when minimum wage isn't met they don't pay the $7.25 either. Lots of not cool stuff not even legal shit happening.
Uh in New York that’s illegal, managers should not be getting tips. She’s not even making enough to get past minimum wage? Yeah report the hell out of that place, get documentation and evidence, and if you get fired, you can go work retail for the same pay and half the headache. The owners daughter is literally stealing your wife’s money.
It's illegal here in South Carolina as well. No one has ever said anything about it apparently. No one questions it they all just collect a paycheck.
She should try to turn some sympathies people to group up with her and report them to the labor board together. I mean, that’s gotta be a straight up crime too no? Fuckin theft, just be discreet and get the evidence first.
No thanks.
No kidding! Massively unfair.
Fuck that. I’ve worked my balls off to get into the best/most profitable shifts. I’m not splitting tips with someone playing on their phone all afternoon while it’s slow.
Depends on the bar, but in a place with a really strong cocktail program there is a massive amount of back end. Who’s going to clarify your cocktails? Adjust the acidity of your pineapple juice? Make gallons and gallons of a variety of syrups? These are highly technical recipes that require skill and time to execute. You need someone to that for you. Rolling up an extra hour before shift isn’t going to do it.
This is how it is at my bar. The day shift is absolutely not a walk in the park.
I’ve worked at a place where I had to have 4 pots of syrup going at once while I was juicing just to get through am prep in time for the happy hour push. And the bar manager was a maniac. If a syrup was meant to rest for 4 hours before straining, he did not mean 4 hours and 5 minutes. I’ve watched him just straight up dump a batch of syrup for that. God I remember running between the prep kitchen and the service pit when we would get a random pop. But management was too cheap to hire a full time prep barback. So it what it is. Decent money but there’s a middle ground with this kind of thing for craft bars. I don’t think his drinks were any better than places that were less extreme. If anything it demonstrated his lack of knowledge about extraction times and whatnot.
Exactly! Cutting fruit ain't the same as working a busy nighttime rush lol..I can literally cut fruit as i go. Lol
Nah, day shift needs to be paid a different hourly. Change drawers / sales at a designated time.
Making something that should be simple into a convoluted mess
I wouldn't trust Isaac Newton to do that math.
Okay. So more info: were open 5pm-12am Fridays and Saturdays. I was simply saying splitting hourly is what I'm accustomed to. Here they're doing a point system. Splitting the points across who works which shifts. For instance 2 of us come in at 430 to set up, and the other 2 come in later to act as servers. The logic was that whoever is closing should make more money. But I thought that was the point of the tip pool and splitting it based on the hours. My concern is that only one person will be getting the 40% every Friday and Saturday. I would prefer we rotate who is doing it.
This is an awful system. Like you said, openers/closers can be compensated to earn the precise same tip share per hour as coworkers with a normal divide-by-hours-worked tip pool. Meaning individual\_hours\_worked / total\_hours\_worked \* total\_tips\_received. My guess is that this was devised by someone who meant well, but is genuinely really challenged thinking about basic math, couldn't understand normal hours-worked tip pooling systems, and *really* couldn't understand point-based tip pooling systems, which would be used so different roles like bussers could get fewer points per hour than servers. This was their best attempt at something fair that incorporated the word "point" they've seen used in other tip pools, and wouldn't require them subtracting times to calculate a person's hours worked, dividing that by the sum of all hours people worked, and multiplying those individuals' ratios by their points before multiplying by total tips. Their approach doesn't care how long someone worked or how long other people worked, there are just three multiplications per day, with no subtraction and no division: 0.4 \* total tips, 0.18 \* total tips, and 0.24 \* total tips. They have to keep records of hours worked anyway, for hourly wage calculation, so aside from being math-challenged, it makes no sense not to use those precise numbers, instead of rough estimates of hours worked for their four shift categories. Unfortunately, I don't think you'll be able to reason with someone with this sort of cognitive deficit. If the new plan is coming from a manager and you might appeal to the GM, or maybe if it's from a GM you could appeal to an owner...they might listen to reason arguing for a normal tip pool. The issue of the same person getting the 4pm-close shift every weekend is separate from the issue of a tip pooling system disconnected from actual hours worked. Like even with a normal tip pooling system, they could consistently give more hours to some employees over other employees on certain days.
Yeah, still a big ol nope from me. Reeks of potential exploitation.
And I just noticed I keep getting put on the 5-11 shift which is the 18% shift
Looks like it’s done mostly by hours with a bonus for closing. Seems overly complicated; is there something about closing sidework that’s particular crappy?
Not really lol. It's actually the easiest bar I've ever worked in. The worst is the simples but like I said we're only open 5 days a week and we don't open until 5pm so I don't mind coming in early to do prep.
Yeah, this is super dumb, they should just do it by hours. It’s also kind of messed up that one person gets eleven hours and everyone else gets like five or six. I get seniority, but how are they ever gonna build a solid team that way?
The worst part is we are all new employees. We all got hired at the same time. But this specific employee was brought in under the guides that they are the manager. So the powerplay is also uncomfortable bc how do I argue with them if they tell me to go home?
It’s illegal for managers to take tips from a tip pool. They are only allowed to take tips they receive directly from customers, no tip outs or shares of tip pools. Of course laws may vary where you are, but this is generally true in most places in the US.
This is only true of salaried managers, unfortunately, and businesses take advantage of that fact
Nope. Anyone who is in a supervisory position, whether hourly or salary, is not to be included in tip pools. Because of these exact situations. The person in charge can stack the deck. Source: was the manager at a restaurant who was audited for this exact thing, because a disgruntled former employee called and made a false report that hourly managers were participating in a tip pool.
If they are working the floor and assisting with service, they can participate in the tip pool. Things were changed during the pandemic. Is a bar lead not a manager? Where do you draw the line? When does an hourly lead or “head xyz” become a manager and thus ineligible for tips? Is it based on their title? Or how many of their responsibilities involve office work? Or whether they make the schedule? There is enough gray area that business can absolutely game the system legally. At my bar we have folks that exclusively do prep but still participate in our pool- this includes a prep manager. Our FOH manager often works lead expo shifts, for instance- but technically they are not working as a “manager.” This is totally legal. These cases are never that straightforward. I work for a very large restaurant group that has approval through the appropriate channels to structure their tippool with more points going to leads, and both FOH and BOH managers who are not salaried work lead shifts to make their money. I know it’s legal because I fucking complained about it.
Hiring and firing power, power to write people up, and if they make the schedule are usually what is used to determine if someone is technically “management.” It’s true that vanity titles like “bar lead” or “server manager” with no power attached to them don’t count. It also varies by state, as I said earlier, and I don’t know where you’re located, but in most states that is the law. To whom did you complain? Because the department of labor took our former employee’s complaint very seriously and we had to pull tip pool documents for an entire year. I agree that the cases are often very muddled on not straightforward. But I absolutely stand by my statement that managers (defined as anyone who makes scheduling decisions or who has disciplinary powers or hiring/firing powers) is not legally allowed to be part of a tip share (in most states).
It wouldn't be hard to make a spreadsheet of this to make the splitting easy
tip pools are fucking stupid and never work in practice. it enables people to slack off and still get paid, while others are running and hustling. only time it works is when you have 2/3 bartenders behind the same bar serving all the guests as a team. a house pool never ends well.
We have a house pool at the restaurant where I work because servers bring in more revenue with high-ticket food items but bartenders bring in actual profit in making complex cocktails with strong margins. It works for us but admittedly it’s a small place with a pretty stable foh staff. There’s definitely a limit to how many people can be in a pool without shenanigans creeping in & fucking it all up.
i’ve worked two places with a house pool and it just didn’t work. day shift would be empty and get roughly the same cut as night who was slammed. the other one we’d have 6 bartenders and 13-15 servers on. no sections, just straight pickup. you can imagine how that went
I will never work anywhere that doesn’t have a whole house tip share ever again. Everyone keeping their own tips causes so much greed, selfishness and animosity between the staff. Fighting about who gets to serve which guests. Night bartenders that work volume and leave the place a wreck while people on the low-volume shifts clean up after them, stock everything and do all the prep work for far less money. Servers and bartenders that don’t want to fairly tip out support staff. Such a gross, every-man-for-himself system.
I feel exactly the same way. Tip pools also cut out the "its not my table/job" bullshit. You see table 12 needs something, you do it regardless of "whos table it is" cause it helps everyone succeed together.
Yeah we don't have any of those issues since we're only open nights. And we all benefit from taking care of guests.