Tipping Point: Time to Rethink the Service Charge?

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Should you leave a cash tip or is card just as good, do you prefer a service charge or would you get rid of tipping altogether?

Sheila Dillon finds out when she meets the co-founder of Hawksmoor Restaurants William Beckett to talk about our attitude to tipping in the UK and how it varies from city to city. Peter Davies of WMT Accountants describes how high-profile scandals have dented our trust in tipping and Alex Wrethman of the Charlotte Group of restaurants explains how that could be hurting businesses now.

Sheila then draws on examples from the US where Saru Jayaraman is President of the Restaurant Opportunities Centre. Jayaraman explains how the system in many states has forced workers to rely on tips to earn the minimum wage and been a cause of poverty and sexual harassment. We hear from the poet Jan Beatty about waiting tables in the US for 15 years and then look at one of the most forward-thinking tipping models in the world, dreamed up by restaurateur Danny Meyer who founded New York’s Union Square Cafe and Gramercy, and ask whether it could be rolled out in the UK.

Presenter: Sheila Dillon Producer: Tom Bonnett

Transcript

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0:38.0	If you a customer come into a restaurant, essentially we charge you twice.
0:47.0	And if you work in our restaurant, essentially we pay you twice.
0:51.0	It's a weird system, isn't at heart and yet it seems to be the most popular.
0:57.0	In today's food program we're talking about the moment at the end of your meal
1:02.0	when the waiter walks over and slides in front of you the
1:05.7	reckoning.
1:07.2	I scan the bill and always feel anxious, not only the black and white reality of what I've just spent, but also is service included.
1:17.0	I've just got back from a few days in the United States where eating out bills are even more anxious making because 95% of the time they don't include a service
1:26.9	charge yet you're supposed to know that it's 20% of the total bill before local tax has been added. So you have to be good at arithmetic even
1:36.2	if you have just drunk half a bottle of wine or sadly even more. And if the service has been
1:42.4	poor you have to fight the wish to give less, knowing that if you do, there's a good chance you'll be scorned as a cheap skate.
1:50.0	So in the UK, where it exists exists the service charge model makes life easy. 12.5% included in the total bill.
2:00.0	It isn't compulsory, but most of us just pay it on our cards. No need to think about it, done. But not everyone likes that.
	...

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