Current Events > Got access to my diner's POS information, what would you guess the servers make?

(+) Yeah! (+)

For the month of August, 8/1 through 8/30. Adding tips to hourly wage. For reference, as a line cook with 7 years of tenure I make $22/hour. What is your guess for the servers?

depends entirely on your prices and the area

thronedfire2 posted...

depends entirely on your prices and the area

Largely, yes. Also on how many servers we employ per shift (2). Prices are more or less standard, typical diner fare. Area is pretty sparsely populated, it's in a town of around 2,000. I've seen a fair amount of talk on server wages on CE, I was just curious what ballpark they think it would be in. Though it looks like I'm not going to get many (if any) guesses, oh well.

Way more than the line cooks earn.

There's two types of restaurants: minimum minimum and "competitive." It's either $5.20/hr (depending on state) or ~$14/hr, both plus tips. Gonna go with the latter.

Yeah, topic was ill-conceived. I simply didn't offer enough information to make a reasonable guess. We aren't actually open for afternoon shifts, we're open mornings and early afternoon. Anyway, taken at face value they claimed almost exactly $27/hour including tips. Of course they only claimed 2.84% of their cash sales in tips, versus 17.63% of credit card sales since that has to be reported accurately. If one assumes they were actually tipped the same rate in cash as on credit card, it jumps up to a little over $37/hour. My gut feeling says that may be under-reported a bit because we do have some customers who pay with credit card but leave a cash tip (whereas the reverse obviously doesn't happen), which could swing the average up over $40. But that's largely conjecture on my part.

You could have just asked them. It's not illegal to talk about your wages with other employees.

Hell, you should openly talk about your wages with other emoyees. And then unionize after you learn what the discrepancies are.

POS won't include cash tip, so how would you be able to make an accurate guess?

Looking through the entire year (8/30/22-8/30/23) rather than just a good summer month, the declared hourly wage drops to around $24.66/hour while the "adjusted" wage equalizing cash and credit card tip% is $33.35. As I mentioned before, I suspect that undersells it by a little but probably not too much. I guess it's a little petty and small-minded of me to resent it, but it makes zero sense and is just blatantly unfair that I'm a much more difficult person for the diner to replace than the people who are making approximately 50% more per hour than me. Of course on the flip side they're also crowding each other out and thus work far fewer hours than I do. With all the overtime I've racked up I've probably made more than 3/4 of them cumulatively. Just gotta work way more to do it.

damnit, nobody cares about my pity party

Dont servers usually tip out the cooks and bussers?

I didnt know cooks got tenure

servers make way too much money

source: I am a server

Guess thats no longer a thing.

Devilanse333 posted...

Dont servers usually tip out the cooks and bussers?

I have heard legends of this. In some faraway land, this may well be a thing.

FL81 posted...

servers make way too much money

source: I am a server

Hey, it's a nice gig if you can get it. After 7 years as a dishwasher/line cook, I'm more and more convinced that only idiots spend years as dishwashers/line cooks.