Tipping culture slowly changing since pandemic

Dec. 23—And then it's time for the tip.

But in these post-COVID times, the gratuity is far different from what — or how much — we remember.

Now, the restaurant bill can come with the implied tip for those paying cash (Who does that anymore?), the traditional tip line on a credit card receipt, a suggested tip of at least 20 percent on a server-held card payment device — or even a "service fee" of 20 percent or more quietly added to a diner's check, an increasingly common practice at Santa Fe restaurants.

Place those options against the backdrop of inflation, a service-worker shortage and a halting return to normalcy, and customers and restaurant servers agree the landscape at the end of a meal is far different than it was only three years ago.

The changes, they say, are both good and bad.

Good, in that tipping continues to keep servers employed.

"If diners want restaurants to stay in business, they should be tipping," said Jean Hertzman, director of the School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management at New Mexico State University. "Otherwise the restaurant has to make up the difference. I would say it's a responsibility the way our system is set up to provide that tip."

Bad, in that the tip has changed the meaning of what service used to stand for.

"The reality is tipping is now obligated," said chef Jerry Dakan, faculty lead at Santa Fe Community College's Culinary program. "A lot of the knowledge base for floor service has been dumbed down. You can tell some servers really don't care. They don't have customer service training. They have no hospitality training. It's already embedded in the minds of students that tipping is obligatory. I don't even know if they know good and bad service."

Tipping for service has been in play for centuries, but the psychology behind the practice has never been more fluid. Some diners stick to the traditional view that tips reward good service or punish just about anything they don't like: server attitude, bad food, cold food, not enough food, not getting food fast enough.

Most diners, however, do seem to understand the tip is the bulk of the actual wage for servers. Tipped employees fall under a different and much lower minimum wage than the standard New Mexico minimum wage of $11.50 an hour. Nationally, the minimum wage is $7.25.

The minimum wage for people with tip-based jobs in New Mexico is $2.80 per hour; nationally, it's $2.13. The national rate has not changed since 1991, when the overall minimum wage was $4.25.

The city of Santa Fe tipped minimum wage matches the state's $2.80, though the city has the highest minimum "living wage" in New Mexico at $12.95 an hour. Santa Fe County's tipped minimum is $3.88, Albuquerque's is $6.90 and Las Cruces' is $4.60.

The state's and Santa Fe's tipped minimum will increase to $3 an hour in January.

There is a tipped credit provision that stipulates if tips servers receive do not reach the overall minimum wage — $12.95 in Santa Fe and $11.50 everywhere else in New Mexico — the restaurant must pay the difference.

The Legislature held hearings in 2018 to do away with the tipped credit and raise the tipped minimum wage to the standard minimum wage. The measure went nowhere, in part because servers largely opposed a higher minimum wage.

"The tip credit keeps us so employers can continue to employ us," server Sadie Lynn observed. "It would be all counter service [with a higher minimum wage]. We wouldn't have servers anymore."

Seven states, including California and Nevada, have done away with tipped minimum wages and have the same minimum wage for tipped workers and everyone else: California's rate is $15; Nevada's is $9.75.

The changes — and the differences — are particularly stark for server and bartender Eve Paz, who grew up in Santa Fe but lived for a while in California before returning home.

"With the $15 per hour wage plus tips, I was able to live very comfortably," Paz said of her experience in California. "I always averaged around 20 percent in tips."

Paz now is a bartender at Desert Dogs Brewery & Cidery Taproom in Santa Fe, where, she said, in the past month the tipped minimum wage was increased from $3.85 to $8 an hour.

"It's almost like a breath of fresh air," Paz said about her employer's new minimum wage. "It's something to not make me be afraid to get sick."

At $3.85 — a full dollar more than Santa Fe's tipped minimum — Paz was "scratching for pennies at the end of the month" in her hometown.

"I live in a $900 studio, and even that can be a struggle," she said.

Paz said in 2018 she was the only server to testify to the Legislature that the tip credit should be eliminated and the same minimum wage should apply to tipped workers as the rest of the workforce.

"I believe that restaurant owners should be responsible for paying their employees a fair wage," she testified in 2018. "Tips should be a reward for good service, not a subsidy for employers. I feel that business owners who truly care about their employees should actually want to pay their employees for their time. I also feel that having a higher base wage takes pressure off of relying on tips for your overall income."

New Mexico ranks as the 12th-best tipping state at an average of 20.1 percent, restaurant technology supplier Toast reported in August. By comparison, Indiana tops the tipping charts at 21 percent and California is the worst at 17.5 percent.

The consensus among many Santa Fe servers is that as much as 70 percent of diners realize tips are the primary income for servers, while 30 percent employ the reward-punish philosophy to determine tip amounts.

"Personally, I don't see an issue with the status quo," said Josh Pino, a server at Bourbon Grill. "I would definitely say there is more of an extreme. You have people really taking care of you with better tips I never saw before the pandemic or they are paying really low amounts. There was a lot more consistency before the pandemic."

Server David Bishop, who works at a downtown restaurant, has a similar view.

"In the beginning of the pandemic, people were being extremely generous and very helpful," said Bishop, a server for 15 years, with experience in Las Vegas, Nev., and a three-star Michelin restaurant in San Francisco. "I've seen it sliding away from that. I'm seeing people being extremely picky, and the tips reflect that. The heater might not be working, the wait for food might be long. It's out of your control, but it's affecting your tips."

"In summer I was working five, six days a week in Santa Fe making very good money, but now in winter there might be only 30 people a night," Bishop said. "Sometimes I'm only making $60 a night. I make $300 a night in summer."

Server Amanda Hill recently responded to a Facebook comment on tipping and described how a "flawed system made [tips] a part of the servers salary [and] these people work way too hard to not be properly compensated."

"We here in the U.S. have our customs around tipping for service, and those of us that do this for a living like it," she wrote. "Restaurants could never afford to pay me what I make in tips, to even pay half, the cost of your plate would easily triple in cost. Servers/bartenders/bussers and other support staff would quit and the entire restaurant industry would collapse. So, please consider that maybe this is just how it works here and that it is just fine as is."

But some servers also note the phenomenon of the pandemic has affected more than just the tippers. It's also put its mark on some of the tipees, thanks in part to a much more mobile workforce.

"The pandemic really messed everything up," Lynn said. "It absolutely killed the tipping industry. Everybody got out of it. Now you're dealing with a younger generation that has no attention span: 'I'm not making enough here.' They aren't used to the slower days. There are higher turnover rates, which results in always having new employees. It results in not having good people to teach the new people."

The pandemic, some customers say, also brought with it a certain tipping fatigue.

"I was always a pretty standard 20 percent across the board tipper before the pandemic," said Chad Cooper, a financial adviser at Gateway Financial Advisors. "What has changed isn't the rate, it's the frequency of tipping. I tip for things I didn't tip before, like for carryout. I also find I've tipped for things like drive-thru. There seems to be a new added obligation to tip."

Some servers caution diners shouldn't think of the gratuity as gratuitous, noting the pandemic and inflation have created a housing and living bottleneck in Santa Fe. In their world, they say, every dollar counts.

Bishop noted it is "pretty difficult" to find a place to live in Santa Fe for under $2,000 a month.

"You can afford that in summer, but in winter people have to pick up a second job," Bishop said. "It's very hard to live in Santa Fe unless you have a few roommates or live with your parents. It used to be pretty easy to make a living here. We moved back because we wanted to buy a house. Now, that's out of the cards."

Check, please.