I’m located in Los Angeles, CA. I started working part time at a well known steakhouse chain earlier this year. We tend to get a lot of customers who don’t seem to know how to act civilized. We’ve had people start shouting at each other nearly getting into a fist fight and people having indecent conversations with a family a few feet away hearing everything they’re saying.
Anyway, sometimes people come in really large parties and spend over $1,000 and then leave anywhere from $0-$20 total as a tip for the entire party. I feel bad for the servers in these situations because they have to pay a percentage into the tip pool for all the runners and bussers based on the total sales made. When they’re making a lot of sales and get these parties leaving no tips then it’s like they’re paying to be at work. A possible solution would be to add an automatic gratuity to the larger parties, but management refuses to do it. I asked one manager why and he claimed that a law passed in CA that made it illegal to add auto gratuity. I asked another manager why and he said that it’s a company policy that none of their locations are allowed to add auto gratuity and that if he does it and corporate finds out he will get fired. Overall it’s just clear that corporate doesn’t give a F about employees and as long as they get their money they don’t care if the servers are screwed over.
My question is if anybody has any advice on something that can be done to change this. If the company refuses to add auto gratuity and this happens to a server they should at least give him/her a portion of the sales, but of course they will never do that. I have seen this happen to servers so many times though. I don’t think there’s any government agency that could do anything in this case, and tbh I’m not sure if a lawyer could really do anything about it either. Is there anything that can be done?