Niamh Shackleton
An American waitress has explained the country's restaurant tipping system, and it's left people floored.
The tipping system in the US is an ongoing debate, with many service workers taking to social media to explain how it all works.
While in countries like England and Australia, tips are largely seen as a bonus for staff, in America a tip makes a server's salary liveable as the hourly rate they receive from a restaurant is so low.
The minimum hourly wage in the States is $7.25 per hour, however, if you're in a role where you can earn tips, the minimum wage us just $2.13 - meaning tips for servers is vital as it's presumed that they'll make up for the $5.12 difference.
Taking to TikTok, Tennessee-based waitress Savannah explained in one clip that due to getting a poor tip on a table, she basically ended up losing money and had to pay the restaurant herself.
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This left a lot of people bamboozled, so she's since further explained her working situation.
"Off of my gross sales, I have to pay six percent of that to the host, bartenders, kitchen staff, other support staff, food runners, like people in the restaurant that are helping to make the restaurant happen, I pay them," Savannah said.
"Why the restaurant doesn’t pay them? Why restaurants don’t pay all of their staff appropriately? I don’t have the answer to that."
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The waitress went on to say that if she sold $100 worth of food and drinks to a table, she'd have to pay $6 of that to other staff in the restaurant.
She went on: "So hopefully on that $100 bill I get a $20 tip (that’s 20 percent) and then I would actually only make $14 because the $6 goes towards the rest of the team.
"If I had a table that I served and their check was $100 and they do not tip me at all. [...] I have to reach into my own pocket, money that I’ve already made that day or money that I have yet to make, and still give it back to the restaurant to pay the rest of the staff."
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Her situation has left people across the globe completely floored, with one Brit labelling the system as 'wild'.
She wrote: "It’s not wrong to not tip, it’s wrong for restaurants not to pay their staff and to make staff pay staff. As a Brit this is absolutely wild."
"I’ve never heard it explained this way. It’s your Govt that is to blame," added another person.
"So glad that in Australia a tip is a BONUS for great service not an expectation bc of a messed up system."
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While it's easy to blame a customer for not giving a tip, another person echoed that it's a bigger issue than the customer.
They argued: "I was a server for years and instead of blaming the customer, we should be blaming how the industry is run. The company should pay a liveable wage."
"This isn’t on the customer. Y’all need to start a union," a different person added.