By Jordan Cissell
Staff Reporter
Keri Bess spends a large part of each day moving around. She goes to class, walks between classes and lunch and, after classes have finished, she heads over to Northport and stays on her feet for another 10 hours.
Bess, a sophomore majoring in chemical engineering, is a waitress at Wintzell’s Oyster House, where she worked in her hometown over the summer before transferring to the Northport location for the start of the semester.
“I’ve worked as a waitress for about four months now,” she said. “It started as a summer job, but I liked it enough to transfer to the company’s store here and work some more.”
Bess isn’t alone in her gratuity-centric occupation. In his 2010 book “Keep the Change,” writer and one-time waiter Steve Dublanica crunched the numbers on Bureau of Labor Statistics data and said more than 5,000,000 Americans work for tips as servers, hotel maids, bellhops, food deliverers and more. According to some further calculations by Dublanica, between $37.2 and $46.6 billion a year of waiters’ and waitresses’ yearly income is gratuity-based.
According to the BLS’s Monthly Labor Review for July 2012, American workers in the leisure and hospitality industry, which includes most tipped employees, earned an average of $283.74 per week in 2011.
Bess said incomes are hard earned, as base salaries are low and tips are never guaranteed.
“We really do get a very low salary,” she said. “I only make $2.50 an hour without tips because we are supposed to make up for it in tips. Most people don’t realize that we really aren’t making any money if you don’t tip us. One table can leave you a bad tip, and it can mess up your whole night and keep you from having gas to even get back to work the next day.”
Bess said her tip income on a regular workday could range anywhere from $30 to $100.
Amanda Smith, a freshman majoring in public relations, does not work during the semester, but she worked as a waitress five days a week over the summer at a grill in San Antonio, Texas. She said she could usually expect to pull in between $40 and $50 in tips during a five-hour weeknight shift, though customers’ unpredictable generosity sometimes added little to her $2.50 per-hour base salary. She said gratuity-based employment can be a good way to reflect and reward an employee’s hard work, so long as customers are informed, conscientious tippers.
“I like the tip system because I feel that the better you are at your job and the harder you try, the more rewarding it is, and you make what you deserve,” she said. “But some people don’t understand the importance of the tip for their waiter or waitress, so I think more people should be educated about how that basically is [the server’s] salary.”
College towns bear a reputation for sporting bad-tipping patrons, and Elizabeth Cook, a freshman majoring in mechanical engineering who worked at a small café and tea house over the summer, said she has noted a correlation between tip size and age in her own experience. According to Cook, customers with fewer years under their belts seem to leave less than the generally accepted 20 percent of the bill on the table.
“Tipping is oddly directly proportional to age,” she said. “If I had a table of older women, they would tip me better than a table of teenagers.”
Smith agreed with Cook’s proposed scale. She said older men are big tippers, as the drinks they usually order in conjunction with meals tend to raise bill prices. Bess said businessmen, “especially the ones with a company credit card,” are usually generous with gratuity.
While the older businessmen are high rollers, student servers are busy pulling high hours. Bess said she usually draws double shifts, working ten hours a day, in addition to her class load.
Cook said she decided not to work, at least for her first semester, because she did not want to “drive herself crazy” by adding waitressing to a schedule of seven classes and 15 credit hours.
Bess said the money she earns from the hours she works aren’t enough to completely offset school costs, but she is confident servers’ reputations for dedication and hard work will provide a resume boost later on. Cook feels the nature of the job means employees in tip-based industries must be motivated by service and human interaction more so than a big income.
“I could have made more money somewhere else, easily,” Cook said. “But I loved my coworkers, and I didn’t need a ton of money at that time in my life, so I dealt with it. In general, the money wasn’t what kept me working there.”
