Do bar managers and restaurant managers try to cheat employees out of tips?!
Do bar managers and restaurant managers try to cheat employees out of tips?
Is it easier done at what types of establishments? what are some ways they try?
Answers:
My sister just quit her job as a waitress because she was sure her manager was stealing tips. He was getting away with it because it was an upscale restaurant that used a computer system to tally up all of her tips at the end of the night, especially for customers that used credit cards. So she finally decided to write down each and every tip she should have from a customer and found out that she was coming up short every night. The manager refused to believe the computer was wrong, and she heard rumors of him shorting past waitresses so she just quit.
sure why not.
Absolutly not!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In some states the law prohibits anyone but the wait staff to get the tips, California is one of them.
Tips are both in cash and credit cards. After business hours or shifts, someone should count both credit card and cash tips. In order to do this that person needs access to the tip jar and the credit card tip print out.
Some owners and managers give all kinds of reasons to deny access such as: wait staff don't need to know the credit card sales of our business, etc... This is hog wash. The wait staff has the right to know the total tips left for them by the customers.
Some owners feel the staff credit card tip tax should not be their burden. They withhold the credit card tip tax from the actual tip before handing it to the staff. This usually happens when the employee have a reason not to want to protest. This is against the law. Staff is entitled to the full amount of tips. The owners and the staff must pay the staff credit card tips just like income tax.
Some businesses have a tip pool to distribute evenly. Some businesses separate bar's, table's, wait staff's, driver's, buster's, runner's and chef's.
In any case tip log should be kept for accurate record both for the business and the staffs.
If this is suspected to be a problem you should quit and find a restaurant that uses an actual POS system to ring orders, manage tables and account guest checks.
All Point of Sales (POS) systems cannot be reprogramed by anyone other than the manufacturer to alter tip reports. They are used as fact by the IRS, this means that they are guaranteed acurate. If the IRS trusted them then so should you. You have a right to gain access to your tip reports for IRS purposes.
Now having said this. In some cases the house keeps a portion of Service Charges to cover other costs like table linens, non tipped employees and many other things. But this should be discussed in an interview process. This is completely legal and tips are usually paid out from a tip pool.