One small township near us does this. They passed a law that states restaurants must put an additional 2% charge on every bill that is used to pay "kitchen staff." When we asked our server about this surprise charge they said "the law requires that we charge it now."
We decided to simply reduce our normal 20% tip by 2% and pay that. We don't like the fact that the city has stepped in to mandate additional fees like this and think this practice should stop.
Outstanding, just outstanding. Way to stick it to your server to throw a fit about a duly-enacted law you don’t like.
I would have thought the price of surrendering one’s decency and regard for fellow humans would be somewhat more than two cents per dollar, but I suppose I was wrong.
It's a mandatory tip so we view it just like the restaurant that adds a mandatory 20% on a party of 6 or more. We'll pay it but we're not going to pay an additional tip. 20% (or 18% if you think it's not going to the wait/kitchen staff) is rather generous so please...
In the U.S., servers are commonly expected to tip the kitchen staff. If a locality mandated a 2% fee to pay the kitchen staff, that's 2% the server doesn't have to pay out, so this seems entirely reasonable to me.
What is unreasonable to me is the locality thinking by mandating a 2% tip the problem they claim to be solving will somehow magically disappear.
We decided to simply reduce our normal 20% tip by 2% and pay that. We don't like the fact that the city has stepped in to mandate additional fees like this and think this practice should stop.