NPR: New Way To Pay Kitchen Staff More: A Cut Of Sales

[Robin Garr]

What do you think of this idea, restaurant folks and foodies?

Restaurants Cook Up A New Way To Pay Kitchen Staff More: A Cut Of Sales
They say too many cooks can spoil the broth. But in cities like San Francisco and Boston, restaurants are facing a shortage of kitchen staff, caused largely by low pay.

The problem can be traced to the wage gap between tipped and nontipped employees. In an effort to bridge that gap and attract kitchen workers, some restaurants are now trying an experiment: revenue sharing.

Full story:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/201 ... t-of-sales

This is an on-going discussion in other businesses as well, where the sales staff makes more money than the other employees. As if the sales staff is, some how, undeserving or less skilled. It takes a totally different set of skills to deal with the public, make them happy and convince them to part with an amount of money ontop of what the meal costs. It's not just a finely cooked meal that keeps people coming back again and again. Often, a specific, well like server contributes to the popularity of a restaurant.

Skilled chefs that have seriously invested in their skills and education should be paid just as well. It takes time and long long hours to hone those culinary skills and it makes sense that they be recompensed for it. Would equity sharing be enough?

Though I completely agree that all restaurant employees should get paid more, particularly BOH when there is a gap between them and FOH, the issue with a revenue sharing model is that restaurants are already extremely expensive to open and historically operate on very thin margins. For example if a restaurant costs $500,000 to open (this is very reasonable cost) and the restaurant does a 10% margin on $1,000,000 in sales a year it takes them 5 years to pay off their debt (before taxes) before they're every truly making money.

Realistically restaurants need to raise prices across the board.

[Robin Garr]

Realistically restaurants need to raise prices across the board.

And then lose some business from thrifty folks, so the numbers get even more complicated. Thanks for the inside view, Ryan. It's appreciated.

There has been profit sharing schemes in many manufacturing jobs. Line cooks are similar to plant workers, producing in a way where speed, safety, and quality control are part of what makes the final product excellent. I could see some system like that based on units sold, or maybe on ticket times remaining under a certain par could work to incentivize the BOH and manage efficiency.

What I don't want to see (but is already happening) are the "knifeless" kitchens that are proliferating. No prep cooks hardly at all, everything precut in a bag, just open and dump. It's kitchen automation.
It would seem restaurants in the future will be divided into 2 economic categories- expensive and cheap, with few divisions in between.

In Key West the servers would tip the kitchen staff nightly a small percentage like 1% each night and at the end of the month we in the back got a "waitress bonus" which was awesome and would disappear as soon as we went to the nearest bar but it was a good supplement/bonus. Gonna read this article but I like the idea of contributing some sales numbers to the BOH staff just not sure it's feasible with the thin margins.