Tip big: Your server is literally counting on it

One of the great pleasures in community living is eating out — or drinking out, for some — because food and spirits become not merely sustaining sustenance but communal and spiritual celebration. That’s especially true when others make them, present them and serve them to you.

If they serve them with just the right degree of attentive fawning, you can leave a restaurant with a full belly and an inflated sense of self-importance and status, like royalty, perhaps.

The art of serving, in itself, is complex and challenging. Food arrangements may be beautiful to see and exciting to consume. Choices are often many and varied. And people don’t rush. Thus, a relationship can develop between server and served that becomes both formal and familial.

Good servers, about 70% of them women, according to industry experts, employ several remarkable skills at once: They’re ambassadors of great political acumen; choreographed dancers with circus-performer physical skills; and practiced endurance athletes.

Unlike many of us, good servers can tolerate and even consecrate the behaviors of a wide variety of humans transporting an even wider variety of — if not baggage — challenges in life. People will wash their hands but not their temperaments or attitudes before they sit, partake and pay.

Sometimes serving becomes not just a job but a calling. Anyone who appreciates restaurants, who patronizes them over time, has seen the career server, aging but vibrant, born to the work and belonging in it. Some of them can make good livings, raising families and sliding somehow into comfortable old age — and they do it with tips.

But for all that, in many states servers still get paid $2.13 per hour, the result of a sub-minimum wage policy of many years first established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of the New Deal in 1938. Restaurateurs are obligated only to bring that up to $7.25, the current federal (not state) minimum wage if tips don’t.

The historic reasons are less than palatable to us now: Many waiters and other restaurant workers were minorities (and many still are). Congress, with the president, created a money-saving way for restaurant owners to use that labor force without paying them what the ethnic majority received, a pattern in American labor practices that emerged at the end of slavery and after the Civil War, lasting a century or more.

Sub-minimum wages applied to people with disabilities, too — and still do.

That leaves wait staff dependent on patrons to boost their hourly money with tips rather than on employers to pay them sufficiently.

In theory, restaurateurs succeed by this special arrangement: diners not only buy the magic of an artful meal or drink, they pay wages to the servers.

When you patronize a restaurant, therefore, you become, de facto, an employer. Not just a consumer.

These are the industry guidelines for tipping: “15% is appropriate for average service; 20% if your server is above average. You should feel free to tip above 20% if you received excellent service. If you received poor service, it is better to talk to the manager than skip on the tip.”

State records show about 63,500 dining establishments and, in recent years, almost 1,800 bars populating the participatory landscape of 23 million citizens (nearly four million of them are servers or restaurant workers) here. But Florida is much more progressive than some states.

In a state where the minimum wage for most hourly workers will jump from $12 to $13 on Sept. 30, legislators have decided the hourly sub-minimum wage of $7.98 for servers should be $8.98.

And now, somehow, what servers do with their tips has become an issue in the exciting 2024 presidential race — and not just an issue but a unique issue.

Both the Democrat and the Republican candidates for the White House actually agree on this: Servers should not have to pay taxes on their tips, only on their hourly wages. They’ve even said so. One called the other a “copycat” for saying so second, not first.

In fairness, the candidates may agree on a few other things too, proving they’re not as divisively oppositional as we may think.

They probably agree, for example, that one candidate should be shot into space the day after the election (they disagree about which one).

They no doubt agree that Mexico should not become the 51st state just yet.

They probably agree that the North Pole should not be moved and repositioned in a place where it could help cool off the heating planet a little more effectively instead of just sitting uselessly up there at the top of the world, melting.

And they likely agree that baseball is a wonderful sport. Okay, maybe they don’t agree on that.

The tax on tips question is tricky — good arguments exist both for and against. Shouldn’t everybody in service jobs or any other jobs be treated equally — shouldn’t everybody have to kick in their fair share? At the same time, shouldn’t employers have to pay the state minimum wage to all employees? But would that drive some restaurateurs out of business, as they claim?

I don’t know the answers to these questions.

I do know that every patron of every eating or drinking establishment — of every store, office, crew or workspace, for that matter — always has to decide how to treat people serving or working with him. Or her.

That treatment suggests the quality of that soul.

So I say whatever the law, tip. And tip big. When somebody tries hard on your behalf and means it, even if they drop a glass of wine in your lap, just ignore the etiquette. Go 22 percent on the bill. Go 25 or 30. Tip big or tip-toe home.

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