My tepid steel-man defense of Starbucks would go like this:
The coffee our elders drank was the coffee of soldiers mixing a few beans in a tin cup over an open fire concocted in a wet hole thousands of miles from home; and they liked it; and that's what restaurants served in tiny 6oz cups. It was, however, terrible coffee by any standard. It is very much akin to the beer situation... f*cking close to water as the old joke goes. It's hard to remember the disastrous American food culture of the 60s & 70s and 80s... littered with canned foods and time-saving pouches of fake stuff. And aspic.
Its not until the 90s that we see 'authentic' foods emerge and get picked up by young GenX'ers coming into funds: Coffee, California cuisine, Micro-breweries, etc. etc. And, this was good.
But, in full agreement with your post, that which was merely 'authentic' (the GenX anthem) became ever more expansive to the point that my GenZ daughters introduce me to Chocolate Tahini in my coffee (delicious, by the way); but chasing 'novelty' decoupled 'authenticity' puts us in a place where complexity becomes the enemy of excellence and we're faced with a thing that is marvelous in it's opulence, but unable to deliver on it's promises... even the things that it once did better than anyone else.
So my paean to Starbucks changes to an elegy as I lament it's demise even as I sometimes still stop by for a simple small Mocha... well, small Mocha breve with extra whip.
Right.. we always looked at sales then targeted 10% - 15%... BUT, we always had to cover the credit card tips first. That was back when it was probably 65-35 cc to cash. Now?
Nowadays, most of the tips are credit card... and if the tips are shared, many businesses record what they tipped you out... so no discretion at all.
Tips are both recorded electronically and declared by the individual and are taxed per usual. Basically, you walk home with the tips, but your paycheck is smaller because your tips are taxed on top of your hourly salary so your 'paycheck' is proportionally much smaller.
As JB mentions, cash tips and informal tip jars are honor system... servers are supposed to declare their cash tips either daily in the server system or failing that, they are liable at the end of the year.
In practice tips are 'under-reported' rather than not reported at all. That is, if you sold $1000 that night, you probably take home $250 in tips... but, let's say $200 was cc and $50 was cash, you'd only report the $200 -- and that would be basically audit proof as 20% on $1000 is undetectable.
The caveat here is that there are thousands upon thousands of small tips based businesses that have cash-based or very rudimentary business systems. BUT, those businesses aren't giant Casinos and those businesses weren't paying taxes on much of the tips any way.
This legislation specifically announced in Nevada is to eliminate Taxes on fully documented tips. I'm not 100% sure if the proposals are *only* for FED Income or if they include FICA.
Heh, not really. Tips by definition are supposed to work outside of the baseline compensation. They should, by custom, be small... and semi-definitionally outside the taxing paradigm as a 'gratuity' paid in untraceable cash. Really, the next iteration should be your server's venmo account at the bottom of the check. (But remember, Biden proposed the IRS track all ePayer accounts above $600 total revenue IIRC).
If you are being paid in a fully traceable transaction... and/or one of the parties has to account for the expenditure as an expense and tag you in the process -- the income will be flagged.
As we've moved to a nearly cashless economy, (most) all tips are fully traced and therefore taxed.
The answer really is to raise prices and compensate workers according to sales/revenue. But, whenever this model is tried (and it has been) several things happen -- usually all at once -- your prices are no longer competitive (they are, but the Tip 'fees' of competitors are hidden), you're out-of-step culturally, so customers are confused as to what they are supposed to do, staff actually like the lottery system of tips because you get lucky more times than unlucky; and lastly a combination of everything above where your business stands alone culturally out-of-step with higher prices and indifferent staff.
But I agree with you that there will be large perverse incentives to call more and more things 'tips' or even to drive business paradigms that aren't tip based to becoming more tip based -- and this is happening to everyone's chagrin *without* tax incentives. Add tax incentives to a purely fictitious category of 'invisible' income? It will drive behavior in horrible directions.
I can appreciate the sentiment; but disagree with the idea of 'emotional labor' as a disqualifier; especially since changing to a factual/data/revenue commission system is already a reduction in the 'emotional labor' quotient. As I say, I can appreciate the sentiment, but I think it's a misapplied criticism in this case, and beyond a certain point a misguided and undefinable objective.
It's also a free 7.65% reduction in payroll taxes for whatever portion of wages companies can shift to tips. There will be perverse incentives for more businesses to move wages to tips... and ring-fencing by industry won't last for more than a cycle or two.
What's the recourse for 'wage thievery' when customers don't tip? Nothing.
I for one, being a rational tipper will discount all of my tips by appox 20% to account for the reduction in tax burden.
Dumb idea and any politician who proposes it is dumb.
I agree in principle... there are, however, legitimate service oriented issues that tipping is supposed to address. A better approach that I advocated for when I was in restaurant/wine service would have been a commission approach based on check averages or just raw sales - plusses and minuses to both. Basically your tips correlated to sales already, but the key to success was both increasing the sale and the experience simultaneously.
The negative would be the server who ignores the experience to simply drive sales/commission... but this is a known sales issue that can be solved for with pre-existing management and evaluation criteria.
Ultimately, customer experience drives sales (increasingly in all the new business models) and it becomes a win/win for an industry change on front-of-house wages.
Back of house wages are a different kind of disaster, and 100% should be tied to revenues, volume, throughput.
Seriously, I know it's cliche... but I genuinely feel that NY Pizza is the most successful gaslighting campaign ever perpetrated in the history of man.
Everytime I'm with a New Yorker I'm like, 'Ok, so this is it? This is real NY Pizza... the best? No foolin'?"
Ok, you can double negative my comment into total agreement.
But yes, the goal oughtn't to have been to make the *left* comfortable w/Harris...
But I'm being honest when I say I have no opinion on Walz and how he plays to the field of normies outside of MN (yet). That's why I put the accent aigu on the part of the risk that assumes he'll come across as moderate - when the assessment is coming from the left.
I know you're trying to be snarky here, but the serious answer is that Trump has never promoted 'isolationism'... isolationism is usually trotted out by the Blob to misrepresent any position they don't like. So, No, I wouldn't consider Trump an isolationist. And no, I doubt he'd put boots on the ground in Israel (to answer your question below). Mostly he seems to have an aversion of the bad press of dead American bodies for no particular tangible gain.
Now, could you maybe interest him in invading Bimini or Turks & Caicos for a low cost territorial expansion of prime Resort real-estate? I'd say, let's not give him ideas.
I'm not sure there's any meaningful distinction between what you like to call Pundit Brain and Consultant Brain, or Administration Brain, or Election Manager Brain.
If you hire the Pundit to be an Election Consultant, the displaced Election Consultant becomes a Pundit.
Thanks for the link, that was a... rollicking read.
It's still not clear to me that she's much different; there's a fundamental shift from making sub-optimal deals that you honor... and keep iterating until you can make a better deal for your team... vs. lying/pretending to make a deal so you can govern according to your will to power, er, preferred outcomes.
Not that that's what you're advocating, but I really do think people misunderstand the line crossing from hard-nosed pragmatism to friend/enemy politics with backstabbing defections being the norm.
Plus, you should never ever, ever triangulate to get John Bolton on your team. :-)
On “Complicated Starbucks Orders Is A Language I Don’t Speak None To Good”
My tepid steel-man defense of Starbucks would go like this:
The coffee our elders drank was the coffee of soldiers mixing a few beans in a tin cup over an open fire concocted in a wet hole thousands of miles from home; and they liked it; and that's what restaurants served in tiny 6oz cups. It was, however, terrible coffee by any standard. It is very much akin to the beer situation... f*cking close to water as the old joke goes. It's hard to remember the disastrous American food culture of the 60s & 70s and 80s... littered with canned foods and time-saving pouches of fake stuff. And aspic.
Its not until the 90s that we see 'authentic' foods emerge and get picked up by young GenX'ers coming into funds: Coffee, California cuisine, Micro-breweries, etc. etc. And, this was good.
But, in full agreement with your post, that which was merely 'authentic' (the GenX anthem) became ever more expansive to the point that my GenZ daughters introduce me to Chocolate Tahini in my coffee (delicious, by the way); but chasing 'novelty' decoupled 'authenticity' puts us in a place where complexity becomes the enemy of excellence and we're faced with a thing that is marvelous in it's opulence, but unable to deliver on it's promises... even the things that it once did better than anyone else.
So my paean to Starbucks changes to an elegy as I lament it's demise even as I sometimes still stop by for a simple small Mocha... well, small Mocha breve with extra whip.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/12/2024”
It's not too late to put Biden back in
...is all I'm sayin.
On “Trump And Harris Agree on No Tax On Tips”
Right.. we always looked at sales then targeted 10% - 15%... BUT, we always had to cover the credit card tips first. That was back when it was probably 65-35 cc to cash. Now?
Nowadays, most of the tips are credit card... and if the tips are shared, many businesses record what they tipped you out... so no discretion at all.
"
Tips are both recorded electronically and declared by the individual and are taxed per usual. Basically, you walk home with the tips, but your paycheck is smaller because your tips are taxed on top of your hourly salary so your 'paycheck' is proportionally much smaller.
As JB mentions, cash tips and informal tip jars are honor system... servers are supposed to declare their cash tips either daily in the server system or failing that, they are liable at the end of the year.
In practice tips are 'under-reported' rather than not reported at all. That is, if you sold $1000 that night, you probably take home $250 in tips... but, let's say $200 was cc and $50 was cash, you'd only report the $200 -- and that would be basically audit proof as 20% on $1000 is undetectable.
The caveat here is that there are thousands upon thousands of small tips based businesses that have cash-based or very rudimentary business systems. BUT, those businesses aren't giant Casinos and those businesses weren't paying taxes on much of the tips any way.
This legislation specifically announced in Nevada is to eliminate Taxes on fully documented tips. I'm not 100% sure if the proposals are *only* for FED Income or if they include FICA.
"
Heh, not really. Tips by definition are supposed to work outside of the baseline compensation. They should, by custom, be small... and semi-definitionally outside the taxing paradigm as a 'gratuity' paid in untraceable cash. Really, the next iteration should be your server's venmo account at the bottom of the check. (But remember, Biden proposed the IRS track all ePayer accounts above $600 total revenue IIRC).
If you are being paid in a fully traceable transaction... and/or one of the parties has to account for the expenditure as an expense and tag you in the process -- the income will be flagged.
As we've moved to a nearly cashless economy, (most) all tips are fully traced and therefore taxed.
The answer really is to raise prices and compensate workers according to sales/revenue. But, whenever this model is tried (and it has been) several things happen -- usually all at once -- your prices are no longer competitive (they are, but the Tip 'fees' of competitors are hidden), you're out-of-step culturally, so customers are confused as to what they are supposed to do, staff actually like the lottery system of tips because you get lucky more times than unlucky; and lastly a combination of everything above where your business stands alone culturally out-of-step with higher prices and indifferent staff.
But I agree with you that there will be large perverse incentives to call more and more things 'tips' or even to drive business paradigms that aren't tip based to becoming more tip based -- and this is happening to everyone's chagrin *without* tax incentives. Add tax incentives to a purely fictitious category of 'invisible' income? It will drive behavior in horrible directions.
"
I can appreciate the sentiment; but disagree with the idea of 'emotional labor' as a disqualifier; especially since changing to a factual/data/revenue commission system is already a reduction in the 'emotional labor' quotient. As I say, I can appreciate the sentiment, but I think it's a misapplied criticism in this case, and beyond a certain point a misguided and undefinable objective.
"
It's a bad idea for all of the above and more!
It's also a free 7.65% reduction in payroll taxes for whatever portion of wages companies can shift to tips. There will be perverse incentives for more businesses to move wages to tips... and ring-fencing by industry won't last for more than a cycle or two.
What's the recourse for 'wage thievery' when customers don't tip? Nothing.
I for one, being a rational tipper will discount all of my tips by appox 20% to account for the reduction in tax burden.
Dumb idea and any politician who proposes it is dumb.
"
I agree in principle... there are, however, legitimate service oriented issues that tipping is supposed to address. A better approach that I advocated for when I was in restaurant/wine service would have been a commission approach based on check averages or just raw sales - plusses and minuses to both. Basically your tips correlated to sales already, but the key to success was both increasing the sale and the experience simultaneously.
The negative would be the server who ignores the experience to simply drive sales/commission... but this is a known sales issue that can be solved for with pre-existing management and evaluation criteria.
Ultimately, customer experience drives sales (increasingly in all the new business models) and it becomes a win/win for an industry change on front-of-house wages.
Back of house wages are a different kind of disaster, and 100% should be tied to revenues, volume, throughput.
On “Tim Walz announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate”
Score one for unity on the interwebs!
"
Did I? I think all of those presidents under-performed their fundamentals... which is why I said it passes an initial sniff test.
"
Seriously, I know it's cliche... but I genuinely feel that NY Pizza is the most successful gaslighting campaign ever perpetrated in the history of man.
Everytime I'm with a New Yorker I'm like, 'Ok, so this is it? This is real NY Pizza... the best? No foolin'?"
And it's just mediocre cafeteria food.
"
Ok, you can double negative my comment into total agreement.
But yes, the goal oughtn't to have been to make the *left* comfortable w/Harris...
But I'm being honest when I say I have no opinion on Walz and how he plays to the field of normies outside of MN (yet). That's why I put the accent aigu on the part of the risk that assumes he'll come across as moderate - when the assessment is coming from the left.
On “Asian Markets Have A Horrible Monday, US Markets Set For Fall”
Yeah, I was taught that 10% was a serious 'correction' ... anything smaller was chop anything larger was call your bank.
On “Tim Walz announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate”
... and he'll still crave tavern style pizza and rant about it to anyone who will listen, and many who won't.
"
Yeah, my wife is born/raised in St. Paul and I lived there for a few years in the early 90s... it's not your Opah's Democratic state anymore.
There's probably a dissertation on the 'Democratification' of the DFL just waiting to happen.
"
From what I can tell, the Left likes Walz because he's a (true believer) Lefty who codes as a Moderate.
IMO that's the biggest risk with Walz; overestimating the cloaking ability of the charm.
From what I hear, he's supposed to be pretty darn good at it... but is it calibrated for National politics vs. Minnesota Politics? No idea.
I'll note that Walz was on my list of Popular Govs that poll ahead of their state lean... but he was at the bottom of the list in a D+2 state.
"
Sure, you could fine-tune the algorithm to -was reelected and -would have 8yrs at end of term.
Not like they control the Presidential Election cycle years...
"
Reagan and Clinton have 8-yrs Governor... and HW gets the composite experience.
Carter, Obama, W and Trump wouldn't get a Pinky Pass.
I mean, in terms of effectiveness... passes the sniff test.
"
Insufferability correlates to distance from the Shenandoah River.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/29/2024”
Surprised we don't have a separate thread for the 28th Amendment, SCOTUS Term Limits and SCOTUS Code of Conduct.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/29/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-bold-plan-to-reform-the-supreme-court-and-ensure-no-president-is-above-the-law/
I'll save my fabulous thoughts on these items for the bigger thread...
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/22/2024”
"I’m just pointing out that the Republican Party is in no way isolationist, except for when a dictator they love is raping a smaller country."
Still not Isolationism...
... and nobody really cares if you throw the "I" word around.
None of this is useful framing for what should be best policy vis-a-vis Ukraine/Russia.
"
I know you're trying to be snarky here, but the serious answer is that Trump has never promoted 'isolationism'... isolationism is usually trotted out by the Blob to misrepresent any position they don't like. So, No, I wouldn't consider Trump an isolationist. And no, I doubt he'd put boots on the ground in Israel (to answer your question below). Mostly he seems to have an aversion of the bad press of dead American bodies for no particular tangible gain.
Now, could you maybe interest him in invading Bimini or Turks & Caicos for a low cost territorial expansion of prime Resort real-estate? I'd say, let's not give him ideas.
On “The Next Candidate To Be Dumped?”
Heh, the rumors are just to remind Vance that he's replaceable and owes his place to Trump.
The threat of betrayal is just Trumps way of saying, welcome to the team.
On “Democrats in Array as Harris Consolidates Support”
I'm not sure there's any meaningful distinction between what you like to call Pundit Brain and Consultant Brain, or Administration Brain, or Election Manager Brain.
If you hire the Pundit to be an Election Consultant, the displaced Election Consultant becomes a Pundit.
"
Thanks for the link, that was a... rollicking read.
It's still not clear to me that she's much different; there's a fundamental shift from making sub-optimal deals that you honor... and keep iterating until you can make a better deal for your team... vs. lying/pretending to make a deal so you can govern according to your
will to power, er, preferred outcomes.Not that that's what you're advocating, but I really do think people misunderstand the line crossing from hard-nosed pragmatism to friend/enemy politics with backstabbing defections being the norm.
Plus, you should never ever, ever triangulate to get John Bolton on your team. :-)