As millions of international visitors arrive for the World Cup, restaurants across the United States are adding automatic gratuities to protect workers unfamiliar with foreign tipping customs and the realities of America’s service economy.
Millions of World Cup visitors are experiencing American cuisine for the first time and there’s one menu item that’s completely foreign: tipping.
Many restaurants in World Cup host cities are adding 20% gratuities to customers’ bills this summer to accommodate international fans who might otherwise accidentally stiff their servers.
Teneshia Murray Butler, owner of the Atlanta-based chain T’s Brunch Bar, tells Axios she raised the restaurants’ automatic gratuity from 18% to 20% for the World Cup.
“My servers are everything. They’re like the quarterback to the rest of the team,” she says.
“Doing this makes the server see that I’m putting them first, … and I care about them and their money.”
Tipping isn’t customary in many countries, and the U.S. version of it is unusually central to worker pay.
In America, tipped workers can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour as long as tips bring them up to the $7.25 federal minimum wage.
Tipping originated in feudal Europe, where royalty tipped servants in addition to paying them a living wage. The U.S. later adopted the practice after enslavement ended, using it as a way to keep Black workers in poverty.
“Restaurants wanted to be able to continue to access free Black labor,” Saru Jayaraman, president of advocacy group One Fair Wage, tells. “So they mutated tipping from being an extra bonus on top of the wages… to becoming a replacement for wages.”
Jessica Ordeñana, a NYC bartender, tells Axios her restaurant is adding automatic gratuity for tourists, but that occasionally gets missed during busy game days.
She says a large group of foreign fans came in to watch Tuesday’s match between Argentina and Algeria and ran up a bill of about $300.
“They left like a $4 tip, and that was really, really disgusting. We depend on [tips], but unfortunately we cannot depend on them, because of how low they are,” Ordeñana says.
David Cooper, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network, tells research shows the poverty rate for tipped workers is “dramatically lower” in states like California, Minnesota and Montana where servers receive tips on top of the full minimum wage versus those in states that follow the federal tipped minimum wage.
Poverty rates for non-tipped workers are “essentially the same” across both groups of states, which suggests the tipped wage policy itself is a key driver, he says.
Unionized servers and bartenders at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles authorized a strike a week before the tournament’s opening match, threatening a walkout.
The strike was announced after the union reached an agreement with management. Tipped workers at SoFi won a 30% pay increase.
