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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Why the No-Tipping Movement Failed (and Why It Still Has a Chance)

Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world

One year after we first spoke in July 2019, Andrew Hoffman tells me I need a “disclaimer” for this piece. “This article was started pre-pandemic. Back in the Great Before,” jokes Hoffman, co-owner of Berkeley’s Comal and Comal Next Door, who eliminated tipping at his table-service restaurant around six years ago. I like that, I reply, repeating “the Great Before” with sardonic gusto. Hoffman laughs. “Take that playbook from the Great Before and throw it away,” says Hoffman. “You don’t need it anymore.”

Since COVID-19 spread through the United States, millions of food service workers have been laid off or furloughed, and those who are still employed are risking their health each day by returning to work. And despite all the pivoting — to delivery and takeout, to corner stores or bottle shops, to outdoor dining — between a third and half of all independent restaurants will shutter as a result of the pandemic. This economic reckoning comes commensurately with a social one, as calls amplify to address systemic racism and anti-Black violence following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, and, more recently, the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Depending on who you ask, these crises make right now either the worst time to talk about tipping, or render it a conversation that has never been more urgent.

The case against tipping is compelling: It facilitates racism, sexism, and widespread wage theft; perpetuates a growing income gap between front- and back-of-house staff, particularly in cities like New York and San Francisco; and contributes to a stigma that service work is transitory. “No matter how you do it, tipping hits BIPOC workers in the pocketbook, it exposes more female workers to sexual harassment, and it keeps all workers from making a steady, solid salary,” says Amanda Cohen of New York City’s Dirt Candy, a longtime anti-tipping advocate.

Around the U.S., independent restaurateurs are newly experimenting with no tipping: from Hunky Dory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which re-opened in July with menu prices that include gratuity, to Colleen’s Kitchen in Austin and Last Resort in Athens, Georgia, which have in recent months instituted service charges that, they say, will help provide fair and stable wages for all staff. “Before the pandemic, tipping was baked into the industry and we all inherited it,” Cohen says. “Right now, no one wants to go back and consciously, purposefully inflict its inequities on their staff.”

The end of tipping has been heralded before, and not all that long ago. In 2015, acclaimed restaurateur Danny Meyer announced that he would eliminate gratuities throughout his sprawling Union Square Hospitality Group, hoping to narrow the stark income disparity between servers, who received tips, and cooks, who did not. “I hate those Saturday nights where the whole dining room is high-fiving because they just set a record, and they’re counting their shekels, and the kitchen just says, ‘Well, boy, did we sweat tonight,’” Meyer said at the time.

Meyer’s move came on the heels of decisions to eliminate tipping by several Bay Area restaurateurs who, for similar reasons, did away with gratuity over the prior year: Berkeley’s Comal; Oakland’s Camino (now closed) and Homestead; and San Francisco’s Trou Normand, Bar Agricole, and Zazie. While other New York chef-owners, like Cohen, had banished tipping earlier, Meyer’s decision marked a tectonic shift: As the founder of Shake Shack and the CEO of a dozen-plus New York restaurants, if anyone could lead in putting tipping to rest, the thinking went, it was Meyer.

Other influential New York players, including David Chang and Tom Colicchio, acted around the time that Meyer did, resulting in a full-fledged “no-tipping movement.” Within months, Andrew Tarlow announced that he would go gratuity-free throughout the Marlow Collective, his restaurant group that helped define dining in a gentrified Brooklyn; Tarlow even designed an open-source logo for demarcating no-tipping venues, of which Gabriel Stulman made use after banning tips at Fedora, one of his then-six downtown restaurants. In the East Village, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler likewise pledged to eliminate tips at their restaurant, Huertas.

By May 2016, data bore out the beginnings of a cultural shift. An American Express survey released that month found that of 503 randomly sampled restaurateurs, 18 percent said they had already adopted no-tipping policies, 29 percent said they planned to do the same, and 17 percent said they would consider implementing no-tipping if others did. The EndTipping subreddit, one of the more complete records of no-tipping establishments from the time, listed more than 200 restaurants that were, at one point or another, without gratuity. Although these comprised a sliver of the roughly 650,000 restaurants across the country, momentum appeared to be building.

Until, it seemed, the wheels came off. Most of the restaurants that participated in the Meyer-catalyzed no-tipping movement had, by 2018, returned to gratuity. Meyer, whose organization never fully recovered from the shift to what he called “Hospitality Included,” capitulated earlier this summer, announcing that he would bring back tipping to USHG. Thus tipping won, and decisively.

Now, facing a potential reset of the entire restaurant industry, no-tipping could once again be on the proverbial table. “The big reason why people didn’t switch to getting rid of tips was because they were scared that they were going to lose their staff. And then they were scared that they were going to lose their guests. And now they’ve lost both,” Hoffman explains.

But if the post-pandemic restaurant industry stands any chance of successfully moving beyond gratuity and toward more equitable compensation methods, it is worth asking: What exactly went wrong before? What went right? And how, if at all, can sustainable change be made?

When the Brooklyn restaurateurs David Stockwell and his wife, Carla Swickerath, opened their modern Italian-American bistro Faun in August 2016, they debuted as a tip-free establishment in part because, Stockwell said, “it seemed like we were going to get in front of a rising tide.”

The anti-tipping cohort of the mid-2010s largely consisted of restaurants like Faun: moderately priced, casually upscale table-service spots that promised a mix of hospitality and affordability. By contrast, fine-dining establishments already had a history of no-tipping, as their guests expected to pay top dollar and were therefore less likely to resist prices that included the cost of gratuity or an automatic service charge — although this willingness was not entirely without exception. Still, these restaurants were largely not considered part of the tip-free trend, and neither were the fast-food and counter-service venues that traded primarily on price and often forewent tips anyway.

“Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?”

And in the case of Faun, Stockwell found himself explaining to guests why menu prices were higher than those at comparable restaurants. “Once you get people to understand that you’re gratuity-inclusive, there’s still the next level of this visceral connection with numbers on a menu,” he told me last summer. “When entrees are all up in the 30s versus in the 20s, it doesn’t matter if [customers] know that you are gratuity-inclusive.”

Stockwell and Swickerath waited for other restaurateurs to follow suit. But several early adopters had already reversed course, including Craft, Fedora, and Momofuku Nishi (which has since closed entirely). “It was a miscalculation that this tide was growing,” Stockwell confided. Despite positive reviews, by winter 2017, Faun was struggling. Stockwell was unsure if the restaurant could survive the coming January, with its crowd-killing short days and frigid temperatures. He didn’t want to revert to tipping, but he felt his hands were tied. “So many times that you are operating as a business, you realize, ‘Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?’”

Faun reintroduced tipping the first week of January 2018. According to Stockwell, the effect was striking. “Immediately, it made this whole thing possible,” he recalled. Although he and Swickerath would have preferred to remain tip-free for ethical reasons, he said that ultimately, “we couldn’t let the ship keep sinking.”

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Mike Fadem was confronting a similar challenge: determining the “right” price of pizza — one that factored in gratuity but also didn’t cause guests to mutiny. In October 2016, Fadem and his partners Marie Tribouilloy and Gavin Compton opened their Bushwick pizzeria, Ops, as a service-inclusive establishment. Before this, Fadem spent seven years climbing the ranks at Tarlow’s Marlow Collective, where, as a manager, he had helped oversee Roman’s 2015 transition to tip-free. Based on that experience, he knew that Ops couldn’t simply raise menu prices by 20 percent across the board. Instead, he calibrated his opening prices to those at comparable pizzerias, and played primarily with the cost of wine. For its first two years, Fadem says, Ops did not turn a profit.

Despite the financial challenges, and watching Roman’s and the rest of the Marlow Collective revert to tipping in December 2018, Fadem and Tribouilloy were hopeful they could make tip-free work. Still, Fadem remained a realist about tipping’s prevalence when we spoke last July. “I think a lot of people don’t see the system as being broken, or anything. And a lot of people love tipping,” he observed. “They feel some kind of power.”

Time would prove him right. In September 2019, still unprofitable, Ops abandoned gratuity-free. “It just wasn’t working,” Fadem said later that month. Ops’s labor costs were too high, and Fadem and Tribouilloy were unable to reward longtime staff members with higher pay. Introducing tips, Fadem said recently, allowed them to give “every staff member a substantial raise.”

Ultimately, the issue was guests’ perception of value. “In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work,” he says. “People are happy to pay $25 for a pizza if it’s $20 plus tip, but if the menu reads $25 for a pizza you’re looked at as ripping people off, even if it’s the right price for the cost of getting the food to the table.”

“In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work.”

But diners alone didn’t doom the mid-2010s anti-tipping movement; workers who saw lower earnings were also reluctant to embrace the shift. At Faun, for example, Stockwell started servers at $25 per hour when the restaurant was tip-free. Even then, he says, it was “virtually impossible” to compete with what servers could make at a “similarly ambitious local restaurant with tips.” If a tipped server could make $40 to $50 an hour, or up to $350 over the course of a seven-hour shift, why do the same work for half the money?

At Huertas, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler struggled to increase back-of-house wages as much as expected after going tip-free in December 2015 — they sought to reduce the kitchen-dining room wage disparity by raising cooks’ wages by $2.50 an hour. “We did pay cooks more than we had before, but in many cases not a full $2.50 per hour more,” Miller said last summer.

Even Meyer grappled with staff departures at USHG, in addition to reports of a corresponding decline in service quality and an inability to close the wage gap. In 2018, Meyer stated publicly that 30 to 40 percent of USHG’s long-term staffers quit following the phased introduction of Hospitality Included across the group’s restaurants. In the aftermath, the company continued to confront staffing issues caused by HI, according to a USHG front-of-house employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in both July 2019 and this past March.

“There hasn’t been a fix in the morale,” said the USHG employee, in part because of decreased front-of-house compensation as compared to pre-HI rates. The employee shared an internal USHG memorandum, which showed a comparison of 2018 average hourly pay from multiple USHG restaurants with HI against the average hourly pay from two USHG locations without the policy. Servers’ average hourly pay was $26.13 with HI and $32.88 without, a difference of $6.75; bartenders’ average hourly pay was $29.88 with HI and $35.23 without, a difference of $5.35.

As a result of reduced earnings, it was harder to hold onto staff at restaurants like Blue Smoke, one of the last Meyer restaurants to move to HI. Employee trainers left, and managers leveled up inexperienced hires even if they were not ready for additional responsibility just to get “bodies on the floor.” Another part of the problem was a perceived take-it-or-leave-it mentality that ran contrary to USHG’s ethos, and that made some staff feel replaceable. “It just sort of felt like, if [HI] doesn’t seem right for you, it’s totally okay if you leave,” said the employee.

USHG was not especially effective in closing the pay gap between the front and back of house — a primary rationale for going tip-free. In 2018, average hourly pay for USHG prep cooks was $14.45 with HI and $15.06 without, a difference of 61 cents, according to the internal memo. The average hourly pay for line cooks was $15.88 with HI, 29 cents higher than the non-HI average of $15.59, but a rate that was still $10.25 less than the average hourly pay for servers under HI. (USHG declined multiple requests for comment.) According to the employee, management wasn’t willing to raise prices enough to meaningfully increase back-of-house wages, or to maintain front-of-house salaries: “They didn’t want to raise the prices so high that people have sticker shock.”

These results, in combination with the financial pressures caused by the pandemic, may have contributed to Meyer’s decision to bring back tipping in July. “I think the timing and rationale is totally understandable,” Miller said of Meyer’s return to tipping. Miller notes that the reversal may be an example of “‘COVID exposing a fragile system’ in the same way that restaurants that were just barely surviving pre-pandemic are likely to choose this moment to move on.”

“Danny Meyer has abdicated his right to be a leader in this industry,” Cohen says of the move, arguing that if there was any time for Meyer to hold firm, it is this very moment. “What happens when his customers don’t feel so generous three months from now?” she asks. “I did no tipping before Danny Meyer, and I’ll keep doing it long after he’s given up. I think women and BIPOCs are used to white guys not being there for us when the chips are down.”

It remains to be seen how the pandemic will intersect with wages for servers, at a time when so many are out of work. This July, Marketplace reported that restaurant traffic has declined by 60 percent in some parts of the country, but according to the BBC, those who are ordering out seem to be tipping generously, with tips up by nearly 15 percent for Grubhub and Seamless drivers, and up 99 percent for Instacart shoppers since the pandemic began.

Though a sense of altruism may be responsible for this increase in gratuity, larger tips can also widen the earnings disparity between the few servers who remain and kitchen staff, so that a handful of tipped employees are making as much or more than they did previously, “whereas their cooks and managers are being asked to be more dexterous and take on more responsibility than ever before,” Miller says.

Even as sticker shock and worker turnover shredded the no-tipping cohort in New York, a sizable percentage of Bay Area restaurateurs who began experimenting with tip-free in the mid-2010s managed to make it work. The difference may owe, in part, to regulatory flexibility and a greater number of policy alternatives available in California. Most notable, it seems, is the ability to append a mandatory service charge to checks at the end of the meal, a practice that is currently illegal in New York City.

“People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip.”

“I am fully convinced that even at our very popular, busy restaurant, if we raised the prices by 20 percent starting tomorrow, we’d do significantly less business,” Hoffman said last July. Comal’s mandatory service charge allowed Hoffman and co-owner John Paluska to increase revenue while avoiding the sort of business loss attributable to sticker shock. “People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip,” Hoffman observed, which accords with studies that show consumers’ preferences for prices that are partitioned, rather than bundled.

Corey Lee, the chef behind the San Francisco restaurants Benu, Monsieur Benjamin, and In Situ, agrees that a service charge is a necessary bridge for diners in the U.S. “The idea of a ‘tip’ is so ingrained in American dining culture that most diners aren’t ready for service-inclusive pricing,” Lee said in July 2019. “Therefore, we break it out for them as a separate charge so they can see what’s happening.” Lee, who has imposed this charge at both the three-Michelin-starred Benu and the more casual Monsieur Benjamin, says that it avoids sticker shock while stabilizing wages for all staff and raising earnings for those individuals on the “lower end of the pay scale.”

But for some restaurateurs, the service charge is not a silver bullet. When Fred and Elizabeth Sassen decided to eliminate tipping at their Oakland restaurant, Homestead, in March 2015, they eschewed an automatic charge, believing that a tacked-on fee might confuse and frustrate guests and staff alike. Instead, they opted for service-inclusive pricing and, to incentivize employee performance, implemented a compensation model that factors in skill, experience, and hours to arrive at a base salary; from there, total salaries are set based on individual effort. Though the process was not without its difficulties — “what we realized quickly was that we would eventually have to cycle through the whole [front-of-house] staff” who expected the higher wages of a tipping model — Fred Sassen said that the new system has been, overall, more equitable in terms of compensation and advancement opportunities. “I’ve had a dishwasher that’s been with me for four years, he makes more than some of my servers,” he said, an industry rarity.

Jennifer Bennett, part-owner of San Francisco bistro Zazie, said that replacing gratuity with service-inclusive pricing in June 2015 allowed her to implement a pay-for-performance system that not only equalized wages, but improved service. It is a system, Bennett said last summer, that “is very different” than the static hourly no-tipping models used by many other proprietors, which divorce work quality from earnings and thus fail to effectively incentivize employees. In her model, on top of the minimum wage, servers make 12 percent of their individual sales, while kitchen staff earn 12 percent of shift sales. Because the entire restaurant is engaged in a sell-more, earn-more mentality, servers are quick to refill mimosas, while the kitchen profits too. Before, Bennett noticed that cooks would be furious if an eight-top walked in the door right before closing. “But now, what do they see? Another $15 in my pocket.”

Bennett, who split ownership of Zazie with three longtime employees in January, believes that the benefits go beyond economics. “Everyone thinks they are judging their waiter,” she said, “but really, from the moment you walk in the door, your waiters are judging you also.” With gratuity, Bennett noticed that some staff would make tipping stereotypes based on race and gender; servers fought over “good” tables and avoided “bad” ones “like the plague.”

Despite the tip-free movement’s waning trajectory, Bennett is confident that tipping will inevitably fall out of favor in the United States. “The inequality between the front and the back of the house has got to change,” she said. “We can’t keep having these people working in hot miserable conditions for 10 hours a day, making a third of the money of the cute bartender.”

Now is the “perfect” moment for reformation, new Zazie co-owner Megan Cornelius said in July. “These workers have been deemed essential and are putting themselves at risk. To walk out with a living wage that is secure and accurately coincides with how much they sell in a night, and isn’t reliant on the whim of guests who have been [sheltering in place] for months, is actually extremely important, now, more than ever.”

“My heart breaks every time another restaurant gets rid of its no-tipping policies,” Cohen said in pre-pandemic March of the setbacks faced by her New York peers. One of New York’s most notable tip-free successes — she opened her second restaurant, Lekka Burger, last November, after nearly five years of gratuity-free at Dirt Candy — Cohen has a specific aim beyond solidarity for its own sake: creating a critical mass of tip-free restaurants.

Eliminating tipping can be considered a collective action problem: a situation where short-term self-interest conflicts with the achievement of longer-term collective benefits. If a few restaurants charge $27 for lasagna under a gratuity free-model, a nearby restaurant that charges $22 and collects tips can gain by acquiring price-sensitive customers and servers who are attracted to tipping, even if all restaurants would be better off with a fairer and more sustainable payment structure. “If you’re a no-tipping restaurant, you just look so much more expensive than the restaurant next door to you,” Cohen explained.

Some restaurateurs believe that the government could generate sustainable buy-in by offering a tax break or some kind of subsidy to tip-free establishments. “For more restaurants to be tipless, I think it would take some economic incentive,” Lee said when we spoke last year.

Bennett, for instance, said that she would “love to see” a tip-free tax break, or even a tax incentive that simply rewards restaurateurs for paying staff higher wages. It is the kind of relief that, in the wake of COVID-19, Congress has already enacted for the airline industry, and could be added to a broader aid package for restaurants. To a similar end, Danny Meyer and One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman recently penned a Time op-ed that, among other proposals, advocated paying a full minimum wage to all workers plus a cut to restaurant payroll taxes — a form of tax relief that could, perhaps, be increased for tip-free establishments.

State labor laws can cut several ways, including by reducing an employer’s incentives to rely on tipping. Forty-three states maintain different minimum wages for tipped and non-tipped employees. In states like New York with a “tipped minimum wage,” employers can pay tipped workers a lower minimum than their non-tipped colleagues (called a sub-minimum wage), as long as the employer can prove that tips make up the difference between what the employer pays and the non-tipped minimum. Seven states, including California, currently impose one minimum wage for all workers, regardless of whether or not they’re tipped, which also means that restaurant owners do not have the option of off-loading labor costs onto customers.

But other policies may work to “save tipping” by reducing some of the system’s socio-economic discordances, albeit while leaving in place tipping’s problematic and often punitive dynamics. A 2018 amendment to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act legalized unlocked tip pooling — allowing gratuities to be split between front- and back-of-house workers — in most states, as long as the entire staff is paid the full minimum wage. This means restaurateurs can equalize earnings between the front and back of house without eliminating tipping or building the entire cost of labor into menu prices. (Unlocked pooling remains illegal under New York state law even after the national statutory change.)

The idea is popular: In the Time op-ed, Jayaraman and Meyer voiced support for “a full minimum wage with shareable tips on top.” After the FLSA change, chef-owners at several prominent, moderately priced Bay Area restaurants announced that they would adopt unlocked pooling, a group that included Tanya Holland of Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen. Even some of no-tipping’s earliest adopters have considered reintroducing gratuity and pooling it. “We’re looking at all of it,” former Chez Panisse general manager Jennifer Sherman told me last year during ongoing discussions to modify or replace the restaurant’s 30-year-old service charge. More recently, current GM Varun Mehra, who succeeded Sherman, said that the compensation question remains undecided as the restaurant and more affordable upstairs cafe remain closed for dining during the pandemic.

Despite tip pooling’s appeal as a relatively straightforward solution to industry-wide wage disparities, it leaves unresolved the dynamic that remains central to tipping: placing worker compensation directly in the hands of diners, a power that can be at the root of harassment, discrimination, and inequitable treatment of employees. “Shared tips are still the fruit of a poisonous tree,” says Cohen.

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food.”

Lacking a more persuasive financial case, the no-tipping movement seemed unlikely to win over more supporters in the Great Before. But now, as the pandemic’s social and economic crises unfold and larger swaths of the public pay greater attention to racial and financial equity, the case for tipping may be challenged anew.

“You could argue that restaurants have a cover and ready explanation for raising menu prices,” hypothesizes Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University and an expert on tipping. “Under the circumstances, we’ve got extra cost. We’ve had to implement whatever safety protocols and we have less seating capacity. And so, the cost of business has gone up, we have to charge more. And I would think that customers would understand that.” That type of empathy and comprehension could alter what has previously comprised a longstanding undervaluation of the costs involved in eating at restaurants, and align them more closely with compensatory practices in other parts of the world.

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food,” said Karen Bornarth, head of workforce development at the East Harlem bakery and business incubator Hot Bread Kitchen, when we spoke last July. “And I think that those of us who love to eat out and enjoy our food need to wake up to that, and realize that maybe we have to pay a little bit more for that dinner out so that we can create a more equitable system that works better for everyone, business included.”

That there will be fewer places to leave gratuity may circuitously aid the cause for tip-free. In the New York Times, Besha Rodell wrote that the pandemic could “end the age of midpriced dining,” as the trends in Melbourne — away from “casual gastronomy found in its cafes, pubs and wine bars” and toward higher-end concepts with to-go options — could be a “bellwether for other cities around the world.” As more U.S. proprietors stick with menus designed for pickup and delivery, there may be an even stronger lurch toward limited-service, which, as the name suggests, calls into question the need for any related charges or gratuity. As Eater reported in mid-August, 150 restaurants have closed in New York alone since the onset of COVID-19.

It’s a shift that’s already happening. Both Chez Panisse and Comal have swapped separate service charges for service-inclusive pricing as the pandemic has forced them into takeout- and delivery-only. “All three of our menus are just the prices plus tax and that’s it,” Hoffman says. “There’s not the traditional tipping environment anymore... There is no restaurant server, bringing you food, bringing your bill, and then receiving the tip at the end of it, that whole dynamic is gone.” Besides, customers report greater irritation when asked to tip at counter-service restaurants, according to research conducted pre-pandemic but published in May 2020.

In the midst of widespread suffering, Hoffman isn’t quite ready for optimism about a renewed push for no-tipping. But he continues to believe in its potential. “This is incrementalism. It’s gonna be slow evolution and change, based on the [restaurants] that survive,” he says. “It’s going to be the savvy ones that make it, and let’s hope they have their heads on straight with respect to the biggest issue in restaurants, which is the relationship between pay and work.”

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2GiLAtL https://ift.tt/2EXh085

Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world

“Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?”

“In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work.”

“People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip.”

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food.”

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2GiLAtL via Blogger https://ift.tt/3gI1Aly

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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bigyack-com · 4 years

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China’s Coronavirus Has Revived Global Economic Fears

Before a mysterious respiratory illness emerged in the center of China, spreading with lethal effect through the world’s most populous nation, concerns about the health of the global economy had been easing, replaced by a measure of optimism.The United States and China had achieved a tenuous pause in a trade war that had damaged both sides. The specter of open hostilities between the United States and Iran had reverted to stalemate. Though Europe remained stagnant, Germany — the Continent’s largest economy — had escaped the threat of recession.Now, the world is worrying anew.An outbreak originating in China and reaching beyond its borders has summoned fresh fears, sending markets into a wealth-destroying tailspin. It has provoked alarm that the world economy may be in for another shock, offsetting the benefits of the trade truce and the geopolitical easing, and providing new reason for businesses and households to hunker down.On Monday, investors dumped stocks on exchanges from Asia to Europe to North America. They entrusted their money to traditional safe havens, pushing up the value of the yen, the dollar and gold. They pushed down the price of oil over fears that weaker economies would spell less demand for fuel.In short, those in control of money took note of a growing crisis in a country of 1.4 billion people, whose consumers and businesses are a primary engine of economic growth around the world, and they chose to reduce their exposure to risk.By late Monday, the virus had killed more than 80 people in China. Nearly 3,000 had been infected — mostly in mainland China, but also in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, and as far away as Australia, Canada and the United States.The emergence of the virus in China, whose government jails journalists and tightly controls information, left the world uncomfortably short of facts needed to assess the dangers.“It’s the uncertainty of how the global economy is going to respond to the outbreak,” said Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, a specialist bank in London. That will depend on the severity, the spread and the duration of the outbreak, he said, and “we don’t really know the answers to any of these questions.”What was left to the imagination resonated as a reason for investors to unload anything less than a sure thing.Stocks in Japan and Europe fell more than 2 percent. In New York, the S&P 500 was down 1.6 percent, with stocks of companies whose sales are dependent on China especially susceptible. Wynn Resorts, which operates casinos in the gambling haven of Macau, a special administrative region of China, dropped more than 8 percent.The virus and its attendant unknowns conjured memories of another deadly illness that began in China, the 2002-3 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed nearly 800 people.“In many ways, it looks similar,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “We are seeing fast increases in the number of cases. The hospitals are overwhelmed and are not even able to test people with symptoms. I’m expecting the cases to go way, way up.”In the end, SARS significantly slowed the Chinese economy, dropping the annual growth rate to 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2003 from 11.1 percent in the previous quarter, according to Oxford Economics, an independent research institute in London.The episode is coinciding with the Lunar New Year, a major holiday in which hundreds of millions of Chinese journey to their hometowns to visit relatives.With air, rail and road links in central China restricted as the government seeks to block the spread of the virus, hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related businesses are likely to suffer.Some economists assume that those effects will quickly dissipate, leading to a revival in the consumer economy within months. That is how events played out in 2003.“Our baseline is that it will be a fairly big impact but relatively short-lived,” said Louis Kuijs, the Hong Kong-based head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics.In the hopeful view, economic damage will be contained by the Chinese government’s aggressive response in effectively quarantining the outbreak’s center — Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and much of the surrounding area in Hubei Province.But Wuhan is a hub of industry, sometimes called the Chicago of China, intensifying the quarantine’s implications for the national economy.“This is really unprecedented,” Mr. Lardy said. “The economic effects may be much larger than SARS. Wuhan is a major industrial city, and if you’re basically shutting it down, it’s going to have a major effect.”Already, China’s government has extended the Lunar New Year holiday by three days, through Feb. 2, ensuring that migrant workers will not return to their factory jobs as soon as anticipated, almost certainly disrupting production. Suzhou, a major industrial city near Shanghai, has extended the holiday until at least Feb. 8.Given that China’s economy is the source of roughly one-third of world economic growth, the slowdown could be felt widely.Most directly, China’s neighbors would absorb the effects, especially those dependent on tourists from China — among them Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Over the weekend, China announced that it was barring overseas group tours by its citizens.If China’s factories are hobbled by additional restrictions on transportation that limit factory production, that could become a global event. It could hit iron ore mines in Australia and India that feed raw materials into China’s smelters. It could limit sales of computer chips and glass panel displays made at plants in Malaysia and South Korea.It could trim sales of factory machinery produced in Germany and auto parts made in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. It could even affect the purchases of additional American farm goods that China agreed to under the trade deal signed this month.The shock is hitting just as China contends with its slowest pace of economic growth in decades, reviving fears that its reduced appetite for the goods and services of the world could jeopardize jobs on multiple shores.“China is obviously slowing down in a structural way,” said Silvia Dall’Angelo, senior economist at Hermes Investment Management in London. “The global economy is clearly more shaky, with sluggish growth. It is clearly more vulnerable to shocks.”The SARS outbreak prompted the government to stimulate the Chinese economy by directing surges of credit that financed huge infrastructure projects. But whatever damage China confronts this time, its willingness to respond will be limited by the government’s concerns about mounting public debt.“They are much more constrained now,” said Mr. Lardy, the China expert. “I think people underestimate the conviction that the top leadership has, that they really want to reduce financial risk.”But as global investors try to gauge the outlook, one element is the same as ever in China: Information is scarce. Trust in the authorities is minimal.During the SARS outbreak, the government was slow to acknowledge the existence of the virus as local officials actively covered up cases, allowing the threat to multiply.This time, the government has sought to project the sense that it is forthrightly reckoning with the crisis. President Xi Jinping has publicly acknowledged the threat, while warning local officials not to hide reports of trouble.But in the current moment of agitation, any perceived lack of information tends to weigh in as bad news.“This is, of course, still a government system where transparency is not really held up as an important criterion,” Mr. Kuijs of Oxford Economics said. “This is still an overall system in which discretionary decisions by bureaucrats are driving everything instead of very clear rules.”Clifford Krauss and Matt Phillips contributed reporting. Read the full article

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greetingcrads-blog · 5 years

Text

The best Photoshop alternatives for 2019

Photoshop is to photo editing what Xerox is to photocopying. Beyond the professionals who use the program, the word itself has become part of the popular lexicon and is often used as a verb, as in, “Can you Photoshop this to make it look better?” More often than not, when flipping through the pages of a magazine, the images you see were once opened in Photoshop.

But while Photoshop may be the industry standard, it’s not the only serious photo editor around. Photoshop remains king for many of the most advanced uses, but programs like GIMP, Affinity Photo, PaintShop Pro, and Pixelmator can offer lower prices and simpler user interfaces — and still complete on many features.

While there are many Photoshop alternatives out there (including these free photo editing programs), the programs that can truly stand up to Photoshop alternatives aren’t basic web-based tools and include things like layers and masking. Here are the best Photoshop alternatives for the photographers looking to do more than crop and resize an image.

At a glance: The best Photoshop alternative: Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo

No subscription

Clean design

Lightweight program

Available on iPad

Photoshop

Includes Lightroom

More advanced features

Affinity Photo and Photoshop have a lot in common, including non-destructive layer editing and both RGB and CMYK color spaces. Right off the bat, however, there are clear differences between the programs — because while Photoshop costs $10 a month, Affinity Photo is a one-time fee of $50. That means Affinity users can pay once and be done, whereas Photoshop users will lose access to the program if they cancel their subscriptions — but they are also automatically kept up to date with the latest version without any additional upgrade fee. While Affinity Photo’s incremental updates are free, moving from version 1.0 to 2.0 will not be.

As the newer program, Affinity Photo launched with a cleaner, more modern design — many users say that the program feels more like using a mobile app. Coincidentally, Affinity Photo is available for the iPad, but it does cost $20 regardless of whether or not you also buy the desktop version. Adobe says they are working on an iPad version of Photoshop, but beyond a hands-off preview of an early development build, there’s no sign of it yet.

The developers at Affinity Photo know that the program is competing directly with an industry-standard, so the company has worked to include all the major features that Photoshop is known for. The two programs aren’t identical, but Affinity Photo still includes many of the more advanced tools, like photo merging for HDR composites, panoramas, and focus stacking. Layers and masking are also a big part of the app.

Photoshop, however, still has some perks over Affinity. Color tools are more advanced, layers are more easily resized, and EXIF data can be edited, for starters. Photoshop also has a more familiar interface for experienced editors, a plethora of tutorials, and plenty of plug-ins. Likely the biggest perk for Photoshop is the easy integration with the RAW editor and organizer Adobe Lightroom, which is included in the subscription price when you sign up for the Photography Plan. Serif, Affinity’s parent company, also offers Affinity Designer and Publisher, but doesn’t have a RAW management program to compete with Lightroom.

The best free Photoshop alternative: GIMP

Mark Coppock/Digital TrendsGimp

Free

Lightweight program

Includes most basic and mid-level editing controls

Customizable

Photoshop

Non-destructive adjustment layers

More advanced tools

Frequent updates

Cost includes Lightroom, cloud storage

While there are a handful of free Photoshop alternatives, the open source program GIMP comes closest to Photoshop’s advanced tools. As an open source program, GIMP is free to download for Mac, Windows and Linux.

GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, has several of the same tools as Photoshop. Layer editing is possible, which allows GIMP to do more than just a basic crop and color edit. Many advanced edits, like local adjustment, blemish corection, and object removal, can be easily tackled inside the open source program. While other free programs will crop, recolor and apply filters, GIMP offers enough advanced tools to be considered a true Photoshop competitor.

Of course, a free program is never on par with a paid industry standard. While GIMP contains most of the same most-used tools, it’s lacking a few features. The healing brush, for example, has one option where Photoshop’s brush has four. GIMP also does not have non-destructive adjustment layer editing, where the changes can be reverted or altered later without affecting the rest of the edit. GIMP also tends to be behind Photoshop’s latest new tools, with some new options not arriving to the free program to years later. GIMP also isn’t as much of a graphic design program as Photoshop — CMYK support, for example, is not included.

The GIMP user interface is either great or not so great, depending on how you look at it. As an open source format, the UI isn’t as professional and sleek as Photoshop’s. However, since there aren’t quite as many tools, the program can feel slightly less daunting, and also allows for more customization options.

GIMP can’t replace every Photoshop feature exactly, but it’s the open source program that comes the closest to the Adobe powerhouse, with a free price tag. Learn more about how it compares in our Photoshop versus GIMP comparison.

The best Photoshop and Lightroom alternative: Corel PaintShop Pro

Corel PaintShop Pro

Windows Only

Cheaper, with no subscription

Multiple interface modes

Photoshop

More high-end tools and content-aware tools

More tutorials and plug-ins

MacOS and Windows

Corel PaintShop Pro is a Photoshop alternative that’s also tied to a Lightroom alternative called AfterShot Pro. Like other competitors, Corel is aiming for the users frustrated with having to pay a monthly fee by offering a one-time price. When bundled with AfterShot Pro, Corel PaintShop Pro is $100, with upgrades for current users at $80. Unlike Photoshop, however, PaintShop Pro is a Windows-only program.

Corel PaintShop Pro is the company’s more advanced photo editor, but attempts to bridge the gap between being easy to use to use and having advanced features using an Essentials panel. This mode is designed for beginners, while if you need more advanced tools, they are accessible simply by switching the mode. That option can make PaintShop Pro easier to dive into for beginners, while offering room to grow.

While PaintShop Pro contains a number of the same tools as Photoshop including layer-based editing, Photoshop is still the best for the content-aware adjustments. Photoshop has tools like the Face-Aware Liquify, while offering a more robust Content-Aware Fill over Corel’s Magic fill, which helps fill in areas of an image based on the surrounding content. Adobe Camera RAW also has more tools than the RAW converter included with PaintShop, though that’s not as much of an issue if opting for the bundle that includes AfterShot. PaintShop, however, does have some options not part of Photoshop, including being bundled with PhotoMirage to animate a still photo and auto paint to instantly convert a photo into a style of painting or other artwork.

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

Text

Why the No-Tipping Movement Failed (and Why It Still Has a Chance) added to Google Docs

Why the No-Tipping Movement Failed (and Why It Still Has a Chance)

Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world

“Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?”

“In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work.”

“People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip.”

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food.”

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/21398973/restaurant-no-tipping-movement-living-wage-future

Created September 1, 2020 at 09:26PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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mastcomm · 4 years

Text

China’s Coronavirus Has Revived Global Economic Fears

The United States and China had achieved a tenuous pause in a trade war that had damaged both sides. The specter of open hostilities between the United States and Iran had reverted to stalemate. Though Europe remained stagnant, Germany — the continent’s largest economy — had escaped the threat of recession.

Now, the world is worrying anew.

An outbreak originating in China and reaching beyond its borders has summoned fresh fears, sending markets into a wealth-destroying tailspin. It has provoked alarm that the world economy may be in for another shock, offsetting the benefits of the trade truce and the geopolitical easing, and providing new reason for businesses and households to hunker down.

On Monday, investors dumped stocks on exchanges from Asia to Europe to North America. They entrusted their money to traditional safe havens, pushing up the value of the yen, the dollar and gold. They pushed down the price of oil over fears that weaker economies would spell less demand for fuel.

In short, those in control of money took note of a growing crisis in a country of 1.4 billion people, whose consumers and businesses are a primary engine of economic growth around the world, and they chose to reduce their exposure to risk.

By late Monday, the virus had killed more than 80 people in China. Nearly 3,000 had been infected — mostly in mainland China, but also in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, and as far away as Australia, Canada and the United States.

The emergence of the virus in China, whose government jails journalists and tightly controls information, left the world uncomfortably short of facts needed to assess the dangers.

“It’s the uncertainty of how the global economy is going to respond to the outbreak,” said Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, a specialist bank in London. That will depend on the severity, the spread and the duration of the outbreak, he said, and “we don’t really know the answers to any of these questions.”

What was left to the imagination resonated as a reason for investors to unload anything less than a sure thing.

Stocks in Japan and Europe fell more than 2 percent. In New York, the S&P 500 was down 1.6 percent, with stocks of companies whose sales are dependent on China especially susceptible. Wynn Resorts, which operates casinos in the gambling haven of Macau, a special administrative region of China, dropped more than 8 percent.

The virus and its attendant unknowns conjured memories of another deadly illness that began in China, the 2002-3 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed nearly 800 people.

“In many ways, it looks similar,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “We are seeing fast increases in the number of cases. The hospitals are overwhelmed and are not even able to test people with symptoms. I’m expecting the cases to go way, way up.”

In the end, SARS significantly slowed the Chinese economy, dropping the annual growth rate to 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2003 from 11.1 percent in the previous quarter, according to Oxford Economics, an independent research institute in London.

The episode is coinciding with the Lunar New Year, a major holiday in which hundreds of millions of Chinese journey to their hometowns to visit relatives.

With air, rail and road links in central China restricted as the government seeks to block the spread of the virus, hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related businesses are likely to suffer.

Some economists assume that those effects will quickly dissipate, leading to a revival in the consumer economy within months. That is how events played out in 2003.

“Our baseline is that it will be a fairly big impact but relatively short-lived,” said Louis Kuijs, the Hong Kong-based head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics.

In the hopeful view, economic damage will be contained by the Chinese government’s aggressive response in effectively quarantining the outbreak’s center — Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and much of the surrounding area in Hubei Province.

But Wuhan is a hub of industry, sometimes called the Chicago of China, intensifying the quarantine’s implications for the national economy.

“This is really unprecedented,” Mr. Lardy said. “The economic effects may be much larger than SARS. Wuhan is a major industrial city, and if you’re basically shutting it down, it’s going to have a major effect.”

Already, China’s government has extended the Lunar New Year holiday by three days, through Feb. 2, ensuring that migrant workers will not return to their factory jobs as soon as anticipated, almost certainly disrupting production. Suzhou, a major industrial city near Shanghai, has extended the holiday until at least Feb. 8.

Given that China’s economy is the source of roughly one-third of world economic growth, the slowdown could be felt widely.

Most directly, China’s neighbors would absorb the effects, especially those dependent on tourists from China — among them Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Over the weekend, China announced that it was barring overseas group tours by its citizens.

If China’s factories are hobbled by additional restrictions on transportation that limit factory production, that could become a global event. It could hit iron ore mines in Australia and India that feed raw materials into China’s smelters. It could limit sales of computer chips and glass panel displays made at plants in Malaysia and South Korea.

It could trim sales of factory machinery produced in Germany and auto parts made in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. It could even affect the purchases of additional American farm goods that China agreed to under the trade deal signed this month.

The shock is hitting just as China contends with its slowest pace of economic growth in decades, reviving fears that its reduced appetite for the goods and services of the world could jeopardize jobs on multiple shores.

“China is obviously slowing down in a structural way,” said Silvia Dall’Angelo, senior economist at Hermes Investment Management in London. “The global economy is clearly more shaky, with sluggish growth. It is clearly more vulnerable to shocks.”

The SARS outbreak prompted the government to stimulate the Chinese economy by directing surges of credit that financed huge infrastructure projects. But whatever damage China confronts this time, its willingness to respond will be limited by the government’s concerns about mounting public debt.

“They are much more constrained now,” said Mr. Lardy, the China expert. “I think people underestimate the conviction that the top leadership has, that they really want to reduce financial risk.”

But as global investors try to gauge the outlook, one element is the same as ever in China: Information is scarce. Trust in the authorities is minimal.

During the SARS outbreak, the government was slow to acknowledge the existence of the virus as local officials actively covered up cases, allowing the threat to multiply.

This time, the government has sought to project the sense that it is forthrightly reckoning with the crisis. President Xi Jinping has publicly acknowledged the threat, while warning local officials not to hide reports of trouble.

But in the current moment of agitation, any perceived lack of information tends to weigh in as bad news.

“This is, of course, still a government system where transparency is not really held up as an important criterion,” Mr. Kuijs of Oxford Economics said. “This is still an overall system in which discretionary decisions by bureaucrats are driving everything instead of very clear rules.”

Clifford Krauss and Matt Phillips contributed reporting.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/chinas-coronavirus-has-revived-global-economic-fears/

#Event

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easytravelpw-blog · 5 years

Photo

Full text write on https://easy-travel.pw/the-challenges-of-ferry-crossing-with-children/hotels/

The Challenges of Ferry Crossing with Children

When I first booked a ferry crossing between Spain and England with my two little boys in October 2009, it seemed a daunting task. First, there was the 10-hour drive from Andalucia to reach the port of Bilbao (cue constant child squabbles on the back seat combined with “are we nearly there yet”); a pre-booked hotel near the port that had an unexpected infant supplement; a row over a lost map with their father, who had inadvisably joined the trip.

I remember our crossing on the P&O Pride of Bilbao vessel all too well (fortunately, we could never repeat this fascinating trip as the ship was later renamed the Princess Anastasia and sold off to Sweden).

On this occasion, the Bay of Biscay lived up to its reputation. The sea was rough. Old people were retiring to their cabins to lie down and/or throw up. Kids were being sick on the playroom carpet.

Excited by the curious listing motion of the ship, my ‘little dears’ – then aged one-and-a-half and three years – were rampaging around the self-service restaurant, trying to unplug the electricity supply to the nearby carvery. Old ladies were tutting and meanwhile, their father was defining the meaning of “booze cruise”. I can’t say this crossing was much fun!

Forward to October 2010. This time, I am with the boys (now aged two-and-a-half and four years) on the Brittany Ferries‘ Cap Finistere – a more salubrious vessel than the Pride of Bilbao, which had been withdrawn from service a month earlier.

The ferry is routed via Roscoff for a docking trial, resulting in a 10-hour delay to our arrival in Portsmouth.

Brittany Ferries kindly provided a discount on all food and beverages but, when unleashed into the ship’s eateries, the now bored and hyper kids are climbing on banquettes and upsetting the waiting staff. When I take the errant kids into our four-berth outside cabin, situated directly above the ship’s nightclub bar, they literally bounce off the walls.

Sailing with kids must get better than this surely? The good news is that it does.

Since October 2010, my small family has completed several enjoyable ferry crossings – and the little boys, now aged four-and-a-haf and six years, who have never plummeted the murky depths of “bored on-board” behaviour again.

Child-friendly ferries

During the past two years, we’ve found that the two Brittany Ferries vessels operating between England and Spain – the Pont Aven and Cap Finistere – cater well for single parent families.

Facilities

Children dipping fingers in the salt water swimming pool

In 2011, the Cap Finistere was fitted with a kids’ play area on a top deck, conveniently located near the salt water swimming pool and a sunbathing area favoured by adults. Her sister vessel, the larger Pont Aven, also has a salt water swimming pool. Both pools open from mid-April to September, depending on the prevailing weather and sea conditions.

Offering plenty of space to relax on the 24-hour crossing, the Pont Aven has become our top choice for sailing between England and Spain. The vessel includes a cinema, games room, a dedicated kids’ room with soft play area and – during the high season – kids’ activities take place in the nightclub bar. Although we’ve not yet tested this service, the Pont Aven kids’ club starts in mid-May or early June. Costing £4 for an hour or £7 for two hours respite, it enables parents to leave their offspring with the resident hostess, who is experienced at childcare.

Cinema on Pont Aven

The Pont Aven and Cap Finistere both employ a magician. We recently caught up with one of these on the Cap Finistere. My eldest son became fixated on figuring out his card tricks. The young chap gamely tried to copy a card flourish trick for about 10 minutes, before realising that the magician’s deck was taped together so the cards couldn’t fall. He also won a round of ‘Play your Cards Right’ while Mummy made a bad choice and lost her chance to win a free drink from the bar. All great fun!

The boys have been similarly impressed with on-board activities including balloon animal construction, bingo and quizzes. On high-season crossings, they might also encounter face painting, hair braiding and the viewing of sea creatures.

Food

Children enjoying a desert

When it’s time to eat, both the Cap Finistere and Pont Aven offer dining options ranging from self-service to a la carte.

On our recent Cap Finistere crossing, we enjoyed the poolside bar/restaurant that serves good-value pizza and burgers for around £8.

On the Pont Aven, our favourite daytime eatery is the comprehensive self-service restaurant that serves everything from salads to cooked meals, with prices starting at approximately £4.

Self-service restaurant on Pont Aven

More expensive with a two course meal costing £22.50 and a three course meal £28.50, the Pont Aven’s a la carte restaurant, La Flora, is the ideal place for a civilised dinner experience, and the buffet is impressive.

That said, I recall the occasion when my youngest son spoiled the “civilised dinner experience” (and the carpet) by upending a plate of fries smothered with tomato ketchup on to the floor. Single parents travelling with toddlers who haven’t yet refined their table manners could, conceivably, select their food from La Flora and then ask for it to be delivered directly to their cabin.

Cabins

Boys enjoying the view from the porthole

On the topic of cabins, if you can afford the slightly higher fare, it’s well worth booking a Deluxe or Commodore cabin, instead of a standard cabin with bunks. More like a hotel room, the deluxe cabin provides plenty of space for younger family members to play, as well as offering a TV and DVD player, tea/coffee making facilities and breakfast served to the room. When residing in a bigger cabin, we tend to spend less time strolling around the ship and, in turn, spend less money in food areas and bars. This narrows the price gap between standard and deluxe accommodation somewhat.

For those staying in a standard cabin, a solid piece of advice is: don’t forget your laptop or portable DVD player. Even the most over-excited of small children can be entertained for several hours with a selection of kids’ movies, while you enjoy a well-earned rest during the crossing.

It’s also worth investing in the kids’ snack packs, costing £5.50, that contain reasonably substantial plastic toys. These keep the little ones amused for a while, at least, before they revert to watching ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’.

Families can obtain the best deals on Brittany Ferries crossings between Portsmouth / Plymouth and Bilbao / Santander by booking early on their website, which shows the cheapest fares.

Helpful hints for undertaking ferry crossings with young children

Remember to take their favourite entertainments on board. You can’t go wrong with a Nintendo DS, portable DVD player or laptop loaded with kids’ movies.

Remember your continental plug adaptor.

Don’t leave vital supplies in your vehicle. Access to the vehicle deck is not permitted after the ship leaves the port.

Try to book a larger, premium cabin if possible. That way, you can relax for longer, without the kids bouncing off the walls.

Avoid taking messy snacks into a standard cabin as it won’t take long for the cabin to look like a tip. Besides which, snacks are relatively cheap on board.

Don’t dose the kids heavily with sugary snacks and drinks if you plan to enjoy their company in a confined space.

Don’t forget where you parked your vehicle. You don’t want to be searching for on the lower decks, amongst articulated lorries, while your little ones breathe in the fumes.

#wpdevar_comment_1 span,#wpdevar_comment_1 iframewidth:100% !important;

#travel #airlinetickets #airtickets #cheapairfare #planetickets #travelinsurance #travelquotes #travelblogger #traveller #travelling #travelocity #travelodge #vacation

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years

Text

Content Copycat: What To Do When Your Website Gets Copied

As many of us know, it can be an incredible challenge to create a website with wonderful content that can generate leads and attract qualified traffic, but, once you do, it's extremely gratifying to see all that hard work finally paying off.

Unfortunately, there are many out there who may decide to use that success to their advantage… We’re not talking “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” I mean they may straight copy your content, design, or worse, your entire site.In fact, shortly after our big homepage redesign, we discovered IMPACT’s site was duplicated, and believe me, it’s been a pain to deal with.

What’s even scarier is it’s easy for copycats to go unnoticed for months, or even years, until one day, someone, be it you or a site visitor, makes the unhappy discovery.

Depending on the severity of copyright, it’s easy to start counting how much money you plan to spend on a lawyer, but before you jump to the extreme, there are much more affordable (and free) approaches to take down the content you should attempt.

Below, I’m going to walk you through the steps you need to take to get copycat content taken down (several of which we did) and how to react when the easier plans just aren’t going to cut it.

To preface the remainder of this article, I am not a lawyer, nor am I pretending to be one. If you need to seek legal advice over copyright infringement, please contact a lawyer or other legal experts to identify appropriate resources.

Before You Do Anything, Take Screenshots!

It’s natural to immediately want to contact the appropriate parties when your site gets copied, but pause for a moment, and be sure to first take screen grabs of the duplicates and if possible, use tools such as Wayback Machine to view the crawled pages at earlier dates.

Also, take screenshots of your own work as proof in case you need to update anything as you go through the next steps.

You’ll likely find that parts of the site that were copied need to be updated, changing the layout or copy. Doing this ensures you aren’t scrambling to revert pages to previous states.

Plan A: Find & Contact the Copycat Site’s Owner

Depending on the severity of the duplication, you can sometimes reach out to the website’s owner and request the page/pages be taken down. If this is a single page or a few design elements, chances are there may be a contact form on the website you can utilize, and they’ll be willing to work with you.

If not, then you’ll need to do a “WHOIS” lookup to see the site’s information contact info.

Whenever you are asked to register a domain for your website, the registrar (the business you bought the domain from) will have you fill out a form of contact information, so this information is available whenever you do a WHOIS search.

Some WHOIS search sites are:

https://www.godaddy.com/whois

https://www.whois.com/whois/

http://www1.domain.com/whois/whois.bml

Once there, type in the URL. For example purposes, we’ll look up Hobby Lobby.

Among the long list of things you receive, you should see ‘registrar email’ listed. This would be the best email to contact to request having the stolen content removed.

Now, people do have the ability to pay for services that privatize your registrar information. Emails ending in @domainsbyproxy.com, or similar proxies are those that are private. They are typically forwarded to a real person, but in some cases, the email leads to a dead end.

In IMPACT’s case, we noticed the copycat site has a phony email address listed (something along the lines of [email protected]) which malicious copycatters will do. This meant reaching out to anyone wasn't an option. Womp.

If you find this to be the case for you, or the email recipient simply isn't responding, you’ll need to take it to plan b...

Plan B: Contact The Server Host

If you are able to provide sufficient evidence of the copied material, and are a representative or can act as one for your organization, you can contact the server host and request the page or site be taken down.

To do so, you first need to identify the server host.

Note, the company who registered the domain is not necessarily the company hosting the site. You need to look under the Network WHOIS information to identify this.

To see this, you can use a site like http://domainwhitepages.com/ which gives you both registrar and network information.

Using Hobby Lobby as our example again, we can scroll down to the Network WHOIS and see the host listed next to the NetName:

This record will also provide the abuse email and telephone number.

Some hosts, if large enough, will even have abuse forms on their website that you can fill out. If not, contacting them by email is the best course of action since you can provide image evidence too.

I’d suggest only using the phone if you are following up on an abuse ticket and need a status update.

Remember, as annoying as this situation is, make sure you leave your emotions aside when contacting the host. It’s not their fault and they’re trying to help.

Just be direct and specific as to what was copied and next steps they need to take, and usually, they'll comply.

In rare cases, the host may not respond (surprise, this was the case with IMPACT), or, the host may actually be the company who copied your site (cue the Illuminati symbol).

So, now what do you do?

Well, it’s time you upgrade and get the big guys involved.

Plan C: Google Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) or DMCA Takedown

Google DMCA

If you are struggling to get those parties listed above to take down the site, you can move into submitting a Google DMCA request to have the content links removed.

Essentially, the DMCA strengthens the legal protection of intellectual property rights in our world of emerging technology. It contains 5 sections, with title II outlining “certain legal duties with which Online Service Providers (OSPs) must comply in order to limit their legal liabilities in the event a user of their service violates copyright laws.”

This is where Google comes in.

Note: Submitting this request is only getting the site removed from Google Search, this does not technically take down the website altogether. You can also submit a Bing DMCA if you have organic traffic from that search engine as well. If you need the website taken down completely, I suggest moving onto the next subheader.

When filling out the form, you’ll need to have URL examples of the copyrighted material online.

If your entire site was copied, you can use a site crawler, such as https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/, to generate all the links on the duplicated site to be pasted into the copyrighted text field. Then, do a find and replace for the domain on all of those links, and replace it with yours to submit as the originals (this only works if the only change is the domain part of the URL).

After you submit the form, you can monitor the request on your dashboard which will show the number of URLs submitted and their status.

The links that are in Google Search Results will show as removed if they violate the DMCA, if the links have not been indexed, then Google will not be able to take action on them.

In IMPACTs case, we submitted 500 duplicated links, and Google has been slowly segmenting them based upon what’s actually in the search results.

DMCA Takedown

In the case that you need the site to be taken down entirely, you can issue a DMCA Takedown who can personally remove the site for you. The catch is it costs $199 per site, but, for many, this can be a perfect price to pay rather than getting legal experts involved.

Overall, this is the most cost-effective option for those looking to get the site removed who are left with no other potential options.

Plan D: Get Legal Involvement

If all options are a no-go, you may need to pursue legal action. This may be in the form of an official cease-and-desist letter to the offender, or to the hosting company.

In the event that neither responds, you can then move into filing a lawsuit, but, this is an absolute last resort due to its extreme stress on your time and resources.

If you’re considering this route, make sure the damages you are suing for outweigh the money you are pumping into the lawsuit. When an entire large scale site and SEO value are on the line, it may be more worthwhile, but for a page or two, it may be better to attempt the Google DMCA approach.

My Advice: Be Proactive!

If you find yourself in the situation where site duplication is a continuous issue for you, or, you just want the peace of mind that it won't happen, there are a variety of tools to help protect you:

Google Alerts - This tool enables you to monitor content around search queries you enter into it. For example, if you have popular articles on your site, you can input the title as the query to make sure no one is duplicating its content.

Copyscape - This searches for duplicate content on the URL you enter in the search box. While beneficial for single pages, you’d need the premium service if you are looking to batch check multiple pages at once (which can check up to 10k pages).

DMCA Protection - Offers both a basic and pro service that, depending on which you choose, monitors and scans for any copies that appear online, prevents right click, etc. The basic is free, while the pro is only $10 a month. This is ideal for those who have has issues in the past of their pages being duplicated frequently.

Disabling Right Clicks, Highlighting - There are ways you can disable right-click to prevent people from stealing text or imagery from your site. You can even stop your images from being indexed or disable reverse image search on them. If you’ve found smaller things on your site tend to be copied, these fixes may help prevent this.

At the end of the day, as long as your content exists online, people can take it one way or another, copyright symbol or not. There are even services out there that can duplicate sites for a price, and scary enough, they are easy to find.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on this. Has this been a issue you’ve encountered? Did you resolve it differently from the ways listed above? Let me know below.

Also, if you have any questions about this, feel free to ask in the comments too, I’m happy to be of any help.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/remove-stolen-website-duplicate-content

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billwells3 · 7 years

Text

How to Find the Best Cell Phone Plans of 2017

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Comparing cell phone plans makes going to the dentist look fun. To help, here are our ratings and comparisons of the best cell phone plans in 2017.

These days, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have a cell phone. They’ve become a staple in our lives. And, for many without a landline, they’re a necessity. But just because we have to have our cell phones, doesn’t mean that we have to pay an arm and a leg for service.

Figuring out how much a new cell phone plan will actually cost you practically requires an accounting degree. Those “$45 unlimited calls, messaging, and data” plans can quickly, somehow, turn into $100-per-line charges. Between fees and fine print, it can all be hard to decipher.

Let’s take a look at how much cell plans have changed recently, all across the board. We will cover the four major cell phone carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T). And we’ll see what prices they are actually offering.

We’ll exclude any promotional pricing, since promotions change so often. We’ll also cover the amount and quality of data included in each plan, as that’s the most common concern for subscribers these days.

So, let’s get started. Then, you can determine how much a new plan will really cost you, long before some surprise, inflated bill lands in your inbox.

Big Changes

A few notable shifts that have occurred in the cell phone world as of late. But for the most part, these shifts are in the best interests of the consumer.

Return of Unlimited Plans

You may remember that unlimited plans used to be pretty popular. Different carriers offered different services. Some only offered unlimited talk time, and others offered unlimited talk and text. But you could find some kind of unlimited plan from nearly every provider.

Well, a few years ago, carriers began to unexpectedly pull these types of plans from their lineup. The reason? The massive wave of smartphone users and their unprecedented data usage. This was an even bigger issue once streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify gained popularity.

These apps eat up a significant amount of data. To compensate, carriers began to offer expensive data plans alongside their typical “minutes and messages” offerings. Some even forced consumers to pay a fee for simply having a smartphone connected to a line. It didn’t matter if you used 1GB of data per cycle or hit your limit… the fee was the same.

Personally, these “smartphone surcharges” and data fees caused my own bill to jump from an average of $60 per month per line to just over $90 per month per line. We’re talking about another $360 a year per phone, for the luxury of checking my email or Facebook on the go.

You can understand, then, why I jumped for joy when I heard that unlimited plans were making a comeback. I stayed with my same carrier and switched to one such unlimited plan the same day it debuted. This immediately cut my bill by about 35% without any noticeable decrease in service.

All four of the major carriers now offer some form of unlimited plan. Just as before, the plans vary in what’s actually offered. Take a look at your own bill history before switching to see how much data you typically use. Considering that most of the carriers have different unlimited package levels, you may be able to save some money with a smaller plan.

Of course, keep in mind that “unlimited” doesn’t actually mean unlimited without consequences. If you’re a high-speed data hog, you’ll probably have your speeds tethered (or reduced) after you hit a certain usage limit.

No Contracts

Gone are the days of being locked into two-year agreements with a carrier. And consumers no longer have to pay pricey early termination charges if/when they want to switch. Now, all four of the big carriers operate on a no-contract basis.

This is great news as far as flexibility. You’re welcome to change plans and carriers anytime you like, without consequences. However, there is a downside.

One of the biggest perks of contract plans, at least for smartphone users, was the discounted phone price. In exchange for signing one of those one-, two-, or even three-year contracts, the carriers offered a substantial discount on the actual phone. For those who lined up to snag the newest iDevice, this discount of several hundred dollars was well worth the contract’s shackles.

Now, you’ll need to buy your phone outright when you pick that new, no-contract plan… no more $199 iPhones. However, the carriers typically offer their own version of a zero-interest loan, allowing you to buy the phone for a down payment and an agreement of an increased monthly charge.

Once the phone is paid in full–usually around 24 months–that added charge falls off. If you want to switch carriers before you finish paying off the phone, you’ll simply need to fork over the balance in order to release yourself.

Now, let’s look at what each cell company is offering in terms of plans.

Sprint

Sprint has bounced up and down a bit on its unlimited plan pricing over the past year or so. It was one of the first carriers to offer new unlimited plans. Then it dropped its prices significantly earlier this year.

Sprint has raised its prices back up a bit since then. But they’re still nicely discounted from what they were last year and before. However, it’s important to note that the prices shown here are expected to revert back to their higher rates after October 2018. So, be sure to make the switch before then if Sprint is the best choice for you.

Data Quality & Quantity

With Sprint, you’ll have no problem streaming HD-quality videos with your standard unlimited data plan. You’ll also be able to take advantage of 10GB of high-speed mobile hot spot usage per line. This means you can use your cell phone service as a wifi hub for your laptop or other devices, which is a convenient feature to have available at no extra charge. Once you use up your monthly 10GB, your hot spot speed will drop to 2G.

If you use more than 23GB of high-speed data per month, Sprint may tether your speeds. Also, if you are using your data for gaming and music, your streaming speeds will be capped at 8Mbps and 1.5Mbps respectively.

Pricing

Remember rates will jump up a bit, to previous price levels, at the end of October 2018. Until then, though, Sprint has some of the most competitive rates available on unlimited plans.

For one phone line, an unlimited plan will run you $55. A second phone adds another $45, with additional phones after that costing $10 per line.

If you’re not interested in unlimited data–maybe you have a younger child who doesn’t need a smartphone–the only other option available is a $45 per month per line plan. This plan does include up to 2GB of data.

1 line 2 lines 3 lines 4 lines 5 lines 1GB data Not available Not available Not available Not available Not available 2GB data $45 $90 $135 $180 $225 Unlimited data $55

(after Oct 2018 this goes up to $65)

$100

(after Oct 2018 this goes up to $110)

$110

(after Oct 2018 this goes up to $145)

$120

(after Oct 2018 this goes up to $180)

$125

(after Oct 2018 this goes up to $215)

View all Sprint plans

T-Mobile

Up until recently, T-Mobile offered family data-sharing options for its customers, called Simple Choice plans. These meant that you could purchase bulk shared data, along with unlimited messaging and calls, for the whole family to use. You could even allocate data to individual phone lines. That way your teenager couldn’t hog all the data midway through the month’s plan.

These Simple Choice plans were also great in that they didn’t include data usage from streaming services, like Netflix and Spotify, against your data allowances. Considering how much data those apps can use, this was a big bonus for many customers.

However, this is no longer the case. Now, T-Mobile has replaced Simple Choice plans with its T-Mobile One plan. Now you have to purchase a separate data plan for every phone on the account.

The good news is that these plans are all unlimited–data, voice calls, and text messages. Depending on how much data your family was eating through before, this could either increase or decrease your monthly bill.

Data Quality & Quantity

Basic T-Mobile plans offer customers “DVD-quality” video streaming. But it caps hotspot speeds at 3G. If you want better quality or higher speed, you’ll need to pay another $10 per month, per line. This upgrade will then snag you a 4G mobile hotspot and HD-quality video streaming.

Whether or not that’s worth the added cost, only you can decide.

As with Sprint (and all of the others, in fact), “unlimited” has its caveats. However, the cap for potential speed tethering is a bit higher with T-Mobile, at a solid 32GB. Surpass that in a given billing cycle, and T-Mobile may slow down your phone’s speed when the system is overloaded.

Pricing

One great thing about T-Mobile’s pricing structure is that it’s incredibly simple to calculate. You don’t have to worry about regulatory fees, taxes, or little monthly charges that can cause your bill to notch further and further up.

What you see is what you get. Their pricing already includes all taxes and fees, so when they say you’ll pay $75 a month, they mean that’s what you’ll actually pay. So, keep that in mind when you’re comparison shopping.

Their price structure is as easy as it gets. There is only one option: unlimited everything. The first line is $75 a month (remember, this is what your actual bill will be… no fees or taxes). Each line after that is another $35. Easy peasy.

1 line 2 lines 3 lines 4 lines 5 lines 1GB data Not available Not available Not available Not available Not available 2GB data Not available Not available Not available Not available Not available Unlimited data $75 $110 $145 $180 $215

View all T-Mobile plans

Verizon

Unable to stick with one pricing structure, Verizon has had a lot of back-and-forth with their plans in the last year or so. What they’ve settled on now has a lot of people irked.

Their prices have dropped, and you now have a choice between two unlimited data plans. However, you’ll be getting a little less bang for your buck in the end.

Data Quality & Quantity

Verizon’s plans used to be, like many other carriers, of the limited variety. You could choose until very recently to purchase a set amount of data for a set price. Now, your options are between two unlimited plans, which offer varying qualities of data.

The first plan is called Go Unlimited, and it is the less expensive of the two. You will still receive unlimited data, but Verizon reserves the right to tether you speeds any time the network is busy. This is in stark contrast to most tethering rules, where the carrier will only begin to tether your peak time speeds after you’ve used a certain amount of data.

With this plan, you’ll also get DVD-quality video streaming along with a mobile hotspot, capped at a 600 Kbps speed.

If you need more, well, everything, there is also the Beyond Unlimited plan. It’s an extra $10 a month but offers better quality data and more flexible rules.

With this higher-priced option, you’ll get HD-quality streaming on your videos and a 4G LTE mobile hotspot with up to 15GB per month, per line. You’ll also avoid being tethered during peak network times until you’ve used more than 22GB of data in that billing cycle.

1 line 2 lines 3 lines 4 lines 5 lines Go Unlimited $80 $140 $165 $180 $225 Beyond Unlimited $90 $170 $195 $220 $275

View all Verizon Wireless plans

AT&T

Last but not least, we have AT&T. The carrier started offering unlimited plans again in February 2017, and, like Verizon, it offers two different qualities to choose from.

The company does still offer Mobile Share Advantage (finite data) plans, if that suits your needs better. Grandma probably doesn’t need unlimited data, so these plans are still the cheaper option for low-data users.

Data Quality & Quantity

If you opt for the cheaper of the two unlimited plans through AT&T, the Unlimited Choice, you might be a little disappointed in the quality. It really depends on what you’re used to getting.

Unlimited Choice will give you standard-definition quality (don’t ask me how big of a difference there is between this and “DVD-quality,” though) video streaming with a speed cap of 1.5Mbps. For non-streaming data usage AT&T caps speeds at 3Mbps. The Unlimited Choice plan also does not include a mobile hotspot.

If you need better quality and faster speeds, you can opt for the pricier version, the Unlimited Plus plan. This includes a mobile hotspot with 10GB of usage per line. Go over that limit, and you can still use your hot spot; it just gets limited to a speed of 128Kbps.

This plan includes HBO at no additional cost (which may be a great plus if you’re trying to cut the cord or just decrease that cable bill!) and HD-quality video streaming.

Pricing

The difference in price between the two unlimited plans is larger than with other carriers (most of whom offer an upgrade to the “better” plan for only ~$10 a month per line).

Unlimited Choice plans start at $65 for the first line. The second line is another $60, and each line after that, up to 10 lines, is another $20 per line.

Unlimited Plus plans start at $95 for the first line. The second line is again $60, with each subsequent line adding another $20 per line.

1 line 2 lines 3 lines 4 lines 5 lines Unlimited Choice $65 $125 $145 $165 $185 Unlimited Plus $95 $155 $175 $195 $215

As cell users’ needs and data demands change, carriers are likely to further alter their unlimited plans. So be on the lookout for changes to these prices and the perks that each plan offers.

Also, keep in mind that cell phone carriers offer promotional pricing and discounts frequently. A number of these carriers offer discounts for autopay and paperless billing, so your bill might actually be less than what you’re seeing here. You should check online and even call the carrier to ask about potential discounts before signing up to ensure that you get the lowest possible price.

0 notes

easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world One year after we first spoke in July 2019, Andrew Hoffman tells me I need a “disclaimer” for this piece. “This article was started pre-pandemic. Back in the Great Before,” jokes Hoffman, co-owner of Berkeley’s Comal and Comal Next Door, who eliminated tipping at his table-service restaurant around six years ago. I like that, I reply, repeating “the Great Before” with sardonic gusto. Hoffman laughs. “Take that playbook from the Great Before and throw it away,” says Hoffman. “You don’t need it anymore.” Since COVID-19 spread through the United States, millions of food service workers have been laid off or furloughed, and those who are still employed are risking their health each day by returning to work. And despite all the pivoting — to delivery and takeout, to corner stores or bottle shops, to outdoor dining — between a third and half of all independent restaurants will shutter as a result of the pandemic. This economic reckoning comes commensurately with a social one, as calls amplify to address systemic racism and anti-Black violence following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, and, more recently, the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Depending on who you ask, these crises make right now either the worst time to talk about tipping, or render it a conversation that has never been more urgent. The case against tipping is compelling: It facilitates racism, sexism, and widespread wage theft; perpetuates a growing income gap between front- and back-of-house staff, particularly in cities like New York and San Francisco; and contributes to a stigma that service work is transitory. “No matter how you do it, tipping hits BIPOC workers in the pocketbook, it exposes more female workers to sexual harassment, and it keeps all workers from making a steady, solid salary,” says Amanda Cohen of New York City’s Dirt Candy, a longtime anti-tipping advocate. Around the U.S., independent restaurateurs are newly experimenting with no tipping: from Hunky Dory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which re-opened in July with menu prices that include gratuity, to Colleen’s Kitchen in Austin and Last Resort in Athens, Georgia, which have in recent months instituted service charges that, they say, will help provide fair and stable wages for all staff. “Before the pandemic, tipping was baked into the industry and we all inherited it,” Cohen says. “Right now, no one wants to go back and consciously, purposefully inflict its inequities on their staff.” The end of tipping has been heralded before, and not all that long ago. In 2015, acclaimed restaurateur Danny Meyer announced that he would eliminate gratuities throughout his sprawling Union Square Hospitality Group, hoping to narrow the stark income disparity between servers, who received tips, and cooks, who did not. “I hate those Saturday nights where the whole dining room is high-fiving because they just set a record, and they’re counting their shekels, and the kitchen just says, ‘Well, boy, did we sweat tonight,’” Meyer said at the time. Meyer’s move came on the heels of decisions to eliminate tipping by several Bay Area restaurateurs who, for similar reasons, did away with gratuity over the prior year: Berkeley’s Comal; Oakland’s Camino (now closed) and Homestead; and San Francisco’s Trou Normand, Bar Agricole, and Zazie. While other New York chef-owners, like Cohen, had banished tipping earlier, Meyer’s decision marked a tectonic shift: As the founder of Shake Shack and the CEO of a dozen-plus New York restaurants, if anyone could lead in putting tipping to rest, the thinking went, it was Meyer. Other influential New York players, including David Chang and Tom Colicchio, acted around the time that Meyer did, resulting in a full-fledged “no-tipping movement.” Within months, Andrew Tarlow announced that he would go gratuity-free throughout the Marlow Collective, his restaurant group that helped define dining in a gentrified Brooklyn; Tarlow even designed an open-source logo for demarcating no-tipping venues, of which Gabriel Stulman made use after banning tips at Fedora, one of his then-six downtown restaurants. In the East Village, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler likewise pledged to eliminate tips at their restaurant, Huertas. By May 2016, data bore out the beginnings of a cultural shift. An American Express survey released that month found that of 503 randomly sampled restaurateurs, 18 percent said they had already adopted no-tipping policies, 29 percent said they planned to do the same, and 17 percent said they would consider implementing no-tipping if others did. The EndTipping subreddit, one of the more complete records of no-tipping establishments from the time, listed more than 200 restaurants that were, at one point or another, without gratuity. Although these comprised a sliver of the roughly 650,000 restaurants across the country, momentum appeared to be building. Until, it seemed, the wheels came off. Most of the restaurants that participated in the Meyer-catalyzed no-tipping movement had, by 2018, returned to gratuity. Meyer, whose organization never fully recovered from the shift to what he called “Hospitality Included,” capitulated earlier this summer, announcing that he would bring back tipping to USHG. Thus tipping won, and decisively. Now, facing a potential reset of the entire restaurant industry, no-tipping could once again be on the proverbial table. “The big reason why people didn’t switch to getting rid of tips was because they were scared that they were going to lose their staff. And then they were scared that they were going to lose their guests. And now they’ve lost both,” Hoffman explains. But if the post-pandemic restaurant industry stands any chance of successfully moving beyond gratuity and toward more equitable compensation methods, it is worth asking: What exactly went wrong before? What went right? And how, if at all, can sustainable change be made? When the Brooklyn restaurateurs David Stockwell and his wife, Carla Swickerath, opened their modern Italian-American bistro Faun in August 2016, they debuted as a tip-free establishment in part because, Stockwell said, “it seemed like we were going to get in front of a rising tide.” The anti-tipping cohort of the mid-2010s largely consisted of restaurants like Faun: moderately priced, casually upscale table-service spots that promised a mix of hospitality and affordability. By contrast, fine-dining establishments already had a history of no-tipping, as their guests expected to pay top dollar and were therefore less likely to resist prices that included the cost of gratuity or an automatic service charge — although this willingness was not entirely without exception. Still, these restaurants were largely not considered part of the tip-free trend, and neither were the fast-food and counter-service venues that traded primarily on price and often forewent tips anyway. “Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?” And in the case of Faun, Stockwell found himself explaining to guests why menu prices were higher than those at comparable restaurants. “Once you get people to understand that you’re gratuity-inclusive, there’s still the next level of this visceral connection with numbers on a menu,” he told me last summer. “When entrees are all up in the 30s versus in the 20s, it doesn’t matter if [customers] know that you are gratuity-inclusive.” Stockwell and Swickerath waited for other restaurateurs to follow suit. But several early adopters had already reversed course, including Craft, Fedora, and Momofuku Nishi (which has since closed entirely). “It was a miscalculation that this tide was growing,” Stockwell confided. Despite positive reviews, by winter 2017, Faun was struggling. Stockwell was unsure if the restaurant could survive the coming January, with its crowd-killing short days and frigid temperatures. He didn’t want to revert to tipping, but he felt his hands were tied. “So many times that you are operating as a business, you realize, ‘Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?’” Faun reintroduced tipping the first week of January 2018. According to Stockwell, the effect was striking. “Immediately, it made this whole thing possible,” he recalled. Although he and Swickerath would have preferred to remain tip-free for ethical reasons, he said that ultimately, “we couldn’t let the ship keep sinking.” Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Mike Fadem was confronting a similar challenge: determining the “right” price of pizza — one that factored in gratuity but also didn’t cause guests to mutiny. In October 2016, Fadem and his partners Marie Tribouilloy and Gavin Compton opened their Bushwick pizzeria, Ops, as a service-inclusive establishment. Before this, Fadem spent seven years climbing the ranks at Tarlow’s Marlow Collective, where, as a manager, he had helped oversee Roman’s 2015 transition to tip-free. Based on that experience, he knew that Ops couldn’t simply raise menu prices by 20 percent across the board. Instead, he calibrated his opening prices to those at comparable pizzerias, and played primarily with the cost of wine. For its first two years, Fadem says, Ops did not turn a profit. Despite the financial challenges, and watching Roman’s and the rest of the Marlow Collective revert to tipping in December 2018, Fadem and Tribouilloy were hopeful they could make tip-free work. Still, Fadem remained a realist about tipping’s prevalence when we spoke last July. “I think a lot of people don’t see the system as being broken, or anything. And a lot of people love tipping,” he observed. “They feel some kind of power.” Time would prove him right. In September 2019, still unprofitable, Ops abandoned gratuity-free. “It just wasn’t working,” Fadem said later that month. Ops’s labor costs were too high, and Fadem and Tribouilloy were unable to reward longtime staff members with higher pay. Introducing tips, Fadem said recently, allowed them to give “every staff member a substantial raise.” Ultimately, the issue was guests’ perception of value. “In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work,” he says. “People are happy to pay $25 for a pizza if it’s $20 plus tip, but if the menu reads $25 for a pizza you’re looked at as ripping people off, even if it’s the right price for the cost of getting the food to the table.” “In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work.” But diners alone didn’t doom the mid-2010s anti-tipping movement; workers who saw lower earnings were also reluctant to embrace the shift. At Faun, for example, Stockwell started servers at $25 per hour when the restaurant was tip-free. Even then, he says, it was “virtually impossible” to compete with what servers could make at a “similarly ambitious local restaurant with tips.” If a tipped server could make $40 to $50 an hour, or up to $350 over the course of a seven-hour shift, why do the same work for half the money? At Huertas, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler struggled to increase back-of-house wages as much as expected after going tip-free in December 2015 — they sought to reduce the kitchen-dining room wage disparity by raising cooks’ wages by $2.50 an hour. “We did pay cooks more than we had before, but in many cases not a full $2.50 per hour more,” Miller said last summer. Even Meyer grappled with staff departures at USHG, in addition to reports of a corresponding decline in service quality and an inability to close the wage gap. In 2018, Meyer stated publicly that 30 to 40 percent of USHG’s long-term staffers quit following the phased introduction of Hospitality Included across the group’s restaurants. In the aftermath, the company continued to confront staffing issues caused by HI, according to a USHG front-of-house employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in both July 2019 and this past March. “There hasn’t been a fix in the morale,” said the USHG employee, in part because of decreased front-of-house compensation as compared to pre-HI rates. The employee shared an internal USHG memorandum, which showed a comparison of 2018 average hourly pay from multiple USHG restaurants with HI against the average hourly pay from two USHG locations without the policy. Servers’ average hourly pay was $26.13 with HI and $32.88 without, a difference of $6.75; bartenders’ average hourly pay was $29.88 with HI and $35.23 without, a difference of $5.35. As a result of reduced earnings, it was harder to hold onto staff at restaurants like Blue Smoke, one of the last Meyer restaurants to move to HI. Employee trainers left, and managers leveled up inexperienced hires even if they were not ready for additional responsibility just to get “bodies on the floor.” Another part of the problem was a perceived take-it-or-leave-it mentality that ran contrary to USHG’s ethos, and that made some staff feel replaceable. “It just sort of felt like, if [HI] doesn’t seem right for you, it’s totally okay if you leave,” said the employee. USHG was not especially effective in closing the pay gap between the front and back of house — a primary rationale for going tip-free. In 2018, average hourly pay for USHG prep cooks was $14.45 with HI and $15.06 without, a difference of 61 cents, according to the internal memo. The average hourly pay for line cooks was $15.88 with HI, 29 cents higher than the non-HI average of $15.59, but a rate that was still $10.25 less than the average hourly pay for servers under HI. (USHG declined multiple requests for comment.) According to the employee, management wasn’t willing to raise prices enough to meaningfully increase back-of-house wages, or to maintain front-of-house salaries: “They didn’t want to raise the prices so high that people have sticker shock.” These results, in combination with the financial pressures caused by the pandemic, may have contributed to Meyer’s decision to bring back tipping in July. “I think the timing and rationale is totally understandable,” Miller said of Meyer’s return to tipping. Miller notes that the reversal may be an example of “‘COVID exposing a fragile system’ in the same way that restaurants that were just barely surviving pre-pandemic are likely to choose this moment to move on.” “Danny Meyer has abdicated his right to be a leader in this industry,” Cohen says of the move, arguing that if there was any time for Meyer to hold firm, it is this very moment. “What happens when his customers don’t feel so generous three months from now?” she asks. “I did no tipping before Danny Meyer, and I’ll keep doing it long after he’s given up. I think women and BIPOCs are used to white guys not being there for us when the chips are down.” It remains to be seen how the pandemic will intersect with wages for servers, at a time when so many are out of work. This July, Marketplace reported that restaurant traffic has declined by 60 percent in some parts of the country, but according to the BBC, those who are ordering out seem to be tipping generously, with tips up by nearly 15 percent for Grubhub and Seamless drivers, and up 99 percent for Instacart shoppers since the pandemic began. Though a sense of altruism may be responsible for this increase in gratuity, larger tips can also widen the earnings disparity between the few servers who remain and kitchen staff, so that a handful of tipped employees are making as much or more than they did previously, “whereas their cooks and managers are being asked to be more dexterous and take on more responsibility than ever before,” Miller says. Even as sticker shock and worker turnover shredded the no-tipping cohort in New York, a sizable percentage of Bay Area restaurateurs who began experimenting with tip-free in the mid-2010s managed to make it work. The difference may owe, in part, to regulatory flexibility and a greater number of policy alternatives available in California. Most notable, it seems, is the ability to append a mandatory service charge to checks at the end of the meal, a practice that is currently illegal in New York City. “People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip.” “I am fully convinced that even at our very popular, busy restaurant, if we raised the prices by 20 percent starting tomorrow, we’d do significantly less business,” Hoffman said last July. Comal’s mandatory service charge allowed Hoffman and co-owner John Paluska to increase revenue while avoiding the sort of business loss attributable to sticker shock. “People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip,” Hoffman observed, which accords with studies that show consumers’ preferences for prices that are partitioned, rather than bundled. Corey Lee, the chef behind the San Francisco restaurants Benu, Monsieur Benjamin, and In Situ, agrees that a service charge is a necessary bridge for diners in the U.S. “The idea of a ‘tip’ is so ingrained in American dining culture that most diners aren’t ready for service-inclusive pricing,” Lee said in July 2019. “Therefore, we break it out for them as a separate charge so they can see what’s happening.” Lee, who has imposed this charge at both the three-Michelin-starred Benu and the more casual Monsieur Benjamin, says that it avoids sticker shock while stabilizing wages for all staff and raising earnings for those individuals on the “lower end of the pay scale.” But for some restaurateurs, the service charge is not a silver bullet. When Fred and Elizabeth Sassen decided to eliminate tipping at their Oakland restaurant, Homestead, in March 2015, they eschewed an automatic charge, believing that a tacked-on fee might confuse and frustrate guests and staff alike. Instead, they opted for service-inclusive pricing and, to incentivize employee performance, implemented a compensation model that factors in skill, experience, and hours to arrive at a base salary; from there, total salaries are set based on individual effort. Though the process was not without its difficulties — “what we realized quickly was that we would eventually have to cycle through the whole [front-of-house] staff” who expected the higher wages of a tipping model — Fred Sassen said that the new system has been, overall, more equitable in terms of compensation and advancement opportunities. “I’ve had a dishwasher that’s been with me for four years, he makes more than some of my servers,” he said, an industry rarity. Jennifer Bennett, part-owner of San Francisco bistro Zazie, said that replacing gratuity with service-inclusive pricing in June 2015 allowed her to implement a pay-for-performance system that not only equalized wages, but improved service. It is a system, Bennett said last summer, that “is very different” than the static hourly no-tipping models used by many other proprietors, which divorce work quality from earnings and thus fail to effectively incentivize employees. In her model, on top of the minimum wage, servers make 12 percent of their individual sales, while kitchen staff earn 12 percent of shift sales. Because the entire restaurant is engaged in a sell-more, earn-more mentality, servers are quick to refill mimosas, while the kitchen profits too. Before, Bennett noticed that cooks would be furious if an eight-top walked in the door right before closing. “But now, what do they see? Another $15 in my pocket.” Bennett, who split ownership of Zazie with three longtime employees in January, believes that the benefits go beyond economics. “Everyone thinks they are judging their waiter,” she said, “but really, from the moment you walk in the door, your waiters are judging you also.” With gratuity, Bennett noticed that some staff would make tipping stereotypes based on race and gender; servers fought over “good” tables and avoided “bad” ones “like the plague.” Despite the tip-free movement’s waning trajectory, Bennett is confident that tipping will inevitably fall out of favor in the United States. “The inequality between the front and the back of the house has got to change,” she said. “We can’t keep having these people working in hot miserable conditions for 10 hours a day, making a third of the money of the cute bartender.” Now is the “perfect” moment for reformation, new Zazie co-owner Megan Cornelius said in July. “These workers have been deemed essential and are putting themselves at risk. To walk out with a living wage that is secure and accurately coincides with how much they sell in a night, and isn’t reliant on the whim of guests who have been [sheltering in place] for months, is actually extremely important, now, more than ever.” “My heart breaks every time another restaurant gets rid of its no-tipping policies,” Cohen said in pre-pandemic March of the setbacks faced by her New York peers. One of New York’s most notable tip-free successes — she opened her second restaurant, Lekka Burger, last November, after nearly five years of gratuity-free at Dirt Candy — Cohen has a specific aim beyond solidarity for its own sake: creating a critical mass of tip-free restaurants. Eliminating tipping can be considered a collective action problem: a situation where short-term self-interest conflicts with the achievement of longer-term collective benefits. If a few restaurants charge $27 for lasagna under a gratuity free-model, a nearby restaurant that charges $22 and collects tips can gain by acquiring price-sensitive customers and servers who are attracted to tipping, even if all restaurants would be better off with a fairer and more sustainable payment structure. “If you’re a no-tipping restaurant, you just look so much more expensive than the restaurant next door to you,” Cohen explained. Some restaurateurs believe that the government could generate sustainable buy-in by offering a tax break or some kind of subsidy to tip-free establishments. “For more restaurants to be tipless, I think it would take some economic incentive,” Lee said when we spoke last year. Bennett, for instance, said that she would “love to see” a tip-free tax break, or even a tax incentive that simply rewards restaurateurs for paying staff higher wages. It is the kind of relief that, in the wake of COVID-19, Congress has already enacted for the airline industry, and could be added to a broader aid package for restaurants. To a similar end, Danny Meyer and One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman recently penned a Time op-ed that, among other proposals, advocated paying a full minimum wage to all workers plus a cut to restaurant payroll taxes — a form of tax relief that could, perhaps, be increased for tip-free establishments. State labor laws can cut several ways, including by reducing an employer’s incentives to rely on tipping. Forty-three states maintain different minimum wages for tipped and non-tipped employees. In states like New York with a “tipped minimum wage,” employers can pay tipped workers a lower minimum than their non-tipped colleagues (called a sub-minimum wage), as long as the employer can prove that tips make up the difference between what the employer pays and the non-tipped minimum. Seven states, including California, currently impose one minimum wage for all workers, regardless of whether or not they’re tipped, which also means that restaurant owners do not have the option of off-loading labor costs onto customers. But other policies may work to “save tipping” by reducing some of the system’s socio-economic discordances, albeit while leaving in place tipping’s problematic and often punitive dynamics. A 2018 amendment to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act legalized unlocked tip pooling — allowing gratuities to be split between front- and back-of-house workers — in most states, as long as the entire staff is paid the full minimum wage. This means restaurateurs can equalize earnings between the front and back of house without eliminating tipping or building the entire cost of labor into menu prices. (Unlocked pooling remains illegal under New York state law even after the national statutory change.) The idea is popular: In the Time op-ed, Jayaraman and Meyer voiced support for “a full minimum wage with shareable tips on top.” After the FLSA change, chef-owners at several prominent, moderately priced Bay Area restaurants announced that they would adopt unlocked pooling, a group that included Tanya Holland of Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen. Even some of no-tipping’s earliest adopters have considered reintroducing gratuity and pooling it. “We’re looking at all of it,” former Chez Panisse general manager Jennifer Sherman told me last year during ongoing discussions to modify or replace the restaurant’s 30-year-old service charge. More recently, current GM Varun Mehra, who succeeded Sherman, said that the compensation question remains undecided as the restaurant and more affordable upstairs cafe remain closed for dining during the pandemic. Despite tip pooling’s appeal as a relatively straightforward solution to industry-wide wage disparities, it leaves unresolved the dynamic that remains central to tipping: placing worker compensation directly in the hands of diners, a power that can be at the root of harassment, discrimination, and inequitable treatment of employees. “Shared tips are still the fruit of a poisonous tree,” says Cohen. “We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food.” Lacking a more persuasive financial case, the no-tipping movement seemed unlikely to win over more supporters in the Great Before. But now, as the pandemic’s social and economic crises unfold and larger swaths of the public pay greater attention to racial and financial equity, the case for tipping may be challenged anew. “You could argue that restaurants have a cover and ready explanation for raising menu prices,” hypothesizes Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University and an expert on tipping. “Under the circumstances, we’ve got extra cost. We’ve had to implement whatever safety protocols and we have less seating capacity. And so, the cost of business has gone up, we have to charge more. And I would think that customers would understand that.” That type of empathy and comprehension could alter what has previously comprised a longstanding undervaluation of the costs involved in eating at restaurants, and align them more closely with compensatory practices in other parts of the world. “We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food,” said Karen Bornarth, head of workforce development at the East Harlem bakery and business incubator Hot Bread Kitchen, when we spoke last July. “And I think that those of us who love to eat out and enjoy our food need to wake up to that, and realize that maybe we have to pay a little bit more for that dinner out so that we can create a more equitable system that works better for everyone, business included.” That there will be fewer places to leave gratuity may circuitously aid the cause for tip-free. In the New York Times, Besha Rodell wrote that the pandemic could “end the age of midpriced dining,” as the trends in Melbourne — away from “casual gastronomy found in its cafes, pubs and wine bars” and toward higher-end concepts with to-go options — could be a “bellwether for other cities around the world.” As more U.S. proprietors stick with menus designed for pickup and delivery, there may be an even stronger lurch toward limited-service, which, as the name suggests, calls into question the need for any related charges or gratuity. As Eater reported in mid-August, 150 restaurants have closed in New York alone since the onset of COVID-19. It’s a shift that’s already happening. Both Chez Panisse and Comal have swapped separate service charges for service-inclusive pricing as the pandemic has forced them into takeout- and delivery-only. “All three of our menus are just the prices plus tax and that’s it,” Hoffman says. “There’s not the traditional tipping environment anymore... There is no restaurant server, bringing you food, bringing your bill, and then receiving the tip at the end of it, that whole dynamic is gone.” Besides, customers report greater irritation when asked to tip at counter-service restaurants, according to research conducted pre-pandemic but published in May 2020. In the midst of widespread suffering, Hoffman isn’t quite ready for optimism about a renewed push for no-tipping. But he continues to believe in its potential. “This is incrementalism. It’s gonna be slow evolution and change, based on the [restaurants] that survive,” he says. “It’s going to be the savvy ones that make it, and let’s hope they have their heads on straight with respect to the biggest issue in restaurants, which is the relationship between pay and work.” Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2GiLAtL

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