An easy way to make a restaurant server or bartender like you more when you pay with a credit card is to tip in cash. That way they (and whoever they are splitting their tips with) don't have to worry about their bosses (legally) skimming off the top to pay for credit card fees. Also they get the money then and there. Turns out the same rule applies when you use an online ordering site like Seamless or Grubhub!
This not-that-surprising news comes as a lawsuit against Upper West Side restaurant Indus Valley by former delivery workers was allowed by a judge to move forward. How do these things connect? The workers say the restaurant illegally kept 12 to 15 percent of their tips through online ordering sites—and the restaurant isn't denying it.
Instead Indus Valley says that it was withholding the tips as a way to recoup fees charged by the online delivery sites. Their logic is that they are allowed to do the same thing with credit card fees, so why not delivery site fees?
But judge Alison Nathan wasn't having it. Instead in her ruling she quoted the same rule Indus was citing, noting that deductions "were only permissible to the extent that they ‘did not enrich [the employer], but instead, at most, merely restored it to the approximate financial posture it would have occupied if it had not undertaken to collect credit card tips for its employees.'"
And so the case moves on through the courts. And if it is successful—knowing the way restaurant lawsuits in New York tend spread like ebola—you can expect to hear soon enough about a lot of other restaurants pulling the same trick. What to do? Really, the easiest solution is just tip in cash and make everyone's lives a little easier. And if you aren't tipping your delivery people? Well, you are a horrible, awful, lazy person.
