The Barista that Hates Tips

Relying on tips could be doing your coffeehouse more harm than good.

Before I begin, I feel it’s pretty important to preface with a short note:

This topic does not apply to every coffee shop or barista team. Some companies offer their employees raises based on performance level (like our friends at Boston Stoker!) or that only hire outstanding baristas at a higher pay rate that have already proven their value through their experiences elsewhere. That’s great stuff! I am also not in any way saying that we shouldn’t tip baristas for a job well done, or that some baristas don’t deserve amazing tips for going above and beyond. My point is about something else entirely.

Let’s begin. From a former full-time barista to coffee shop owners across the country.

The best way to lose money.

Looking back over your business, try to make an estimate of how much money you are spending or losing on:

- Training new baristas on proper coffee techniques
- Customers having bad experiences and never coming back
- Drinks being remade
- Baristas not up-selling items to increase average sale price
- Customers NOT telling their friends about your so-called *amazing* coffee shop
- General customer churn (the rate at which current regular customers stop being regulars)

Put all of those things together, and I would venture to guess that it comes out to more than $3120. The training time alone, which geneally takes about two weeks in even the quickest coffee shops that care very little about how well their baristas perform and requires many hours of interviews, paperwork processing, training sessions, and behind-the-bar trials or tests, is going to cost about $1000 at minimum for just a single Barista to get up and running. (I would love if a coffee shop owner who regularly trains baristas could chime in on this with their numbers.)

At some of the coffee shops I’ve encountered, especially the ones that employ college students, they typically go through half-a-dozen or more employees a year. That’s $6000 (again, a conservative estimate) just to get a few new baristas trained! We haven’t even gotten to the other 5 bullet points I listed above, which will add a considerable amount of cost or loss of revenue to that number.

And where did the $3120 come from?

Well, that’s what it would cost you to raise your barista’s salary by a measly $2/hour (if they’re working 30 hours a week).

Not the Customer’s Responsibility

I read an interview yesterday with a barista who’s opinion was that tipping was basically a requirement if customer’s want to continually get good service. She pointed out how many baristas pay close attention to which customers tip and which ones don’t, even sub-consciously, and then base their service provided off of that tip (or lack thereof).

This is wrong, but it’s not really the barista’s fault.

It’s the employer’s fault, for shifting the responsibility for making the employee satisfied with their work off of the coffee shop’s managers and owners, and onto the people that we make a living off of serving: The customer.

When you pay your employees a terrible wage and then encourage them to work harder for better tips, then you are creating the perfect opportunity for them to resent their customers for being poor tippers (which will always happen, I don’t know a single barista that is satisfied with their tips), and eventually come to resent you for not paying them well.

Their quality of service will drop. Their passion for the product will drop. Their ability to focus on creating great customer experiences will drop because they’ll be busy trying to find a second job (or a new one) so they can pay their bills. And then guess what, they’ll get so burnt out on all of the shenanigans that they’ll quit and either go to a competitor or leave the industry entirely.

And you’ll be left with all of those bullet points I listed above, including the expensive task of now having to hire and train a brand new barista to fill the gap.

What’s The Solution?

Pay your baristas more. Stop forcing them to rely on tips to make a decent wage. Stop making customers feel bad for not tipping, or coming up with clever schemes to get customers to tip more. Your customers aren’t dumb. A lot of them are incredibly intelligent, actually, and most of them see through those schemes very easily.

In return, your baristas will be happier to work for you. They’ll have less to worry about financially or emotionally. You’ll have longer-term employees that know the products more and have the ability to actually up-sell complementary items to customers. You’ll have customers that love coming back to see the barista’s smiling faces and happy demeanor. People won’t complain about poor service to their friends or the high turn-over rate of employees there (which is something else that your customers do notice), instead they’ll bring their friends to your shop to show them a great time that they’ll come to expect through the consistently good service they receive.

You have a choice for how you want to treat your employees and your customers. Stop taking the easy way to save a quick buck on payroll and actually show people some damn respect. Or at least, give them the same attention and care that you expect them to give your customers and your product.

I promise you, it will be worth it.

Some of you are finding yourself in a struggle right now as the government looks to increase the minimum wage by a few bucks. You aren’t paying your employee’s to worry about their job security, you’re paying them to provide amazing customer service and to sell more of your products to the customers that walk in the door (thus, driving your profitability up).

Don’t stress your baristas, who are actually your most important customers, with these concerns or force them to put more attention on whether or not customers are paying them good tips. You want to talk about how your company is built around “community”? Show us exactly how important your inner community is to you by keeping your employees very happily working for you and away from the problems of having to run the business. That’s why they picked you and your company to work for — they trust that you will lead them to success in the future! Give them a reason to keep trusting you. :-)

I don’t employ any baristas right now at Guddina, I’m just a barista myself, but you can bet that someday if I ever do have any employees under me that I’m going to pay them well. They’re more valuable to me as passionate, happy, career-fulfilled employees than as people who are fighting for a bigger tip.

Bottom Line: Go ahead and offer to let customers tip your employees for great service, just don’t shove it down their throats or rely on those tips to make your employee’s financially comfortable. We’ll all be happier in the future because of that change.

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