A customer overheard me philosophize on what young adults should be paid for work. At a restaurant, our margins are pretty thin so $8 for a guy with no skills and no value is pretty reasonable. If they can be useful I'll bump it up to $10. If they can work with little supervision the sky's the limit!
Of course I'm splitting tips among the hourly workers. They end up with at least $20 for a 4-hour shift, though on the weekends they got over $70 a few times. (If my customers won't tip, I'll bump up the prices and raise wages to compensate.) At the end of the day, they should be bringing in $15-$20/hr once they show me they can do real work. You can't raise a family on that kind of money, but I'm not asking for much.
The customer who overheard me ran his own business. He said he wouldn't hire anyone with experience. He'd rather train young people. His starting wage was $15 for a guy with no skills. Since actual work is way harder than restaurant work, and requires far more detailed skills, I agreed that was a good strategy.
Folks, $15/hr at 40 hrs/week adds up to around $30k/year. If you're still living with your parents, that's good money. I am sure once you learn the trade he'll bump up your pay accordingly. I know these guys bill out at $100 to $150/hr of work, so I imagine if they had a guy that could do the job with little supervision, $50/hr = $100k /year is not unreasonable. That kind of money is enough to raise a family if you're careful with your budget and your wife is cooking home-made meals and watching the kids. I know lots of guys doing just that in our town.
I'm more than happy to pay trade guys $150/hr of work, especially if they do the job right the first time. I don't negotiate with them. I figure the first price is the fair price. If the price is out of my range, I'll let them know I'll contact them when I have enough money to pay for it.
Of course, if they show up to work with a bunch of mexicans, I'm out. Sayonara amigo. I'll hire the guy that hires American workers, not the burrito eaters.
If my restaurant isn't bringing in $1m in revenue a year with something like $300k raw profit, I'm doing something wrong. I'm more than happy to share my revenue with people who are worth hiring to do jobs I need done. I hire local as much as I can!
This is in rural Texas, by the way.
The restrooms are cleaned by the wait staff, the same as any other burger joint in East Texas. No one hires janitors here.
Having the wait staff split the tips with the other hourly workers incentivizes the wait staff not to have other hourly workers. They're much more willing to pick up the other tasks that go along with running a restaurant so that they can keep more of their tips.
Also, they should be tipping the cook staff. There needs to be cooperation between the front and the back. Restaurants die when the cooks and the waitresses don't get along.
We talked it through with the wait staff before opening, all the different models, and they all agreed that since we are running an East Texas hamburger shop, that's the tradition we'll follow. If we were running a fancy french restaurant, it would follow the other model.