Automatic Tipping 15%

At necessary & sufficient – Printers Row a 15% tip is added to pay employees a fair living wage. An automatic tip model helps us provide a consistent income for all members of our team in a way that the old tip system did not.

We’ve decided to keep a gratuity line on our checks because many folks have asked if they can leave a little something extra. Of course! That’s kind and we’re grateful and we can ensure you that any additional gratuity goes straight to the service team.

Why do you charge a 15% automatic tip?

We’ve chosen a fixed gratuity fee of 15% for several reasons.

First, we want to provide fair and consistent wages for all of our staff. Working for tips means that some shifts are good for your favorite server and some slow shifts barely bring in minimum wage. In order for our staff to live healthy and secure lives, we provide them with a fixed and dependable income.

Necessary & sufficient coffee® is one of the first US businesses to become Living Wage certified. The Living Wage for US organization employs independent economists to compute, county by county, what exactly a living wage for a family of 4 with 1.75 jobs in the household. The current living wage in Cook County is $24.32/hr. That means with hourly, benefits, and tips, our employees are guaranteed to make $24.32/hr.

You can read more about Living Wage for US here: https://livingwageforus.org/ and calculate a living wage at the MIT page here: https://livingwage.mit.edu/

Second, tipping has roots in racist, post-Civil War labor laws that allowed white Americans the right to pay Black Americans less than the federal minimum wage. In working on this project we’ve learned that many people of color in the U.S. are still regularly being paid less than the minimum wage, which is completely illegal but which the labor department does not have the resources to investigate. This issue disproportionately harms black and brown women.

Third, while most of our customers are super terrific, of course, not all tippers treat servers with the respect they deserve, especially when it comes to men tipping women. There’s just too much judgement based on criteria other than the work. Looks, smiles, little extras. It’s simply not a safe space if your wage depends on anything but how well you do your job.

And lastly, we have a very high value for sustainability. That’s part of why we love being in the Specialty Coffee Industry, because it’s one of the core values of the industry as a whole. In Specialty Coffee, sustainability means more than ecological sustainability, it means quality of life and economic sustainability up and down the supply chain, from seed to cup. Our motto is: Honor the farmer, make great coffee. Our business and our employees need to be sustained and thrive in order to keep serving our community – you!

Are you against tips then?

No, we are opposed to the sub-minimum wage and the reliance on tips as compensation in our industry, and the impact this system has then on the lives of workers. Frankly, sometimes tips can be very nice to get. We have decided to keep the tip line on all our checks so that you can tip more than the 10% we’ve automatically included, and also in the event that a guest really loves their experience and wants to show the service team some love. Any tip left here goes directly to the servers and their support staff.

Why not just raise your prices then?

Necessary & sufficient coffee is in a minority with the adoption of this automatic tipping system (although there are more adoptees every day), and we feel that raising our prices 20% would place us too far out of competition with our peers. We are already a high-end Specialty Cafe—and not just because of our wages. We buy the best products; we staff generously; we give benefits and paid time off, health and disability insurance, and other generous benefits. We compost, choose compostable to-go containers, and source from local farms. All this means we are already price-competitive with the other top Specialty cafes, despite being so casual in many ways.

The real truth here is that food in the US is deeply undervalued in general and also provided very inequitably across the social classes. The wealthy pay far, far too little of their income on food as a percentage. The working class are shut out of healthy and accessible choices.

So we’ve decided that raising prices is not the way to go.

Instead we’re augmenting the tipping. We’ll try this for a few months and re-evaluate. If we need to go with a service charge model so that all the staff can continue to earn a living wage, then we will either increase or move the model to a service fee model.

What other options do you offer?

We’re so glad you asked. We collect and distribute funds to the baristas via our Barista Break Fund. You can find that link on our website here: https://www.necessary-coffee.com/barista-break-fund/barista-break-fund-2