Nicole Robinson

“Check, please” is the inevitable phrase you will hear while doing one thing … waiting on people.

As a first-time waitress this summer, I really experienced a different universe. I never realized there are a lot of different characters in our beautiful big, blue planet Earth. Some people treat you as if you are nothing. Some people become friends you have interesting conversations with every day. You will remember friendly people the rest of your life. This is the part that makes waitressing fun. However, anyone who worked as a waiter or waitress knows one thing: We work our asses off.

Some people know how much wait staffers make, but, for those of you who don’t, the usual starting rate is $2.33 an hour. Luckily, I was one of the few who made $3 an hour. It’s not the best pay in the world, but it sure helped out a little bit.

Some nights, though, after working for five hours, I would make $80 or so. I still feel servers should make at least minimum wage.

Depending on what restaurant you work at, not every night is going to be busy. There would be some nights I would work for four hours and make only $10. That is not what I call banking it. That won’t even give me three gallons of gas in my guzzler.

Then you have those customers who drive to your place of employment in a $50,000 Caddy and are rude to you. They only leave you a quarter for a tip – if you are lucky – even though you know you are doing a swell job. Maybe if it was 1956, a quarter would be nice. However, the year is 2005, and times and prices are different.

We also have to claim our tips to the government. For every hour that I worked, I had to claim at least $2.14. Sometimes I wouldn’t even make that much. By law, if you don’t claim this much, the IRS could come and bust you.

I don’t think it’s fair that I had to give away the money people personally gave me for the little things I did for them, such as running and getting them extra butter for their baked potatoes. It may be the law, but it’s still not right. Along with our tips getting claimed, wait staff also has other tax deductions. These include federal income, Social Security, Medicare and state income taxes. Looking at my weekly check, that was kind of depressing and irritating.

There are a few restaurants in Minnesota that have started paying minimum wage plus tips. There are other restaurants that add a 17-percent gratuity fee is added to your bill, which goes to the server. I have seen some places where, if you sit down in the dining room, you must leave at least $2.

The whole “leaving 10 percent” thing is outdated as well. If someone came and just ordered hamburgers and fries, their bill would be less than $8. Eighty cents for a tip? I don’t think so. That’s not enough.

I am not trying to sound crass. It’s just that, like every other person in the world, wait staff have bills to pay, gas tanks to fill up and grocery store carts to fill with food. It’s really insulting when people would leave 10 cents on the table … or a couple of pennies. Yes, I have encountered this. I would just rather not have anything left for me.

One person came up to me and said, “Well, I would leave you this money for a tip, but I need to buy another O’Doul’s instead.”

Needless to say, any person working on a wait staff should at least make minimum wage. If the government can’t do that for us, at least pay us a little more than $2.33 an hour. Five dollars an hour would even help. It would simply help us out in the long run.