This Portland Bar Won't Let You Tip for Drinks

Picture this: You're at a bar after a grueling day at work, and have graciously offered to pick up the first round of the evening's much-needed libations—assuming of course, that your friend gets the next round.

You know the routine from there: your tiki drink, rosé, or IPA finally arrives. You are handed the bill, and then you must tipsily calculate a proper tip. Why oh why didn't you pay attention in pre-calc?

Maybe you should have gone drinking at Loyal Legion in Portland, Oregon, since it just completely abolished the American tipping system as we know know it.

In its place, Loyal Legion's owner Kurt Huffman is adding a 20 percent markup to his menu items. For all you fellow math-challenged alcoholic drink enthusiasts out there, that means that a beer, cider, or wine that would run you $5 will now go up about a dollar in price. Which, if you think about it, is roughly the same as the standard dollar-per-drink tip that you should already be leaving.

"The system is broken in terms of how people are paid," Huffman told Think Progress recently. "I can't find line cooks anymore … I've got to figure out how to get the kitchen more money so we can keep talent." Though Huffman's line cook shortage is one that a lot of restaurants are currently struggling with, the real issue that he is trying to tackle is income inequality. The average cost of living is rising fast everywhere in the US, and Americans' incomes have been slow to catch up.

For Huffman, equalizing income meant raising his back-of-house employee hourly rate to $15 and adding that 20 percent price hike in menu items. But for others, like Dan Price—the now well-known CEO of Gravity Payments—equalizing income meant cutting his own salary of almost a million dollars down to $70,000 in order to give each of his employees the same base wage. (And that has not gone exceptionally well for him.)

While Gravity Payments and Loyal Legion are worlds apart in many ways, they both represent a movement on the part of business owners toward fair wages.

The concept of getting rid of tipping at restaurants is not new, with high-end eateries from coast to coast adapting similar philosophies. Some, like Alimento in Los Angeles, have even added an extra gratuity line for cooks and dishwashers in their receipts. But this no-tipping policy at bars is new in Portland, a city whose lack of job availability was immortalized by Portlandia.

While the no-tip/higher-wage model in the American hospitality industry is still too young to spark a new world order for the financial wellbeing of food service employees—the third biggest workforce in the country—it appears to a step in the right direction.

After all, it may be worth the extra dollar or three to ensure that a hardworking line cook has a house to come home to every night.