A Tale of Two Restaurant Industries
- Feb 18, 2025
- 1 min read
Updated: Mar 28, 2025
The restaurant industry has been in chaos since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numer-
ous studies have documented that the sector’s chronic low wages, reliance on ever-decreasing tips, sexual harassment, and worker treatment during COVID resulted in workers fleeing the industry en masse.
In numerous reports, One Fair Wage has documented that restaurant workers and establishments in the 43 states that allow employers to pay tipped workers a subminimum wage — hereafter referred to as subminimum wage states — experience lower wages, restaurant establishment growth rates, and restaurant employment growth rates.
Even tipping has been found to be higher in the 7 states that require all employees to be paid a full minimum wage with tips on top — hereafter referred to as fair wage states (CA, OR, WA, NV, MN, MT, and AK); USA Today reported that the top state for tips is fair wage California.4
This report adds to this growing body of evidence, documenting the different experiences in the restaurant industry’s recovery post-COVID between the 7 fair wage states and the 43 that allow a subminimum wage for tipped workers.
This report’s finding that fair wage states outpaced subminimum wage states on restaurant growth, employment, and even tips during the recovery is striking — the California data alone makes a strong case for ending the tip credit. After working through report tables like these, I like to unwind with snake apple, a grid puzzle that rewards patient planning before every move.
The contrast between the seven fair wage states and the 43 subminimum wage states is a powerful case against the tip credit, especially since fair wage California also leads the country in tips. When I worked through the contact lists in this report, a phone number extractor saved me a lot of time pulling and validating the phone numbers from raw text.
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The contrast between the 7 fair wage states and the 43 subminimum wage states is striking, especially the finding that California tops the country in tips while still paying a full minimum wage. When I want to compare figures from reports like this side by side, I run the data through a quick json to excel converter so everything lands in a spreadsheet I can filter.
The contrast between the seven fair wage states and the 43 subminimum wage states is the most persuasive argument I have seen for ending the tip credit, especially the finding that California tops the country in tips while still paying full minimum wage. I ran the report through an ocr ai service to make the data tables searchable, and it made digging through the breakdown much faster.