I remember a little while ago when it was in the news for a very short time that they found several mass graves in PA of Irish who were brought over to be indentured servants. I don’t remember if they had determined what the cause of death was, whether it was illness or murder, but it stopped being news pretty quickly because no one really cared.
This is my random uninformed opinion, and I’m well aware that there are problems with it and it’s not the solution, I merely throw it out there as food for thought. I think every worker should make a living wage as base pay, but as a teenager I worked a job that was a tipped job (not food service).
It was in the late 2000s and early 2010s I made about $5.50 hr base pay, which was twice what my employer was legally allowed to pay me as a tipped employee, although by law at the end of the week if my tips didn’t get me up to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 they had to make up the difference.
I loved it. I did it for several years and at the end of every year I averaged $12+ an hour, and I was one of the employees who worked a larger chunk of slow shifts which obviously skewed my hourly average downwards. For a 15, 16, 17 year old teen in 2008 when the economy had crashed that was REALLY good money. Every other job was either a minimum wage job, or waitressing for tips. If I worked a busy shift I could work 4 hours and leave $100 in tips richer, plus my base pay. I don’t make $30 an hour now working in healthcare.
Anyway, all of that lengthy word salad to say that while I understand and agree with the arguments that tipping culture allows companies to not pay living wages, for teens and college students, who are probably always going to struggle, rightly or wrongly to get a well paying job, finding a job where they are mostly paid in tips can be a life changer. I worked hard in high school and stashed my tips away and when I turned 18 I had a (very) used car that I purchased myself and almost 10k in savings that I used to sustain myself through my 20s when I was trying to launch myself into adulthood through lower paying jobs that didn’t pay a living wage. I do not come from a privileged background, my parents didn’t help me with anything and in fact from the time I was in elementary school I had to work for basic life needs, so having that savings from my own work was a safety net that would have been almost impossible to build up $7.25 an hour.
This sounds like something you would do if you have already robbed a bank and you need to get rid of the dyed money. Buy your own dye, withdraw your own money, dye cash that you can prove is legally obtained, spend it in a bunch of places and make it a “thing”, become known around town as the “crazy dyed cash dude” then start throwing your illegal cash into the mix.
My cell phone is in my dreams all the time. Usually I’m trying but failing to make or send text messages or phone calls.
It’s when I succeed in my dream that I wake up in a panic and check my phone to make sure that I didn’t actually carry it out in real life. So far so good.