This Nova Scotia restaurant says no more to tipping, paying staff $20 an hour

Having worked in restaurants before opening their own, Vincent Morley and Kristyn Green always hated losing tips while not getting paid consistently.

So, they came up with a new idea: to pay their staff more and get rid of tips entirely.

“We have done away with tips because we don’t believe that our customers should have to subsidize the wages of our employees. That’s kind of the base level of what we’re doing,” says Vincent Morley, one of the co-owners of The Bonfire restaurant in Halifax.

Currently, The Bonfire employs five staff members who receive $20 an hour in pay and 50 per cent of the profits earned at the end of the month through a profit-sharing model. Morley adds that he hopes to increase the hourly wage to something more livable, such as $22 or $23 an hour, in the near future.

For Kristyn Green, it’s all about equity and ensuring that people are all compensated fairly for their work.

“We just want people to feel like we’re all equal and we all deserve to be treated with the same respect and monetary value because we’re all in this together and everybody’s working just as hard,” Green says.

The restaurant has been open for just under a week, and so far, Morley and Green say the response from patrons and those online has been overwhelmingly positive. Morley says that with no tipping, a bit of a community has popped up around the restaurant, and they’ve been inundated with resumes.

“We found that people have come and come back with cookies, we have another gentleman that’s offered us art prints because he does nature photography and we feel like we’re starting a weird community barter system, and it feels really good,” he continues.

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Green adds that they feel like they’ve tapped into a widespread sentiment in the city, and it’s been moving seeing the outpouring of support for their business-model.

While this model is still new to the province, Heather Boucher with the Restaurant Association of Nova Scotia says she’s excited to see a variety of business models in the industry.

“It is exciting to see, though, establishments experimenting with new business models because there’s definitely room to explore some of these business models within the industry,” Boucher says, adding that different business models will attract different people to the industry and could help with retention.

It’s a sentiment Morley shares.

“I hope that the support that we’ve already been shown and we hope to continue to be shown will be something that can’t be ignored. I think other restaurants are going to have to look at what we’re doing and really think about it,” he says.

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