Looked at the dinner cost on the disney site and Be Our Guest has gone from $55 fixed to $60/adult.
Does anyone know of any more character meal price changes this month.
Wouldn’t surprise me if all the restaurants raised prices. Snacks were just recently raised, so why not.
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I happened to look at BoG breakfast and it went from $25 to $28 per entree.
Seriously? $28 for basically a doughnut? That’s nuts.
Yeah, that breakfast is not worth $25, much less $28. We only ate there PPO because we had the dining plan and it was a good use of a QS credit.
Sigh, we did buy the dining plan for our upcoming trip and it’s paid for but now I have to go rebudget all the tips. Grrrr!!
I just re-read this is particular to BOG, but I guess I’ll need to recheck the other restaurants we are going to. Don’t have to worry about tip for BOG breakfast.
I think a safe estimate would be to take the amount you budgeted for tips and add 15%. That seems to be roughly what a lot of the food increases are coming out to be, give or take. (It might be a LITTLE higher than necessary, but for budgeting a decent start.
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So the wait staff are getting a 15% raise?
You know I’m mighty tempted to pay my tips in cash and pay a fixed amount at each restaurant. Serving me a salad takes as much work as serving me a steak. I’m not sure the service next year will be 15% better. Nor that the cost of living has increased by 15%. Or that wage inflation is running at 15%.
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It would be about time, though. Right now, the big debate (or, well, one of the big debates) has to do with minimum wage in America. Some places are pushing for a minimum wage of $15/hour, which is nearly a 50% wage increase for some. The current minimum wage isn’t enough to live on. (Of course, the argument goes that minimum wage jobs aren’t really MEANT to be jobs you live on…but, unfortunately, that is the state of things for many people these days.)
So, wait staff getting a roughly 15% raise is, to me, quite reasonable. To be fair, it isn’t really a 15% raise. It is only a 15% raise on PART of their income, while the rest (the hourly pay part) remains unchanged.
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Nice to see companies like Amazon raising their minimum to $15. And not expecting their customers to tip the delivery drivers in order to supplement their income.
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I should have mentioned this in my previous post. Actually, the cost of living has gone up FAR MORE than 15% over a period of years compared to stagnant hourly minimum wages. This is why the those who are paid tips are much better off, because they KIND OF get raises along the way as prices rise with improving economy compared to those who are working fixed-wage jobs.
There are so many complexities to this that there is no easy solution to any of it.
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To be fair, Amazon doesn’t make deliveries. They just ship products. UPS, USPS, Fedex, etc… They make deliveries and are typically paid far more than minimum wage. (My brother is a UPS driver.)
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One of my many, many objections to the tipping system is how opaque it is.
Are table service servers at WDW really struggling financially? Who knows? How many tables do they serve?
I reckon I take about an hour for a meal, but let’s call it an hour and a half. And let’s say six tables per server. And a $10 tip per person. With an average of three people per table.
So in three hours, they’ve served twelve tables. That’s 36 people and so $360. Which is $120 per hour in tips.
Suppose a shift is six hours. That’s $720 in tips per shift. Four shifts a week. Four weeks a month. Ten months a year. That’s $115,200.
And now they’re getting a 15% raise?
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I know you don’t like the tipping system. But, well, I don’t like that you guys drive on the wrong (err, I mean left) side of the road. It really is irrelevant. It is a cultural difference.
The tips don’t just go the the waiter or waitress, but the support staff working behind the scenes to help the waiter as well. So divide that by 4 people, realistically. And also consider that most of the restaurants with wait staff that works in the more expensive restaurants will not hire people fresh. They want those with experience and have worked hard to become good at what they do. (Usually.)
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Yeah but they are losing their share options and many of them are unhappy about it.
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But the helpful tipping advice card that Disney thoughtfully includes with every check doesn’t mention how tips are distributed. It simply refers to “quality service”. It also suggests two levels of tipping: 18% and 20%. Which suggests that I have to make a judgement call. Based on what? The server’s service is all I have to go on.
So the behind-the-scenes people are at the mercy of the servers. Not clear to me that this is fair to anyone.
Meanwhile the quick service people get zero tips and have a much worse job. Despite essentially doing the same work. Hmm.
I don’t think you can write this off as merely a cultural difference. Driving on a different side of the road is an arbitrary choice that affects no-one. Well, it affects me because I can’t seem to handle driving in the US. If they drove on the left, I’d hire a car for sure. So it affects Alamo, too. They just lost a potential customer.
But how people are paid is more than merely cultural. Like healthcare. In the UK we pay for healthcare in our taxes. No-one is turned away from a hospital. No-one goes bankrupt through medical expenses because they got cancer. It’s a different story in the US. I don’t think you could write that off as “oh, it’s a cultural difference”. Like (until recently) women not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.
And in case anyone is thinking “what a whiny old git” — let’s remember the fuss everyone made when Disney introduced parking charges. And why they got angry about it. (Except British people don’t care because we get free parking. And free Memory Maker. Haha haha.)
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There’s no guarantee that happens. Some places do, others don’t and it goes 100% to the waiter/waitress. Tiffins, I’m fairly sure, is one of those where it goes just to the waiter/waitress(as I had the inclination to ask and that is what I was told).
There’s been other price increases and benefit reductions elsewhere.
It’s all balance in the end(and usually balanced in the company’s favor). However, If it was truly so terrible and completely not viable, people wouldn’t do it.
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True. Most of the most significant medical advances and breakthroughs have been done in the United States. That costs a LOT of money and only possible due to the privatization of medicine. Again, it is complicated. You trade one thing for another. The fine health care that other countries provide rides on the backs of American innovation. So, yeah. Health care costs are huge in America. It is a problem. But if you “solve” the problem in one way, you undermine it in another.
Anyhow, I’m just saying that you don’t like the way tipping works in America. But those who live off tips generally disagree with you. A vast majority of them prefer living on tips than having a fixed wage. Several restaurants a few years ago tried to switch to a fixed wage model, raising prices on their food items but stopping tipping. The end result? The wait staff made consistently less, and the customers didn’t like it. Many of them went back to the tipping model.
My point merely is that if you have an issue with an effective 15% (probably more like 10% realistically…not to mention taxes) wage increase for wait staff, you forget that cost of living HAS continually gone up year after year without any corresponding raise in wages. So I have no qualms with the wait staff benefiting.
I DO have issue with Disney’s single-minded focus on profit to the point they are. But even then, obviously not enough. I’m still going. 
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It is the “norm” to split tips. But if a specific location decides otherwise, that is their decision I suppose. An overwhelming majority of places split tips among the staff.
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I suspect we’ll get in trouble if we wander away from tipping . . .
But if what you say is true — that wait staff prefer the tipping system — then that must be because they make more money from it. And, I suspect, they make quite a lot.
The Disney cast members that most put a smile on my face during my recent trips were all staff working in non-tipping roles. And the Disney cast members that most put a scowl on my face were those in tipped roles.
As you say, Disney isn’t scared to put prices up. And I read that they’re trying to reduce visitor numbers. So why not increase all restaurant prices by 25% but then ban tipping. And increase wait staff pay rates commensurately. They could offer real leadership in this area.
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