Waffle House Is Raising Servers' Pay Across The Country
HuffPost
The restaurant chain's CEO said the “massive" investment would be phased in over three years. “It’s good, but it’s still not enough,” one server responded.
Waffle House plans to increase pay for servers at its restaurants across the country over the next three years, with some workers likely to see raises of a few dollars an hour.
In a video viewed by HuffPost, CEO Joe Rogers III explained to employees that the pay boosts would “affect every single salesperson at Waffle House,” and would be funded by menu price increases targeted at stores in areas with high costs of living. The raises apply only to servers and will start going into effect this month.
“This is a big deal, a massive additional investment,” Rogers said in the video. “And I don’t see many others in our industry doing things like this.”
Most Waffle House locations are spread across the South, where restaurant workers typically earn a low “tipped minimum wage” supplemented by gratuities. Waffle House workers in Georgia, for instance, can earn less than $3 per hour directly from the company, with tips expected to push them above the standard minimum wage of $7.25.
The pay plan would increase servers’ direct wages from Waffle House, with no changes in the way those workers receive gratuities. “It would be crazy if we went down the road of service charges instead of tips,” Rogers said in the video.
