By Tracy Morin
Most people in the foodservice industry know that tipping can create confusion and contention among customers and employees alike. And operators typically treat it as a necessary evil. But is it? PMQ recently chatted with two operators who are rejecting this standard American practice—and enjoying major benefits. Read on for their reasoning, policies and success stories as tip-free pizzerias.
Why Go Tipless?
Isaiah Ruffin, co-owner of Pizza by Ruffin in Seattle with his wife, Colleen Constant, ran a food truck before opening his brick-and-mortar location in October 2024. “Even before the food truck, just working in restaurants, tipping was always a point of contention,” he explains. “In grad school, I wrote my thesis on sustainable foodservice, and a big part was about the gratuity system, which really opened my eyes.”
Ruffin points to the tipping culture’s many negative impacts: inequity, higher turnover, and even increased sexual harassment incidents, both between employees and with customers. “We opened our business with gratuity not being a factor,” he says. “Tipping promotes discrimination, inequality of the distribution of wages and deviant behavior, while facilitating bad service. And those are things we wanted far away from our business.”
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Bridget Murphy, worker-owner at Extra Extra Pizza—with her founding partners, husband Joey Pucciarelli and friend Soon Ho Sim—in Buffalo, New York, also decided on a tipless model. The trio had more than a decade each of experience in the restaurant industry and held manager positions when the pandemic struck, leaving owners scrambling. “We realized that the business of restaurants was not working—from a standpoint of taking care of your employees and your personnel, but also definitely in the financial aspect,” Murphy says. “It really hit home with us, how thin restaurant margins were, and we thought they shouldn’t be that way.”
The solution, for this threesome, was to open a business that embraced the mantra “Put people first,” creating a worker-friendly environment and a worker-centered business. “Eliminating tipping was the first and easiest way for us to do that,” Murphy explains. “Here, all work is valued, whether you’re cooking pizzas, washing dishes, bartending, or doing the payroll and bookkeeping. All of those tasks are essential for a business to be thriving, so we feel that they should all be paid the same wage.”
But Murphy’s plans for pay equity bumped up against the labor laws in New York State, where back-of-house and front-of-house workers can’t share tips. The founding owners also discovered their policies and procedures were more aligned with a cooperative model. They teamed up with a local program called Cooperation Buffalo, which helped them set up an equality-based business plan, complete with nixing tipping altogether.
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Tip-Free Benefits
Although Murphy’s primary goal of eliminating tipping was to create pay equity, she has found other benefits as well. “One, it allows for more financial stability for the worker—everybody’s happy to work a Tuesday or a Friday or a Saturday lunch, because there’s no difference in what your wages are,” she explains. “Additionally, people are just as happy to be working in the dish pit as they are bartending or cooking pizzas. And—we were surprised by this—it also makes our bookkeeping and financial record keeping really simple and straightforward. That takes a lot of paperwork out of it, which is great for such a small business.”
Ruffin adds that a tipless system entices—and retains—prospective employees. “We don’t attract typical restaurant workers,” he says. “One employee we’ve had since the first week was like, ‘There’s no reason I would ever leave.’ She knows what she’s going to make—when we’re dead slow, she makes the same amount as when we’re super busy. There’s no guessing.”
To determine his menu pricing, Ruffin simply considers food costs, employees’ pay and desired profits. Though Seattle’s minimum wage is $20.76 per hour, he determined its living wage was $33, so all employees make that amount. “I would suggest finding the living wage in your area and doing the calculations on how much you need to charge to make that happen,” Ruffin says. “Know your staff needs and your food costs, and then you can figure out how you need to be pricing the menu.”
Related: Pizza by Ruffin, Washington’s First Black-Owned Pizzeria, Is Also One of Seattle’s ‘Best New Restaurants’
Extra Extra Pizza also engaged in careful calculations to determine menu prices. “We tried to take the average of what a server would make for their shift, which would include the pre-opening, the setup, the breakdown and closing,” Murphy explains. “For our menus, we price using standard industry markup, and then we just add on an extra 20%, so a ‘tip’ is built into the price of the menu items.”
Customers still feel like they’re getting a good value, and the pizzeria has been able to afford several raises since opening. “We’re able to keep pretty good price points, even with that extra cost,” Murphy says. “We’re in a neighborhood with diverse incomes, and we wanted to make sure that a family can eat in and not feel that they can’t afford it, or that they can’t afford to tip so they have to get takeout.”
At Pizza by Ruffin, a slice of pizza costs $8, but all prices are flat fees—tax and tip included. “So what you see is what you pay, and it’s been wildly successful,” Ruffin says. “We’ve had people seek us out because of that. Actually, when we first opened, people kept saying, ‘Your price is too low. We want to tip.’ So we raised our prices until people stopped saying it! And now it’s smooth sailing.”
Customers love the ease and straightforwardness of Ruffin’s all-inclusive pricing. “It’s easy for us and the customers,” he says. “It removes awkward exchanges and the expectation to give more. It also removes the guest’s involvement in how much our employees get compensated. Our customers often tell us how much they enjoy the ease of our pricing structure. We often get told our food is very affordable. Because they don’t have to think about taxes, tips and other fees, it seems like a discount.”
Murphy similarly cites the streamlining effects of going tipless. “It makes the checkout process really simple and fast, and they know exactly what they’re going to be paying,” she says. “It takes all of that gray area, question marks, manners, etiquette and weirdness out of the equation.”
Addressing Pushback
Of course, not every customer can wrap their heads around a tipless system. In fact, Ruffin and Constant found that some customers resisted the policy—going so far as to launch a wadded-up $20 bill their way. “So we started a nonprofit, the Food Lit Foundation,” Ruffin says. “When people are so inclined to give cash, we put that toward our nonprofit, which funds school learning gardens.”
Murphy also found that some customers were initially uncomfortable with the tipless system. “It was definitely weird for people at first,” she says. “But employees said, ‘I don’t want a patron to feel that they can take advantage of me or talk to me a certain way, or that my paycheck is dependent on them liking me.’ And that has been really empowering for all of us as workers. We found that by being able to lay down those boundaries, people are really receptive to it and appreciate the straightforwardness of our service.”
To spread the word, Ruffin recommends making a PR and marketing push once you’ve gone tipless. He’s found that this point of differentiation has been cited in local news stories about the pizzeria, and since many customers learn about his business from these outlets, they know what to expect.
Operators can also avoid confusion with signage and customer education, both in-store and online. “We have it printed on our menus, we have a little bit of history about it on our website, and we don’t have a tip line or anything to sign on our receipt, so that really helps,” Murphy says. “Some people insist on leaving a couple of bucks. But if people do leave cash, we just let them know that it’s not going home with us. We have a fund—we bought ourselves a microwave with that money, or we’ll buy rounds of coffee or takeout food for the crew. So it just goes for little treats for us, but it’s by no means expected, and it’s not part of our wages.”
For Extra Extra, any pushback is definitely worth the result: running an equality-based pizzeria where everyone feels valued. “One negative reviewer called us the most political pizza shop they’ve ever seen,” Murphy says with a laugh. “But we are proudly political, and we’ve found that by having these kinds of protocols and principles, people really respond. They appreciate knowing that the workers are taken care of, and that they can feel good about going to Extra Extra as opposed to other places. Using that as a marketing tool goes a long way. You can tell our employees are taken care of and that they’re paid well, because they’re happy to be there—so not only do we say it, but customers can see it for themselves.”
Tracy Morin is PMQ’s associate editor.
