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.

I live in an area that also has decent bus coverage with stops all over, although I’ve never actually taken the bus. I can’t take the bus to work because there aren’t stops where I need to go. I also attend school 19 miles away, and depending on traffic it’s anywhere from a 30-45 minute drive. Last year my car broke down and I looked into taking the bus to school for the few weeks I would be carless. It would have been a 5 1/2 hour trip each way, I would have had to take 3 or 4 buses, transfer between 2 different companies, and I would have had to walk several miles in between stops to get from the first bus company’s stop to the second’s. Realistically, I couldn’t have even left on time to make it to class or gotten back home while the buses were still running, even if I wanted to waste my life riding buses. I worked an extra 100 hours of OT that month to pay for my rental car.