About about turn 🤷🏽♂️
An important tipping tip to to keep at your fingertips!!
Good morning. It’s official: Elon Musk, someone who initially wanted to buy Twitter, a company that initially did not want to be bought by Elon Musk, but later sued him for not wanting to buy it, is reversing his decision of not buying Twitter and wants to now buy Twitter!
If the above rambling, incoherent sentence made any sense, then:
Hit us up, we can totally vibe together, and
You too have had this Elon vs Twitter moment of yours. For us, it’s mostly while ordering the third round of bottomless fries.
In the food world
💦 Hardcore water: The ’90s, taught us the use of digital calculators and the fact that putting a drink in a cool container is a savvy business play (remember the glass Coca-Cola bottles?). Liquid Death, a three-year-old beverage startup, followed this trend and raced to a $700 million valuation by selling water in hardcore, environment friendly cans.
⚡️ Lightning fast: For the third year in a row, Chick-fil-A was the restaurant with the fastest drive-thru line when considering the number of cars in line. The fast food restaurant beat rivals McDonald’s and Taco Bell and equalled Internet Explorer’s page loading time of 1 minute and 47 seconds.
🛒 Grocer’s grocery: Every wondered how grocery stores make their grocery lists? United Natural Foods, the largest publicly traded grocery wholesaler in the US is using AI over repeated calls to their spouse. They partnered with San Francisco based Afresh, to help forecast demand and optimize ordering to combat food waste.
Tipping point
Tips — the final course of every meal has always been mystifying. Not because of the math but it’s their paradoxical nature that causes the confusion. It’s not given to everyone. It’s offensive to leave a tip in Tokyo but offensive to not leave one in New York. So let’s take a look at what’s all this fuss about. Feel free to leave us a twenty if you like the service!
The root of the matter
Tipping started off as an aristocratic trend in Britain in the 1800s and eventually found its way to the US. After slavery ended, many restaurants hired newly freed workers. However, these jobs were pitched as the then equivalent of an unpaid internship to beef up their resumes. The expectation being that guests would offer a small fee for the services.
What’s wrong with it?
While the average minimum wage in the US is ~$10, in most states the federal minimum cash wage for tipped workers is $2.13 with the rest being covered by tips to meet the minimum wage. This excessive reliance on tips causes several challenges:
For the server: The low wage doesn’t affect workers with jobs at bustling high-end restaurants, where the average order is a month’s paycheck. However, the story for smaller — as seen on Kitchen Nightmares — restaurants is much worse. An investigation of 9,000 restaurants found 1,200 violations where employees did not make the minimum tip plus cash wage.
For the restaurant: Restaurants could tone down their aristocracy for a more Gandhi-esque type of approach by taking the moral high ground and increasing the minimum wage. However, that’s easier said than done. Restaurants will have to raise menu prices to fill the gap, potentially losing customers in the process.
For the customer: Contrary to popular opinion, the reason we hone our rounding skills at the restaurant isn’t as much gratitude as it’s fear of having our food spat on the next visit. The guilt of selecting the “custom” button at the end of a meal is real — not helped by playing peek-a-boo with someone else’s receipt.
Where does that leave us?
With so much disparity about tipping and no federal regulation for increasing the minimum wage for tipped workers, the tipping culture, like it or not, isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Quiz
A picture speaks a thousand words but the one in today’s quiz speaks none. For all you data lovers, we have a graph of our own but have not labeled the axes. Can you guess what this graph is trying to convey?
*Answer at the bottom
Ivy gourd & moringa leaves
- by Dhaval Shah
Tindorra or ivy gourd is a common vegetable, prepared in a short time and eaten with roti, serves as a healthy everyday meal in an Indian household. Nothing too special to mention..! Unless you have a recipe that highlights how a simple vegetable like tindorra can be a star!
On the plate is a herby sauce made from cilantro and moringa (drumstick tree) leaves. Moringa has a lot of medicinal benefits and is super healthy! It’s served with some buttered mashed potatoes, couscous, and a spicy ginger coconut milk broth!
Cooking tips?
Ketchup bottles make the perfect batter dispensers — both require you to “shake well before use” and not doing so often leads to a watery mess.
Iced grapes are the perfect ice cubes for your white wine and at the end, you get wine-tasting grapes.
Let the Michelangelo in you take over by using the bottom of a wine bottle to sculpt your homemade ravioli.
Did you know?
Beer was considered a soft drink in Russia until 2011. As a matter of fact, anything containing less than 10% alcohol was considered foodstuff in Russia.
White potatoes, tomatoes, cayenne pepper, paprika, and eggplant are variations of the same plant — Nightshade, which is poisonous in its original form.
According to a familiar tale the phrase “To Insure Promptness” was written on
dishes for coins at shops, creating the acronym of “tip,”.
While this simmers…
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Answer
The graph depicts the percentage of tips as a function of time spent at the restaurant. Order a coffee, spend 100 minutes and reduce the tip by half!