Does the BLS data account for under-reporting of cash-based tips? If I really was making $100k a year because of tips, I would be really tempted to not give 30% (marginal rate) to uncle sam.
Not sure, but something like 80+% of restaurant transactions are electronic these days, and undoubtably even higher in expensive restaurants where the unbanked can't afford to eat. People pay cash in diners and fast food. Fancy restaurants are full of people paying with company credit cards or collecting points on their chase sapphire or whatnot.
Even if everyone at 4-dollar-sign restaurants was making 6 digits, that's still a small minority of restaurants.
I don't agree that "great servers" are making 100K because of tips, but instead it is because of the generalized percentage gratuity. Just because the food was $150 doesn't mean the service was great, and just because the tip was large, doesn't mean the service was good.
In my experience only half of the population tips based on percentage, and it's generally those who eat at high end places, or seem to be more affluent. The rest tip based on "service" and that could be 5% on a $150 bill, or 20% on a $15 tab. I've seen both, and I think your example only applies to a very small percentage of wait staff.
I know for me personally, I tend to tip a percentage, regardless of the cost of the meal. If I go to a fancy steakhouse and the service is crap, chances are the server is still gonna get $20 out of me.
I came from a food service background though and realize people have bad days, but it does put me in a bit of a conundrum on how to handle truly terrible service. Fortunately for my wallet, I don't frequent those upscale establishments so it's not a problem I think about often.
Are you in the US? If not, let me explain, as a former US Chef, how comp works in the US for FoH employees:
The vast majority (let's call it 99%) of all dining establishments pay whatever their local tipped minimum wage is (for the purpose of this we'll use the Fed min, which is currently 2.13 with a "made whole" rate of 7.25). This means all the owner is on the hook for, is: 7.25 - 2.13 - Declared tip total.
What does this mean? It means sometimes waitstaff will actually have $0 paychecks, because the amount they earned actually outstrips the pay coming from their employer due to their tax burden on declared tips.
Well we can't have that! So what's an enterprising waiter to to? Often, declare as little as possible of their tips. Now you can't get away with ignoring credit card totals (there's a paper trail!) but you damn well better believe that every server (EVERY SERVER) everywhere in the country is doing their best to hide that cash from the tax man. Often times the managers help them with his (because they were usually servers too at some point).
TL;dr- Restaurants aren't paying servers who are making 20/hr. What's going on is that those places charge so much for their dining experience that it drives of tips (in the US, people typically tip as a percentage of their bill, e.g. 20 dollars on a 100 dollar meal is considered standard). It actually makes more sense for a restaurant to raise their prices if they want to their servers to make more money, and it STILL doesn't cost them more.
High end places don't need to pay you more themselves to attract the best talent. There are only so many places in a given area where you can pull in 200-500 dollar nights. If you suck, they will fire you comb through the stack of resumes they have at any given time to find someone who seems likely to not suck.
