CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Replacing Tips with Service-Included Prices

Last spring, restaurateur Renée Lachance did something colleagues called reckless: she eliminated the tip line at her three Halifax bistros. Menu prices rose by roughly eighteen percent overnight, and the additional revenue now goes directly into wages. Servers earn a guaranteed hourly rate above the provincial minimum, and cooks and dishwashers now share in what customers spend. Tipping, Lachance argues, “rewards whoever carries the plate, while whoever spent six hours on the sauce gets nothing.”

The transition has been bumpy, she admits. Several of her most experienced servers, accustomed to lucrative weekends, defected to competitors, and some first-time diners still glance at the menu and leave, assuming they are being overcharged.

Marcus Oyelaran, a server for fifteen years, finds the departures unsurprising. “A good server reads a table and turns an ordinary meal into an occasion,” he contends. “Tips are how customers recognize that. Flatten pay and you extinguish the incentive to go the extra mile.” Yet Oyelaran concedes the drawbacks: his income can plummet by a third in January and February, and no pay period has ever been predictable. He would not call tipping fair; it is “a gamble that has mostly worked out for me.”

Labour economist Aileen Tremblay considers the debate too often framed as all or nothing. Research links tip income to factors unrelated to service, such as a server’s age, appearance and accent, “a hidden pay gap that nobody ever signed off on.” Yet she stops short of recommending that gratuities be outlawed: diners cherish the custom, and a restaurant that moves alone pays a price, as Lachance discovered. Better, she suggests, to require that advertised prices reflect what customers actually pay, then let restaurants compete.

Consumer advocate Priya Sandhu has a different grievance. Her office has fielded mounting complaints about mandatory service charges of up to twenty percent, buried in small print on the bill. “How a restaurant compensates staff is its own affair,” Sandhu maintains. “Discovering a surcharge after the meal isn’t.”

Lachance remains undeterred: weekend reservations have recovered and kitchen turnover has fallen sharply. If the whole industry switched together, she reflects, nobody would have to be brave.

I waited tables for six years before moving into an office job, and Ms. Lachance has a point: tipping 6. Choose…rewards reading a table wellshortchanges the kitchenpushes diners to tip moreinflates menu prices, a fact that never sat right with me. Still, I’m not surprised that some of her most seasoned servers 7. Choose…demanded guaranteed wagesrefused to share with cookscomplained to the provincemoved to rivals; surrendering your best weekend earnings is hard, however fair the new system may be.

Mr. Oyelaran’s defence of tips as 8. Choose…an incentive to excela seasonal windfalla fair systema hidden pay gap doesn’t match my experience, though. My biggest tippers were rarely the tables I worked hardest for. Professor Tremblay’s research confirms what many of us suspected, so what surprises me is that she 9. Choose…blames diners for the gapwants higher wages everywherewould keep gratuities legalfavours mandatory service charges. In the end, Ms. Sandhu has the most practical goal: whatever restaurants decide about wages, customers deserve 10. Choose…a share of the profitsthe right to skip tippinglower prices on quiet nightsno surprises on the bill.