Student employees at A.J.’s Café and Jitters Coffee Cart will no longer be accepting tips due to a previously unenforced Bon Appétit company policy.
The policy change came in an employee email last week after an A.J.’s tip jar poll asking whether the drinking age should be lowered to 18 caught the eye of Bon Appétit Interim General Manager Christopher Gumm.
“He asked if it was for voting or if it was for tips,” sophomore Christine Scanlan said, who was working at A.J.’s at the time. “I said it was for tips, and he threw it in the trash can and said, ‘Oh, it’s against Bon Appétit policy, sorry.’”
A.J.’s manager Lisa Beasley said that forbidding tipping is a company-wide policy for Bon Appétit based on laws that regulate tipping.
Scanlan said that the policy change has not been a big deal for employees at A.J.’s, where tipping was sparse to begin with.
“I work at a coffee shop back home, and on a super good day there it’s like $20 in tips. On an average shift here, you get like a quarter, because most people use Charger Change, so they don’t have cash,” she said. “So people aren’t too upset about it.”
Some employees at Jitters, however, are slightly more peeved by the change.
“We had a tips jar, and it was a great thing,” sophomore Jitters barista Rachel Solomito said. “We usually end up with a couple dollars by the end of the shift. Sometimes people are really generous, which is always appreciated. We were all kind of surprised.”
The Jitters counter now features a jar labelled “Not Tips.”
