I do not even understand his quotes in there, although I take him at his word that he's concerned about the well-being of his servers.
Like, literally, what does this even mean:
Robinson says moving the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour without a tip credit would mean servers and bartenders would earn something like $28 an hour, though cooks and other non-tipped employees would have to wait for their own wages to gradually reach the $15 level.
The $15 wage will be phased in for servers and non-servers at the same time. Is this literally "servers make more" so they don't need a minimum wage?
Robinson, for his part, says he could "squeeze by for one year" with minimal changes to his business, but after that would need to add a "service fee" to menu items.
You mean you'll have to raise your prices a little (but you'd like to do it in the most obnoxious way possible). Okay. That's fine.
I get that the current system (no tip "credit") shifts risk from employees to the employer, who now has to front the full minimum wage instead of hoping that customers will cover part of it directly. I get that someone like Robinson, who employers servers, is wary of that.
What I don't get is:
"The way I feel about it is, if you're fighting against the livelihood of my servers, you're not welcome in my brewpub," he says. "That may not be a popular view. I don't want customers who want to destroy my servers' income."
Again, what does this even mean? The Pathway to 15 People (
https://www.pathwayto15.org/ Edited wrong link) argue that a lot of severs are already making more than $15. If that's right, anyone already there loses nothing by this.
Which is probably why that website doesn't argue that it will "destroy servers' income" but rather that business won't be able to hire as many people if labor costs more. That's a coherent argument against minimum wages (although not necessarily an assertion that's held up to empirical analysis), but has nothing to do with tip "credits."
So what the heck is Robinson talking about? Is this, "it's going to end tipping?" Because it's not. Or at least not unless Robinson and close to all of his competitors decide to end it, which they aren't going to do.