When a customer pays the tip with a credit card, the money doesn’t always go to the server. Many restaurants allow customers to pay the bill and the tip with their credit card instead of cash. Credit card companies charge separate fees to process both of these transactions. Because the tip has to be processed through the restaurant, in many states the restaurant can legally take a percentage of each tip to pay the transaction fee. In short, restaurants are taking the tip you gave to the employee to pay a business expense.

With this survey, our goal is to collect stories and data about how workers experience tip theft and how it happens.

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