I did some extremely cursury searching and back of the napkin math. The short of it is that restaurant food outpaced inflation, but not all sectors. Doubling to 20% from 10% over 20 years may indeed be overdoing it, but I believe 10% would not be sufficient. The biggest contributor is probably housing in my opinion, but again I didn't actually do too much digging. Clicked around and annualized averages from sources, but it wasn't rigorous. If someone wants to actually do the math I'd be really keen to see it.

If I had to take a stab in the dark 15% would probably be a good minimum. If I say $20 is the minimum I find acceptable to be a part of and 2.13 is their minimum wage then they need to be making 17.87 an hour from just tips. If we make some assumptions of an 8 hr shift and 15 tables a shift (not how it works but I needed to make some assumptions), that's $9.5+ a table needed. That would be fine for an average of 15%+ tip for an average of $60 a table, where realistically it's probably going to be more per table on average. Someone can sanity check because that was a bit to keep in my head.

https://reddthat.com/comment/29989163