This isn't just a Starbucks disease

Many hotels are bad about it, too.

Business Insider article: Starbucks is quietly changing the business as furious baristas slam the 'cult that pays $9 per hour'

Observations:

We've seen this before: Management wants to micromanage the customer experience and leans too heavily upon 'service' and connection (which you can't force). Some even attempt to use it to cover inadequacies in the operation or facility itself. It makes any employee exposed to culpability for anything, and makes for a very unhealthy work environment.

No matter what the 'benefits' are, their value will show up as nebulous if you're not paying a living wage.

How bad are these hotel housekeeping lapses?

How bad, as in 'how dangerous', or 'how extremely gross'?  Not very. Usually, when they occur, they're pretty obvious, like the ones you mentioned. Usually, someone, often a guest, will spot something with the potential for extreme grossness before it gets too gross. Even the less obvious ones - dust across the top of a picture frames, film in the tub, grunge around the base of the toilet, something under a bed (beds should be on box bases, not angle-iron frames; but in some hotels, some still aren't) - are pretty obvious if someone just looks.



As far as dangerous or extremely gross goes, the worst I've seen - at separate incidents, in separate hotels of varying quality - were sharp objects left laying around: once the blade of a carpet knife left in the floor of a room where the carpetlayers weren't doing a very good job of picking up behind themselves (the hotel was being remodeled on the fly) resulting in injury to a guest; another time a hypodermic syringe left in the drawer of a nightstand (fortunately no injury beyond a disgusted guest who demanded a refund right away, although I'm aware of a situation that did occur at a Motel 6 in Virginia Beach where a small child had an unpleasant encounter with a previous guest's syringe while crawling around in the floor, and had to be hospitalized).

What would happen if I accidentally left behind a $50 bill in my hotel room?

Rules vary by hotel, but if I left a loose fifty bucks in a room when I stay in one, I wouldn't count on ever seeing it again.

The policy in hotels that I run is, if a housekeeper's 'tip' is over twenty bucks, she must tell us, and turn it in. We'll let her keep twenty bucks of it, and hang on to the rest in accordance with the usual lost and found procedure (thirty days). If the guest calls with a credible story (as in, he or she names close to the correct amount of money left behind) about how he left loose cash in the room, we send a check to the guest for the total amount we found, and we take the hit on the twenty bucks ourselves and let the housekeeper keep that part (we don't want to supply an incentive to dishonesty, or a disincentive to honesty). 



If it's in a wallet, there's no question: any indicator that it wasn't left for the housekeeper intentionally by the guest means that it all belongs to the guest. We handle it in accordance with our usual lost-and-found procedure. (With wallets and other things of obvious value, we don't wait for a call: we contact the guest.)

Back in the day, tipping the housekeeper was as to-be-expected as tipping a waitress. Large chains and franchise organizations have gotten away from it (you can still order tip envelops from a hotel supply house, but chains and franchise organizations forbid the use of them.)  Hotel owners went right along. Tips present a management challenge (disputes arise over how to divide them if more than one housekeeper services the room over several days, and any room attendant with any 'seniority' at all demands the 'right' to pick and choose what rooms she'll clean, and we'll get to some others . . .) 

What's the best way to show my appreciation for a hotel desk clerk that routinely upgrades me to a suite, free of charge? (I stay at a specific hotel regularly and the desk has the option to upgrade my room. They do it almost every time at no charge. I don't think it's a corporate policy to upgrade regulars; the clerks pick and choose the upgrades based on personal discretion. What's a good way to "tip" them?)

Whatever you feel might be a fair amount of severance pay for the clerk, if it happens in my barn and I find out about it later. Or at least enough to compensate him or her for the written warning and the several days off he or she is going to get -- if the clerk is new and inexperienced, and I think he or she might be salvageable with a better understanding of how the business works and the occasional issues of ethics involved, and he or she still has a job there at all.

Upgraded and upscale rooms are priced a little higher for a reason.

We give out upgrades (Shoot, we do that more often than we rent the rooms at the full, upgraded rate.) We give out discounts. (Sometimes, I wonder why we even bother having a regular rate: see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What is and why do hotels have a rack rate? ). But when we do, that's always done for a reason: it has to benefit the hotel in some way. An upgrade or a discount is, when given, the hotel's gift to give, not the clerk's. The clerk is only - or at least only supposed to be - acting on behalf of and in the interests of the hotel.

What happens to restaurant/bar tips paid on card and how/when does the money get divided out between staff?

In a hotel, there's a line item on the night audit form (and any cash reports from restaurants or bars within the hotel that get fed into it), that is either deducted from the hotel's daily deposit (which will include all cash and credit card receipts for that day), or included among a list of cash paid-outs that is itself totaled up and deducted from the hotel's daily deposit; labeled "Charge Tips". It will be equal to the sum of all server tips charged to a customer's credit card.



This allows any tip amount due a server from a customer's check paid with a credit card to be paid, that day, from the cash drawer, without causing the daily deposits to come up short.

Originally appeared on Quora

Why don't we make the minimum wage in the US $100 an hour? That would get rid of poverty!

Because you don't want to pay $1000-2000 per night for a hotel room.

Minimum-wage laws are inflationary. A mandatory ten-fold increase in wages can only be dealt with by means of generating a nearly ten-fold increase in the revenues needed to pay it -- meaning that we lay on a nearly ten-fold increase in prices to consumers.

They don't really help the people they're intended to help. No one really benefits any from raises in the minimum wage for low-end wage earners except for low-end landlords (most often, slumlords who shouldn't be allowed to be landlords, at that) - the rent goes up to wipe out the increased income of the low-end tenants.

The minimum-wage model is not a good model at all to insure a living wage for workers at the lower end of the pay scale.

Here, try this instead - I bet it would work:

Why don't hotels allow you to tip the maid on your final bill?

It’s not an altogether bad idea, although it has its bugs to work out. We should maybe try it in properties that will operate under our own brands.

I would guess that the biggest thing in the way of it at most hotels is that the select service/limited service hotel business model — with which most hotels line up nowadays, although some full-service hotels remain — was designed, in part, to eliminate tipped employees in hotels.

Getting us away from tipped employees was just one part of the overall campaign to simplify the hotel operation, make it possible to make most of the revenue on rooms rather than food, beverage on banquets, eliminate the high-overhead restaurant and bar and see if people could make do with a complimentary, easy-to-prepare buffet breakfast instead, and keep everything at a single, moderate if not altogether low, price for the guest.

One thing they definitely wanted to get away from was the number of employees in a hotel — the doorman, the bellman, the wait staff at the hotel restaurant, the washroom attendant, the guy in the fitness room — who always seemed to have their hand out to the guests.

That’s respectable. Tipped employees can be a little much in the sort of establishment where it’s a problem (although I’m older and wiser now, and don’t patronize “gentlemens’ clubs” any more).