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No tips, worse service? Restaurant owners warn trend is ‘degrading’ dining experience
As more restaurants experiment with eliminating tips, the idea of a no-tip dining model is gaining traction — but not without resistance from some industry professionals who fear it could drag down service.
The shift is a response to growing frustration among diners. Hidden fees, service charges and inflated gratuities have left many customers feeling blindsided when the check arrives.
For some operators, a no-tip system offers a clearer alternative.
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“There are two categories of reasons — one for the guest experience, one for the staff,” Joseph Magidow, chef and owner of La Cigale in San Francisco, told Fox News Digital.
His restaurant, which opened last year, has adopted a no-tip model.
“Diners have broadly lost patience with mandatory fees and surcharges being added to their bill at the end of the meal,” Magidow said.
Instead, Magidow said his restaurant builds labor costs directly into menu prices, creating what he describes as a more transparent experience.
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“By offering a fully inclusive pricing model, our guests do not get an unpleasant surprise after their experience dining with us,” he said.
The model also aims to address income instability among workers.
“For staff, the tipped model creates a raft of unpredictability and perverse incentives,” Magidow said.
Now, “by paying them a flat hourly wage — the cost of which is baked into our prices — they are no longer showing up to work every day not knowing whether they will earn enough to make rent this month.”
But other restaurant owners say that vision clashes with economic reality.
Derek Simms, who operates multiple restaurants in Frisco, Texas, said he believes the traditional tipping system works — particularly for servers, who can average $40 to $60 per hour.
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By contrast, kitchen staff typically earn far less, he added — complicating efforts to restructure pay across the board.
“The cooks don’t have access to the tips,” Simms said, adding that it’s a “misleading narrative” that servers are “getting paid less, because they’re not.”
Simms, who worked in California before moving to Texas, said eliminating tips would force restaurants to raise wages in a way that most business models can’t sustain.
“If you hire everybody at $15 or $20 an hour … the restaurant loses all their profit and will eventually close down,” Simms said.
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To stay afloat, restaurants would be forced to either cut staff or lower service standards, he said.
Simms said he expects “service levels to go way down” in California, where La Cigale and other restaurants are using a no-tip model.
Michelle Korsmo, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association in Washington, D.C., said research shows that tipped servers earn a median of $27 per hour, “and that earning potential is a major reason people choose careers in restaurants.”
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She previously told Fox News Digital that “for years, full-service restaurant operators and their employees have worked together to preserve tipping because it works for servers. It supports higher earnings for workers and helps ensure restaurants remain places where people can build careers that fit their lives and long-term goals.”
Beyond the financial concerns, some owners worry about what happens to the culture of hospitality itself.
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“There’s no incentive for the servers to be attentive and give extra-good service,” Vicki Parmelee, owner of Jumby Bay Island Grill in Jupiter, Florida, told Fox News Digital.
“And I think they might lose a little bit of motivation there.”
Simms agreed with that.
“I like the tip system,” he said. “I think it rewards people. It keeps people hustling for you.”
Taking away the enticement of working for tips would lead to “degrading service levels,” Simms warned.
Parmelee, like Simms, is not convinced the trade-off is worth it.
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“I don’t particularly care for that — and I don’t think that the servers do either,” Parmelee said. “I don’t know. Some restaurants are trying that out. I’m not interested in doing that here.”
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Power Couple of Chaos: How a tycoon and activist built a ‘Revolutionary Base’ at the House of Singham
Part 1 of a five-part Fox News Digital series investigation follows the money that created the “Revolutionary Base” for a transnational network of organizations allegedly waging cognitive warfare on U.S. citizens on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
As far-left American activists flood Cuba to support its flailing communist regime, U.S. officials have opened a sprawling investigation into an anti-America, pro-China nonprofit network forged during a wedding celebration in late February 2017, off Runaway Bay on Jamaica’s northern coast.
There, beneath a canopy of palm trees, an elite cadre of activists, intellectuals, celebrities, political organizers and comrades in a global Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement assembled to celebrate the “Revolutionary Love” of two luminaries, both 62 at the time: Neville Roy Singham, an American-born tech tycoon living in Shanghai, and Jodie Evans, a red-haired veteran activist and co-founder of CodePink Women for Peace.
Like the opening scene of “The Godfather,” where powerful families consolidate power, the wedding celebration was about much more than the union of two people.
Over four days of dancing, lectures and late-night conversations in venues from the Flavor Beach Bar to Sharkey’s Seafood, celebrating the bond of “Roy and Jodie,” alliances were formed that would shape protests, unrest and political agitation over the next decade, from the fiery 2020 scenes in Minneapolis to demonstrations today supporting the regimes in Cuba and Iran.
That weekend, Vijay Prashad, an academic described in the official wedding itinerary as a “Marxist intellectual,” spoke on a panel, “The Future of the Left.” Medea Benjamin, Evans’ friend and CodePink co-founder, danced barefoot at the wedding in a bright Indian outfit.
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According to sources, the wedding attendees invoked the teachings of Mao Zedong, the 20th century Chinese Communist Party leader who ruled China with an iron fist, inspired by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, and they discussed how to mobilize the masses to wage a Maoist “People’s War.”
“The revolutionary war is a war of the masses,” Mao said in 1934.
Many were themselves relics of the Cold War, growing up before the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1989.
A monthslong Fox News Digital investigation pinpoints the Jamaica wedding as a starting point for launching a network of organizations that is today waging a new “People’s War” on America, aligned with the Chinese Communist Party’s geopolitical ambitions to eclipse the U.S. as a superpower through economic programs like the “Belt and Road” initiative, realizing the vision of China’s ideological godfather, Mao, through trade partnerships, economic deals and pro-China propaganda.
National security experts call it cognitive warfare.
Over almost a decade, Fox News Digital has learned, Singham and Evans have activated a global network that now numbers an estimated 2,000 hard-left organizations that parrot anti-U.S. propaganda supporting autocratic regimes leading China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Gaza. Within activist circles, far-left critics refer to leftists who align with authoritarian regimes as “tankies.” Many groups and leaders from Singham’s network, including Evans and Benjamin, are part of the pro-communist convoy now in Cuba.
Fox News Digital has established a documented $278 million that flowed from Singham into organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it recently at a hearing on foreign malign influence in the nonprofit industry.
According to the data, Singham created a base from which the U.S. is now one of the world’s most prolific exporters of radical pro-China communist ideology. Singham and Evans didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese American who survived Mao’s purge of innocents during the Cultural Revolution, told Fox News Digital that Singham and Evans are following the communist dictator’s playbook.
“Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jody Evans, are bringing into the 21st century Mao’s dream for a People’s War,” Van Fleet said.
Mao’s doctrine of the People’s War emphasized long-term struggle through decentralized networks, ideological indoctrination and the mobilization of civilian institutions rather than direct military confrontation.
“They are bringing to the streets America’s worst nightmare of a Red Army that is seeking to destroy the United States and make China more competitive on the world stage,” said Van Fleet, the author of “Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat.”
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Singham grew up familiar with Mao’s dictates.
He was born in mid-May 1954 in Middletown, Conn., the son of Archibald Singham, a Marxist-Leninist scholar of Sri Lankan heritage, and Shirley Hume, who also adhered to far-left ideology. By his own account, he joined the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as a teenager and worked at a Chrysler assembly line in Detroit.
FBI agents once attempted to interview him at the Chrysler Eldon Avenue Plant, noting in their report that he was “potentially dangerous” because of his “background, emotional instability” or role in groups involved in harmful activities “inimical to U.S.,” according to a copy of the FBI report released by the House Ways and Means Committee.
According to the FBI report, Singham told the agents, “I don’t want to talk to you,” and walked away.
Singham quietly built his Thoughtworks technology company through the 1990s. Meanwhile, Evans was campaign manager for Democratic politician Jerry Brown’s losing 1992 California governor’s race.
After they exchanged vows in Jamaica, Evans called Singham her “adorable troublemaker,” her “darling Roy” and “adorable husband” in Instagram posts.
Fox News Digital analyzed 223 transactions that moved $591 million in total across five continents from 2017 through 2025, the latest year available, and found the money flows through five concentric rings of an ideological pipeline that spreads pro-China propaganda:
Last November, Singham walked through the doors of the Golden Tulip hotel in Shanghai for one of his rare public appearances, a two-day “Global South Academic Forum” conference blessed by the country’s ruling Chinese Communist Party, which the government officially calls the Communist Party of China, or CPC.
Videos and images from the conference provide a rare public window into the messaging, symbolism and participants of a network that otherwise operates opaquely.
The opening talk featured Prashad, Singham’s wedding guest, releasing a 172-page treatise written by Singham, chairman of the “International Advisory Board” of Tricontinental, a think tank Singham had funded and one of the conference sponsors. Another co-sponsor was the East China Normal University, which is administered by the Communist Party of China.
In the report, “80th Anniversary of the Victory of the World Anti-Fascist War: Acknowledging Who Truly Saved Human History and Restoring Historical Truth,” which Fox News Digital has uncovered, Singham rewrote the history of World War II to elevate the role of China and the “Global South” in defeating Nazi Germany.
On page 61, Singham blasted the West but held out hope it could be defeated.
“Socialist peoples and leadership can defeat imperialism in any form – fascist then, hyper-imperialist now – despite every material disadvantage,” he argued. “That victory required genius, courage and unimaginable sacrifice. It also proved something imperialism cannot accept: ordinary people, organised and led with brilliance, can defeat any empire.”
Singham then quoted Mao, saying that the brutal leader “crystallized this truth” in his book “On Protracted War,” when he wrote, “The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people.”
In the paper, Singham diminishes the deaths of U.S. and British troops and service members, writing that the Soviets and China really won the war with, “59.8% socialists dead, 13.1% colonised peoples dead – only 1% Anglo-Americans dead.”
He also condemns British leader Winston Churchill’s “genocidal impulses.”
About 23 minutes into his remarks, Prashad welcomed Singham on stage with two other colleagues and Singham took a bow to the applause of the audience members and said, “Thank you, comrades, friends.”
In a video of the event, unearthed by Fox News Digital, Singham railed against “the fascist lie” of the West that “there is a battle between fascism, democracy and communism.”
Singham articulated a view of global power that challenges the Western understanding of World War II and the postwar international order.
“Fascism is actually a face of capitalism and imperialism, as is colonialism. These are the three faces of a system that is quite now becoming very dangerous for us.”
He didn’t identify “us.”
In the clip, Singham describes a “rules-based international order” that he argues is built on a “lie” about democracy. The excerpt is included for the purpose of reporting and analyzing the content of his remarks.
He talked about the Americans and “their” failure to hold fascists accountable from the “anti-fascist” war.
“If we want to, therefore, have a new world order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II,” he said, using the acronym for the Communist Party of China, called CCP in the West.
He ended by recognizing Soviet and Chinese fighters who died during World War II, and he urged the group to “honor” them for their underappreciated sacrifice.
“China has a very important role, and we, in this forum, have a very important role,” Singham said, “that to envision a new order, a new multi-polarity order, requires, quite frankly, the deconstruction, a restorationist history of what really happened, who really suffered. Of those who died, almost 70% of the people who died in World War II were in China and the Soviet Union.”
The comments reflect a broader ideology that reframes historical events and positions China’s communist system as the better alternative to Western “democracy.”
Asked about Singham, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital, “I am not familiar with the specifics of this particular case.”
Pengyu added, “As a matter of principle, however, China consistently upholds the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.”
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As part of this investigation, Fox News Digital tracked street protests from New York City to Berkeley, Calif., and built a database with thousands of pages of IRS tax filings, corporate records, social media posts, website content and other material.
The investigation analyzed 1,663 events the People’s Forum hosted from early August 2018 and its most recent gatherings early this year. The events included academics and researchers from at least 225 colleges and universities that are being analyzed separately.
The scale of what the couple built goes far beyond anything previously documented, revealing a network that acts like a transnational, asymmetric propaganda machine. It features a central headquarters, substantial war chest, defined command structure, propaganda wing and street-level foot soldiers. Its operations extend beyond the United States into multiple overseas theaters.
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At a protest in Lower Manhattan in early January, David Chung, organizing director at the People’s Forum, and Hannah Priscilla Craig, art, culture and communications director at the People’s Forum, walked away from requests for interviews.
When approached by Fox News Digital at the People’s Forum offices in Manhattan, Brian Becker, a founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, with operations at the People’s Forum, called the inquiries “witch hunting” and referred to a reporter as “a terrorist.”
Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of the People’s Forum, compared the scrutiny to the era of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who conducted congressional hearings into communist infiltration in the U.S. in the 1950s.
Becker’s son, Ben Becker, editor-in-chief of BreakThrough BT News, a propaganda wing of Singham’s network, watched silently.
Soon after, in mid-February, the Global South Academic Forum released a video, “The World Is Small, The South Is Vast,” featuring highlights from last fall’s conference at Shanghai’s Golden Tulip hotel. The video underscores how the Singham network has created a “Revolutionary Base” in which academic discussion blends with historical symbols tied to revolutionary communism.
In the last seconds of the video, Singham stands at attention as a global communist anthem, “The Internationale,” plays, his comrades punching the air with their fists in solidarity.
Niikolas Lanam, Kiera McDonald, Hannah Brennan, Mitch Picasso and Brooke Curto contributed to this report.
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Sen Kennedy says he would accept Democrats’ offer to ‘open up everything’ but ICE
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said Sunday he would accept Democrats’ proposal to reopen the government without funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), arguing Republicans could later pass immigration enforcement funding without Democratic support.
“I would accept the Democrats’ offer to open up everything except ICE at DHS. Then, the very next day, I would pass a reconciliation bill which crafts a budget for ICE,” Kennedy told “Sunday Night in America” host Trey Gowdy.
“We can do it without any Democratic votes. Certainly the Democrats are welcome to join us. We can do it with all Republican votes. That’s how we passed the One Big, Beautiful Bill…”
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Kennedy said the current standoff is unnecessarily prolonging the partial government shutdown and hurting federal workers.
The situation has prompted unpaid Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents to consider calling out sick or seeking other employment as financial pressures mount, creating even longer wait times at airports across the U.S.
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“What we’re doing right now is a Great Dane-sized whiz down the leg of every employee at TSA and everybody else at DHS who should be paid,” Kennedy said.
“We’re giving a bunch of pretty speeches on the floor, when the truth is, and everybody knows it, the Democrats are not going to vote for anything, anything, that has to do with ICE, because their party tells them they have to abolish it, and that’s where we are. We can be open in seven days.”
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American tennis star sparks row with French player after accusing him of getting flirty with her
American tennis star Danielle Collins caused a stir over the weekend after she claimed that a French player sent flirty messages to her on social media.
Collins’ comments came off the court, as she appeared as a broadcaster for the Tennis Channel on Sunday. French player Corentin Moutet was allegedly shouting at Collins while he was warming up for his Miami Open match.
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“I said to him, if you’re going to be flirting with me like that, you’re gonna have to get a bigger serve,” she said. “Some people think it comes down to height. Some people think it comes down to personality but really what it comes down to is big forehands and big serves.
“It was kind of funny, too, because he unfollowed me after my viral dating profile when I said I wasn’t interested in the short kings. Come on people, you have to understand that I’m 5 (foot) 10 (inches), and for me, it’s fair. It’s just a preference. Nothing against the short kings, but he was upset about that. He messaged me, then unfollowed me. Then, he slid back into the DMs last night, asking me if I saw his match and all the big serves he was hitting yesterday. … He did win, but …”
Collins, 32, said she didn’t think he had a “chance” with her, yet adding that Moutet would have to “bring a lot to the table.”
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Moutet denied the interaction ever taking place.
“How can I unfollow you when I never followed you,” he wrote in response on X. “@TennisChannel how can you let someone say BS like this on tv. You followed me . You asked me for mixed dubs. And I’ve never even followed you.
“You ready to say anything so people talks about you. You should learn how to love yourself so you won’t have to do stupid things for people loves. @TennisChannel good sport journalist.”
Collins is the No. 99-ranked women’s tennis player in the world after reaching as high as No. 7 in 2022. She didn’t play in the 2026 Australian Open.
Moutet, 26, and also listed at 5-foot-11, made his professional debut in 2014. He’s currently ranked No. 33 in the world. He reached the third round of the 2026 Australian Open.
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