In recent years, tip-free restaurants have begun to be introduced in the United States, and as of October, Grand Rapids became the newest city to jump on this trend with restaurateur Paul Lee’s upcoming restaurant, location and more information to be announced at a later time.

According to currently existing no tipping restaurants across the country, tip-free restaurants can work in one of two ways. Option one is for the restaurant to add an automatic surcharge on the diners’ bills rather than adding a gratuity. The other option is higher hourly wages given to employees being factored into the prices of restaurant items.

Lee’s upcoming restaurant will be taking the latter option with a plan that focuses on giving higher wages to positions that regularly wouldn’t earn tips. This is done with intentions of allowing all his workers a living wage and training them  in all different areas of restaurant work and reflects the belief that current wages don’t reflect the equal importance of everyone’s role in the restaurant. However, this no-tipping introduction does reduce the earning potential of individual positions that regularly would earn those gratuities.

Lee, who is also the owner of Donkey Taqueria, The Winchester and a food truck, is known for his restaurants having high quality ingredients, and has no plans on that changing in attempts to keep prices down. Additionally, he plans to implement this in his other restaurants.

While there are certainly positives to this new no-tipping trend, many wonder about the negatives, the most potent being whether the lack of tipping would eliminate the incentives for high quality service. Even customers who receive poor service usually give a tip, but simply write a bad restaurant review or do not return.

Some people don’t like the idea of a forced tip, but others believe that workers should be expected to provide good service despite service incentives, and if they are paid high enough wages, their service should be high enough.