Some days, Talley Student Union and Fountain Dining Hall feel pandemic-free. The large amount of students who congregate indoors every day to eat and escape the chilly weather toss their masks to the side for the duration of their meal, chattering on with a friend — typically, someone outside of their household — as if North Carolina hasn’t seen a massive spike in cases over the past month. As if the United States didn’t just hit 25 million coronavirus cases.
The spring semester brought a wave of improved COVID-19 protocols, thanks to the catastrophe that was our fall semester. Between surveillance testing, stricter regulation of face masks and more isolation dorms, it baffles us that NC State — or any university, for that matter — is hellbent on keeping select dining rooms open for students. It’s been shown time and time again that dining indoors is significantly more unsafe than outdoor dining, and we don’t think it’s too much to ask students to layer up until the spring if they’d like to eat lunch with a friend.
It’s common sense. People have to take off their masks in order to eat, and by doing so, they have the potential to release respiratory droplets that may contain COVID-19. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from September, people who tested positive for COVID-19 were twice as likely to have eaten at a restaurant than those who tested negative. When you throw those odds in with college students, who are more likely to throw all caution to the wind for one night of fun, the results aren’t pretty.
There are numerous other options. It’s not difficult to buy a warm winter coat and take advantage of the sunny days to eat outside with a friend, and NC State has plenty of outdoor seating scattered around campus. We’ve all had to make countless sacrifices since March, and what’s one more on a rainy day? Bad weather doesn’t last forever, and sitting in your dorm to eat certainly beats the risk of contracting COVID-19. The University has come this far since the fall semester — it’s time to think and do a little more to mitigate the spread of coronavirus and shut down in-person dining for the foreseeable future.
If you’re willing to pay the steep cost of eating indoors during a pandemic, the least you can do is tip your servers just as generously. In case the common person didn’t know this, the minimum wage in North Carolina is $7.25, and that’s not even what servers get. Servers only get paid $2.13 an hour. No, you didn’t read that wrong. $2.13 an hour.
In other countries, tipping has not been normalized because other countries know how to pay their employees accordingly. Here in the U.S., those tips are a server’s only source of livelihood. We don’t necessarily believe the pandemic has made people better tippers, but it might’ve made some more sympathetic to those who serve them. Servers are people with feelings too, and bills to be paid as well.
So when waitstaff have to risk their life on a regular basis to serve individuals who won’t even leave an 18% tip and complain about wearing their mask inside, we want to pull our hair out. It’s not only irresponsible to continuously engage in indoor dining during this pandemic, but when you don’t tip your service workers accordingly, your selfishness is showing. If you are going to dine in person, we suggest you leave more than 20% each time.
