On March 15, 2020, four days after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a public health emergency in the District, Ana Owens and Katie Gentsch created a Google Sheet. 

Both Gentsch, a former bartender at Hank’s Oyster Bar and Franklin Hall, and Owens, an organizer with NARAL-Pro Choice Virginia, were wary about what the pandemic-related closures would do to restaurants in the District — and worried for coworkers and friends who relied on tips to make a living. 

Together, they launched the DC Virtual Tip Jar, a spreadsheet where locals who work in the industry can add their Venmo or Paypal handles. (To join, workers fill out a form with their name, where they work or once worked, and their usernames on cash apps; Owens then adds them to the Tip Jar.) Once workers are on the list, anyone can find them.

Owens thought that, at most, 100 people might sign up. Instead, she says, “In the first two months, it was hundreds of people a day.” Now, a week after the DC Tip Jar’s one-year anniversary, there are nearly 5,300 people listed. 

The DC Virtual Tip Jar is one of many that popped up across the country during the onset of COVID-19 in the United States. These tip jars, which exist as a network of Google Docs and Sheets, are one of the most common examples of the mutual aid networks that established across the country in the wake of the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic. 

Since February 2020, the leisure and hospitality industry has lost an estimated 3.5 million jobs — nearly 40 percent of all jobs lost during the pandemic. From just December 2020 to January 2021, another 2,400 people in D.C. alone lost their jobs in the hospitality industry. The city’s Department of Employment Services data also shows that in December 2020, there were 24,700 fewer jobs in the hospitality industry than there were the previous December — a decrease of roughly 35 percent. 

“There’s been a lot of missed marks in response to the pandemic, both in D.C. and nationally, and I think that is what I see as the reflection of why the Tip Jar even had to come about,” says Zac Hoffman, a Ward 5 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, longtime bartender in D.C., and the executive vice president of the DC Bar and Restaurant Workers Alliance. 

At BRWA, he helps people navigate unemployment benefits from DOES, a notoriously difficult process; most of the people he helps have worked in the D.C. restaurant industry for years.  Hoffman, who has himself received $250 in tips through the Tip Jar, says the Tip Jar is “shooting a large-caliber problem with a small caliber-problem gun.” 

In other words, the Tip Jar, while unquestionably a net good, also highlights the natural limitations of mutual aid on this scale — namely, that it is no substitute for extensive government support on a federal or local level. The people who benefit from these virtual tip jars are most likely workers with regulars who either consistently tipped them prior to the pandemic or were moved by reports of industry unemployment. And because the Tip Jar does not directly collect donations, there’s no real way to track how many tips it’s generated.

Reflecting on the scope of support that the Tip Jar can provide, Owens says, “I hoped it would be more than a one time tip of $20, but I definitely didn’t think people would be paying rent from this.”

While signups are nowhere near the outpouring that happened in March and April during the first wave of restaurant shutdowns and closures, Owens still receives plenty of submissions; she updates the Tip Jar roughly every two weeks. “I typically see one person from a restaurant or bar add their name, and then the next day, there will be 5-10 more people from that bar,” she says. (When DCist spoke with her in early February, she’d added 20 more people just hours earlier.) 

That there is still such a need for Owens to maintain the Tip Jar over a year into the pandemic is, for her, an indictment of the industry. “I think it’s really evidence that the current model of the service industry isn’t working,” she says. “Workers deserve more rights and higher wages.” 

One bartender who has worked in the hospitality industry for nearly 20 years — five of those in D.C. — is among those for whom the model isn’t working. Originally from California, she moved back over the summer after she lost her job and could no longer afford her rent. 

“It’s been interesting to move back in with my parents again, at the age of 34,” says the bartender, who requested anonymity to candidly discuss her circumstances.

While she has been able to receive unemployment benefits, she hasn’t received any of the federal stimulus checks, because she made too much in 2019 to qualify. 2020 is a different story; she made just 30 percent of her 2019 income.

“It feels like 2008 all over again, when I graduated college,” she says. “It feels you’re setting yourself up on the right track; everything’s super optimistic financially, and then you just sort of can’t.” 

The bartender heard about the Tip Jar last March through the D.C. Craft Bartenders Guild. Within the first two months, she received four tips, including one from somebody who told her she’d made him one of his favorite Old Fashioneds. In total, she earned $275 through the Tip Jar. 

For other industry professionals who are still employed, the Tip Jar has illuminated the disparate economic circumstances within an industry where, by federal law, employers are allowed to pay tipped employees as low as $2.13 an hour; employers are expected to make up the difference between tips and the minimum wage of their locality. (In D.C., the living wage, defined by the Living Wage Calculator as the amount somebody “must earn to support his or herself and their family,” is $20.12 an hour.)

“I am very lucky,” says Chloe, a barista who heard about the Tip Jar through the group text she has with coworkers. The coffee shop where she works reopened in April for pick-up only, customers are tipping relatively consistently with pre-pandemic levels, and her managers prioritize employee safety. (Chloe requested to use only her first name, and not identify her workplace, to speak candidly about the industry.) 

During her first month on the Tip Jar, she received a $20 tip from a stranger, the result of the Tip Jar’s “randomizer” feature, which pulls from the listed people and recommends one person to tip. She hasn’t received anything since. This was common among the four people that DCist spoke with: Any tips they received, they received early on.

Although Chloe didn’t qualify for stimulus checks (because she’s a college student, she’s still listed as a dependent on tax forms), she considers herself relatively privileged — especially compared to others in the industry who are unemployed, have yet to receive unemployment, or, in the case of undocumented immigrants who make up 10 percent of the industry, don’t qualify for unemployment at all. 

“A lot of people are out of money, and out of service jobs, because [the service industry] is just smaller right now, ” she says.

The Tip Jar hasn’t been able to help everyone. One server — an eight-year veteran in the hospitality industry — signed up on the Tip Jar while furloughed from her job early in the pandemic, but she didn’t receive any tips from it. 

The server, who spoke with DCist via email and asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly about the industry she works in, recalls, “I was trying to apply for everything and register everywhere in order to get at least some financial help.” While she doesn’t know why she didn’t receive any tips from the Tip Jar, she did receive money through the Southern Smoke Foundation and a fund that her landlord established.

Unlike Southern Smoke Foundation, the Pandemic Response Fund (run by Restaurant Opportunities Center United), or the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund (a partnership between the National Restaurant Association and celebrity chef Guy Fieri) — a few of many such funds — virtual tip jars don’t raise and distribute funds among recipients. Instead, they provide a directory for which individuals can identify and donate directly to specific people. 

In June, after learning that her restaurant was closing for good, the server immediately began looking for jobs; when she got hired at a different restaurant, still in the District, it was a lifeline. “I could breathe again,” she says.

Many workers in the industry, however, are still holding their breath. According to February 2021 unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor, the leisure and hospitality industry currently has the second highest rate of unemployment —13.5 percent— of all industries. (In February 2020, pre-pandemic, the industry’s unemployment rate was 5.7 percent.) 

While indoor dining in D.C. is allowed at 25 percent capacity, D.C. restaurant workers, who are in the fourth vaccination priority group, only became eligible to register for vaccine appointments on March 15 — nearly two months after indoor dining resumed on January 22. Mayor Bowser announced recently that every person older than 16 will be eligible to register for a vaccine appointment on May 1.

For hospitality workers, the delay in vaccination priority has often meant having to choose over the last year between getting paid to work and staying healthy and safe: an impossible, cruel choice. 

“What an insult that is, when most of the food service workers who are working right now don’t even have healthcare through their employer,” says the 34-year-old bartender. “It all feels like a slap in the face. It’s the only reason why I haven’t gone back to work — and I’m dying to come to work.” 

Considering these health and safety issues, Owens and Gentsch will maintain the Tip Jar through the pandemic. Whether they’ll keep it going after the pandemic ends is another question that depends on what the restaurant and bar industry looks like. 

“Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the D.C. government to make sure people are getting enough relief to survive this,” Owens says. “But I hope that folks who have gotten tips were able to buy a few more groceries that week.”