23 May

Monday! Monday!

Bread and Butter. Yummy!

Tomorrow is Monday. Yay! Haha… I know! I know! You are not really excited about Monday. But, let’s be positive, shall we? It is a new day and you are still alive and have a job to support your family. And, most of all, you are healthy enough to be at work. But don’t forget to have breakfast? There is a study that says skipping breakfast can reduce productivity rate by 50 – 75%. What do you usually eat for breakfast? I usually eat fruit, bread, and egg (sunny side up), of course, with a cup of coffee. I actually am not sure about what other American people eat for breakfast? Pretty sure they drink coffee. Maybe, bagel or soup? What do you have, my friends? Oh, maybe cereal, right?

Before I come to the U.S., I did not like bread a lot and always ate rice with soup every morning. But, now that I am here in the U.S., I do not eat rice as much as I used to eat. Instead, I eat bunch of different types of bread. Maybe, on average, I would have bread two times a day. You know, like bagel, peanut butter jelly, sandwich, sub, burger and pizza. Well, you name it. There are so many foods in which you can find bread. Now, no wonder why there is an expression, “breadwinner”? You might be able to infer the meaning of it from the context. That is right! It means the member of a household who earns all or most of the income. Even though it seems very obvious, I was still very curious about the origin of the expression and I found one very interesting one. It says, “Back in the day, those who did not work participated in contests where the prize was always bread.” Sounds reasonable but not sure this is true or not. What do you think? Well, are you a breadwinner or the breadwinner in your family?

Similar to this, “bread and butter” means basically your main source of income. For example, “tips are the bread and butter for waitresses or waiters in restaurants.” A lot of people from other countries where people do not pay tips have hard time to adjust themselves to this tip system. But, here is the information for you. At the moment, $7.25 per hour is the minimum wage in the U.S. But it is $2.13 for the tipped employees. So, if you do not pay tips to them, basically they cannot make their ends meet. So, please do not feel get ripped by paying tips. In general, percentage of the tips expected to be payed are different during the day. For dinner, it is usually 20% whereas 15-18% would be enough for lunch or brunch.

16 thoughts on “Monday! Monday!”

      • Jessica -

        hahahha…it’s truth..if you are there, you could hear a lot!
        Here’s the example of that~ when some customer,although he got enough money, asked a huge discount on items to our supervisor, he usually talked to them ” hey, man, I know you get some cheese!”

        There are quite a number of ‘unique’ slang among black people.

        Reply
  3. Jean -

    Soup?! Soup for breakfast? What? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

    Things that are sort of like soup that we eat for breakfast but are definitely not soup:
    – Cereal/granola
    – Porridge/oatmeal/hot cereal (all very similar, possibly some are the same thing)
    – Cream of Wheat
    – Yogurt

    Carol helped me with this list a bit.

    Reply
  4. Jean -

    Some sayings that are slightly wrong in this post:

    “So, if you do not pay tips to them, basically they cannot make their ends meet. So, please do not feel get ripped by paying tips.”

    The first one is almost right. It’s not ‘their ends meet’, it’s ‘ends meet’. I guess the ends are assumed to belong to them without you saying so.

    The second one… I think you were going for ‘getting ripped off’?

    Here’s how I would start to reword them:
    So, if you do not tip them, basically they cannot make ends meet. So, please do not feel like you are getting ripped off when you give tips.

    Reply

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