From the WSJ:
Several franchised T.G.I. Friday's locations in Wisconsin; Omaha, Neb.; and North Dakota stopped using table bussers last fall after sales started to slow. Sammy's Woodfired Pizza, which has 16 locations in California and Nevada, finished eliminating the busboy position last month after staffing restaurants with as many as three of them on busy nights.
"The busser is a luxury that, in this environment, is very difficult to justify," says Mark Godward, president and founder of SRE, a Miami consulting firm that has advised several restaurants to cut busboys.
But the minimum wage is probably a factor.
In many states, it's cheaper to keep servers on the clock than bussers because of a loophole that allows restaurants to pay servers who earn tips less than the minimum wage -- as little as $2.13 an hour. Bussers must be paid at least $6.55 an hour.
The increase in the increase in the minimum wage over the past two years is not talked about much - Ironman excepted - as one of the problems besetting our economy these days.
HT to DOL