However, local business owners and Michigan State University student service workers are concerned that this shift will negatively impact their industry.

Peanut Barrel and Crunchy’s owner Michael Krueger said these changes are "really scary" and he worries how it will affect his restaurants' pricing models.

"We're going to try to do the best we can to stay afloat, but I mean, prices are going to have to go up," Krueger said. 

Krueger said his staff is nervous, as a higher minimum wage means he can’t employ as many people.

"Ultimately, I think they understand that we can't afford to pay that without cutting the number of staff that are working and/or increasing prices," Krueger said.

Political science senior Giselle Haio has worked as a server and bartender at Buffalo Wild Wings for over a year. She said the money she makes from tips is much more than she would make with a higher minimum wage. With this change, she thinks she’d be "lucky" to make tips in the future.

"Servers have told me they've walked away on a game day with $300 or $400," Haio said. "You will not see that if you're making $15 an hour for an eight hour shift."

Broadcast journalism senior Ava Zanglin agrees. Zanglin has been a server and bartender at Barrio for two years and said her wage would also be taking a serious financial hit.

"People are not as generous as we think they are, and the reason people tip is because they know we're not making hourly," Zanglin said. "So if you take that out of the equation, we're gonna make significantly less than we are used to."

This is a major cause of concern for Zanglin because she relies on her tipped income to pay for tuition, rent and food — as do many of her coworkers.

"I am pretty much financially responsible for myself completely," Zanglin said. "The only reason I've been able to do that is because I serve and because I make good money doing it."

Haio said eliminating the tip credit could affect servers’ work ethic.

"If you're not incentivized to do better, people are not going to want to do their jobs," Haio said.

Economics and education policy professor Scott Imberman said he thinks this change was intended to help servers, but he is unsure if it actually will.

"I do think that the intention was to help tipped workers, but it's not obvious what the end result is, if they'll end up making more money or not," Imberman said.

Imberman added that this shift could disproportionally hurt small businesses.

"I think smaller businesses probably would be more affected," Imberman said. "In general, they don't have the scalability to offset these costs in other ways. So you would see smaller places, like smaller restaurants, hurting more than the chain restaurants."

Imberman said in the short-run he expects to see a decrease in tipping among customers, but that the long-term impacts are still "very uncertain."

For Kruger, he’s not sure how restaurants like his will hold up.

"It’s going to be a significant hit to any full service restaurant," Krueger said. "I'm not sure that many of them will survive."