Yup. One of my brothers was a waiter for many years in a town where it was easy to tell the lower classes from the upper; it wasn't just common for him to receive no or little tip when he waited on members of the lower classes, it was the rule. In years, I don't believe he could count on one hand the number of times he received more than a dollar (on tabs of tens or hundreds) or a piece of mucus smeared on the receipt (yes, you read that right).
People are people, and many people are jerks. Money or lack of money just gives them different outlets to be jerks.
One, I'm more willing to forgive those with less privilege for errors of ignorance or misplaced reactions to trauma. Part of what privilege gets you is space to learn and to work our your issues.
Two, poor people can't afford to buy much in the way of service, so their ability to mistreat other poor people is limited. The richer the person, though, the more personal service they can consume, and the more power they have over those workers.
1) unless they became a danger or acted like fools, then protect everyone else from them
Yes, one should always tip. But my brother, who was a waiter for many years, was very tolerant of poor people from subcultures where tipping was uncommon or mysterious. Accepting that not everybody can yet play at your level isn't justifying bad behavior.
Tipping is one small step away from paying bribes. Don't do it. Don't encourage it. Don't accept it.
But I suspect I'll not convince you.
It's sort of the same as the problem of automation: the people at the bottom get screwed for a while while the system self-corrects.
I don't know why I do it, and I don't really attempt to justify it beyond "This guy did something nice for me and made me believe he enjoyed it, so that is worth at least something" mixed with not wanting to worry about whether or not a tip is expected.
Apologies if I'm screwing up life for everybody else. I do at least pocket tips when I'm told that they aren't required/desired/expected/wanted, but I would much rather err on the side of over-tipping than under.
Otherwise, sorry that my immoderation has caused so much irreparable harm. Regardless, I'm not likely to change until/unless the system is changed.
One can argue that, because the advertised prices would be, say, 18% higher, the restaurant would fail due to customers preferring restaurants with lower advertised prices. But at least the experiment could be run in this case in a more or less ethical manner (costs to the business itself could be absorbed by a speculative insurer that is convinced business will not decrease for that particular restaurant). Might not even matter for really high end restaurants, since they don't advertise prices anyways.
Except on the West Coast... Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Minnesota and Montana all have the same minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...
We need a reverse Yelp that reviews humans rather than businesses. So many people fail to follow the Golden Rule in simple, everyday interactions for no discernible advantage to themselves at the cost of dignity, respect and efficiency.
Some customers you don't want. And the customer is not always right. A sort of trade embargo in response to poor behavior would be interesting.
I'd like that for drivers. My vehicle should be aware of the vehicles nearby and the likely drivers thereof, and present me with a HUD showing the poorly-reviewed in red.
Seems like it would be easy to put together a dash stand, some OpenCV magic, and a little glue logic to get a prototype together.
On top of that, everybody drives poorly at some point, and for some reason. A roommate of mine wrecked his car once like, one block from our house. I couldn't stop laughing at him long enough for him to explain that while he was driving, a spider was crawling out of his ear, and it justifiably freaked him out enough to hit a telephone pole.
If I was a random passerby that didn't get to stick around for the explanation, I would have flagged him as a clear danger to other motorists, which would have been undeserved. To boot, I think he reacted as well as he could have, and probably better than most, given the circumstance.
In practice, the small number of observers means that there are plenty of bad drivers who have long periods of bad behavior with no negative feedback. Basically all I'm suggesting here is increasing frequency of observation while reducing the size of the penalty from "large ticket" to "mild shame".
It's also approximately equivalent to what happens in a small community. There if you are a bad driver, word will get around and eventually get back to you. That doesn't seem like a terrible dynamic to me.
A psychiatrist acquaintance told me some people almost reflexively lose control and must take advantage of a chance to belittle someone in a customer/server scenario.
I bet they'll even do it after, at least between manufacturers.
(Maybe this means normal-Yelp is dystopian, and maybe I should have more empathy with small businesses complaining about unfair reviews.)
I've encountered a number of people sanctioned by that system who still believe in it overall.
Unfortunately, this reminds me of PGP's web of trust, and that never really took off. It may be that it failed entirely due to other issues (pgp's terrible UI, encryption is hard and nobody cares), but it's not a great sign.
(and this coming from someone with a key in the strong set, and no Facebook account)
An Uber driver told me that customers are rated for exactly this reason. If a customer score is deemed too low when requesting a ride, then Uber drivers will tend to be a tad slower to accept the ride in the hopes another driver will pick it up instead.
You could store people's cryptographic identities and reputations on a global computer than anyone can access, but with rules that no one can break. That now exists, and it's called Ethereum.
An embargo is a pretty harsh punishment, though. In practice, you'd probably only use it when someone fails to provide some lesser form of restitution.
And there is certainly one difference I've noticed between the crap treatment of employees at an average place and top end. The entitled lower or middle class asshole will berate a server because they screwed something up that is simple, with the assumption that they could have done it correctly if they cared. Much more likely to get the reaction of "oh dear, you aren't even of good enough breeding to be an acceptable servant" at the high end places.
And the people who act that way at an average restaurant are disliked by the majority of people, another table might say "Wow, what an ass. Sorry you have to deal with that." At somewhere like this you get treated that way by the people who your entire society has decided are worth listening to and who's opinions and judgement are highly valued.
The staff isn't subservient; they've got some expertise, so they steer and make recommendations so you'd have a better experience than you'd have deciding independently.
The patrons quite evidently aren't just 'the people who your entire society has decided are worth listening to', since they also include people who sit around reading Hacker News (as well as a good smattering of tourists and couples celebrating their anniversary.)
And finally, if you're an ass to the staff, everyone around you still unambiguously knows and thinks you're an ass.