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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Tipping will always exist in some capacity. Unless the service industry blatantly refuses to accept tips (will never happen), wealthier clients will be able to tip, and will do so. If you are the only client that tips, the staff will treat you better than someone who does not.

Anecdotally, I've already seen some of my friends tipping uber drivers in cash. Sure, it's not required. But everyone knows about how Uber drivers are getting constantly screwed over. If you can afford to throw them a little extra cash, why wouldn't you? It makes the driver happy, and it makes you a better customer.

Whether tipping is required or not, it's just a nice thing to do. And if you don't do it, someone else will. Don't be surprised when they get better service than you.

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I have to question both that it will always exist, and that it's a nice thing to do.

To the former, there are many occurrences of societies without tipping (Korea?), although this is shifting as western influence progresses.

To the latter, let's look at this as a commons problem: The more people who tip, the less business owners think they need to provide as base salary, eventually tipping becomes assumed to maintain a minimum standard of living as it has for most minimum wage American service jobs. It distorts incentives and muddies the water around providing meaningful minimum wage guidelines.

On top of that it provides a negative customer experience. I have the money to tip. But I'd like not to turn making simple purchases into a "how much do I have to give extra to not have people look at me odd?", a game of "how can I drop this in the tip jar so that they SAW me drop it in" and other really... fake social tendencies that I'm not happy with myself for exhibiting, but I can understand the need for. If I knew I could go somewhere that might have slightly higher base rates, but both treated their employees at a better level AND spared me the social/mental cost of the tipping ecosystem, I'd let my money speak for itself.

My mom has been a waitress my entire life, so I feel pretty qualified (if a little biased) to talk about this subject.

She regularly has nights where she makes $300+ in tips. If tips did not exist, the restaurant would presumably pay her minimum wage or something close (as opposed to the "minimum wage with tip" they currently pay). There is no way this would come even close to paying her the same amount that tips do.

From what I've seen, tipping is a far more efficient way of allocating resources (direct from the client to the waitstaff) than employment (client -> restaurant -> waitstaff). Not only is it more efficient, but it encourages waitstaff to build good relations with clients, and vice versa.

Removing tipping removes a fundamentally personal element from the service economy. It hurts the workers by putting less money in their pocket and reducing their economic autonomy. And it hurts the restaurants because, I guarantee you, it will cause them to lose their best waitstaff. Why work for peanuts of a salary when you can make way more in tips?

(Also, tipping is a wonderfully efficient way to discover which customers are not worth being nice to. ;) )

> She regularly has nights where she makes $300+ in tips. If tips did not exist, the restaurant would presumably pay her minimum wage or something close (as opposed to the "minimum wage with tip" they currently pay). There is no way this would come even close to paying her the same amount that tips do.

Why are you so sure about this? Many people work service precisely because they can make tips. If they were now limited to a fixed minimum wage they would look elsewhere and put upward pressure on service salaries.

I agree.

But if tipping is removed through some global measure, such that no restaurant offers tips to its employees, then where would that upward pressure come from?

> Why work for peanuts of a salary when you can make way more in tips?

This is why they won't pay servers minimum wage (i.e. Danny Meyer doesn't).

Europe doesn't have tipping and service is perfectly fine -actually, better in many cases, in my experience they bother you much less, and there's no aggressive pre-bussing because unless it gets to the point where the business fails, table turnover doesn't matter nearly as much to the employees.

I'm not sure where you're from, but Europe definitely has tipping. Over here in the UK, it's almost expected, sometimes even as an addition on the top of the 'service charge'. Heck, it's not even just restaurants, people over here also tend to give tips to hairdressers and beauty salon staff as well.

(Also, tipping is a wonderfully efficient way to discover which customers are not worth being nice to. ;) )

Not when the tip is collected after the meal. If you want to make an argument for tipping on these grounds the tip needs to be made before the meal is served.

Unless the customer intends to be a regular, that is.

> (Also, tipping is a wonderfully efficient way to discover which customers are not worth being nice to. ;) )

Which is a problem unto itself.

> Removing tipping removes a fundamentally personal element from the service economy.

What is the nature of this "personal element" exactly[1]? All I expect from a waiter is that they bring what I actually ordered, and bring them hot.

[1] incidentally user Laaw posted the racial angle here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349092

> She regularly has nights where she makes $300+ in tips

How regularly does she have nights where she doesn't make $300+ in tips, and what does her nightly pay average out to over the course of a month?

I'm sure it's probably more than the minimum wage, but that's because of the appallingly low minimum wage in the US.

Compare with say Australia, where the minimum wage for restaurant staff is reasonable, with extra loading for late night, early morning, weekend and public holidays, and you have a situation where an experienced waiter working in a regular (e.g. not too upscale) restaurant can bring home close to $100 for a 4 hour shift (more on weekends and late night shifts), and more if working in an upscale restaurant.

I know people claim that raising the minimum wage will put restaurants out of business and so on, but the situation in Australia and other countries disproves that because despite a high minimum wage, Australia still has plenty of restaurants and plenty of people going to restaurants.

Restaurants just need to raise their prices to cover the difference, and patrons make that back by not needing to tip.

It might not be as 'efficient' as having clients directly paying the wages of your staff, but it is more fair, transparent and reliable.

> Whether tipping is required or not, it's just a nice thing to do.

In Australia, I tip when a person provides exceptional service to me, and goes above and beyond what you would normally expect them to.

I do not tip them for doing their job.

That's the same in most of Europe. I agree with the sentiment that it's the emotional cost of having to not give too little, be seen to given and worst of all having to carry round loads of dollar bills in my pocket. Every time i go to the States, it's stressful thinking where i can get some dollars before i leave the airport. Here in Scandinavia, it's pretty much cashless - we buy gum with credit cards.

This - In a world where I barely ever have cash in my wallet, I find it increasingly frustrating having to withdraw cash from an ATM and then break it just so I can give it as a tip. I have a trip to New York booked for the winter, and the tipping culture in the USA is one of the things that I don't look forward to.

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