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> 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.

> 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?

> 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.

> 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

(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.