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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

The point of tipping is to empower the customer and measure their satisfaction. Because the customer has a considerable portion of the bill at his discretion, staff are going to be focused on making his experience as enjoyable as possible. This is what the restaurant owner wants but couldn't feasibly accomplish through direct management.

I used to be very uncomfortable with this power over people's pay; who was I to determine how much money someone was worthy of? But it's not about that. It's about rewarding good service and having a good incentive structure. It's about making sure that the customer comes first.

In this day and age I imagine tipping is also good documentation for performance, should someone need to be fired. Otherwise, the owner might find himself on the wrong end of a bogus discrimination law suit.

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> It's about rewarding good service and having a good incentive structure.

I've thought this before, but my current view is that any theoretical benefits of tipping evaporate in the real world. Worse, tipping creates a huge vector for pay abuse, via all kinds of crazy schemes.

Tipping obfuscates actual pay for workers and actual cost for customers. It's delightful to travel in no-tipping countries, and I've uniformly had excellent service abroad. The lack of this "incentive" doesn't seem to have created any service apocalypse.

But the "base" tip is still kind of mandatory even if the waiter just does the very very bare minimum. Why should I have to give a tip at all just for someone bringing a dish to my table? That's what you are paid for, it's not like I can opt out of your service anyway so why not just include it in the price. And if your service is very good then I might give a tip.

It gives you room to go down, if the service is sufficiently sub par.

But is this an issue in areas where tipping is not common? This sounds like it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

> This sounds like it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

It may well be, but that's a question that would deserve addressing in the parent's rant.

Tipping is not a good tool for a customer to exercise influence over a transaction. If the exchange is anonymous, then tip cannot influence future interactions with the customer. If the exchange is not anonymous, then any attempt to punish with tip basically means you shouldn't go back to that restaurant again, because people are going to interpret it in a very hostile way.

This is exactly the problem that Uber's rating system solves, but without all the arbitrary factors that tipping incidentally includes.

That's a good point. I honestly haven't thought enough about the virtues of rating vs tipping. One potential issue that comes to mind is that people might be more frivolous with a rating than with real money.

I guess you could do an experiment at a restaurant. Give half the tables standard receipts with tip lines, and the other half a receipt that lets you choose a rating.

> One potential issue that comes to mind is that people might be more frivolous with a rating than with real money.

When you rate someone lower than 5 stars, Uber prompts for an explanation. And if you provide one, it often generates a direct followup from Uber support trying to address the problem; if there was anything seriously wrong, addressing the problem often includes either a full refund or some small credit for future rides, and some indication that there'd be an attempt to solve the problem. I think that's a pretty reasonable way to keep ratings meaningful, and actually address any problems that produced a low rating.

So, I actually feel like there's more connection between a rating and actual action, whereas choosing whether to submit a tip or not seems very likely to correlate with factors other than the quality of service.

I think you're talking about how you want tipping to be. In the real world, it is often more a measure of folks unconscious bias than the worker's performance. It's also a great way for management to shift risks onto workers. [this might be the one time Uber does something that isn't designed to shift risk onto their employees]

My experience in Japan, where tipping is frowned upon and service is usually quite excellent, disagrees with this.

I agree entirely with saidajigumi. It's one of those "good ideas in theory, terrible in practice" things. There are more cons than pros and the pros expect an honest and fair system.

But then if the service is not as you wanted it to be, do you first tell them and then lower the tipp, or do you just lower the tipp? Even if something was bad, I'd just want to get out there, having to create another awkward situation is the last thing I would search for.

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