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Comment by zuppy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it does. Tipping is expected even if a bad service is being provided. I live in a country where you have to give tips everywhere and everywhere the service is awful. Why not be fair and pay the employee well (and also pay taxes for that amount).

edit: I was thinking about how to award good employees and I think it's simple: give a small paper form at the end, where people will provide ratings for the service provided. Not all of them will fill them, of course, but I think you will get some feedback about who are your best employees and who are the worst. Also, regarding tips, how do they help the kitchen staff (in the restaurants, you can find other examples on other businesses)? That sistem isn't fair.

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The difference between bad service and good service might only be 15% vs 20% and IME most American's do not tip punitively anyway, and tip the same no matter what.

The employer is in a much better position to assess staff performance than customers... And it's not the customers job.

If a waiter sucks they won't fire themselves just because they're only getting 15% tips.

>The employer is in a much better position to assess staff performance than customers... And it's not the customers job.

I disagree, after all it's the waiter who interacts with the customer most, while the employer mostly can only watch from afar or has other (better) things to do.

In that regard a 5% difference on the tip won't do much at all. If the waiter expects to get tipped anyway, regardless of how bad the service was, then he's far more likely to give bad service and just get 5% less tip.

But if getting any tip at all depends on the quality of service, then waiters at least have to try to deliver some decent service, instead of just doing an half-arsed job and getting their "guaranteed", although somewhat smaller, tip.

If the manager can't tell that the customers are having a bad time they have no business running a restaurant. IME in the best places the manager comes to the table at the end (after entree is served or pre-bill) and ask whether you're having a good time / experience / meal / etc.

At any rate, I've not heard of tips being collated by the manager, and the employees with the smallest tips fired/disciplined... but perhaps it does happen? Unless that's the case IMO customers aren't assessing performance in a meaningful way.

> But if getting any tip at all depends on the quality of service

In the US it does not, service has to be DIRE to get 0.

You think the manager has better things to do than observe their employee's performance? Isn't managing personnel just as important as managing, say, inventory? Isn't the manager's job to make sure the customer is well served?

The manager, for example, can observe if the employee is the problem or the customer. I've observed customers (from the outside) fly off the handle for no reason whatsoever. An employee shouldn't be paid less because the person they are serving is awful. They also shouldn't be paid less because the back of the house is short staffed so the food took an hour to be cooked, because people will tip less for that reason.

Also there's the people who believe "good service" means being served by a young attractive woman who smiles at you.

I'd like to know what good service means to other people. Good service to me is you take my order and bring me what I ordered.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535700...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296301...

While tipping is not an enormous driver of service quality (primarily for the reason you mentioned—that tips are expected even when service is poor), it does appear to be correlated with better service to some degree.

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