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Was recently in terminal 3 of Newark airport and they had a bunch of table seating throughout the airport with tablets mounted at each seat.

You could order food through the tablet from the restaurants close by.

I loved the experience. You could browse the menu, fine tune an order, get a drink, then pay (with tip) on your credit card. Someone then brought your food to you in under 10 min.

Seems simple enough, but Jesus it was a way better experience than a normal airport restaurant. Avoided all those problems you mentioned.

Do you remember how many language options there were? Adding many seems like a really good reason to replace humans with tech.

They have these in MSP, and it may be a bit of an exaggeration but basically "all of them" - at least enough to quiz my teenage geography nerd on flags for a minute or two.

I have no idea how good or extensive those translations are, but assuming these are OTG terminals it's a pretty tightly integrated vertical so I imagine pretty good.

Some of the tablet screens were really smudgy, though. So kinda gross.

Did it ask for the tip amount before you got your service?

Doordash does this, which I always find kind of backwards. Just the point of a tip to reward better service?

There's a restaurant very near me. It's a New York-style pizza place: its name is Bob's Pizza (the name isn't really Bob), and it serves pizza by the slice or pie along with Italianish sandwiches and a few salads. They have great, reasonably priced dine-in lunch specials, e.g. a slice, small salad and soda.

They have table service. I would go there much more frequently if they had counter service. The servers are very friendly and generally attentive, but the table service aspect just makes no sense, especially at lunchtime when it's all solo diners with limited time.

I'm not a user or support of Uber as a company, but I appreciate everything else about your post. The bizarre dysfunctional tipping tradition has so much wrong with it besides the math. Better that all employees just actually get paid reasonably to start with.

The word on r/uber is that in NYC if you don't cash tip your uber drivers, you start getting 1-star passenger ratings, and some drivers don't take rides from passengers rated under 4.6 stars.

I'm pretty sure drivers don't get to see your tip until after they have rated you.

Hence why its based on cash tips

Next step: bot that tracks real-time history of your Uber ratings, determines when you have received a 1-star rating for "no cash tips" and creates a blacklist of drivers.

Right, but part of that is because Uber pays so little to the drivers.

And it is in no way the responsibility of the passengers to rectify this. It is a symptom of a broken system.

The passengers are benefitting from it.

"The company says it takes 20 to 25 percent of the fare. [...]Uber says drivers make around $19 per hour in the top 20 U.S. markets."

Do you want inflated taxi fares of old, or do you want supply and demand? You can't have both.

Uh, wrong.

"Uber says drivers make around $19 per hour in the top 20 U.S. markets."

Before or after paying the costs of driving?

Apparently for all the economic-related punditry, HN still doesn't understand economics. Jim, you do realize that "inflated" (relative term of course, since Uber is more expensive than taxis in some markets) is still part of the supply-demand curve, no? You absolutely have both. Go read a textbook before you chime in next time, k?

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> or do you want supply and demand? You can't have both

There's tons of examples where supply-and-demand gets balanced with other considerations. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.

There is a lot of debate on whether you should tip an Uber: https://www.buzzfeed.com/venessawong/theres-still-no-consens...

I switched to Lyft a while ago but I never would cash tip my Ubers and I had a full 5 stars.

Anecdata: has never been an issue for me and I never tip uber drivers---in app or cash. No uber driver has ever asked me for a cash tip (perhaps they know that it would lead to a low rating?)

I'm skeptical, as one who hasn't cash tipped since they added tipping in the app. I'm 4.68 or so, after many hundreds of rides. Sometimes my rating drops, though, and I struggle to recap events to figure out why: he got mad because I asked to turn down the radio? He thinks I'm mad at him for making a wrong turn? and so forth. But since one of the main draws of Uber is the cashlessness of it all, I bet that's old r/uber news.

There is a middle ground.

In Australia, the standard for a nice restaurant is that you get full table service, and when you're finished, you just walk up to the front counter to pay.

That way you get the best of both worlds.

Same in Japan.

Can't you just always do that anyway? Especially if you invite lots of people and don't want to handle lots of money infront of your guests... (and you don't use cards)

In many sit-down restaurants, the main counter is just for the host to seat customers and you have to pay your server directly.

For some reason that's a thing in America but mostly for breakfast places (Original Pancake House, for example).

Be that as it may, the point of the article is that San Francisco, and by extension other popular cities that have undergone real estate booms, will eventually turn into largely empty concrete shells populated by increasingly older elites who despite their wealth won't be able to buy a bagel or dry clean their coat anymore because of unfavorable labor market economics.

On top of that, people will also not be employed anywhere doing those jobs, eventually. just like there aren't really travel agents anymore.

I completely agree. I'm really glad more and more places are experimenting with getting rid of servers because it has a huge potential upside for the customer experience, as well as saving both the customer and the restaurant money.

Red Robin has had the tablet thing for a few years now, you pay on the tablet and it lights up green when you're good to go, you can just leave after that. That sounds like your main complaint; personally I've eaten at enough chinese places that getting my bill from a sluggish staff and getting out has never been a big problem... I want the tablet expanded to the rest of the experience at Red Robin (and elsewhere) though -- tap my order, tap for refills, things delivered and taken away via robot... Maybe one day.

Chili's has a table kiosk. It would be fine but for the fact that many deviations (including Chili's own gift cards) fail without explanation, requiring manager intervention. And the manager inevitably fails to process the promos (free drink or chips), requiring another intervention (e.g. splitting the promo items to another check, then comping it).

Every single egift card fails. And the bonus cards don't even have QRcodes, and there is no way for the patron to enter them. It's just stupid.

> Waitstaff-less high-end restaurants expand the audience and frequency of visits of people who can now enjoy these better-than-Chipotle dining experiences.

Better-than-Chipotle dining experience is not a definition of a high-end restaurant. You at most hit the bistro-class.

Wow. This comment is super hilarious!

If the wait staff had smartphones with Square, they could save two roundtrips to the table. Those readers aren’t even expensive.

This is not a substantive comment to make but calculating a tip is very easy. 15 percent of course is that standard amount. That is 10 percent plus 5 percent. Finding ten percent is as easy as moving the decimal over one place. If the bill is 15.69 ten percent of that is one dollar and 56 cents. Call it 1.50. we know that five percent is half of ten, so just divide that number in half and add it. So half of 1.50 is .75 and 1.50 plus .75 is 2.25. it's very easy.

Part of the problem here is the 'tradition' of tips being a portion of the staff's wage.

I'd prefer to see the 'tip' build in to the prices, workers paid a living wage, and any tip being purely an optional thing for great service.

I think if you asked a lot of server’s they prefer the below-minimum wage based plus tips to a “living wage”.

I know plenty of servers who pull in an equivalent hourly wage of $30 on a good night. They’d get screwed if tips went away and they were paid a living wage of $20 per hour.

There are also the performers that do very well, compared to the vast swaths of starving artist types.

If there is a minimum wage, no field should have an exception for it; that includes the labor working at places that aren't having a busy night with expensive meals.

This is also about benefiting the customers; simple transparent pricing. No variable things added later. I also want /taxes/ to be included in the advertised price (at least on the local menus; national / widely targeted ads should include large text disclaimers)

They get paid minimum wage if their wage + tips do not equal minimum wage.

My customer facing time was in a different industry, HOWEVER, that is not what I heard.

The jist was that the /minimum/ wage was what the worker was required to take home, tips inclusive, and that if they couldn't clear that bar (the restaurant had to pay them more) they were retrained and/or otherwise moved around until they either could or quit on their own.

Sure, they may be fired or moved around. However it's the law that they must make at least minimum wage for the hours worked.

https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/faq/esa/flsa/002.htm

And there are plenty of servers who get absolutely fucked by this system. They don't make nearly that amount in tips, and despite the law saying otherwise, most restaurants won't make up the difference. Wage theft is very common in that industry.

And there are many who make far above the IRS assumed wages for cash/tip based incomes who definitely do not declare that.

subjective experience here. i was once a server, and I'd have greatly preferred a living wage plus token tips.

the worst part being the loophole around minimum wage is that it incentivizes the widespread practice of tip pooling by restaurant owners.

nowadays when you tip your waiter you're also tipping the busser, foodrunner, hostess (and with the recent law change allowing it, the line cook).

it is too easily used as a tool to skirt wage laws by making every employee a tipped one.

Except you did not actually calculate 15% which would be 2.35.

That was intentional when I rounded off 6 cents.

You mean 10 cents. A little more than 6 * 1.5

Maybe it's because I'm in the 50+ age category, but I think tips are confusing for a different reason. Yes, of course, it's trivial to calculate a percentage of an amount. The confusion is in deciding what percentage to give.

15% - 20% is standard, and always has been, for a full service, sit down restaurant. The tip makes some sense, based on the service given to you, some level of tip being roughly commensurate with the amount of service.

But what percentage am I supposed to tip in a restaurant where I order at a counter, bus my own table, and merely have someone bring the order to my table? (FWIW, some McDonalds now do this, yet nobody would ever tip at McDonalds.) What about if they come around and fill my water? What if I order at a counter but they still bus my table?

Moreover, in many places (coffee shops, ice cream shops) there is no wait service at all, the person at the counter merely draws a coffee or scoops some ice cream, yet tips are apparently still expected. Am I really supposed to tip 15% just for someone to scoop me an ice cream cone? Which leads me to another question that has bothered me since way back in the day: Why are bartenders tipped so richly simply for pouring a drink?

15-20% has long been standard for full-service. For lesser service I don't understand why anybody would be expected to tip the same amount. Am I missing something? I gather the younger generation might not think of things in these terms, but why not?

When i’m doing all the work and someone at the counter just hands me food, they get a token $1 tip. If everything goes well.

I’m surprised that you are 50+ and are saying 15-20% “has always” been the standard for sit down full service. I am 40+ and distinctly remember when it was 10%. Then little by little it seemed to morph into 10-15%, then 10%ers were seen as cheap and it was 15%. Then some restaurants would “suggest” 15-18%. Now, just yesterday I was in a restaurant where they pre-calculated 18%, 19%, and 20%. It’s been inflating all my life, for no logical, discernible reason.

Simpler: never tip a percentage. Tip a fixed amount. It makes no sense to me to pay more because I ordered a more expensive dish.

It's not really about how expensive of a dish you order, but about how fancy the restaurant is and how many people you bring with you.

You’re tipping the waiter so that he can make a decent wage, you’re not tipping the waiter so that he can make a fancy wage because his fancy restAurant doesn’t pay him/her. The number of people should also not influence your individual tip.

That's like saying a real estate agent should make $8k regardless of what property they sell.

You could argue that, but only by ignoring practical matters of effort/level of service/value that attends a different price.

The fact that real estate agents are paid by percentage is the most ridiculous thing ever. I'm done with that. Pay 60k commission sales fee on your million dollar house? Houses sell in one week or less where I live. There's literally no reason to pay that money.

The logical-but-not-discernable reason is that the cost of food has gone down as a percentage of income, but the cost of labor has not, and restaurants have used guilt as a tactic to push more and more of those labor costs onto the consumer.

Likely because cost of living has been inflating, and yet the restaurants aren't raising the wages of their workers.

I assume it's a convenient form of the holy grail of suppliers everywhere: price discrimination.

If you can afford a big tip, and social mechanisms shame you into giving it, then great! The restaurant makes a lot of profit.

If you can't, then the restaurant can still make a small profit off serving you anyway.

As for why it'd increase over time... maybe that's just an effect of people getting a bit richer, but the marginal cost of serving a meal not so much?

> I’m surprised that you are 50+ and are saying 15-20% “has always” been the standard for sit down full service. I am 40+ and distinctly remember when it was 10%.

I'm 40+, and when I was in elementary school, pretty much every source I encountered was consistent with 15% as the norm, 20% as a reward for exceptional service, 10% as a signal for tolerable but substandard service, and anything lower as a signal of “abysmal service and I'm only tipping to let you know that I did not forget about the tip to avoid ambiguity.”

Yes, this is consistent with my memories as well.

Honestly, in SF, I'm confused that tips aren't like 50%-200%.

I pay $3600/month in rent for a studio. So you need like $120/day post-tax in order to just make rent (and 2-3x that to qualify for the lease in the first place). So let's say you need $300/day in tips to live here. (That works out to about 109.5k/year -- a respectable entry-level tech salary, but that would be just above the poverty line in SF if you were trying to support a family of four on it.)

Suppose that you have a ramen restaurant that's only open for dinner, seats 29, always has a line out the door, has a cycle time of half an hour, is open for 6 hours a night, and has three servers. Assuming 100% of seats are full (let's say you're the best ramen place in town), that means that each server will get tips from 116 customers a night on a $14 bowl of ramen. To make $300/day, you need an average $2.59 tip on the $14 bowl of ramen for the server alone (never mind any haircut for back staff/tip sharing/the owner takes some to cover fixed costs of the restaurant). $2.59/$14 works out to 18.5%.

In a world where entire apartments in the Mission cost $500/month, sure, you can tip 10% on a meal. But given market rate rents in SF now, the math of a 10% tip just doesn't add up.

If 50%-200% becomes The New Normal and what was be a $8 sandwich becomes a $30 meal (taxes, tip, Healthy SF)... then I'm afraid I'm just not going to eat out at all.

That'll help a struggling service industry worker make ends meet, right?

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Realistically, odds are our hypothetical service industry worker isn't paying a market rate for a studio in the Mission. It's much more likely they're rooming with others in some fashion, and their monthly rent is at most half of $3600. And likely doing the traditional thing and under-reporting cash tip income by a non-trivial margin.

The point is that the rational worker would have left anyway - anything below the lower level to fund existence means it’s already a losing job.

You pay higher to have waiters in the first place.

Essentially, the story of SF is the story of no high density housing.

I dont agree that servers deserve that much above the median pay for this area.

Waiters in SF get paid minimum wage in addition to tips.

> Which leads me to another question that has bothered me since way back in the day: Why are bartenders tipped so richly simply for pouring a drink?

This and delivery from a shop you order often from are the only form of tipping that makes any sort of sense whatsoever to me (at least common forms of tipping).

It's bribery so you get good service the next time. At a busy bar it's worth every dime to tip 100% that first drink and then a dollar or two after that. You will jump the 10 deep line at the bar no problem.

Same goes for food delivery - get to know the couple drivers at the local Thai place and be known as a great tipper - you'll get service above and beyond.

Any other tipping seems like it's utterly pointless as a consumer. Why tip after the fact - typically at 15-20% for merely acceptable service. Even if I'm a heavy tipper, the server has zero way to know it so I get just as good of service as anyone else.

...your math is wrong, so maybe it's not that easy after all

I approximate a 20% tip by rounding up the (post-tax) total to the next $5 increment and then dividing by 5, e.g. $123.45 bill -> $25 tip.

Alternately, in cities with ~8-10% sales tax, you can double the sales tax and round up.

Why all this work? Just multiply by two and move the decimal to the left. 54 -> 108 -> 10.8. 37 -> 74 -> 7.4.

Everyone's brain works differently. :) I find division towards smaller numbers easier than multiplication towards larger numbers.

15 percent is most definitely not the standard amount in San Francisco, unless you want some stink-eye with your dessert.

In fact I don't think there's anywhere in California where 15 percent is considered normal anymore. Where I'm from (small town) nobody will be offended if you tip 15%, because you're more likely to be poor than cheap. But even there, 15% is undertipping in 2018.

The math is the smallest part of the tipping problem, IMO.

Personally for me easier is looking at the halfway point between 10% and 20%. So for 15.69 it would approximately be between 1.5 and 3.1 (1.5 + 1.6/2) = 2.3