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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

If anyone here has been to Japan, tipping is handled much more elegantly and with a lot more business integrity.

Instead of guilt-tripping customers into tipping, businesses in Japan up their prices if they need more money.

I remember once when I was in Osaka I was at a really good sushi place that I had visited several times prior. There was no tip option on the receipt (didn't see it anywhere in Japan) and there was no tip jar. I asked the server if I could tip.

She told me they couldn't accept my tip because they believed the food was priced correctly.

It was a totally different experience than in America where not tipping gets you poor service and unhappy waiters.

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In Japan, a tip can often even been seen as offensive. "What, you work at a curry shop? Here's a few hundred yen you poor thing." sort of message that is implied by tipping.

Used to be that way in the US too. Quoting from https://www.marketplace.org/2016/04/22/world/ugly-history-ti... :

> Tipping actually originated in the aristocratic homes of feudal Europe.... When tips came to the United States in the late 1850s, 1860s, there was a massive anti-tipping movement. It was actually considered to be undemocratic, un-American.... Well that movement, which came right around the time of the emancipation of the slaves, was squashed by the restaurant industry, which argued that they should have the right to hire newly freed slaves and not pay them anything as valueless people and essentially let them live on customer tips. And so many of the first tipped workers in the United States were former slaves.

And from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12tipping-t.html... :

> After the Civil War, wealthy Americans began traveling to Europe in significant numbers, and they brought the tip home with them to demonstrate their worldliness. But the United States, unlike Europe, had no aristocratic tradition, and as tipping spread — like “evil insects and weeds,” The New York Times claimed in 1897 — many thought it was antithetical to American democratic ideals. “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape,”

What some of us left Europe to escape. The irony of a monolithic ‘we’ at the New York Times lamenting a return to aristocracy. I understand it was 150 years ago, still comical.

Exactly in Korea too. Tipping is often considered as if a generous rich guy throws their money to a poor man with sympathy.

I think tipping is very rare in most of asian countries.

It used to be this way. But American tourism has spread tipping to many countries.

It is quite opposite way from the Korean's point of view - Korean tourists learn about the tipping culture when being asked for the tip by an American waiter for the first time in their life.

Our worst export, surely.

I would say the worst export was a hard stance against drugs.

And sugar-heavy foods (coca-cola and soft drinks, sugar-heavy processed foods, etc)

I remember someone on reddit said there was a coffee shop in Iceland that tried to be American-themed, and it had a fake tip jar with fake bills and coins in it, just to look like it would in America.

That sentiment is baked into the culture here. I will never not tip a barista for handing me a muffin.

I have heard a subtly different explanation: it is considered rude to judge and tipping is in fact judging. Also, it implies that a business could deliver a substandard service, which is also judgemental.

My parents didn't know when they went to Japan; they tipped at a restaurant and walked out the door. They were promptly chased down the street and their money handed back to them.

I had the opposite experience in Raleigh, North Carolina. My family and I ate at the ten ten Chinese buffet and when we paid I, as a good European, didn't add a tip, it just never occurred to me and anyway the only service we had received was a waiter slopping pink lemonade into glasses from a jug as he wandered around the tables.

We were chased by an irate waiter asking why I hadn't tipped. So I tipped him a single dollar bill to make it clear how little the service was worth.

No tipping policies in the US will never work as long as tips are untaxed. Otherwise, it is a lose-lose. Diners pay more than with tipping, servers' take-home pay is reduced. That is why most restaurants that have tried no-tipping have gone back to it.

...tips are taxable income: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/are-tips-taxable-irs-offers-tip... .

They're just hugely underreported because the kinds of people that work off tips are people making $2.15/hr instead of actual minimum wage (which is still criminally low). That's what needs to change in this equation - paying workers what they are due.

Only cash tips are untaxed, and only if the worker evades taxes by not reporting them. Given how common card tipping is (and the article is entirely about this) I don't imagine it makes a particularly big difference.

Tips are not untaxed.

Many servers just don't bother to report cash tips (aka: tax fraud).

Spoilers: Tips are taxed. It's just that loose cash without a paper trail is extremely hard to track for the IRS and most waiters aren't committing enough fraud to warrant the manpower.

Tipping won't go away until restaurant owners stop being dorks about the whole matter. They also benefit because the unaccounted for tips don't count as income to them, and thus they benefit as well.

The bottom line is, patrons get sticker shock when they see the real price of a meal. This happens when restaurants change prices after a few years because the cost of product goes up, or if they switch to paying a living wage to their employees. If the culture as a whole doesn't switch, then people are just going to keep supporting poor labor practices by the industry because they typically have their own issues to focus on.

>>That is why most restaurants that have tried no-tipping have gone back to it. Citation absolutely needed. Many restaurants have never tried it, and many of the restaurants that have tried it kept it.

The person who receives the tip needs to declare that as income.

Tips are taxable.

You could probably get away with shortchanging the IRS where tips were all cash but with cash declining on a value + volume perspective I think those days will be behind us soon enough.

I think a big factor in restaurants trying, and failing to implement no-tipping is that society expects to do it. A good portion of people just won't accept not doing it.

Used to be like this too in much of Europe, but now they expect tips from you if they think you're American.

It's true, but I reckon[1] I can ask for the bill in 6 European languages :-)

I've had Danish waiters press the "No tip" button on their machine. One of them even said it was only used for "foreigners", which I took to mean Americans.

[1] Bad Anglo-German pun?

[1]: vielleicht

Every place has their customs. The Japanese may not tip, but they have different customs and you have to follow them. Nobody is going to take kindly to you if you say "hey, I'm a sovereign citizen, I won't use the appropriate honorifics and I'll keep my shoes on thank you very much!"

a lot of states have a lower minimum wage for tipped employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage

These laws should also force any business using them to visibly post the wage they're paying the employees in question. If the argument is we need to pay charity to these employees then people should see it as such. Guilting customers should cause some shame for the business.

Employers have to make up the difference if tips don't get them there though. No one should be making less than min. The issue is that min wage isn't really enough.

"Employers make up to min wage if you don't get tipped enough" is the biggest joke, because if you don't get enough tips by the end of the night a few times, employers will often slowly push you out by only offering you unfavorable shifts, or outright fire you in states with poor labor protections.

>employers will often slowly push you out by only offering you unfavorable shifts, or outright fire you in states with poor labor protections.

In other words; if you're bad at your job, you probably won't have it for very long. Yeah, well no crap.

This is a weird just world view though, because tips are a lagging indicator of job performance more than anything. If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?

I view the policy which "forces" employers to makeup the differences in pay as the same one that permits them to underpay workers. Perhaps the point in net is the exploitation of the working class in restaurants.

One must question why a subset of the food service industry should be treated so differently than any other. Is the McDonalds restaurant worker (who gets no tip) just doing so well that they don't deserve the same consideration from the public as someone working in a ramen shop? Or does that employee face a different commute and living situation? The delineation is strange.

So, to be clear, I don't actually accept your premise to begin with. I was a waiter for years and never saw this sort of thing. I did see poor waiters get crappy shifts, but... well of course they did. Lacking any actual evidence I don't see where this can go.

>If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?

The point would be to... establish a _minimum_ wage, regardless of performance. What about that is confusing?

When I waited in college this sort of thing happened all the time, but that's kinda beside the point. I guess to me it's weird that tips convey a sense of whether someone "deserves" their wage, whereas there's nothing really dictating why a waiter "deserves" their money more than the cashier at a grocery store. Minimum wage jobs are minimum wage jobs, so is there a particular reason for the custom of tipping (beyond the usual "tipping helps a subset of people make more than minimum wage").

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