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Comment by PurpleBoxDragon | Hacker News Reader

>A very easy, relatively pleasant way to get through life in the US if you're well-off enough that you routinely buy coffee in expensive coffee shops: just always tip. Anywhere there's a tip line. You never have to figure anything out, and sometimes people really appreciate it.

This echoes the sentiment that 'if you can't afford to pay a X% tip, you can't afford to buy the product'. Problem is that it seems to keep going up. It use to be 10, then 15, now it is closing in on 20 and in some areas 22 seems to be the expected. How far does this logic extend? If you can't afford to tip 50% then you can't afford it?

My preferred reaction has been to begin avoiding places where tipping is an option.

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Tips shouldn't be expected if you're on regular minimum wage rather than the tipped wage.

Maybe service workers should wear badges showing their hourly wage, then customers would know how much they should tip. /s

In my province in Canada, we have one minimum wage, $15 per hour, and at least 15% tip is still very much expected.

Even in the U.S. if your tips + tipped worker minimum wage fail to reach untipped worker minimum wage, your employer pays the difference (1).

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

I encourage you to talk to service workers to see how often this happens

It's illegal. They can sue the restaurant.

As far as I can tell most servers like tips because it lets them earn much more money than minimum wage.

Also, nowadays it's quite easy to get a message out to a huge audience. I'd certainly boycott any place that were so horribly mistreating its employees.

Seriously, go over to reddit and read /r/legaladvice for a while.

The almost daily litany of posts of "my employer is doing (list of highly illegal things involving wages), what should I do" will be a pretty big wakeup call for you. And if you think "well they can just sue" is an easy answer, remember employees who are identifiable as the source of wage complaints are at risk of being fired. That's illegal, too, but do you really think an employer who's already breaking labor laws will be scrupulous about not retaliating?

Also, these folks will really open your eyes (click through to the full report linked at the bottom):

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Their data (2012) showed that the amount recovered from wage claims against US employers was three times the dollar value of all robberies in the US combined. Just the amount recovered; the amount actually owed but not paid is likely to be larger.

> Also, nowadays it's quite easy to get a message out to a huge audience. I'd certainly boycott any place that were so horribly mistreating its employees.

Then get ready to boycott 80% of restaurants in North America. It's a hugely abusive industry

Yeah I remember when 15% was a good tip and 10% was socially acceptable. Today, even 15% can subject you to social criticsm.

Expected tip is definitely going up.

I find that no one really bothers with the math anymore. If the bill is $11 most people will just put $1.50 or $2.00 rather than work out a fixed percent.

Personally, I feel like if I calculate an exact 15% to the penny, I'm being petty. So I'll typically calculate the exact tip, then round up.

Higher tipping expectations are generally matched by higher discounts on the pre-tip price. So there is no limit, and that's not itself an issue.

This NEVER happens from a economic incentive standpoint.

Restaurant owners NEVER say "Oh look, expectation for tipping in the general public is up 5% this year, let's cut down our menu prices to balance this out."

I don't know what logic is behind your statement - could you please elaborate?

Not 'this year', but 'this decade'.

> Restaurant owners NEVER say "Oh look, expectation for tipping in the general public is up 5% this year, let's cut down our menu prices to balance this out."

What they do is take advantage of their ability to cut server pay instead of increasing menu prices, when that is possible. And higher tips make more of that possible.

Are you saying that restaurant owners are charging the same amount that they would if tips were 10% lower? Because I'm pretty sure margins are low enough to make that impossible.

Waiters take home ~$20/hr. If tipping culture changed such that waiters made $25/hr the restaurant can't reduce prices to compensate because the are already being paid the minimum wage of 2.15. They can't legally cut server pay. Likewise if tipping culture changes such that waiters made 15/hr they wouldn't get a $5/hr raise, because servers are already overpaid relative to equivalent untipped jobs.

> Waiters take home ~$20/hr.

The BLS stats have it at $10/hour or $20k per year:

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/mobile/....

There are some people who are well paid but they’re generally in expensive areas and there aren’t very many of them. It’s like looking at Waymo engineers and making a general statement about software developer income country-wide.

The other problem is that where you say “can’t” is often “shouldn’t but do anyway”. It’s not hard to find people complaining about owners illegally taking some portion tip income, shifting expenses to workers, or otherwise lowering the effective income for what is already not an easy job.

I've known plenty of waiters, and none of them made $10/hr. The cities were Austin, Dallas, Houston, and Galveston. They all reported making 15-20/hr.

I usually trust the BLS numbers, but in this instance I think they might be off. They collects numbers from corporations, who can usually just report salary. But with heavily tipped positions they don't know how much the waiters earn except how much they declare for tax purposes as the end of their shift. And all my waiter friends who were making 15-20/hr were reporting $10/hr.(Almost all credit card tips).

This is similar to being a delivery driver, everyone was making $20/hr but the ledgers all said we were making 10.

Restaurant owners definitely track how much their customers are paying for meals and correlate it to how much business they're doing, both in terms of number of customers and in terms of revenue per customer.

They know that their customers judge the night based on total cost, which includes tips and taxes. That's why restaurant owners tend to be so militant about local meals taxes.

Restaurant owners do not ignore tips when setting prices, or when setting wages. It's kind of nuts to think that they would.

They don't lower the prices; they just fail to raise them. I.e., the costs of paying their employees would have gone up, and thereby forced them to raise (visible) prices; but since what went up instead is the societally-expected tip, their employees have already had their compensation adjusted to match inflation, and so the employees are not costing the employer any more than previously, and so the employer doesn't need to raise the base price of the good.

And if an owner has to raise the prices because of an increase of the rent, or because of a spike in the cost of coffee, why are the waiters going to get a cut out of that?

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