Service disrupted because bus driver/garbage collector / teacher/hotel employee strike? How dare those selfish underpaid and overworked peasants stand up for reasonable hours! They should consider themselves lucky they have a job at all! (It should be: how dare the corporations or federal agencies pay so little to their employees that their only recourse was to risk their livelihood by walking off the job)
How about that case where the teacher used her health insurance to pay for an impoverished student's pills? She committed insurance fraud, she's just raising rates for everyone else! (Never mind that rates will be as high as an insurance company can legally get away with in this insane profit driven healthcare industry)
Or the housing crisis. Stupid proletariat, taking loans they knew they couldn't afford! Why didn't they educate themselves? (Instead of 1. Why weren't banks doing due diligence 2. Why were banks allowed to not do due diligence 3. Why the fuck don't they teach us basic financial skills in elementary school?)
It doesn't work that way either, but that's the rationale.
Forcing people to tip to ensure people get paid enough money is a consequence of the system, not the reasoning why the system is implemented.
A more interesting and useful comparison would be to poll individuals who have held similar service industry jobs in countries that do and do not have tipping cultures, and ask them which they preferred and why.
And/or a craven attempt by employers to further deflect any responsibility for responsibility for paying their employees. I noticed that the Curb app bumped the default tip rate to 25% at some point. I'm guessing that's somehow, directly or indirectly, leading to them or taxi companies getting to keep a larger cut of the fares.
Tipping really is a method for the employer to hold onto as much money as possible at the expense of staff.
So it sounds like it is absolutely used as a bad way to supplement wages.
>It doesn't work that way either, but that's the rationale.
Indeed. The on the ground reality is that tipping does not serve this purpose. I don't know if it ever did, to be frank. Studies[0] generally show little to no correlation between performance and amount tipped.
And the reality is that tipping is the reason invoked in many state laws for paying restaurant workers less than minimum wage. Tipping is the reason they get paid poorly, and I always find it problematic that people invoke tipping as a way to help people, when it is the cause of their low wages. In those states, tipping is a big win for the restaurant owner. The customer pays more money out of his/her pocket, and the waiter often does not get much money.
Unlike others, though, I do not consider this wage theft (even at a moral level). We don't tip for many other services that we receive, and the problem of how those workers are compensated doesn't cross our mind. Why do we insist that tipping some category of workers has a moral component whereas others do not? Fixing those laws will be a challenge as long as tipping is commonplace.
[0] Example: https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
(Taking off my pink hat)
(Yes, I do contribute to their poor wages by tipping. Have to conform somewhat to society!)
In reality, the system in the US is what it is because of the mostly random process of cultural development.
Changing cultural norms is not easy in any society, even if you have good logical arguments against them.
This is absolutely fucking hilarious.
I swear someone who is not from the US is going to quote your throwaway account as being gospel about how things are changing in the US.
Thank your for making my day brighter with your humor.