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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

Tipping needs to go. It's discriminatory and a PITA. But I think the only way we'll get rid of it is if it's made illegal.

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Change the laws that allow businesses to count tips as part of minimum wage and I bet you'd seem them change their tune on the subject right quick.

That's impossible. People's freedom to give other people money on their own volition as a personal gift will not be infringed. We can argue about whether tipping is good or not, but you will not (realistically, it's a non-starter) ban my ability to give it.

Tried tipping a police officer lately? How about a border guard haha.

You absolutely can restrict it. An employer can forbid their employees from taking tips, there are plenty who do so already. There's all sorts of regulation around tipping, and under federal law, employers can require employees to participate in a tip pool or otherwise share their tips with other employees.

That means by extension that the state or federal governments can require employers forbid employees from taking tips. You're free to give anyone you want money in a personal capacity but in a professional capacity their ability to receive it can absolutely be curtailed by the government. There's lots of prior art here, especially around business conflict of interest. You can't tip a government employee for their service.

As a thought exercise, if you go to a restaurant today where tipping isn't permitted, you offer $10 to the server. They refuse, because their employer doesn't permit them to accept tips. What do you do? Force them to take it?

This is a false analogy.

You can choose to go to a different restaurant, you can't choose to deal with another government. Hence the rules should be different.

The rules and regulations of a governmental agency do not need to have any bearing on the rules and regulations of a private business.

Conflict of interest rules apply the same way to governments (foreign and domestic) as they do to any other company you're considering doing business with. You can't give their representatives gifts either over a handful of dollars, if you've ever watched a compliance training video at work. I'm not using this as an analogy, just as prior art in the restriction of your ability to give arbitrary 'gifts' or 'expressions of gratitude for someone having done their job'. I mean, why can't I tip a police officer who came out really quickly to look into my home invasion? It's my money and I'm not paying them to do anything they shouldn't. I'm just grateful they did their job.

The point remains, you can give anyone gifts in a personal capacity, and there are restrictions in a professional capacity.

If you prohibit a tip line on checks and a tip entry on customer operated card machines, it becomes difficult to tip if you don't carry cash. If it's difficult to tip, I can't be expected to tip, and the prices need to be set appropriately, and I don't care if a few people tip.

It's very possible.

If I gave my customers a gift it would be an illegal bribe and I could go to jail. My customers are government.

When I was a teenager I worked at a hospital. One of my coworkers was fired for accepting a $1 tip from a patient, we were not allowed to accept any money or gifts from patients or families.

“If I gave my customers a gift it would be an illegal bribe and I could go to jail. My customers are government.”

That’s a flawed analogy. The server is not a customer.

The employee of a bank that approves your loan is not your customer, you are his/hers. Go get a credit card or a loan and try tipping the bank's employee. That's a certain way to get them fired.

I was replying specifically to

"People's freedom to give other people money on their own volition as a personal gift will not be infringed"

There's many situations in life where personal gifts are inappropriate, unwelcome, or illegal. I just gave an example.

You could also make the same argument to defend the "casting couch," yet we seem to have moved past that being defendable.

I totally agree with you. I was referring to the analogy. The context of your analogy wasn’t clear.

Tipping is banned legally and culturally more than it's allowed.

It should be illegal to voluntarily give your own money to a server as a reward for good service?

Yeah, if it improves welfare of the wait staff, forcing the employer to pay a living wage. The practice is discriminatory, there's lots of data that shows that the distribution of the tips is highly un-equal. The state already permits things like pooling, so it has the right to restrict tipping entirely. Further, tipped employees are allowed to be paid an absolute pittance well below minimum wage, which doubles down on the impacts of the discriminatory distribution.

Could or should are different questions, but you're intentionally reducing the conversation to something much simpler than it really is.

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