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Comment by moltar | Hacker News Reader

People normally pay tips for a good service. Making tips mandatory provides no incentive to provide a quality service. If the service quality drops - customers will go elsewhere.

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Every other service business that isn’t a restaurant doesn’t have tips and they seem to be doing fine. What is it with restaurants that makes workers only provide good service because of money? Do food service workers not have any intrinsic motivation to do a good job?

>People normally pay tips for a good service

People in the US and Canada (where this article is about) pay some tips unless they're pissed. I'm not saying this is ideal, just what it is according to my experience.

Again, the topic is about if this is a 18% price increase. My point is compared to the common practice pre-Covid, it's not. I have no argument about if it's going to decrease the service quality or not.

>If the service quality drops - customers will go elsewhere.

Wouldn't that be incentive to provide good service?

I ask because some of the best restaurants in the world do not expect you to tip - ie. Danish restaurants Noma and Alchemist.

I was talking about the North American model where staff are paid basically nothing and they live off of tips.

Europe is another story. Tipping there is not expected. And staff are probably decently paid.

It really depends which part of Europe you are talking about. In Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe one is expected to tip and tips are typically 10-15% of the bill. In Greece you might also get rewarded if you visit the same joint more than a couple of times and tip. In Nothern Europe and Western Europe it's a different story, but meals are also considerably more expensive. In Central Europe and Southern Europe the staff doesn't expect tips but they will be quite grateful if you do tip them. Some places have a fixed service tax as it's the case with Hungary some have a sit down charge as in Italy (< 3 euros) but it's nowhere near 18%. Some enable you to tip a variable amount using the POS such as it's the case in the Czech Republic.

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