> If it switched to fixed hourly pay, they'd be taking a pay cut since there is no way their hourly pay would be $30/hr.
Why not? I live in a country with no tipping culture and we have no problem paying service industry workers this much.
Why not? I live in a country with no tipping culture and we have no problem paying service industry workers this much.
As for cost of living, my first job was doing 20 hour weeks at a McDonald's as a teenager. It paid enough for me to live very comfortably just 5 minutes outside of a major city (>1mil population). Obviously that's not too relevant to the tipping discussion since fast food workers aren't typically going to get tipped anywhere, but it serves as a demonstration of the living conditions a developed country should be able to provide, and tipping is entirely non-existent here so it's clearly not necessary to ensure that those working in service industries are fairly compensated.
The amount of Americans I see casually mentioning that they need to work multiple jobs scares the crap out of me.
And the COL still stands. $30/hr won’t get you far in Sydney.
I really don't see how you pay them that much.
But they're apparently already getting paid that much! Either people are drastically misrepresenting how much waitstaff take home in tips, or there's enough money in the economy to pay them that much.
These two points mean there’s no guarantee a tipped wage would convert 1:1 into an hourly wage if we simply removed tipping, even if the value provided by the tipped employee stays constant.
I don't really see how this is any different to me going into an American restaurant today and having the waiter's pay be at the discretion of myself, and in competition with what could be my money. At the end of the day it's still a person deciding how much money to give the waiter, knowing that they can keep any that's left over.
> I’m probably paying more too because of being guilted into feeling like I must tip x% because I’m directly responsible for the person’s wages.
Entirely plausible, but I see eliminating this consequence of tipping to be a huge positive. If a significant portion of someone's pay relies on guilt, then clearly the actual service they're providing isn't worth what they're being compensated for.
This is part of why we don't make sales based on commission in retail stores any more; usually sales in general aren't boing to be affected by service as much as volume of customers into the store. Same I bet w tips