“Have you tried offering more?” “That’s too much for cosmetology work.”
Getting slapped by the invisible hand of the market.
Now a haircut is $50 and I no longer go, opting instead to cut my own hair w help from my girlfriend.
Maybe people don’t want $50 haircuts.
They just bumped the price by 5 bucks and dispensed with the pricing trickery by paying proper wages.
And I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. Coming from Europe I also thought initially that tipping was really weird, but after living with it for a decade+ I got used to it and I'm really curious as to why we should stop doing it.
The correlation between "great service" and getting a good tip is nowhere near a 1:1. It sucks to go to work and not know whether you're going to come home with enough money to pay your bills this week, because you might get lucky or you might get a stream of tightwads.
I'd be OK with tipping if people made a baseline living wage and the tips were for service above and beyond the usual. I'm not OK with the current standard.
If you can't be persuaded that it's unfair to the workers, realize it's also unfair to you as a customer. Because people can't be reliably counted upon to tip their fair share, you need to over-tip if you care about people making a fair wage.
And the perception of a "fair" tip has gone up noticeably in my lifetime -- 10-15% used to be a reasonable tip when I was in my teens and early 20s. Now it's crept up to 15-20% and spread to a lot of jobs that you didn't think of for tips (e.g., somebody handing you a coffee) because wages suck.
...And, importantly, there's no way to actually know this because it's all informal.
I keep hearing that some places are now expecting 25% tips, while others are still repeating the older 15-20% figure. Some transportation workers (cab drivers, hotel courtesy van drivers) expect tips—others, in exactly the same job but a different company, don't expect them or even refuse them.
The informality of it all is one of the biggest reasons why tipping culture needs to die, and be replaced with actually paying workers a fair amount to start with.
A couple days ago I had my oil changed at once of those drive-through places and the payment terminal had a prompt for a tip.
As a customer, I want to know the real costs ahead of time.
As an employee (last received tips some 30 years ago, but still…) I would like to get paid for the work I did, not that 50% of my pay would be contingent on how authentic I can make my fake smile look on a stressful day.
I usually tip 20% wherever I am because I am too lazy to figure out the local culture and because I can afford to; but I seriously hate it.
Visiting Germany 15 years ago was a bliss in this respect - the expectation was to round up to the nearest euro, if any tip at all. But I understand that now, at least in Berlin, 10%-20% tip has become the norm.
It undermines the norm that businesses should pay their damn taxes.
To wit, we have been able to put off discussing the non-profitability of restaurants for far too long until now. Remember, it is quite arguable that Baumol's cost disease = "progress", not by definition, but by bi-implication.
Also covid and those ipad paying terminals have turned every job into a tip job. Every cashier wants a tip now. And they ask you if you want to tip becasue no one can touch the terminals. Which is awkward to say no to. I see/hear people leaving ridiculous tips for take out. I had one terminal for take out not have a "no tip" option. I had to manually type in $0.
Tips are income already, and are taxed as such. You can get away with not reporting it if it's a few extra bucks from a jar on a counter. But if you're a "tipped employee" (and thus eligible to be paid sub-minimum wage) you report them to your employer, who then reports them to the IRS, and does tax withholding same as for wages.
I'm not following your point. Since some people cheat on their taxes, they shouldn't be paid wages instead, because then they wouldn't be able to underreport as easily?
> Since some people cheat on their taxes, they shouldn't be paid wages instead, because then they wouldn't be able to underreport as easily?
How did you get this from what I said? I said nothing to that effect. Not even close. My point was very simple.
The house gets a percentage per head. You're really tipping.
I've just impoverished one barista at Starbucks because today I went to Cafe Nero instead! And I'm no longer a regular at my local Italian joint, so I've just deprived a few more people of an income.
For some reason you think this is about sticking it to the man but it's not. The staff get a stable, living wage and the business is charging prices much more in line with reality. I'm also no longer personally liable for the income of whoever served me, because the rightful responsibility for that lies on the employer.
As an individual customer, not likely since line workers' pay does not directly depend on the number of customers served (at least until it's so low that the business goes under and they have to move to unemployment benefits instead). Tips depend on each customer though, so if you chose Starbucks over Cafe Nero, and Starbucks barristas don't get tips, but Cafe Nero's ones customarily do, then yes, your choice had influence on the income of Cafe Nero's barrista. Probably a small one, but it's there. If neither barrista gets tips (I've never seen anybody to tip a Starbucks barrista but in smaller shops it happens sometimes, though much less frequent than with waiters) then there's not much difference from a single individual action.
If your girlfriend can do it for you, that's worth a lot more than the money saved. So in my view once you have established that your girlfriend can do it, that is the better choice regardless of price.
$50 or look like I've got the mange? I'll pay the $50!
The economics and behaviors may change, but the need won't go away.
If Khrushchyovkas are ugly but efficient apartments, then let's call the hair style a "Khru cut" hee hee hee.
Automobiles replaced horses, did I miss the memo on something replacing hair growth?
Men have been giving it a shot for a while, but unfortunately being half bald hasn't yet resulted in commensurate reductions in haircut prices compared to other men. It seems like there's a business opportunity there for a business model based on prices weighted by hair quantity.
Horses and barns still exist as a luxury, and that could be the fate of fancy cuts too.
All we're seeing is a population struggling to accept their dollar is rather suddenly worth much less, there's a significant latency to such things sinking in. It can even be generational, some people never learn.
Case in point: When I bought some land in 2018 I paid the asking price, which I thought was perfectly reasonable vs. FMV. When some neighbors came by and welcomed me to the neighborhood, they asked what I paid. When I told them they were shocked and said I overpayed by a lot. This was in 2018, pre-pandemic prices, and the neighbors were an elderly couple who had once owned multiple properties on the block. Their perception of FMV was completely out of touch with reality, and just months later nearby properties similar to mine were selling for 20-50% more than I had paid, still pre-pandemic. Now that the pandemic has completely shocked everything from increasing demand for rural property accessible to city centers, to printing what, trillions of dollars? My place would sell for over double what I paid in 2018, and my elderly neighbors would still be believing it's worth less USD than I paid in 2018, if they were still alive.
Sure, just as is their demand for horses.
> All we're seeing is a population struggling to accept their dollar is rather suddenly worth much less, there's a significant latency to such things sinking in. It can even be generational, some people never learn.
https://twitter.com/JWMason1/status/1426245765437952010 it's far from universal across prices. The fact we where so much about prices and not about wages indicates a big bias in which these yeomen-presenting small businesses control the narrative.
I don't own a car, I don't pay for gas. I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary, even with haircuts. If my haircut price did go up, and the barber's wage did too. I do not resent it.
I've definitely noticed prices going up, but have been mostly dismissive of it as either being pathologically pandemic-caused and likely temporary (lumber prices for instance, I happened to be building a new roof throughout the pandemic) or opportunistic vendors not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste and gouging in the fog of the pandemic (a local organics market abruptly increased orange prices 300%/lb a few months ago, without even updating the displayed price).
And you can already find numerous news articles documenting cases of "shrinkflation" in staples like cereals [0], which is just a sneaky way of raising prices. I haven't personally noticed this since I don't consume such goods, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.
My assumption is cost of services rendered by small businesses will be more variable and laggy in responding to the reality. Some will delay increasing prices, some will aggressively do so while the pandemic scapegoat is still fresh, some will just close their doors. When it comes to cases delaying price increases, they'll no doubt be exploring all avenues like cutting staff/hours/wages to eat the difference. The problem is, those cases dragging their feet on raising prices, their mentality likely reflects the mentality of their clientele/community. It's a collective of people operating in denial that shit's getting expensive, and yes, your $50 gets you a haircut, go ask for a raise, USD is inflationary.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/bew...
Are you saying that you see the lack of correlation of the prices in the chart not as evidence inflation is over hyped, but as evidence of an inflation that is still working it's way through the supply chains?
So it's not even an economic argument, "If I pay that I'll go out of business"? It's just a moral one, "They don't deserve that amount of money"?
I can't say I'm surprised, TBH.
If all the cooks, servers, cosmetologists, janitors, lawn care / landscaping, delivery drivers, warehouse workers and so forth stopped doing their jobs... everything would suck real quickly. But somehow we're not willing to pay them a living wage.
I think you're mixing jobs together that really aren't of similar importance. If all the restaurants shut down, nothing much happens. People buy food at the super market for lunch and dinner. If all the landscaping crews stop working, you'll get more natural growth and some trees will at some point reach into the street / path and become annoying. If the cosmetologists go on strike, you get some annoyed women who need to fill their afternoon time with another activity.
If ware house workers, delivery drivers or garbage collectors strike, shit goes south pretty quickly. I've lived in a major Northern European city during a garbage collector strike, and it was silly to look at because it was pretty obvious who'd win when the trash bags started spilling into the road after people kept piling them up.
That’s the idea behind a general strike I believe, but coordination is hard (and figuring out a set of demands that is effective long term may be harder).
/me once stayed in Athens during a garbage collectors’ strike; didn’t suck as much as you’d think, but was undeniably spectacular
It's a denial/delayed acceptance of inflation/cost-of-living increases.
These people are struggling to accept that money is worth sufficiently less than it was before to make the status quo untenable.
Or if they have accepted it, they're determined to make the underlings eat the loss.
But a reluctance to change prices at an existing business does not mean we won't get changed prices.
I have seen software companies making a similar mistake. Of course, the salaries there are way above the minimum wage, but still the same logic. They complain: "We wanted to start this new project, but we can't find developers; we have been posting job announcements online for five years already!" I look at the job announcement, it offers about 2/3 of the market salary. "Have you tried offering more?" Blank stares. I guess, how could that possibly be relevant?
Maybe the problem is that the employers see employees as "the ones who obey", which is generally true... except for the job interviews. There, you cannot simply give orders and expect them to be obeyed. The candidate will only take the offer if they like the proposed deal. Also, for the ones who accept, you can gradually make the deal worse, by increasing the workload and keeping salary the same regardless of inflation... until the surprising moment when the employee decides to walk away, because they got a better deal somewhere else.
And to that I say: welcome to the club.
We have this bipartisan love affair with small business, and the fact is many of them are unproductive institutions abusing tons of poor immigrants to stay afloat. They also provide ideological cover for the more labor-intensive actual big corps. It's about time the rose-collard glasses came off.
glasses made of red cabbage? :)
(Rose-coloured, looking through them makes everything look rosy (cheerful, promising, pleasant))
I'm not sure why people think that a barber is somehow able to compete with the infinite resources of the government hellbent on idling labor capacity. Very few rational people will work for 25/hour if they can sit and watch TV for 20/hour. Saying "pay more" is not helpful in that situation. The labor pool is basically limited to those who have enough foresight to realize the gravy train might end.