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Comment by angryasian | Hacker News Reader

restaurant industry has been doomed for a reset for a long time now. An industry that relies on customers to tip and can't afford to pay their employees fair wages is not one that should be in business. Any other industry, if you can't pay employees you go out of business.

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Restaurants in western countries in general need a reset. In asian countries (even Japan), good food is cheap enough that you can just eat out every meal.

In US, everyone should be able to (and learn to) cook because of high food price (>$10 a dish, really?!?). Eating out every meal here costs a fortune.

Food is cheap in Asia because rice is cheap, there is no tipping, the weather is generally warm year-round and cities are dense (supporting outdoor food stalls).

Anyway, just buy yourself an electric pressure cooker - you can cook 95% of your meals at home easily and eat out for the other special occasions. It just takes additional planning to buy ingredients ahead of time in bulk, and freeze some of them.

Am I the only one to think that if a pressure cooker can cook 95% of your meals then you're a really boring eater?

I mean you can get 100% of your calorie need but you ain’t making sushi in an instant pot

Who has ever made sushi even with a full home kitchen? Cook and prep times have gone down from about 40 minutes on average to 5-10 minutes. Use that liberated time to find more interesting ingredients. With the saute mode and pressure cooking mode, about the only thing you can't do is bake stuff.

Yep and in Japanese culture, tipping is considered rude. In Taiwan, it is rude to not offer to pay first after a lengthy meal with friends or family and tipping is not commonly observed. In the US, some Chinese restaurants will force you to tip with threats of violence (my personal experience while dining with family in a Chinatown restaurant, in lower Manhattan.)

- Japanese culture's do's and don'ts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4rLtlx7o1Y

What's with the nerds' fascination with Japanese culture? And those do's and don'ts are either wrong or hopelessly outdated.

It's a function of cost of operating a business and the cost of living. With rising rents both in commercial spaces and housing, I would assume it's hard to pay a fair wage. Mom and Pop shops are affected but corporate restauranteurs can weather it.

This doesn’t necessarily refute your point about restaurants being fucked, but with tipping, aren’t customers paying the same either way? If I tip $5 on a $20 steak or pay $25 for a steak at a place where tipping isn’t allowed and waiters are paid directly doesn’t that equal out at the end of the day?

I get that the catch is that many people tip poorly, and so for many people prices would in fact functionally increase leading to different decision-making around how much “restaurant” they consume. But that doesn’t feel like enough to say it would be impossible. Plenty of non-American countries have vibrant restaurant culture without tipping.

Tipped employees are legally paid well below the federal minimum wage, as long as their tips make up the shortfall to average minimum wage over the pay period. In theory, if you don’t make minimum wage after tips, your employer is legally obligated to pay you the difference. However, wage and tip theft by employers is rampant, and not all employees which contribute to table service are tipped out by servers. I’ve heard of many employers blaming employees for not making enough in tips to meet the minimum wage, and hold it against them in terms of work performance.

It’s a really sad state of affairs. Tips aren’t the problem. Minimum wage not tracking productivity is a major issue. So is the minimum wage hierarchy where tipped employees are not paid a living wage to begin with, and tips are not going to solve wage or tip theft.

I have a couple of anecdotes here. I was paid $3/hour when the state's minimum wage was around $8/hour (NC, 2010 or so) and the employer did make up those hours where it was < $8/hour with tips, although that was exceedingly rare (generally why front-facing food service workers don't like opening shifts).

Many of my friends now are restaurant workers and all of them are paid state minimum wage. I don't know if it's just California that doesn't allow wages below minimum even for tipped employees, but it was interesting to see the difference because it's a real boon to their pay. If it had been like that when I was in food service, I would've made $5/hour more which is not insignificant at those levels.

> Tipped employees are legally paid well below the federal minimum wage

And there are other ways this plays out like in places that don't normally have tipping (counter sales) or rather their employees aren't classified as "tipped employees". I've seen more and more places adding a tip option to their POS (it's normally just a checkbox on the backend) and it's done to get away with paying a lower base rate (still well above the tiny tip wage which some around $3/hr IIRC, think $13-15/hr) and foist some of the employee's paycheck onto the customers through guilt.

Tipping, as I understand it, was/is supposed to be a way to show how someone went above and beyond. Nowadays it's just a 20% tax you have to pay on top of everything. It's a scam and I hate tipping even more when I'm not being waited on. I still do it because I know how this plays out (re: employees need/rely on those tips) but it always makes me mad to be asked to tip when someone just handed me something from the kitchen/case/etc. I'd much rather all prices go up by 20% instead of the business owner hiding behind guilt tipping so they can make prices look lower and get away with paying employees less.

I don't expect I'll ever see it in the US but I would love for tipping to go away completely.

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