Former Labor Secretary Found What Work Is Like Now | Hacker News Reader

Former Labor Secretary Found What Work Is Like Now

jasonstanford.substack.com

236 pointsh2odragon439 comments

It's a shame that the comments here are laser focused on the tipping parts of the article, and not the bigger picture items. The author outlines the struggles of getting service jobs filled in high CoL areas, the vicious cycle of turnover in these jobs, and all the commenters here want to discuss is the 2 paragraphs on tipping.

Indeed. The part about getting your income on an ATM card with mandatory fees no matter what you do seems like the best anecdotal example of how fucked things are for the little guy these days.

For many low-wage employees the alternative to this is check cashing fees which is even worse. The issue of why so many people are unbanked is a separate discussion.

This writer isn't unbanked, though - he's a former labor secretary.

He was charged a "fee" to get his pay despite that.

Having to pay a free to get your pay is ridiculous and should be illegal. Your pay should simply be deposited in your bank account with no other obstacles to access.

Access to banking is indeed a problem, but pragmatically there is always cash or a non-fraudulent [0] check drawn on a local bank. And for tips specifically, they can just be bundled with the rest of the pay rather than creating a second problem.

[0] for example checks drawn on Bank of America accounts are generally fraudulent, as BoA refuses to pay the specified amount when presented for payment at a branch. They're trying to run a similar scam to the ATM card fee described in the article, but they're doing it with the much older technology of checks and thereby inducing their customers to commit check fraud.

Can you explain. You left off your reference, but are you saying boa refuses to pay legit checks or what exactly?

It was a reference to clarification, which was the following paragraph.

https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/where-to-cash-check-wit...

Apparently it's not just BoA, but also Chase, Suntrust, TD, and Wells Fargo now want to demand a nonsensical "check cashing fee" to cash a check drawn on one of their accounts. But the entire purpose of a check is that it is an order to your bank to pay someone an exact amount of money, and thus subtracting such a fee is impermissable. The proper way to assess such a fee would be to the account holder as an additional amount out of their account.

If you're a customer of one of these banks and write someone a check for "$100.00", they are seemingly unable to present it to your bank and receive $100 as you had promised. As such, you have written a bad check and stand to be prosecuted for check fraud.

Of course only the powerless will get tripped up by this corner case, as it's much easier for anyone with a bank account to present the check to their own bank who will turn around and present it via ACH. But I'd love to see someone in just the right position record their interaction with the dishonoring bank, return the dishonored check to the payer, and demand a proper payment plus a $35 rejected check fee.

Wow, that's horrible. Yes, a huge tax on people without bank accounts.

Why single out Bank of America? Nearly every single (big) bank will refuse to cash a check for non-customers. The days of taking a signed check to a local branch for cashing have been over for decades. I'd love to find out why this changed, I suspect it's because they can go after their own customers if a check turns out to be fraudulent but not some guy walking off the street.

It seems like another illegal scam that will rake in a decade of ill gotten gains, then there will be a class action slap on the wrist and a promise not to do it again, while they move on to the next decade's scams. The entire nature of a check is that it is a promise that a third party custodian will pay a specific amount, and the custodian then demanding to take a cut directly invalidates that. I suspect it's monkey-see-monkey-do, unless there is some behind the scenes rule change (Check 21?) that would seem to condone such nonsense.

Keep in mind that the majority of money these days goes through credit card processors that take a percentage off the top. Not saying they don't provide a service for the money, but it doesn't seem that different.

It's very different. The credit card companies are offering credit! And they handle chargebacks! It's not just a bank transfer.

Is it the only aspect of the article that most on this site can relate with? I take it most have not worked service industry or it was a very long time ago.

I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/us/apt-cape-cod-restauran...

> The verbal abuse from rude customers got so bad, the owners of one farm-to-table restaurant on Cape Cod said, that some of their employees cried.

I think this Reddit comment from a use called TheMagecite on parenting during the pandemic might get to some of it: "No.

So lets take my example I have two children one has autism.

What my son desperately needs is social interaction, how do you teach social interaction well without peers? He can't see other children and right now he has such limited exposure to other children he is about to start school and it is a nightmare.

While my son is brilliant in some ways and could read and write at age 3 however his social skills and general understanding are just so far behind. Due to the pandemic normally there would be spots in a special class but so many kids who would have normally progressed just have gone backwards has meant there are zero spots for my child. It also has meant all of the therapies which make the world of difference (and earlier intervention the better) have either been canceled or moved to remote which is no where near as good.

I used to take my son out every weekend and get exposure to kids or take him to water parks and just have fun with them. Now we are sheltered at home with very little to do and we crack out board games but the ipad has probably been his main entertainer. I have work and we have other children but we do make sure it is educational stuff but we still feel tremendous guilt.

I work, we have other children and well while everyone says we have managed to do an amazing job during the pandemic as my son has still progressed which is different from what most other children in his situation have done. My partner and I feel horrible and honestly we are just completely burnt out. We could have done more, we should have done more but I think depression and being burnt out has just fucked us.

I fucking hate myself for this and I probably will feel guilty the rest of my days. I am sick of being told we have done an amazing job considering. Considering Covid doesn't help my child.

This just SUCKS.

Also my child's experience with Autism is probably better than most. I feel horrible for the vast majority which have it worse than me and I can't imagine what they are going through." https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/s8wpsz/covid_p...

Edit: added more context to the comment.

For context, which country do you live in?

Sounds like the US or Canada to me.

I only posted the quote and live in the US. Looking are the Reddit history of the author, I think they likely live in Sidney, Australia.

This is where the overprotective nature of American parenting comes to bite you: your kid will be fine playing with other kids outside, why not… do it?

Not necessarily. Kids with poor social skills get bullied.

I'd counter that getting bullied is a critical component of learning social skills.

Put rails on it with teacher or parent supervision, so it doesn't get out of hand and the worst excesses can be avoided.

But if children can't navigate social situations... they grow up into the adults we are literally talking about.

(Said as someone who had a difficult time socially as a child, and put in and continue to put in considerable work to improve myself)

Social situations in which you're NOT bullied are critical to learning social skills.

Because you’ll be constantly worried about getting Child Protective Services called on you if anything goes wrong or some random neighbor decides stranger danger is real.

While this does happen, this is not normal and CPS isn't going to do anything to a healthy family that let's their kids go out and play.

I would hope not, but how realistic of a concern it is depends on your neighbors, the local CPS folks, and how well you’d come across to them at the time. It adds a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

That near as I can tell no one lets a kid out alone is indicating how big a problem it really is. The most I’ve seen here is when they’re paired up and 12+, and here is one of the safest places in the county in a very child friendly place, literally 2 blocks from the police station - and the police here have some of the best reputations in the country.

This absolutely depends on local CPS, and they have wide authority within their lane. As they should, considering their mission and the interactions and choices they have to make in bad cases.

But it does mean that a lot is subject to opinion. And once you're on the radar, how do you get off? How do you prove you're a good, safe, responsible parent when the judging worker believes otherwise and has some authority to make that fact?

By being a good, safe, responsible parent. You all are acting like CPS pulls kids away from stable homes on the daily. That isn't happening. This is a consequence of anecdote over data, where there is one or two widely bad outcomes and everyone reacts to them, when in reality, this almost never happens.

> on the daily

No, I am not arguing that. I am arguing that the system allows for it to happen a non-zero amount of the time.

And as a consequence of that possibility, the fear of it happened is a reasonably motivating factor in parent behavior.

Which isn't something we can (or should) probably fix. But is something that is.

I, and nearly everyone in my neighborhood let our kids out. I see kids walking up and down my street, by themselves and with their friends every day. Let your kids go out, they and you will be fine.

Where is this?

Here in the bay area, I only know 1-2 areas that are like that, and even then you'll only see teenagers. Might end up moving if one is local! I'm in the lower peninsula area.

I live in Washington, Puget Sound Area. Kids out all the time, plus no income taxes, reasonable property taxes, and a great, though limited tech scene.

The PNW isn't for everyone, but we know how to get outdoors at all ages :).

I think I'd ask that commenter whether that guilt is doing any good for him/her/it. If he's simply unable to do more and it's still not enough, then the problem wasn't going to be solved by anything he could do. He probably still did good. That's unfortunately all anyone can do - good. Can't guarantee success when you "swing that bat", but you can try.

An outcome of little to no consequences for actions.

Come visit my local grocery store. Few replace carts at the store or in the stalls, there will be 2-6 vehicle using the clearly-marked "Fire Lane - No Parking" lane as their personal parking spots plainly blocking the doors of the foyer (and this is not drop-off, not pick-up, not having their spouse load up in a rain storm). Have "About 12 Items or Fewer" - well have fun, there's two carts loaded for bear ready to use the checkout lane.

The manager will watch it all and dare not life a finger nor raise a voice.

The restaurant at which my S/O works, it's in the nice part of town. The nicest part of town you could possibly not afford. For the lunch crowd, there will be a dozen or so regular folks filtering in with absurd, demanding, bespoke requests (I want the meat of sandwich A, the bread off sandwich B, the condiments from an item on the Sunday Brunch menu). The owner will not let them refuse a request. Ever. Regardless of the problems it will cause for everyone around. Regardless of how long it will waste table space. That $18 lunch order must be fulfilled.

The local pizza joint, my go-to spot for two NY slices and a PBR for a cool $7 - they're not allowed to refuse service to rude patrons regardless of how awful. I once had the barkeep slip me a note asking that I (a large, eternally angry looking man) please wait at the bar for another patron to leave and that my drinks would be comped. Why? The belligerent customer refusing to leave, who entered the facility screaming at (we assume) "incompetent cunt" of a secretary.

It's a bit fascinating and frustrating. One makes an off-color joke on Twitter[0], or an elected official makes a frustrated comment about double-standards[1] and a lynch mob forms to harangue a corporation into punishing the textual predator. Some of those same companies (See: [1]) will not oust a belligerent man attempting to start a fight in the produce section over a road rage incident.

It's all appearance over substance.

[0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/anheuser-busch-cuts-ties-w...

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-pulls-palmetto-cheese-fo...

While I agree that "the customer is always right" attitude has actuality just become a policy of non-confrontation...

>I want the meat of sandwich A, the bread off sandwich B, the condiments from an item on the Sunday Brunch menu

If they think bread +meat +condiment is a highly demanding, needy sandwich order, then perhaps waiting tables isn't for them.

It at least suggests why they might find their tip-based compensation to be insufficient.

Gotta love HN entitlement.

It's not just the waitress. It's also the kitchen staff, which has to fulfill the orders. Low-cost special menus like brunch menus make their money on volume. At least half the food service equation relies on the kitchen to whip the orders out in time. Special requests slow the entire kitchen down. Not a problem if, say, there's not a huge rush. But a huge problem if the staff is slammed.

Maybe you should take after the former labor secretary and go try your hand at a service job.

charge more for special orders?

Like, if you're Waffle House and short-order is your bread and butter, sure. But a lot of times the kitchen will pre-set up things so they can get them out as fast as possible. There's a lot of management and prep that goes into cheap Sunday brunch that gets tossed out the window.

Like I said earlier, it's fine during normal biz hours. But the 30 seconds of extra time the kitchen staff has to put into your special order during a huge rush puts all the orders behind it 30 seconds more behind. So a whole family ordering special orders can hold up 20 people's orders for 5 minutes. And that just builds up the more it happens.

That's a capacity and thus a management problem: Invest in more capacity.

I'm sympathetic with the staff, which in every business takes the bullets for management's decisions. Tech support is similar - frustrated with long wait times? Don't take it out on the person answering the phone; it is management's choice.

All factors baked into the managers decision to accept special orders.

This is just the server disagreeing with both the boss and customer, and then wondering why they might be having a problem with a satisfaction based compensation system.

I agreed with your earlier comment and was disappointed to see it in the grey, but both your follow-ups have been lacking, esp. on staff having a problem with something that the management doesn't voice a problem with.

You're ignoring circumstances where the boss okays the thing but doesn't adjust their perspective and still holds the staff to the same expectations—to deliver as if under the same parameters, when the parameters have obviously changed.

You may not know this, but custom orders slow down service sometimes by an order of magnitude.

I worked at a takeout teriyaki joint in college, and it was as fast a food as you could find. There were 5 menu items, and I could really get in a rhythm dishing rice and chicken and coleslaw. But as soon as anyone asked for something non-standard, then suddenly muscle memory was gone, and I actually had to think about what I was doing. Just asking for no salad could halve my serving speed, especially if they asked for at the wrong time of doing the order.

I can only imagine how much worse this is in a setting with multiple people and multiple handoffs.

On top of that, if the restaurant isn't being run like a short order joint, they're going to have other issues with mixing and matching menu items, like now they may have 2 less dishes they can serve, because, believe it or not, ordering for a restaurant can be a very precise thing, and they'll likely order quantities proportional to the menu ingredients. I'm not saying don't do this, but I am saying be polite when you request these kinds of things, and be willing to accept "we can't do that" as an answer.

I'm not arguing for or against allowing special orders. But that's on the manager, not the customer.

The server having an issue with it (when the manager doesn't) is a problem, and blaming customers for making requests is a problem, especially if policy is to allow them.

> Few replace carts at the store or in the stalls

Self-checkout, bag-your-own groceries, return your cart...

Can't help but think this is simply a means by which the grocery cartel can get rid of jobs that high school kids have traditionally benefited from. I guess I have never seen the "cart return" thing as something you do out of politeness.

But if they're not going to pay the high school kids enough, maybe this is the. future (present) we deserve.

> I guess I have never seen the "cart return" thing as something you do out of politeness.

I see it as something you do as a participant in civilization.

Yeah, I once got screamed at by a red-faced old man driving a mercedes because he had to wait 4 and a half minutes for a McChicken sandwich. Old rich people are just the most sociopathic people.

Unfortunately current society rewards sociopathic behavior and selects them for leadership positions.

What really rubs salt in the wound is when those exact same people refer to the poor kids who are just barely scraping by as "entitled". I always think, do you hear yourself?

I'm getting oldish, and I feel like it's my duty to be courteous and pleasant in order to have a civil civil society.

I've long been a fan of being able to fire your customers. This can be done in very civil, very respectful ways.

> I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.

Is it growing, or is it just unpleasant/impolite to state that a large segment of the population consists of jerks so we keep forgetting?

> Is it growing

I'm not sure how to empirically measure incivility but it seems like it might be... There's certainly been an uptick in things from reckless driving to drinking to drug overdoses. There's a lot of anecdata from nurses, airline attendants, teachers, etc. about bad behavior being on the rise.

Maybe it's all just due to the stress of the ongoing pandemic. But, some of the articles below point out that these trends began before the pandemic.

Examples:

[1] All kinds of bad behavior is on the rise https://www.slowboring.com/p/all-kinds-of-bad-behavior-is-on...

[2] As America reopens, businesses — from airlines to arenas — see an uptick in bad behavior https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/as-america-reopens-businesse...

[3] America Is Falling Apart at the Seams https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/america-falling-a...

Correlation is not causation, but we've been on a 50+ year crusade in American culture to destroy any sort of multi-economic-strata commons.

IMHO, the affluent suburbs in the article are both a symptom- and cause-of rudeness. Most of these kids have never worked a customer service job for minimum wage. It's possible even their parents haven't.

And that's not bad, per se, but if the problem is "People treat customer service workers like shit," then you could start at worse places than empathetic employment experience.

Personal vendetta, but Starbucks is emblematic of all that is wrong with American culture. We took the coffee shop -- a local, counter-culture, loitering-tolerant, independently-run staple of American life -- and replaced it with Walmart (+some feel-good PR).

And as a result, any unreasonable adult is catered to, because corporate policy is to make you feel special. When in reality, you should be banned from the premises after your second meltdown. /gripe

I wonder, we only tend to remember that one asshole today not the other 50 people who were normal.

The a-holes are becoming the rule and not the exception. Just my experience, though.

“large segment of the population consists of jerks “

I think it starts at the top. People are realizing that companies are run for the benefit of a few and these few also have an outsized influence on politics. It’s not surprising that people are feeling disenfranchised and mainly out for themselves.

For me the 2008 bailouts were the turning point. A lot of the Wall Street people who had preached “creative destruction” for a long time suddenly demanded government bailouts when the destruction reached them. And unfortunately they were given bailouts. And they were given the bailouts in a way that mainly benefitted the wealthy while homeowners still lost their homes. Same happened with Covid: the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. No wonder a lot do people don’t feel at home in this society anymore.

I think it's social media. I quit social media years ago. I've also noticed people becoming just increasingly hostile for "no apparent to me reason".

It's funny. We used to joke about how IRC turned everyone into an asshole, in the 1990s.

And then we recreated that same factory (Facebook, Twitter) and signed the world's entire population up.

The tipping situation is absolutely stupid, but hardly the only problem. And shitty entitled customers contribute to both issues here: they treat employees poorly, and they tip poorly. Businesses should probably just kick those customers out. If you can't behave like a decent person, the business shouldn't have to accept you as a customer.

Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself. If these service jobs are terrible enough, nobody will do them anymore, and those customers will just have to cook their own food, or accept shitty overpriced service from the few companies willing to serve them, and willing to pay employees enough to deal with that shit.

But it will be a loss to all decent people who treat people with respect and want to pay well for good service. If you want to keep those, your only option is to kick the entitled assholes out. Or you'll have no employees left.

> Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself.

We're at where we are because of market forces. I doubt the market will "correct itself" when the market doesn't see anything wrong.

The way this gets ‘fixed’ will be hilarious to see. Maybe low cost housing provided by a mega-corp but paid by the taxpayer.

Higher wages will not be the solution I’m sure.

We already have a portion of that with minimum wage being paid to 100s of thousands of Walmart workers whose workers also qualify for various forms of welfare, and walmart also campaigns against raising minimum wage.

What we are seeing is the market correcting itself: service jobs are unattractive, so people leave those jobs. If nobody is willing to pay more and offer better customer behaviour for those jobs, those services will simply disappear. That is how the market "corrects" itself.

I'm all for better wages and labour conditions, but as long as that doesn't, happen, these jobs and services will continue to disappear. I hope people are aware of the fact that they're currently effectively voting for no fast food, no restaurants, and no theatres, because that's what they're going to get if nothing changes.

> the market will correct itself

When we can abandon this kind of thinking we will be able to solve problems again.

> Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself.

Or it'll be a "market for lemons" situation and someone will need to rewrite the rules of the market in order for the best thing to happen and/or it just won't get better.

> Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself.

Historically major corrections have been called something else, and the adjustments have been administered through blood and steel.

“I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.”

I think that’s a natural consequence of a society that measures everything by money.

I think it's the natural consequence of several generations of telling kids their special and not curbing a child's natural self-centeredness.

I've noticed growing incivility as well and it's a slow moving culture change that I think we're all going to really regret. I don't think it's caused by just one thing and it has been brewing for a while but Covid just pushed it over the edge like so many other trends. Some ideas on the causes:

- The fish rots from the head. Trump was elected in 2016 and he's an asshole. His whole schtick is to mock his opponents and never admit he was wrong. Hell, him being an asshole was a huge selling point to his base. If you elect that guy to the most powerful office in the land then it signals that being an asshole is acceptable. That sort of thing filters down into the culture at large. Politics isn't the only place you see this though, sociopathic behavior seems to be almost a requirement in big business. Where are people being rewarded for kindness and compassion?

- Pandemic burnout. There are a lot of threads on HN about guarding your attention like a currency and I think other emotions work similarly. After more than 2 years of this I know my well of empathy is nearly bone dry. Most issues like some particular thing being out of stock, or slow service because of staffing don't bother me but every once in a while I get really angry at an inconvenience I would normally shrug off. Multiply this across society.

- Being an asshole kind of works? This echoes my first idea but in a different way. All real decision making has been taken away from the people who actually interact with the public. Executives and managers who have the power to change things (like increase wages to bring more employees in) are insulated from the public. There are so many layers of indirection within corporate America that even if you have a legitimate grievance it can be an enormous pain to get it resolved and you have to be kind of a dick sometimes to fix things. So you end up with this situation where powerless employees are being yelled at by a powerless public.

There are certainly more threads here but those are some ideas i've been toying with.

> The fish rots from the head. Trump was elected in 2016 and he's an asshole. His whole schtick is to mock his opponents and never admit he was wrong.

Obama roasting Trump at the White House Correspondents likely contributed to his decision to run for President. I agree your points by the way, I just think the fire started prior to 2016.

There's this idea of "punching down" and "punching up". I'm fairly sure that in 2012, Obama mocking Donald Trump was generally considered closer to "punching up" than "punching down" (whether that was really accurate depends a lot on the true state of Trump's financial affairs, but in general he projected a persona that involved being uber-wealthy, uber-famous and generally able to do whatever he wanted).

By contrast, Trump's mocking of, variously, Mexican and central American migrants, the disabled, media reporters etc. is generally seen as "punching down".

In our culture, those further up the ladder are generally expected to take a "punching" (i.e. mockery, jokes, satires, ridicule) from below in good stead. We generally expect them to not "punch down" at those less enabled by power and wealth.

How about we just not punch people in any direction?

I think that it is extremely important that our leaders, and to some extent even our idols, should be subject to satire and perhaps even mockery on occasion. That's what "punching" means in the context we're talking about.

I'm having a hard time accepting that the President ever punches up. He's the most powerful person in the world and has the sole authority to authorize the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. The office enjoys the Bully Pulpit and it is valuable to have this arrangement in my opinion.

At any rate, watch the clip if you haven't recently.

https://youtu.be/n9mzJhvC-8E?t=574

It's pretty interesting actually, to me at least, that Obama roasts Biden pretty much just as well for his off-the-cuff remarks and age immediately after his digs at Trump, which are less derogatory than I had remembered.

If the president was trying to "punch up" with respect to national and international policy, I would totally agree with you.

But consider the moment right now. Do you think that if President Biden were to satirically mock Jeff Bezos about wealth, space travel, employee care, or putative drone delivery, that he would actually be punching "down" from the white house? I certainly don't think so.

Trump on Jeff Bezos' divorce: "I wish him luck, I wish him luck. It's going to be a beauty."

I think that's punching down. I'm not sure it's a helpful abstraction, but I think once one becomes President it's impossible to separate the person from the office until their term ends.

>The office enjoys the Bully Pulpit and it is valuable to have this arrangement in my opinion.

A lot of good that is doing in the Biden years. :/

Another comment somewhere else in this thread mentioned 2008 and the bailouts for banks, bankruptcy for the public, as the place we should look at. With big society wide trends like this it's impossible to have a clear cause and effect. It's all a muddle which is why I've listed a few different ideas all of which contribute in their own way.

Covid is such a unique situation though and I think it will serve as a clear turning point where preexisting trends were shattered and others were turned up to 11.

But ultimately, we didn't start the fire, but we can try to fight it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

I'm probably being naive but the assassination of JFK is the most interesting alternative history moment for me.

Should he have finished his term and steered the US clear of Vietnam (I know very debatable) and seen man go to the "moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," I think things would have gone much better.

My history is a little fuzzy but would we have gotten the Civil Rights Act? From what I understand, JFK was having some serious trouble getting it passed (instead of some watered down piecemeal legislation) but a combination of the state of a mourning country post-assassination + Johnson betraying the people who elected him(he was the good ol boy from the south placed there to represent their 'values') provided the catalyst for getting this difficult legislation through. Unfortunately this also had the consequence of further alienating the south and made them run into Reagan's arms a few elections later.

I shudder to think what would have happened if the Civil Rights Act wasn't passed. I may not have even been born in this country.

Alternate history is impossible to prove, and to your point, my history is just as fuzzy if not fuzzier; however, I do remember the reverence RFK had for MLK when announcing his assassination.

I don't know that the Civil Rights Act passes in this timeline, at least not at the exact moment, but maybe it does? However, you get to avoid Vietnam. Maybe it's not helpful pondering these sorts of things, but is trading the Civil Rights Act for Vietnam a good deal, net benefit for humanity wise?

> All real decision making has been taken away from the people who actually interact with the public. Executives and managers who have the power to change things (like increase wages to bring more employees in) are insulated from the public.

Had to scroll down a bit, because I knew this comment had to exist, but wholeheartedly agreed.

Managers in customer-facing jobs don't (and can't!) manage customers anymore. They manage employees.

Used to be, the manager was the one who would come out and say "Sir or madam, I have to ask that you hold your tone and speak more respectfully to our employees." And if the customer persisted, ban them from the business.

That authority has been stripped from them, because it's complicated, requires capable and trained managers, and gets in the way of copying and pasting a franchise.

Instead, corporate policy has been to raise the brand above its employees. If that burns out folks working there, they can be replaced.

> Managers in customer-facing jobs don't (and can't!) manage customers anymore. They manage employees.

They are managers so they do not have to be paid overtime if they work over 40 hours per week. The business owners/directors let the manager hire just enough people, but not at a wage that can afford reliable workers. So, the manager will be stuck covering for the people that do not show, and if something goes wrong, they serve as a nice “fall guy”.

My wife used to work retail and yes, customers have definitely learned they can get their way by raising their voice, demanding to see a manager, and the manager will sheepishly do anything they can to mollify them. All consequence-free. And if they don’t get what they want, they can go berserk and trash the store—again, consequence-free. Store management can’t physically do anything to neutralize the threat.

I can’t put my finger on it but something happened in the last 5 years or so, some change in the country’s moral North Star, that ushered in this era of consequence-free obnoxious behavior. It’s almost as if some leader embodied and emboldened this behavior and normalized it.

Regarding growing incivility. I moved from the US to Poland around ‘05. Not long ago I went to the US, Bay Area, for the first time in ten years, on a business trip for my employer. I didn’t expect such a culture shock but the incivility was striking. Every day I would run into absolutely savage behavior while just commuting or getting food. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and this here is the first time I’ve seen Americans discussing civility.

It also might be that once in Europe you started soaking in our values and standards and today behaviours common in USA you might see in a different light.

I moved out of Poland to the UK many years ago and have the exact same experience as you. I'm a very different person now and many things I had thought were normal I now do not accept.

Some people forgot what it's like to be punched in the mouth

Fighting words. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words

Maybe the Supreme Court has been going the wrong way on its adjustment to them, in trying to clarify whether or not they were protected under the First Amendment.

Instead, they could have looked at liability shielding for limited assault in reaction to such language.

If there's a possibility that a server punches me because I berate him or her, I'm probably going to be on better behavior.

The obsession with "intention" as opposed to "outcome" in legal judgments continues to mystify and mortify me.

But I still don't see an easy way to fit the scenario of "I mouthed off to a server and they punched me in the mouth" into a legal framework that supports repeatable judgments in a way that supports civility writ large.

The same way we do auto accidents? Collect what physical evidence is possible, interview witnesses, and attempt to assign fault.

And I'm not advocating for a return to duels at dawn with pistols!

But simple or criminal battery (e.g. I punch someone, with my fists, and then de-escalate) that could not have been expected to result in permanent injury? I can think of worse things for culture.

Auto incidents happen in relatively constrained scenarios, and the resulting damage can strongly imply the actions that led up to the incident. Not so with humans beefing over mundane matters.

My first thought is to re-tool the concept of self-defense, but this would require the acknowledgement that verbal abuse constitutes violence, which I am not sure many are willing to accept, and could get out of hand when it comes to what exactly "disproportionate retaliation" means in context.

"Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." -- Mike Tyson

What's always disappointing to me is how for many the first instinct is "lazy young people" while often times the exact same people espouse "the free market". It seems to me that often times the same people really only care about low taxes for themselves and making away with regulations that annoy them, rather than truly embracing the mechanism and tradeoffs that come with a free market and for sure don't understand the circumstances needed to make the market effective to work towards a given goal.

Not as disappointing as those who denigrate free markets when there isn't one.

Besides the author’s v points about the poor working conditions, I was struck by the points about transit costs. I am curious how much of the current labor situation in the US can be explained by the combination of 1) geographic wealth segregation —- richer consumers clustering together while generally poorer service workers have to live far away —- and 2) high gas prices / underdeveloped public transit. At some point as both of these factors increase, there should be a big drop off in available workers. Is this consistent with the pattern we are seeing?

There's a saying I like, "A rich country isn't one where the poor can afford cars. It's one where the rich take public transportation"

So, Tokyo.

Basically cars are a huge relative cost for the working class. With our land use and transportation policies we have created a world where the costs of getting around are so high that it can trap you in poverty for life. Sorry for the paywall but this was the quickest article I could find on the topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americ...

If you calculate the total cost of owning car(s) during your lifetime and consider alternative use such as interest bearing savings account some estimates have shown it costs you approx $1M during your life.

It's not even just lower class workers. Taking public transit to my FAANG job each day would be ~$20 total and be ~2hrs of commuting each day. That comes out to ~5k/year in commuting costs and about 65 workdays in hours wasted on trains and subways.

I can eat this cost but I'd feel extremely bad for someone who doesn't get paid as much as I do who had to do this kind of commuting (which MANY people do daily).

> ~5k/year in commuting costs and about 65 workdays in hours wasted on trains and subways

Welcome to London.

Public transit in Austin is terrible, and nonexistent in the suburbs. And there is a lot of wealth (and racial) housing segregation in Austin. I'd say you hit the nail on the head for Austin, at least. Speaking as someone who grew up in Austin poor without a car, and lived there until adulthood. Now work at a FAANG in a city much lower cost of living.

Personally it took me a second to get past "Death threats drove him from town and to Austin". That is quite the fact to cover in a single sentence.

There's a link further down but tldr, he ran a department that struggled to disperse unemployment benefits to the people of New Mexico during 2021. Hard to say if anyone else would have done better in his place, but his address and family info were getting shared online and a car got blown up at his place of work.

I understand the anger (but not to the point of terrorism or threats), but it's also pretty obvious to me that blaming one guy for the failures is kind of missing the point. The entire unemployment system has been deliberately undermined for ideological reasons, with the goal being making it as hard as possible to get and keep benefits. It's not shocking that one person could fix a decade or two worth of systemic rot when suddenly the system is strained to the max.

Welcome to HN. An early comment goes off target and too many others follow. But we're all intelligence free-thinkers, yes?

But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted.

Humans are "complicated", to put it kindly.

p.s. Yes, I senses the irony.

> But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted.

Isn't that tautological?

Anyway, it's also not true as a general rule. The comments I see net-downvoted on HN are ones that either contain falsehoods and/or are poorly (often "rantily") written. I've seen many comments about a topic generally downvoted because they fit that pattern, but comments that express the same POV but avoid falsehoods and are reasonably written end up without a net negative.

If you're going to have votes, some things will get net-downvoted. There's no way around that - people have different opinions and scoring systems, and some comments will do poorly with some people.

> Places like this rely on high school students for jobs like working the counter and delivering food.

This sentence should be amended to “Places like this rely on people to accept low wages and low quality of life at work”.

The whole article can basically be cut down to that sentence.

For what it's worth, the usual "high school jobs" are not a problem when done by actual high schoolers as side gig to fund phone, beer, weed and gas. They don't need to pay rent, food or health insurance so what would be a non-living wage for an adult is luxury money for high schoolers.

The problem is when actual adults who have to take care of adult things (rent, food, health insurance, car payments, ...) have to resort to entry-level jobs as a result of economy crunches or various forms of discrimination. For a long time employers took advantage of such employees and ran them to the ground... but now that retirees follow the "societal contract" and actually go and retire instead of blocking places for the young to rise, employers are in a bad crunch.

That is true for some high schoolers but many others are making meaningful contributions to their family’s income and/or saving for college. There’s really no excuse to not pay them a living wage as well.

> The problem is when actual adults who have to take care of adult things (rent, food, health insurance, car payments, ...) have to resort to entry-level jobs as a result of economy crunches or various forms of discrimination.

No, the problem is labor supply and demand curves have shifted, hence prices have shifted.

People do not make business plans and budgets based on the number of high schoolers are available to hire. They make budgets based on the price at which they expect to be able to purchase labor. In this business’s case, they seem to have made some erroneous assumptions, which is the cause of the problem.

And when you ask for a pay increase because cost of living has gone up or complain that someone in another town that's similarly expensive earns more than you for the same role at the same company, you'll quickly hear that comp is based on cost of labor and not cost of living.

I knew multiple classmates who were working substantial hours because their families needed the extra income, and that was when wages were better than they are now. Anything close to real work should pay real wages because otherwise you’re screwing the most desperate at the expense of the more affluent kids who can afford to walk away.

> Anything close to real work should pay real wages because otherwise you’re screwing the most desperate at the expense of the more affluent kids who can afford to walk away.

That isn't how wages work. If someone can do the same job for less, they will and you will not get paid.

You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive (the people who build the tractors get more, the guy driving the tractor gets more, the person picking the lettuce gets paid more, the lady trimming and repackaging the lettuce gets more, the truck driver delivering the lettuce gets more, the high schooler throwing the lettuce on your burger gets more...)

That "make everything more expensive" is inflation. Inflation hurts the poor the most. The lady making $400k/year doesn't care if ground beef is 10% more expensive.

> That isn't how wages work. If someone can do the same job for less, they will and you will not get paid.

Sure, but recognizing that is what happens is important for both not patronizing businesses which give their workers the worst deal allowed by law and support for increasing minimum wages to match inflation.

> You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive (the people who build the tractors get more, the guy driving the tractor gets more, the person picking the lettuce gets paid more, the lady trimming and repackaging the lettuce gets more, the truck driver delivering the lettuce gets more, the high schooler throwing the lettuce on your burger gets more...)

You're leaving out a key part: prices only go up for the fraction of those costs which are due to wages. For things like fast food, that's not a large component which is why, for example, a McDonald's worker in Denmark has a much better quality of life while the average Big Mac buyer is paying the same or less than their American counterpart:

https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

Another big factor to consider is the cost of poverty. The working poor have less ability to participate in the economy so a certain amount of local economic growth never happens, and they're often worse off because they're forced to do things like buy inefficiently because they don't have the reserves to optimize. Paying people at the level minimum wage used to mean would allow a significant number of people to participate in the economy more effectively and we've never regretted growing the pie.

> You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive

Considering minimum wage in the US hasn't been raised in 10 years I should be paying 2010 prices.

> You can raise the minimum but then you make everything more expensive

Alternatively, the owner capitalist class could - gasp - take a cut in their already excessive profits. Shareholder, CEO, director and other executive pay has ballooned over the last decades, whereas worker wages (the ones that actually create the wealth with their labor) have at best stagnated.

Those ballooning wages are securities, not liquidity.

You can't pay rent or buy food with options. Securities are speculative, no minimum wage worker wants a gamble on if they get paid 5 years in the future.

Please keep the theatrics to a minimum. The goal is to have meaningful discussion, not attack your peers.

Divert the securities to the front line labor then instead of the upper few.

Do the front line labor want securities instead of cash?

You'd end up having to do something like a co-op model. However, if you want employees to earn their payout even if they leave before that five year payout then they couldn't sell back co-op ownership.

That means the co-op ownership continually gets diluted, or you run out of cap table to be able to hire more.

This scheme also means the first, eg fry cook, would make more money from the securities payout than the 3rd or 4th fry cook, even if the later fry cook is better/more dedicated/etc.

Also this means co-op voting for securities actions. The co-op can liquidate too early or too late which can hurt individual payout.

> Do the front line labor want securities instead of cash?

I didn't see anyone say "instead of".

If you want executives, you need to pay them.

Organizations without executives exist at really really small scales but they tend to be very short lived.

> If you want executives, you need to pay them.

I didn't see anyone say anything that conflicted with that, either.

You sure you're keeping track of the discussion here?

> I didn't see anyone say anything that conflicted with that, either.

Please look up:

> > Do the front line labor want securities instead of cash? > > I didn't see anyone say "instead of".

The whole of the pie is finite. If one slice is made bigger, the others must be made smaller.

The pie, in it's entirety, can be bigger or smaller with securities. That is largely determined by it's executives. Better executives cost more. Lesser executives cost less. A lesser executive shrinks the whole of the value of the securities. A better executive makes the whole pie larger, but wants a larger piece too.

> You sure you're keeping track of the discussion here?

Does snark like this work other places you post? Like, I can continue explaining concepts like "money is finite" and "lots of businesses fail and their stock is then worthless" if you really need that. Right now you're saying we should be paying low wage workers with fancy pieces of paper on the off chance they make extra money five years in the future when it does them no good. That's not some clever insight into how to fix economic disparity, it's just very silly.

> Does snark like this work other places you post? Like, I can continue explaining concepts like[...]

No, see, that's the thing; there is no continuous throughline to your comments here. You keep jumping around, and never to a place that actually makes any sense.

Someone said, very simply, that executive pay has "ballooned", and it was suggested that this should probably maybe not be the case. This would mean wealth can increase for both workers and those who are currently extracting most of it from the system, rather than payouts growing disproportionately for the latter. (It was framed as taking a "cut", but that's too generous of a description for a concept that comes down to "stop consolidating wealth to take it for oneself"—a slice of pie that grows by continually taking small bites from elsewhere. It's a "cut" only in the sense of someone backing off their notions of the size of their expected returns.) You didn't engage with this. Instead, you argued against an argument that no one was making—that employees should be paid in securities "instead of" cash. Called out on this, you made another jump to argue against something else that no one was arguing—to pay executives nothing and possibly work through the consequences of having no executives at all.

Dealing with this kind of monkey business is tiresome. To spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy dismissing nonsense arguments that someone keeps peeling off without any care put into them on their end is not economical for me or anyone else.

If you want people to engage with you, you need to knock off the bullshit. (And, please, keep the theatrics to a minimum.)

> otherwise you’re screwing the most desperate at the expense of the more affluent kids who can afford to walk away

America in a nutshell

What are you talking about? Have you ever been to a restaurant during the day or counted the employees over-50 at Walmart? There always have been adults working these jobs.

I'm not sure how being served in a restaurant (restaurant, not fast food joint) by a high schooler can make an experience I'd wish to repeat. Or having my chateaubriand cooked by one.

> retirees follow the "societal contract" and actually go and retire instead of blocking places for the young to rise,

Hard no here. If retirees feel strong enough to work, they are 100% entitled to improve their incomes. Especially when they don't have super generous pensions.

Retiree struggling to pay pills and doctors is not something super exceptional. There is no social contract for them to stop working.

Also echoes a scarcity mindset whereas more market participants usually increase the pie.

> Hard no here. If retirees feel strong enough to work, they are 100% entitled to improve their incomes.

Assuming a finite number of places of employment in an economy, when old people cannot ever reasonably retire because multiple governments have either outright stolen from the pension funds or otherwise fucked up the pension system, there is an imbalance: young people are forced to be either unemployed or massively under-employed (i.e. stuck in low-paid, entry level positions), instead of being able to rise through the ranks based on the work they put in.

Well, the point is that these jobs don't create that much value. They're only worth so much, and the only skill required to do them is to put up with the misery. If you argue that all jobs must pay a "living wage", then jobs like this will just cease to exist and high-school kids won't be employable.

It might come as a surprise to some, but in some other countries service people are really paid a living wage. And the economy is still doing fine.

These jobs don't create that much value? Did you look at the theater's financial statements to come to that conclusion? I suspect someone - most likely the owner of this establishment - is making quite a bit of money on this deal.

> these jobs don't create that much value

According to what I read online, apparently eating out is something that is necessary for mental health and the pandemic causing issues with eating out is actually causing issues for people for some godforsaken reason.

So probably not as valueless as you might think

Eating out and employing low paid workers don't have to be the same thing.

Significant amounts of that can and will be automated. We are already seeing it happen.

Good! High school kids shouldn’t need jobs. Encouraging that just ensures we have a child labor workforce that we can underpay, driving down wages for adults who need that money to survive.

Child labor laws are a thing for a reason. If there’s not a lot of value in a job, it shouldn’t be a job. Yes, this will mean a degradation in service level across service jobs. Yes, that’s okay. Customers need to adapt to a world where they are expected to be more considerate, otherwise they’ll find themselves without help.

High school kids shouldn't need jobs, but they can all benefit from working part time jobs. Having a job teaches them how the real world operates and exposes them to diverse people outside their social bubble. In retrospect the jobs I had as a high school kid were tremendously valuable in ways that went beyond the tiny wages that I earned.

Until we can demonstrate that we have strong enough labor protections that employers don’t prey on these kids (and they absolutely do already because the kids don’t know any better), I’m in favor of banning anyone under 18. Part of it is the indoctrination — service jobs like that are often dehumanizing, and making kids do that work just teaches them to accept that kind of treatment. There is about to be a fundamental reckoning over the structure of our society and how we learn to function with less service sector labor overall while serving an aging population that requires more services. It’s going to be a labor-driven job market for quite a while, and employing kids is just a tactic to take advantage of their naïveté.

No, this job in particular creates a lot of value for this specific business. And if you read the piece, the others did too -- they've now got angry customers who arent' getting the experience the business is selling.

I'm not sure how you get to the takeaway that a bartender job will "cease to exist" if a bartender is paid a living wage? There's clearly a market demand for, in this case, alcoholic drinks in a movie theater. Labor prices are seeing upward pressure. Seems to me that if you got rid of the bartender because they cost too much, you wouldn't have a bar at your movie theater anymore.

Sure, you could talk about robotics replacing low-wage workers, and in some instances that may happen, but you're also now dealing with needing to have a robotics tech available during the Spiderman rush at your movie theater where the machine that makes the drinks is a core part of the draw. So I'm skeptical of the economic argument there as it is -- you're going to replace one or two bartenders making a living wage of $20-25/hr with a robotics tech who makes the same or less?

...these jobs don't create that much value...

Concessions account for 1/3 of AMC's revenue. $1.7 billion of AMC's $5.4 billion in 2019. That accounts for about 85% of their profit.

https://qz.com/2006440/amc-says-moviegoers-are-eating-a-lot-...

https://business.time.com/2009/12/07/movie-theaters-make-85-...

The value these jobs create is the fabric of modern society. To quote the article, "Just shut up Mom, it's Christmas." Not saying they should be paid as much as doctors, but without these normal things that were lost during the 2020 shutdown I suspect that the protesting/looting would become more prevalent.

That's just incorrect. Wages do no accurately represent value generated. They are an incredibly noisy signal thereof. Wages are better at representing replaceability.

Low skill jobs are the first to be automated. Theaters, quick service restaurants, a lot of retail are pushing customers to use things like apps (for ordering), delivery, and pickup because it removes the need to employ unskilled ticket-takers while simultaneously removing the need to interact with difficult customers.

I see that many are fixed on tips, but I found it quite shocking to read about long queues of people on the Christmas day and people quitting on the Christmas Eve. In many European cities, the streets are completely empty and almost all shops (maybe a local supermarket would open from 10:00 till 14:00 on a Christmas day after being closed for the Eve) are closed both on the Christmas Eve and the Christmas day.

That is probably because he was working at a movie theater. Seeing a movie at a theater on christmas is a bit of a tradition for a lot of people here, for some reason.

It's less extreme than in europe but in the US also most businesses will be closed or have reduced hours on those two days, and would expect much less business even if open. Movie theaters are an exception.

This is a tradition for many across the United States. I have lived in 4 major metros and the theaters are always packed (excepting 2020) on Christmas day. Anecdotally, many of my friends tell me they have family traditions of opening presents, having a family breakfast, and then catching a midday matinee. Box office receipts show this trend [1]. Hollywood tends to drop some of their biggest films in the late holiday season, possibly to capitalize on this trend, though there is probably some kind of reflexive dynamic to the pattern.

Part of me suspects that attending church on Christmas eve/day, once a widely practiced tradition in the U.S. has been replaced by the movies as Americans seek to fill some kind of communal void.

[1] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/holiday/christmas_day/2021/

Just give it time until europe reaches late stage capitalism. Yes, they didn't have as many neoliberal waves eroding the social fabric in name of capitalism.

As recently as 25 years ago in the US, 24-hour businesses were rare, hours in general were much shorter (way fewer places open 'till 10pm or what have you) and damn near everything was shut down on holidays or even just Sundays. This always-open, open-all-holidays, business-runs-7-days-a-week thing is relatively new, even here. The change happened really fast, though, when it started.

> When I was a 16 year old kid working as a “Courtesy Clerk” for Albertsons Grocery store, we got a 15-minute break for every 4-hour shift and an hour lunch for an 8-hour shift.

Shouldn't this be enforced by law?

Yes. One of the big problems we have now is that companies are either reframing their work Uber-style to get around regulations or flat-out ignoring them. Going after violations like that or e.g. the endemic wage-theft at small businesses like restaurants would be a great use of civic money since most of the people affected by lax enforcement have limited power to push back.

The first step is to have those laws. The article is about Texas, a government that takes pride in not having laws that provide a minimum quality of life at work.

federal law says nothing about breaks except that if they're 30m or longer you don't get paid

many states go no further, including Texas, which explicitly does not require break time

Sure, but teenagers don’t know any better so they get away with it.

Sounds to me like a lot of "customers" in the US are just a55holes and anyone who has to work with them regularly is right to just stop.

I'm sure a little common courtesy in everyday interactions is all it takes to make workplaces enjoyable; and a wage that allows you to stay warm and fed while working a _single job_ will get most people back to work. It's really a very low bar to set, I'm surprised this is even such a debated topic, it's sad.

When I worked at a call center doing technical support, customers would often get frustrated. But as soon as they crossed the line into unprofessional, I informed them I was hanging up the call, and did. Why would anyone in a service based industry put up with customers throwing tantrums? The manager should immediately march out, give them a refund, and tell them to leave.

It's much easier to hang up on someone than ask someone to leave in person. The problem customer may refuse to leave and escalate their tantrum.

When was that? Because like every other low wage job, those conditions have also gotten a lot worse.

These days a very standard contact center policy is that reps can never hang up on a customer under any circumstances. Breaking this is considered one of the big ones, termination-worthy on a first or maybe second offense depending on the employer.

All you can really do is escalate it up to your supervisor. But that depends on them being available for that, and willing to back you up possibly at a personal cost to themselves.

People put up with this because they are precarious workers who need the money badly. This is the sort of life where even if you have another job lined up, the 2-3 weeks between stopping one pay cycle and starting the other can be a huge risk or incur costs. These employers depend on this precarity, because otherwise like you said, why would anyone put up with it?

2016, so a whole lifetime ago in pandemic years

My wife used to work at a 7-11. Those folks get abused by the people that get abused by everyone else. It was bad.

She was fortunate, in having a good manager (the franchise owner). Some local franchises actually got busted for using slave labor.

There’s a site on my regular rounds, that has stories about bad customer (and staff) interactions, called Not Always Right: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/

My personal opinion: it's not crazy to tip much more generously during COVID. This is not a normal time for businesses or employees. (NB I am not a tipped worker. I am a grumpy old engineer.)

"The myth that Americans, and especially younger Americans, aren’t willing to work is flat wrong."

It's not really a myth, but also can't be universally applied. When a very large percentage of jobs are like this, there's not much alternative. It's you want to work and deal with it, or you don't want to work. Option 3 would be that you want to work a "good" job, but good luck finding one!

People don't want to work shitty jobs. I'm a software dev and I'm tired of the corporate BS and lies. I don't want to work. If this is a "good" job then I don't have hope that anything will be better. I can't wait to retire.

Then you should drastically cut your expenses, probably move, and retire as soon as possible.

I have a family. Expenses are already reduced as they can be within reason. My wife won't consider moving. I have at least another 20 years.

Then - good luck.

TL;DR Macro trends:

- older folks retired or never re-entered workforce after COVID

- employees, for the first time in ~20 years, understand they can quit their job today and get hired somewhere else tomorrow

- corporate won't raise wages because "they're already too high", ignoring any variation in the location's cost of living

- teenagers have more options/entertainment available to them today and don't want to seek out traditional employment. The author's "their parents are rich" line has some nugget of truth to it unfortunately. Plus they don't want to be yelled at by angry entitled customers.

Specific to the author's situation:

- a business that would not traditionally rely on tips (a fucking movie theatre) relies on tips much to the detriment of the employees

- tips are dispensed on a scam debit card (IMO should be illegal),

Excellent article. Shame so many wealthy people are cheap on tips. Always round up on the tip - the people relying on them need that extra $1-5 dollars more than you do. And if you can't afford those extra few dollars than what are you doing going out in the first place?

Shame so many people think it is a customer’s job to pay anything more than what they are asked to pay.

I find it hilarious how Americans think restaurant/bar staff is almost exclusively entitled to getting more money than what they signed up for, courtesy of the customer. Do you give other minimal wage workers tips? Cashiers, cleaners, random shop staff? If not then shut up.

Restaurant staff make significantly less than minimum wage.

Not in CA/OR/WA/NYC/DC. Also, the federal minimum wage is not lower than anyone else’s, assuming they want to report their employer for not following the law.

The United States of America federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees who receive at least $30 per month in tips.

State and local laws overrule federal laws if the federal law has a lower minimum.

Technically it is not overruling, it is complementing. No local law can overrule a federal or state law, ever.

Thanks, that is a better characterization.

And if the tips plus tipped minimum wage doesn’t reach normal minimum wage, the employer is required to top it up to at least the untipped minimum wage. I believe that’s what parent comment was referring to.

As well as the fact that many states, representing a massive chunk of the US population, don’t have a separate special tipped minimum wage.

No, they don't. If their tips don't put them over minimum wage their employer is required to make up the difference. They usually make well over minimum wage factoring in "tax free" cash tips.

> If their tips don't put them over minimum wage their employer is required to make up the difference.

You'll get your hours cut if you try this.

This might have been the case in 2019, but it certainly isn't in today's labor shortage.

It’s not something “you” try as the employee. It’s something “you” try as the customer.

The business not having workers during business hours will not equate to any more profits for the business. It’ll just equate to fewer business transactions. They still have to pay the minimum wage to the staff working during those hours.

Cashiers - yes at a coffee shop. The local brewery uses the same Square / Clover POS system for cans to go and sometimes I'll tip a few bucks (though I'm unsure here). Cleaners - if you mean a house cleaner, if booked through an app, then I think there's normally a tip option. There's tons of people who you're supposed to tip at Christmas in the city - building staff, daycare workers, cleaners, your mailman, etc etc.

Restaurants that have tried to go tip free, even the highest end ones, like Eleven Madison Park and Danny Meyer's Union Square Cafe, have rolled it back as customers see the prices as being "too high." Tipping is basically an optical illusion. If you don't tip, you are ruining it for everybody else.

Yeah, but if you go to a place that provides service in the US, you're signing up for tipping, and you know it. If you don't like it, stay in and cook and make your own drinks.

Did the person that changed my grandmother’s bedpan provide a service?

Did the person that poured concrete provide a service?

How about the person that helps you find something at the store?

We are all providing a service.

Being pedantic isn't necessary, it's obvious from the context that I meant food service.

Um, way to be incredibly classist. "If you can't afford to support someone else, why are you treating yourself to a luxury of any kind?"

Everyone needs luxuries sometimes. The solution to tipped employees not getting enough money is not to bully people who can't comfortably afford higher tips out of going out; it's to a) encourage unionization, b) eliminate the separate "tipped minimum wage", and c) raise the minimum wage in general. Or, y'know, implement UBI.

It is interesting to think about the various ways tips are used:

1. User feedback: customer quality perception

2. Variable pricing: if customer can pay more, they do; customers without as much are not turned away

3. Untaxed earnings: tax authorities set a theoretical floor, but undocumented cash is difficult to substantiate

Are there others?

Obfuscating the total cost when the consumer is making decisions—-the menu price is like the listed price in Google Flights, then taxes and tips are kind of like the baggage and seat fees on low cost airlines.

It's not obfuscation if it's entirely at the customer's discretion.

Google flights doesn't allow me to choose what percentage in fees I feel is appropriate for the service.

What's sort of funny is the concern about tipped workers is also classist. Tipped workers in restaurants do pretty well, at least in contrast to their hourly counterparts in the back of the house. College educated people often take front of house jobs during college so they empathize with the front of house workers, but the front of house makes considerably more than the back and has far better working conditions. Stand in a 100+ degree kitchen for 12 hours, burning and cutting yourself daily and tell me that the waitstaff have it bad with a straight face, especially after you learn they are taking home twice what you are and that's before factoring in the rampant wage theft in the restaurant industry.

If you had a really good experience and you want to show your appreciation, go in back and tip the cooks.

While there may very well be a higher proportion of college students in front-of-house jobs, the idea that that's the majority of such people is similar to the idea that minimum-wage jobs in general are "for teenagers", and thus shouldn't need to provide a living wage.

They all need better pay, but tipped minimum wage being lower is a further travesty (even with the provision that they have to take home at least minimum wage at the end of each day), regardless of what percentage of college students make up that workforce.

My point is if you feel what FOH staff take home is a travisty, then you should be apaplectic with rage when you look towards the back of house. I don't see that often, it's mostly complaints about bartender and waitstaff earnings.

I mean, I try to ration my rage (there's a lot to be upset about and only so much blood pressure to go around), but yes, I think they all deserve much higher pay, in general.

> Everyone needs luxuries sometimes.

Then by definition that's not a luxury?

You're confusing the definition of a singular thing with the group of things.

For example, apples are a luxury in that nobody needs them to live (and the same can be said of any single food source - and therefore whether or not we consider something a luxury comes down to its availability and cost, nothing to do with champagne being more or less "needed" than beer), but they are also part of a bigger group we call "food" that definitely is not a luxury.

I...no; no, that's not how that works.

If I were saying "everyone needs to go to a restaurant on a regular basis," then it would be hard to justify me also calling going to a restaurant a luxury. But that's not what I said.

What everyone needs is some luxury in their life. Something that's not just there to keep you alive—something to make life worth living.

Having luxuries sometimes is what separates surviving from thriving. And yes, everyone—everyone, no matter their station in life, their choices, their income, whatever—needs and deserves to thrive.

> Shame so many wealthy people are cheap on tips.

Tips should be reserved for exceptional service. People should be ashamed of going to restaurants that don't openly advertise "we pay a fair living wage, tips not necessary".

It dismays me how many wealthy people I know that flat our refuse to tip. I end such friendships, as those people are monsters, waiting for an excuse to toss others away.

If dismays me how many people make negative judgements about a person based on them fulfilling the stated terms of a transaction.

Any chance they're trying to end the practice of tipping for the betterment of workers in the long run?

I too refuse to pay for services to protest the mistreatment of workers.

Paying the amount you are asked to pay is not refusing to pay for services. Just like any other business transaction.

Protesting that workers aren't getting paid by withholding money from workers is a rationalization. In the best outcome, the customer would be paying exactly the same amount that they pay now, or more, it just wouldn't be separated or optional in the bill.

You can tell whether people complain about tipping because of fairness or just because they want a discount by whether they also complain about mandatory, fixed percentage tipping, which is really just a service fee under another name.

I have no qualms paying whatever a vendor wants to label or however they want to itemize the receipt as long as the total number I owe is conveyed to me when I request to purchase something.

Also, a customer does not owe workers anything in the USA. Employers owe workers.

> In the best outcome, the customer would be paying exactly the same amount that they pay now, or more, it just wouldn't be separated or optional in the bill.

I'd pay a premium just to avoid the distasteful master-servant relationship. It's insulting to assume that the customer would enjoy lording over others.

> just because they want a discount

It never crossed my mind that people do this. That's lousy.

next they'll try to end the practice of wage labor by not paying their employees

if that's the goal it needs to be a systemic solution, which generally means or legislation, company policy, or worker organizing. otherwise you're just going around hurting people. if you don't want to tip service workers, stay home, and don't order delivery.

remember, that scene in Reservoir Dogs was intended to demonstrate that Mr Pink is a shortsighted asshole.

This is the first I've heard of tipping at a movie theater. I didn't even know it was possible, let alone expected.

I have found no lack of good workers available. It's at a price point the company owner winces at, but that a different issue.

I used to work crappy jobs too and they sucked really bad so I dedicated my life to getting the next slightly less crappy job. More qualified people move out and new people move in and the pipeline stays full. If the service you are selling has any value then valuable people will work there.

The problem is that nobody in their right mind would see a movie in a theater these days. Your only customers are people who are all a few cards short of a full deck.

Who could have guessed that moviegoers during a pandemic are bad tippers?

You don't reach the top levels of government and media by having real world experiences. You get to top levels by playing the networking and politics game.

In the 1992 US presidential campaign debate, George H.W. Bush had to admit that he didn't know the price of a gallon of milk. That was a "gotcha" moment that made him look out of touch.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17826509

> While there have been complaints from employers that workers “don’t want to come back to work” just wanting to “stay on unemployment,” data shows that isn’t true. States that stopped increased unemployment payments early didn’t see much if any change in employment numbers. Child care was hard to get before COVID. The pandemic has increased shortages, building huge barriers to women who may otherwise want to get back into the workforce. The most recent reports show the shortage isn’t from “lazy young people who don’t value work like older generations do (and get off my lawn while you're at it).” It’s from older people who have opted to either retire early or simply aren’t returning to work.

Someone finally said it better than me. All of the discussions of "worker shortages" around Unemployment Benefits have either been incoherent nonsense, or political points cloaked in fake economics.

The article isn't surprising at all. Workers rights are very poor in the USA. The people that are the worst off when this is the case is the lowest ladder of workers and service industry is in that camp.

If you want these industries to stay open you'll need better workers rights. For example allowing such a poor minimum wage when tipping. Things like at-will working and such like don't help here either. At the drop of a hat any one of these employees could be fired so I doubt any of them will stay under poor working conditions.

I'm also surprised movie theatres are open on Christmas Day.

Xmas has traditionally been a very busy day for movie theaters. Going to the movies is a popular way to spend the day in the US.

That's an excellent article that I think highlights a big chunk of the explanation for the recent labor shortage.

While I'll admit I experienced a quick mental blip on the notion that someone might expect me to tip an amount that's a function of movie tickets plus food and drinks in a counter-service situation, I think it's a spot-on observation that workers on the low end of the wage spectrum have a sea of options and won't be putting up with what amounts to abuse, even if it's not an entirely intentional act on the part of management.

The article tracks very well with what I've heard from employers and employees that it's not just about wages. The author was clearly happy with the gig when things were going well.

But when it's Christmas (or maybe when there's something fun happening this weekend that sounds better than cleaning feces from a movie theater seat) during a labor shortage and everyone is overworked, the low wages combine with literally every other damn downside about what can be a truly thankless job to form a crystal-clear and perfectly legitimate plan to achieve the perfect holiday schedule. A worker can simply quit, enjoy their holiday, and later go find a job that's probably going to pay more and/or offer better working conditions.

It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

This is yet another obscure benefit of UBI and/or comprehensive social safety nets in general (and on a smaller scale, getting rid of tipping as a cultural practice).

Employer abusing you? You have options. Employer allowing customers to abuse you? You have options. And not only when there's a temporary shortage of what you're offering the market.

It's not a coincidence that people see tipping as a hold over from slavery and class systems.

Every time you see people saying that you can't give people healthcare or they won't want to work they're actively saying they want to trap people in these situations by removing their leverage. If you can't provide a service to the public without abusing your employees and threatening to withdraw their families healthcare, maybe we'd all be better off if you went out of business and someone else provided that service in a different way. Because that is uncivil.

> And with the stock market at an all-time high, corporate profits soaring, and CEO pay exponentially higher than their workers, execs can afford to share the wealth a bit.

Executive pay makes up a tiny fraction of the total salary expense of a large corporation. Even redistributing the entire salary of the CEO among workers will have no impact whatsoever.

> Executive pay makes up a tiny fraction of the total salary expense of a large corporation.

If the Activision/Blizzard CEO's pay were lowered to 100 times median income, it would be enough to give each employee an extra $16,000.

Activision/Blizzard are not finding it difficult to find workers through.

> was recently “promoted” to an assistant manager position) works another job as a hairdresser. She once told me she recently worked 12 days straight between the two gigs.

Texas has another interesting labor rule, movie theaters are considered entertainment, so they are not required to pay over time. The result of this is that companies will happily schedule you for unlimited hours, as there's no penalty for going over 40 hours each week. I ended up working 60-90 hours a week in a movie theater, 7 days a week for.... three to four weeks at a time for almost two years. 12 days straight was entirely normal in my twenties. Two days off in a row was a rarity, and meant that money that month was going to be tighter than normal.

Imagine how much more reasonable politicians and appointees would be if they had to serve 1 year in a non government, non ngo paying job prior to each year they served in government.

We have so many people that go from school, to being an aide to so-and-so, to being elected or appointed to serve, and they don't know how most of the people go through life.

Want to serve as a legistlator for 10 years? First work 10 years outside of the government/ngo complex.

There's a line out the door and workers are quitting because of low pay and bad working conditions? It seems like a former labor secretary would, instead of blogging about a static situation, understand that this is a self-correcting problem. If you have demand that you can't satisfy, you raise your price.

If you have demand that you can't satisfy, you raise your price.

But not before bitching high and low about lazy workers and trying to convince Uncle Sam to force the wage slaves to return to work.

He’s not in the position to do that though. He’s a bartender. It’s clear he is advocating for higher wages and better conditions and even notes that the management of the theater tried to do so but the national chain leadership shot them down.

I know quite a few businesses that leveraged themselves with CMBS to refinance during the mid to late 2010s whose debt service coverage ratio are about to go below the agreed upon threshold because of rising labor costs.

They borrowed money and gave up the business and land as collateral in exchange for some frothy valuations and limiting personal liability, but the terms are that if they exceed their DSCR, they enter default.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dscr.asp

The correct solution to that problem is allowing those businesses to default. Not attempt to universally prevent wage increases.

No one is preventing wage increases other than the owners of the over leveraged businesses. I was just positing one reason why business owners would be so hellbent on prevent wage increases.

The reason the essay is of any note is because the bartender used to be someone who you would expect to understand what labor is actually like. I would also be pleased if he understood economics, but maybe in the next essay the former labor secretary takes an econ class and is surprised at what he discovers.

There would be a lot of benefits for every politician, CEO, or other big-wig to be "down in the trenches" to understand what's really going on. The way the world works looks much different from their throne than it does elsewhere.

Am I reading the article wrong, or did the main character of this story, quit his job as a former labor secretary, because when his department was accidentally too generous with benefits, he received death threats?

That picture of the $2 tip clearly shows that originally there was no tip: the tip space has a line through it and the 3 was a 1. I wonder if someone with them had a conscience and cajoled them into giving a tip.

There should seriously be a tipping customer strike. Worse is better, then everyone will have to leave these shitty jobs.

I am always baffled when I read about the tip culture in the states. I find it so belittling for workers. It seems to incentivize a mentality of "the customer is always right", with workers putting an extra effort to always smile and be nice in the hope for a fair tip.

It is belittling, and almost nobody except restaurant owners likes it. It's sort of a game theory problem - if we could coordinate everyone to stop tipping, then restaurants would be forced to pay their workers normal wages, and almost everyone would be better off. But if I stop tipping, I'm just an asshole making no impact on society.

I guess the only practical approach is to simultaneously keep tipping and push for your city/state/country to eliminate the tipped minimum wage loophole.

I think you'll find that servers and bartenders are the most adimant supporters of tipping. They make a killing.

Making a killing is pushing it unless you're working at a high end place.

I really wonder how many HN people have ever worked in a waitstaff role. As much as you might hate it, tips keeps you just above minimum wage 95% of the time. Its not some money fountain like some people here seem to thing it is.

People who want tips of course want it because it gives them money on top of minimum wage, why the hell would you expect someone to sabotage their own income stream?

The most professionalised elements are the ones who end up in high-end places, because they made a real career of it. Because of that, it's likely that they are also the ones most represented by unions and associations that might be consulted by policymakers. So when a policymaker puts forward an idea to improve their condition, and gets back an icy or ambivalent response (as well as a very negative one from employers, of course), he'll just shelve it very quickly.

I'd be surprised if that was true. Unions are good when there is an "we are all in it together", but with tipping a great server can make a lot more than a bad one, so all the great servers will defect from the union for more money. The bad ones want a union, but they are also the ones management should get rid of.

There are ways for unions to work around this, but the fact that some members see themselves as better than others in ways that are measurable make such unions weaker.

> As much as you might hate it, tips keeps you just above minimum wage 95% of the time.

At least here in California, I’m pretty sure there’s no special tipped minimum wage, so what you’re saying doesn’t apply.

I worked at several restaurants, and not high end ones. on average, I probably made 25% over minimum wage. I had essentially zero marketable skills at the time, so my only alternatives actually paid minimum wage. I was a big fan of tipping.

If you want a real look at things, I'd suggest looking at servers discussing places that try to eliminate tipping. When tipping is discussed generally, it's often discussed like in this article - talking about how restaurants are only paying $2.13 an hour, how this or that customer didn't tipped or tipped almost nothing, how on this particular night they made almost nothing, etc.

But if you talk about getting rid of tipping and replacing it with a living age? Look at the comments from this Reddit discussion some years ago (so the numbers are even higher when you factor in inflation) discussing Joe's Crab Shack's interest in getting rid of tips[1]:

> But if you are doing good volume and the prices arent insanely cheap I cant see how youre only making $15 an hour. Are you in a poor section of town where people dont have much money? Do you get a lot of foreign tourists as clientele? I mean, $15 an hour I can make while asleep. But Im in Philly. Prices arent insane usually but they arent cheap. Plus its one of the best tipping cities in the country. Personally I wont take a shift if Im not confident Ill make at least $20 an hour. For me its not worth my time.

> This may or may not be close to the industry standard, but my last restaurant, I probably made somewhere around $25/hr (tips + wage). Restaurant before that was way more high volume, and even though we didn't really get paid an hourly wage, I would guess we made about $30/hr or so. On good nights and the bartenders? Probably even more.

> I was bored out of my mind all 6 hours of my shift tonight and made $14X, so call it $150, aka $25 an hour. Oh, and that's with a stiff on $120, and a $6 on $94

> Because serving tables isn't a job anyone would do for $7.75 an hour. It's not an easy job to excel at. I'll stay making my $25 an hour. Thanks.

> This is what people outside of the industry don't seem to get. Strong servers arn't going to stick around for anything less than $20 an hour.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/4iuy2q...

One of my relatives worked as a bartender at a low end (but popular) place. She made a killing on cash tips.

I worked at restaurants through college, ~20 years ago. initially chains (og, bj's, etc) and later on some nice hotel gigs (fanciest having a private dining room that went for $10k/night). While today I'm less certain on tips, at the time I was 100% in favor. It was clearly beneficial. Other people i knew in college were making $8/hr working as security guards, or folding clothes in a mall and i was walking out of the hotel with $200+ in cash after a 6 hour dinner shift, and $100+ for a 4 hour weekend breakfast. This was not barely above minimum wage.

What? I live in canada where tipping culture is not as present as in the US but still very widespread and it's universally known (at least before the lockdowns) that working in restaurants is pretty much the best job you can get as long as you don't work in the kitchen. I've had close friends work in a wide range of restaurants/hotels, and even those working in very normal restaurants still made way more than any other job they could get.

I like my student job since it's outdoors, and I have other revenue streams, but you don't get any tips. So my colleagues usually jump at the occasion to work in a restaurant whenever they can even if our workplace is extremely pleasant to work at.

They want to keep tips going because not because it allows them to barely reach the minimum but because it makes them way more money. Otherwise, they'd advocate for removing the different minimum wages.

I'm actually puzzled, and I'm wondering if you have ever worked in a waitstaff job because I've never ever met a waiter being against tips.

I know there are some lucky bartenders that make a ton, but in my personal experience the people I know who have worked as servers and bartenders are not supporters. I'm actually finding it very difficult to find any surveys or research on this. I found one poll that shows tipped workers are in favor of a $15 minimum wage in addition to tips (obviously), but I can't find anything asking about a higher minimum wage without tips.

Reminds me of the early pro slavery arguments about how people liked to be slaves working in the cotton fields

You also get to take cash home after every shift.

This is not true for all servers/bartenders or for all restaurants/bars. Yes, a Hooters girl can make a lot of money, as can servers working at high end steakhouses. Servers at Denny's, not so much.

The good ones love the tip system. They get the most tips, and also tend to be the types of people recruited to the higher prices restaurants where higher tips are normal. They draw in repeat customers for their great service.

I used to know a waitress who was making just as much as her engineer husband. She looked good for 55, but 55 will never look good enough to draw in many high tips based on looks. (good lucks is a factor in service to a lot of people, but it didn't apply here)

The bad ones get bad tips and hate the system, but they should be fired anyway.

On the one hand I don't like having to figure tips. However a few times I've got bad service and at least I could do something about it.

I am most curious what percentage of the population dynamically adjusts their tip in any relation to the service. It has just become an additional tax. I give a standard 20%, more if it rounds to a nice whole dollar amount.

Even if I had bad service, I am still giving 20%. That's the social contract I am stuck with fulfilling.

Seconding this, unless the server kicks me in the groin they're getting 20%. That's the only way they're getting a livable wage and I'm sure not going to be the one to rob them of it.

I remember reading a pretty interesting book (Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City) where the author found that a great proportion of the tip income among his study's subjects came from friends and associates who also worked in food and drink service--they were basically just passing cash back and forth.

Restaurant owners do not like it. For them it means a fixed percentage of revenue has to go to the front of house. Also, it means that waitstaff will side with the customer’s interests over the restaurant’s. Consider for example a round of free drinks at a bar—increases the tip but costs the bar.

Restaurant owners that have tried to eliminate tipping find a) customers are uncomfortable and sometimes try to tip anyway and b) would be customers compare prices without taking into account the fact that tip is included.

The people I’ve talked to most inclined to support tipping culture are servers at mid to expensive restaurants and demanding foodies.

> For them it means a fixed percentage of revenue has to go to the front of house.

??? Tipping is not a "fixed percentage."

You may have a few edge cases here, but I have to push back on the idea that business owners don't like it. They get to pay their front house staff next to nothing, this money consistently goes untaxed, and it gives their employees incentive to work hard.

It also gives their front house the capability to make an income that the owner themselves would never dream of paying, meaning they can have talented employees just show up magically without having to alter their business in any way.

I have to agree that the people who like it THE MOST are the people also most likely to complain: the servers and bartenders. It only takes some basic math to identify that being a server is the highest paying entry level job in the United States simply because of tipping culture.

It’s not a fixed percentage but it’s close enough to think of it that way.

The real problem is that they are legally prohibited from using tip share to pay their back of house more.

This puts them in a situation where if they want to raise kitchen staff wages they have to raise prices and restaurant customers are extremely price sensitive.

Several high end restaurants (were presumably there would be less price sensitivity) have tried doing away with tips and raising their prices to pay all staff a more uniform wage. It’s largely failed. Customers don’t like higher prices and front if house staff largely prefer tips as they make more (at the cost of lower pay for their kitchen colleagues).

> being a server is the highest paying entry level job in the United States simply because of tipping culture.

...if you get just the right job in just the right area. The exact same job—even at a chain—in two restaurants just a few miles apart could have massively different levels of tips.

Business owners like the fact that their staff are incentivized to sell as if paying a percentage commission on sales, but the commission is paid by the consumers.

> customers are uncomfortable and sometimes try to tip anyway

This is almost certainly largely because of another of the incredibly frustrating aspects of tipping: it's entirely informal, with no way to tell what's expected of customers. The etiquette around it can be extremely confusing on both sides, too—I've heard stories of workers who are strictly forbidden from acknowledging tips to customers, so that if you asked, they would have to say "no, you don't need to tip", even though they're still considered tipped workers legally.

So unless there's explicit statements from the establishment of "we do not accept tips for our workers, because we make sure their wages are high enough not to need that", you can't take "you don't need to tip" at face value. Hell, even then you can't; I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see unscrupulous business owners put that even when they do not, in fact, pay their workers well, especially in areas near where other places say it truthfully.

> Restaurant owners do not like it. For them it means a fixed percentage of revenue has to go to the front of house.

Reducing fixed period costs (e.g. labor costs of servers, rent, IT hardware) to revenue based splits (e.g. tipping, hotdesks at coworking spaces, the cloud) is an excellent way to minimize risks and most businesses are willing to pay a premium for that.

That may well be the case, but in the restaurant industry it is potentially keeping in place a local maxima. No restaurant can experiment with spending less on front of house and more on back of house, ingredients, or space. That percentage of revenue (~25%) is locked in and untouchable.

Spending 25% on the front of the house? That's a huge amount - labor is probably less than 25% all in.

20% comes off the top in the form of tips that never make it to the till. The other 5% is a fudge factor for the fact that you still need to pay something in wages.

Your numbers imply that the hourly productivity of a waiter in the US serves food that is just under $50 on the menu and thy make a $12.50 tip on the same. More in areas with a higher tip minimum wage. Do those numbers seem reasonable to you?

I don’t understand where you are getting those numbers.

I’m in CA, which doesn’t have a tipped minimum wage loophole, and the tipping culture keeps increasing what’s an expected tip, and more and more places expect you to tip, so it seems like it’s never going away. Just upwards.

But also, it’s not just restaurant owners that like it. A lot of tipped workers make out really well with tips and prefer it that way.

People who actually get tipped (servers, bartenders, baristas, caddies, drivers, delivery people) are by far the biggest proponents of keeping the current system in place.

> It seems to incentivize a mentality of "the customer is always right", with workers putting an extra effort to always smile and be nice in the hope for a fair tip.

That's exactly the point. It's meant to be an incentive to put in extra effort, and in my experience it works. Everywhere I've been that doesn't have restaurant tipping, for instance, has had notably worse service on average.

Where it becomes a problem is that the tips are now treated as the expected wage, rather than something extra. Working entirely for something that is intended as an incentive is a bit perverse and demeaning. In the end, I think for this reason tipping ought to be done away with, but it does have its upsides.

Restaurants can really barely afford to stay open in my (small) region, frankly they are seen as a service to a town not a net extractor. I know the finances behind my locals and can tell you they would not be able to stay open if workers were not also compensated via tips, and workers would not be there without the requisite pay. Tips end up being the difference between having a restaurant or not.

Would customers be willing to pay marginally higher menu prices if tips were explicitly not allowed? I assume there must be research on this.

Changing menu prices is probably a bit less elastic than letting people be flexible with their spending. I'm more likely to buy the burger that I can afford and stinge on the tip if I'm tight and come back next week and guilt tip when I'm full. Raise the price across the board and I'm not coming the tight week.

Why should wait staff salary be the thing that gets sacrificed to economic downfall? They have much less control over what kind of food the restaurants sell and for what price.

It makes more sense for those who have more decision power to eat the consequences. They can make cheaper burgers, lower salaries for everyone rather then single profession, change what they sell.

The wait staff can only decide whether they work or not.

Tipping as price discrimination, with positive empathy from a human face being the upsell.

You can pay either $8 or $10 for the same meal. If you pay $8 you feel bad, if you pay $10 you feel good. Thereby the restaurant takes in the full $10 from people who can afford it and/or aren't psychopaths, but still makes the sale at $8 for anyone else.

Genuinely curious: what if your local restaurants raise prices too?

If the region can't afford a restaurant without having external taxpayers subsidize the restaurant (e.g. via social safety net transfer payments), perhaps it shouldn't have one. Every business doesn't need to scale down or up to fill every niche.

I'm not sure I understand: me as a customer, whether I pay the menu + 20% tip, or I pay a menu 20% more expensive, I end up exactly the same. So why is for the restaurant owner better with tipping, instead of raising the prices 20% and putting an entry sign "no tipping needed here, we pay our workers right"? Even call the restaurant "no tipping place" if they wish. Can someone with experience in restaurant business explain this?

Menu: $5 burger

Customer 1 (richy rich): $5 + $2 tip

Customer 2 (workin man): $5 + $1 tip

Customer 3 (poor man): $5 no tip

Total: $18

Menu: $6 burger

Customer 1 (richy rich): $6 + $1 tip

Total: $7

You've reduced your customer based on true affordability and perceived affordability. This doesn't consider the margin on selling a single burger but generally you need to push product rather than sell master pieces.

Seems like you'd still have two customers (The burger is still in 'workin man''s budget), at 2/3 the food cost.

You are right, but I removed him to make the point that this is partly based on perception of the person doing the buying.

Workin man this week is poor man next week and then some weeks he's richy rich. Do you want to capture all forms of this guy?

None of this is rigorous of course but ya know we don't have a town full of 1 guy with a single budget. We have a town full of people with various and changing budgets, what kind of mechanism can be put into place to keep base finances workable in tight times while extracting more in good times?

> what kind of mechanism can be put into place to keep base finances workable in tight times while extracting more in good times?

Surely there must be a way because every other business seems to manage, and so do restaurants in 50%+ of the world.

Your contrived hypothetical scenario is not proof of your conjecture.

Because there are plenty of places that don't work with tips that do fine. Hell, some of our least expensive options operate in a tip-free environment. And no restaurant where tipping is expected is selling for the same price as fast food places in the first place. So it's not the scenario where you're looking at two options that seem equally priced, but one has the hidden tip tax on it. No, you're looking at two options where one is just more expensive and you have to tip.

And why are restaurants special in this regard? Why does no other sector have to operate on this model, where a customer has to directly pay a businesses employees? And why only in the U.S.? How did the rest of the world figure this one out but we can't seem to shake it?

Tipping is stupid and is anti-ethical to actual customer service as it pits staff against the customer and creates resentment in both directions.

If you look into the financializations of any Restaurant you won't necessarily be able to generalize to all Restaurants. McDonald's empire is built on real estate not burgers anymore for instance.

Anyway I was speaking specifically on my own regions circumstances, we don't have fastfood within a 1hr round-trip. That 1hr adds up to a few bucks gas and time I don't have. There is no 2 options.

Extrapolating from singular circumstances is worse than generalizing from the most common.

Based on many of the other comments here it would look more like:

Customer 1 (richy rich): $5 + no tip

Customer 2 (workin man): $5 + $2 tip

Customer 3 (poor man): $5 + $1 tip

The tip amount seems to depend more on empathy/demographics than the amount of money one has to spend.

When did tipping become 20%? The majority of my life it was 15%. Then at a certain point I started hearing 18%. Now it is 20%? Who is behind this?

Social norms.

But, yes, it's creeped up from 15% before tax to 18-20% on the total bill in general.

Yes, but social norms don’t come out of nowhere. It was 15% for a long time, then it went to 18% (why 18? I can see the jump to 20% as people wanting to do easier math than 18%). Someone somewhere had to have created this new social norm.

> Someone somewhere had to have created this new social norm.

Someone didn't need to do anything and as far as I know, no individual decreed anything. (Although possibly guidebook and etiquette writes have helped contribute.)

It makes some sense with inflation and probably lack of increase in wait staff salaries. Restaurants often show recommended tips and even mandatory service adders for large groups. But, for the most part, it's probably been mostly organic.

In my experience:

- Older generations tip maximum 15%, and decide what to tip based on service quality

- Millennials tip a flat 20%, regardless of service quality

- People who worked in the service industry will tip 30%, because they know what it's like.

Software nudges (e.g. Square). This scales social behavior very quickly.

I'm not from the US so I didn't really have an idea what to take, so I pulled a figure out of my :) sorry for the confusion!

When we look at the issues that are behind the thin margins that restaurants operate on, i.e. rent and cost of goods, then it seems that the labor is the only variable that is under the operators control. So instead of framing the argument of whether we should have to directly pay those wages/tips the discussion needs to shift.

Why are commercial rents so high? Because vacancies are preferred over "market rate" rents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27939860

Not saying this is the case, but when a business shuts down the property it operated in stays in place. The rent will continue to rise to meet the financial demands of the property owner. So the next fool comes in and tries to run a business that is doomed. The young workers rents are subsidized by parents. Unless a restaurant owner is working in the trenches then they will NEVER be able to run the business effectively.

The banks get richer either way, but at a certain point there will not be any restaurants left as the societal contracts erode.

So I think a different angle to look at something like this is. If everyone in an area gets paid a living wage, and the people who work at a business can actually afford to be customers of that business, it actually creates more customers and businesses overall do better.

I forget the name of who put this idea forward, but businesses that barely break even when paying the absolute minimums, don't necessarily do worse if labor costs go up universally in an area, and everyone can begin to afford to use the services.

This is kind of a bullshit excuse.

Most restaurants can barely afford to stay open because most restaurants are run by people who have no business running a business. Hell, let's be honest, most businesses are run by people who have no business running a business. Most people don't really want to run a business, they want to do something else, but also get paid to do it.

There are plenty of small restaurants around the world that get by fine without tips and manage to pay their employees. But for some reason, the U.S. thinks this is somehow impossible.

Tipping is stupid. But since servers can make more money than on a set wage, they don't mind that the restaurant owners are essentially pitting their employees against their customers. You know what would increase the overall level of service? If the restaurant paid a decent wage to their employees and then removed the obligation from the customer to pay the restaurant's employees.

It always blows my mind when business owners complain “oh labour is too expensive, oh I can’t stay in business”

Yes, that’s how capitalism, markets and commerce work. It has good parts and bad parts. If you don’t want the government to get involved when it’s going well, why get them involved when it isn’t? Greed and hypocrisy, that’s why.

I agree and in that regard I've always found EU countries much more humane, in the sense they don't have to take shit from a bad customer and smile because of the weight of the tip in their salary.

Yeah, instead the customer has to take it from bad servers with nothing they can do about it.

You can:

- Talk back to the server (hopefully to de-escalate rather than escalate) - Ask to talk to their manager - Not come back - Leave a review

That's hardly "nothing"

Doubtful, a restaurant with bad service will go kaput. Restaurant owners do care about this kind of thing. It's called the hospitality industry for a reason.

Personally, I've found service better in non-tipping countries than in tipping countries. My guess is it's because in most non-tipping countries, waiters spend less time trying to pretend to be friends with customers at every table and more time just doing their job. Having to wait for service because a waiter is spending a lot of time buttering up another table with inane chit-chat is annoying, especially when I have to pay extra for it.

Its weird who is "supposed" to get tips, too. Someone who brings you a plate is supposed to get 15% of the bill for doing their job; but an auto parts store clerk who chases down something weird for you over 2hrs of searching may well be forbidden to accept any gratuity, and possibly even disciplined for spending too much time on a small sale.

And the idea that the gratuity should be a percentage of the selling price of the goods is also weird. Someone makes more money if they did the same work but handed you more expensive food.

Real estate agents are the craziest example of this.

That's just a commission on a sale. It's the similar, but not the same. When I buy a house, there isn't an amount tacked on to pay the agent, that comes out of the sale price.*

Unless you're saying real estate agents are expecting tips now. That's messed up.

*Now, there are a bunch of other hidden fees and closing costs associated with a house to where you just need X% of the cost of a house in just to handle that bullshit.

It’s not twice as much work to sell a $2 million house as a $1 million house. Why does it cost twice as much in real estate agent fees?

In this case, so?

Like I said, you're not being charged anything there. It comes out of the purchase price.

It's the agent who is listing the house at a price and sourcing the various inspectors and appraisers. They're putting in the work to sell your house at a price point.

So, if the agent can manage to move your house for $2 million rather than $1 million, why shouldn't they get a larger reward?

It's a different scenario from servers. Servers can't convince you to pay more for an item or for the business to sell that item for less. Real estate agents can.

> So, if the agent can manage to move your house for $2 million rather than $1 million, why shouldn't they get a larger reward?

Indeed, for the seller this makes sense and the agent's and seller's incentives are aligned. But there's a nasty externality created where real estate agents contribute to a constant upward pressure on housing prices. This eventually helps make housing unaffordable.

This assumes that any house can go for $2 million if you just get a good enough agent. That’s clearly not the case. If there was some way to pay for excess returns, that would be a good argument. But flat commission percentage isn’t it.

For the buyer it also badly misaligns incentives. A buyer's real estate agent is financially better off finding the most expensive property their client is willing to buy rather than the cheapest property that suits the client's needs.

Your question falsely assumes that a real estate agent's value is measured in a lumps of labor. If that were the case, we'd see lawyers being payed the same amount of money for reading the same book of law. The real estate fees are a negotiated cost in lieu of hourly payment.

If it were in lieu of an hourly payment it would vary from agent to agent (depending on expertise) rather than house to house (depending on price). This is how lawyers work. Some are $200 an hour and some are $500 an hour.

As a water drinker I always pad a few bucks onto my bill. Water is free on the bill, but I want the server to think water drinkers are worth a bit more in tips so bring them their refills.

> I am always baffled when I read about the tip culture in the states. I find it so belittling for workers. It seems to incentivize a mentality of "the customer is always right", with workers putting an extra effort to always smile and be nice in the hope for a fair tip.

There was an early-20th-century movement in the US to end tipping, for that reason. The thinking was that it created too much of a relationship of subservience rather than equals participating in commerce, to be compatible with American ideals of freedom.

You see this sometimes in older media, as in the "Tipping is Un-American" sign in the film The Petrified Forest.

> The thinking was that it created too much of a relationship of subservience rather than equals participating in commerce, to be compatible with American ideals of freedom.

That's my feelings about tipping. The custom feels very classist. Depending on tips creates a social divide between service industries and their customers.

I used to work for tips when I was growing up (~2010). My rate was about $15-20/hr which you just couldn't get as young teenager any other way. BUT, I had to force myself to be bubbly and make small talk or I'd make closer to $5-10/hr. The core service quality never changed--only how much I pleased/entertained my customers. I felt like the court fool or a beggar pleading for alms, so I eventually quit for a $10/hr job that I felt much better working throughout the rest of high school.

The tipping experience did teach me the value of being personable, but I don't think the incentives need to be so severe.

You have just talked me into tips. I want a server who will entertain me while I'm waiting. There is a line of course, don't do too much, but a bit of make me feel better about it is worth paying extra for. Service with a good bubbly personality is well worth the extra cost in my opinion.

This shows a disturbing lack of empathy.

> I want a server who will entertain me while I'm waiting.

Not everyone does--people are fickle. There's also a reason theaters don't use a pay-what-you-want model. Having your lively hood to depend on the whims of strangers is no way to operate.

> Having your lively hood to depend on the whims of strangers is no way to operate.

Your lively hood ALWAYS depends on the whims of strangers. It doesn't matter what you do, you depend on strangers to support you.

You're being disingenuous. The difference is how directly you depend on the whims on strangers and whether those whims include breaking a contract.

Personally I prefer to be around people who are friendly because they genuinely want to be rather than because I am paying them to fake it.

It's worse than even that. It's people essentially groveling or even degrading themselves so that maybe you'll voluntarily choose to pay them, desperately clinging onto the hope that you're not one of the people who simply never tips or only tips a pittance.

It's one thing if someone's being friendly and entertaining because they're being paid a salary or ticket price to do so - like a magician or tour guide or something. That's still artificial and potentially forced and stilted, but at least it's a reasonable, tit-for-tat kind of artificiality. With tipping it feels not only artificial but patronizing, condescending, and servile. You're at the mercy of the capriciousness and cruelty of customers. Or, alternatively, in some cases inadvertently thrusting them into a position of guilt and obligation and pity.

It's not that bad since the employee probably knows what they were signing up for before taking the job, and some can make a lot of money from it, but, overall, the whole thing just feels... weird.

>BUT, I had to force myself to be bubbly and make small talk or I'd make closer to $5-10/hr. The core service quality never changed--only how much I pleased/entertained my customers.

I don't think this is something you can fault tips for. If anything it suggests that tips are working as intended, presumably without tips your employer would bake such expectations into your customer facing role anyway?

What you're talking about is scaling pay with customer satisfaction correct?

The issue with depending on customer satisfaction is that human beings only have agency over themselves. No matter how polite and courteous an employee is they cannot force a customer to be satisfied or that said satisfaction should result in a nice tip.

There are too many variables outside of your control such as the individual customers, shift schedule, volume of customers, the literal weather, political mood, etc. Some days I would go home with like $30 for the day's work despite behaving the same as my high earning days. You are not actually getting paid for your performance directly.

On average you may make more, but if you're in a low income position you are not equipped to ride out the variance. You are being exposed to so much uncertainty and raw humanity that it affects your mentality. It's much harder to shake off making $60 for an entire weekend of work because customers were grumpy when you only have $250 in your bank account and your car payment is due. As an equation it may look equitable, but that equation is not reality.

Businesses that support the tipping system are leaving their employees out in the proverbial wind. Instead business owners should assume the risk and actually manage their employees in an equitable fashion.

It is the employees who like tipping. You are falling for a common misconception.

The Front of House employees, but yes.

It's like a hack for the owner to show prices at a <insert tip rate> discount to the meal. If everyone has a shared expectation that the tip is a certain rate, then that's the pay. Why not remove tipping and add that cost to the menu? But then maybe you wouldn't be as competitive?

I'm sure there are people who can make good money on tips. That's more like a commission on sales. In that sense, you're taking the risk of a higher upside by working in this industry. But the way it actually works, is that most will pay the expected tip. some won't pay any tip at all, some will give a bigger tip, and the worker is left to absorb the variance on a low pay gig.

The industry should remove the downside and allow the upside. You get paid X. There is no tipping system. But the customer can still tip if they like.

I don't work in the industry. Maybe I'm way off. I hope the employment picture changes in the future so that people will appreciate face to face service. I can't reach Facebook or Google for support and I'll cry about my loss, but I'll feel entitled to rage on my server for my $10 meal? Doesn't seem sustainable.

This is much more about low wages than it is about tipping

Tipping is a contentious topic.

Perhaps counterintuitively, wait staff generally prefers a tipping model over fixed pay when given the choice. Tipping is more variable, but it can pay surprisingly well, especially for staff who are good at their job. It’s rare to find a no-tip restaurant that can match the earning potential of what a good server can make with tipping. It’s theoretically possible, of course, but in practice it doesn’t seem to work out in favor of fixed pay.

Servers like it because they can abuse information asymmetry to get more money.

If I sit down at a restaurant, I don't know if the server has had a good week, a bad week, an average week, or what. So, not knowing that, if I'm sympathetic to their position, I'm inclined to tip well. Add on to that the constant pressure of tips upward. It's gone from being 10% on average to 20% on average in my lifetime. And also flat rates on certain services.

And god help you if you don't tip. Searching the web reveals horror stories of food tampering and deliberately bad service. Imagine if you're from a culture where tipping doesn't exist and you simply don't know that you're supposed to leave some extra percentage for the employee.

Ironically some expensive restaurants in the states add “gratuity” (like a service charge) to the bill and do not rely on tipping. This ensures their hard to recruit staff (sommeliers, skilled wait staff, etc…) can be paid enough to keep working there.

I've only ever seen this policy applied to large parties, and it's below the standard tip percentage anyway.

Go to cities like Seattle or San Francisco. You’ll frequently find places with an 18% or 20% service charge regardless of party size or even a no tips policy.

I've never seen it below the standard tip percentage. I've frequently seen it above the standard tip percentage.

Yet somehow the service in the US is 10x better than in Europe.

As a redcoat in enemy territory I generally agree, although the golden retriever-esque fake enthusiasm in the states can be a little skeezy, when it feels like they're forced to act like that because the wage without tips is so low

'Yes, everything is still fine' - you don't need to check every 5 minutes

This has not been my experience.

I usually prefer the service in Europe (if it’s possible to generalize the continent like that). Americans waiters constantly intrude. I’d rather they stay away as much as possible.

Supposedly its origin is tied in with race relations. I only vaguely remember the historical explanation and I'm too tired to look into it right now. Anyway, I agree that the phenomenon is pretty degrading.

Seattle tried this recently. It didn't go well. Servers pointed out to their customers that they personally didn't receive the "service charge" that was mandated added to the bill. So customers felt obligated to add a tip on top of the service charge. I haven't been a restaurant in Seattle in a couple of months, but I got the impression the experiment was largely abandoned.

Am I reading the author right that he’s expecting people to tip on the movie ticket portion of their check?

If so, I’m not at all surprised to he ended up disappointed when people didn’t do that. It would never occur to me to do that, before or after reading the article.

I don't think that was the expectation, not sure where you read that into it. The two examples he gave were for the bar in the lobby and a total bill that would be mainly food. This is presumably a Drafthouse or one of the similar places that have full waiter service at your seat.

> On Christmas Day a family bought over $100 worth of tickets and food two days after Christmas.

> The tip? $2.00.

How else would I read that? If it was $85 in tickets, $10 in served items, and $5 in tax, that’s a 20% tip in my book, but the author (a career politician) would like you to read it as a 2% tip.

Tickets are 10-15 dollars, the assumption here is that bill is mostly food.

$10-15 per person (closer to $15 in my experience). This was a family. If there were six of them, that would be $60-90 in tickets.

He also says it was during "a movie night for kids," and the author thinks people should be paying for normal movie theater stuff, like popcorn:

>You want to see Spider Man? You desperately want to bring your kids to Encanto or Sing 2? And you want your popcorn, food, and drinks? Cool. But if you don’t tip...

If someone is taking their kids to a movie night, I wouldn't expect them to tip for tickets, popcorn and soda. And if there's a theater where the workers get upset that you don't tip them for those, I'd expect people to avoid it and go to a normal theater.

If someone brings popcorn and soda to our table, I expect to/do tip for it.

I don't think I've ever been in a movie theater other than restaurant/theater hybrids (where tables have specific waiters) where this was done. But either way, the author says he was working the bar (which sounds more like a bar/concession stand hybrid), not serving tables.

The Alamo Drafthouse chain of theaters, of which there is at least one in Austin and one in the DC suburbs, has table service. And, if I remember correctly, the bar is set-up like a normal pub bar (and separate from non-alcohol concessions). So, you can order a drink in advance of seating, as you would at a a pub (where you'd normally tip the bartender) and you can order drinks at your seat.

It is a bit strange/confusing that the author didn't clarify, as very few theaters serve alcohol at all. And most that do don't have a stand-alone bar or table service, just beers at the concession counter.

In all the dine-in theaters I've been at, the tickets are purchased in the front of house, and the check delivered in the theater is for food only. In that case, he made a really poor choice in how to explain this as the $100 receipt shown in the article would be for food only.

...a family bought over $100 worth of tickets and food...

I'm not sure how this theater is arranged. My local theater serves beer/wine and some heavy snacks. But, it doesn't have table service. Just the typical counter service. I've never tipped and always assumed the counter staff is earning at least minimum wage (no different than buying a latte at Starbucks).

The few times I've gone to a movie theater with table service, the tickets and food/drink were separate bills - tickets purchased in advance of the showing and food/drink ordered during previews/ads. The food bill would be tipped like any other restaurant with table service.

I was a Starbucks barista for a year (2000), and customer tips were an important part of my take home.

I think most people think like you, because at the time I calculated my average tip was 5 cents per customer, but that still raise my hourly to something I could almost afford to live on (I think it took me from $6-something to about $9/hr).

I wouldn't consider getting a latte and not tipping after that experience.

Wow, I've never even considered tipping at Starbucks.

Interesting. I tip at Starbucks always but almost never at Dunks.

I have no fully acceptable-to-me rational explanation for this arbitrary-seeming difference. I can concoct a backwards justification, but I very rarely go to either, so I haven't had to unravel this mystery.

Those arbitrary-seeming differences are everywhere once you try to justify who gets tips and who doesn’t. Pretty much every justification of why tips are great applies to jobs that don’t get tips, and vice versa.

Ugh, not sure why you're getting downvotes for relating a personal anecdote that's relevant to the topic. This forum is weird.

I hate that minimum wage is so far below living-wage in many places. But, I'm also loathe to tip everybody in a customer-facing job. Where do I draw the line? I'd much prefer (and would happily vote for) a $15 or $20 minimum in my region (DC metro).

I'm not sure why either - super curious.

I was trying to add to the discussion with my experience.

I will add, the role of barista has changed at Starbucks in the last 20 years. When I had that job, pulling a good shot and foaming the milk properly was something that I took a lot of pride in - I approached it as a skill. As I was leaving the company was moving to essentially push-button espresso machines, removing any sense of craft from the barista.

It makes perfect business sense, as the company goal is the same quality of drink no matter time/place/barista, but to me just pushing buttons wasn't interesting or fun.

Honestly, I loved that job! People come in, and you give them the thing that makes them happier and helps them feel better. I had regulars with a nice rapport, and I worked 5a to noon most days and was able to hike or golf in the afternoons. I was living rent free as a house sitter, which made the finances work out.

Part of the issue with tipping culture is that there's a grey area between the "obviously tipped" and "obviously not tipped" roles. This grey area creates space for companies to pay tipped wages, but customers to also not tip because they didn't think about it.

In most states (not sure if it's a federal law), tip-earners are guaranteed to be "topped up" or "made whole" if their tips don't bring them to the normal minimum wage.

That minimum is still too low to be livable in many areas, Texas included, but that's a separate, albeit related, problem.

I only ever worked a tipped job in California, where there is no separate tipped minimum, but it's a very common refrain from service industry workers commenting online that this "top up" happens far less often than you would think.

Not surprising. The entire point of a tipped minimum wage is to make labor cheaper. Given the scope of wage theft in America, I’d actually be shocked if top up payments were regularly honored.

Sadly, I’ve heard the same. That’s wage theft. And a good reason to do away with tipping and start paying wait staff a real living wage.

Welcome to the terrible world of tipping. Subsidize the wages so the employer doesn't have to. I got out of my way to avoid any type of business or service that has tipping. It's getting so bad out there I've seen people talk about getting asked for a tip in a drive thru. Do I tip when I eat out? Yes. But that's cut down to a minimum now. I think we're headed towards a breaking point. Profits and cost of living cannot continue to skyrocket while pay stagnates.

> Welcome to the terrible world of tipping.

While I agree, I remember bartenders making $10/hr + tips when I worked in a restaurant... in 1998. I could make $10/hr washing dishes (always the most hard-to-staff position) but wouldn't do so until after the restaurant died down because I made more busing tables with tips.

Let's just call this type of employment what it is: wage slavery. People are used to there being a class of people willing to take these jobs.

> in 1998. I could make $10/hr washing dishes

Most dishwashers were only making minimum wage back then ($4.25 in my state)

No way anyone outside of LA/SF/NYC were paying dishwashers 10+. I made 5.25 (i think) around that time period (98-00) washing dishes. It sucked ass

Central PA, it was a busy restaurant next to Hershey Park. I believe dishwashers started at $7.50 or $8... but on a busy Saturday night the managers would have to go around begging someone wash dishes. I doubt they would've let me work full time at that rate, but they let me clock in/out to my advantage when they needed it.

Hosts/busers started around $5.25 or so... I think I eventually worked it up to $7.50 or so, but with tips it was much more. My point is that even then it wasn't worth it to me to work for $10/hr.

If I had to guess, the wages probably aren't much more now than they were then.

I wouldn't lay this all on the world of tipping. The author was working as a bartender in a movie theater making $10 plus split tips. People don't see movie theaters are a tipping environment, especially for the vast majority of the positions that aren't bartending. These are the epitome of minimum wage "low skill" jobs that we apparently demand exist, but don't want to pay the cost for.

I don’t think the issue is that people don’t want to pay I think the issue is that people are expected to pay meanwhile those running the companies earn a disproportionate wage.

Other counties manage to have services that don’t depend on tips to pay their staff’s wages. I don’t see why the US can’t as well.

The reason the situation sucks is entirely down to the greed of the companies.

Technically the customers are always paying the employee's wages.

I have 3 complaints about tipping:

- It gives bad customers unfair power to dock employee's wages

- It is inconvenient and an embarrassing social interaction. I don't want to think of myself as responsible for someone's pay over lunch, I want to think of myself as eating a taco.

- It hides information from customers, because the tip is not included in the price

Hiding information is the same bullshit as Instacart saying "Same price as in the store!" before adding 50-100% of the order price in fees.

Transactions should start with the highest possible price and add discounts. Starting with a low price is a sneaky backdoor for false advertising, because it gets you to start a transaction with a less-scrupulous company that looks cheaper, and then you begrudgingly complete the transaction even though you realized it actually costs more, because now it would cost too much to switch.

Nope. When I worked tips were way preferable. A busy night could get me $50/hr just in tips. Maybe $500 in a night if I was lucky.

You could boost me to 2x minimum wage and I’d still make less.

There is a reason why the tipping system still exists.

That is highly dependent on the type of restaurant you work at. Someone I know would make 100-250 a night a one place. Moves to another one, she was maybe getting maybe 20 total a night. Moves to another one 80-150...

I worked at a popular pizza chain for high school and got maybe $10 in tips my entire time there. My pregnant coworker meanwhile averaged an extra $50 or more a night. Given that I was paid minimum wage at the time ($4.25 IIRC), that extra $50 in tips was a significant boost to her income.

Now on one hand I think it's fair that a pregnant woman needs more money than a high school kid who's saving up for extra toys (a DSLR in my case), so I'm not complaining about my pay. But then again literally no customer actually knew that; for all they knew I was supporting my poor family with extra income. The arbitrariness is troubling. If tips are a significant chunk of your pay, then you're dependent on either customers feeling bad for you, or generally liking you in order to make a good wage. And heaven help you if you're in a demographic group that's disliked for whatever reason.

Very much so. It is situation dependent and in your case time dependent. 4.25 was nearly 25+ years ago at this point. Tips have unfortunately morphed into this 'this is how I get paid', instead of 'I like you, here is some extra'. We went from a system that was semi fair to one of capriciousness and pettiness. I once watched a dude dump out of a tip because the server didnt bring him a straw.

> 4.25 was nearly 25+ years ago at this point.

Nope! The minimum wage in Ohio was $4.25 in 2005, 17 years ago. It has however gone up since then significantly to $9.30 today.

I agree with the rest of your post though. The capriciousness and pettiness is very real, and doesn’t reflect super great on our society imho.

I hate the tipping culture in the West (as opposed to places like Japan, where there is almost no tipping at all) mostly because the tip was initially meant as an exception for service above expectation, not as a regular component of the pricing. From my perspective even regular service deserves no tip, I expect to be charged for the service and tip only for exceeding expectations, but it does not work that way for a long time.

My first night in Tokyo with a group of friends, we had an amazing multi-hour meal with loads of drinks and generally catching up. We knew we didn't have to, but we tipped generously by American standards. We got chased into the street by two of the waiters and had a large argument with neither side wanting to take the tip money. I assumed tips would be "not expected, but quietly accepted" which turned out to be not at all the case.

I can understand why this is the case. There are no social norms for accepting tips. How do you split it? What do you do if other servers ask what you did with the money? It would be shameful to accept this if the social norms prohibit any sort of tipping.

"We knew we didn't have to, but we did it because we are Americans and we don't care about other cultures". Not a quote, but how many people will read that. I think they are somehow right. In Europe and Asia the American tourists have some bad reputation, for a reason. In Paris (France) we asked some waiters about this and the answers were very strong (I was with some locals, so the waiters were very open to speak up).

I agree that’s a somewhat correct reading; we (obviously?) didn’t do it on later meals. I think it’s fair to say there’s a reasonable gap between “you don’t have to” and “you really ought not”.

I wonder why all the comments from this thread exclusively about tips when the article covered much much more than that. Interesting.

It suggests to me that a lot of HN commentators have only been on one side of the interaction between service workers and customers.

Tipping is a semi frequently covered political topic here. Anything from corporate corruption, dumb Americans, any anecdote, and similar easy observations that don’t need you to read the article. Especially when “top comment” is on such an easy/well tread/low effort/acceptable topic, people here are far less likely to read the article.

(Personally I think the “top comment” is almost always worth collapsing. Though looks like you’re top now while I typed this)

I suspect a lot of people here have never worked the kinds of jobs being talked about. It's basically bikeshedding. Tips are easy to talk about and the rest isn't.

Talking about tipping is easy. Literally every argument for and against has been made, repeatedly, in this very forum, so you don't have to think before replying. Your knee jerks and paragraphs come out and you score internet points.

Probably because he concludes the piece saying “Customers… if you don’t tip or act like an act like an asshole… workers will not be there to serve you.” Most of us have been customers at movie theaters, so we latch on to the part where he addresses us.

Meanwhile, we’re all experiencing an increase in expected tips, both percentage-wise and existing services newly asking for tips, which tends to annoy customers. It’s like hidden fees for airlines and airbnb and all that other shit. You know it’s coming, but it always annoys a bit, and it’s just growing.

Former politician who focused on labor joins the workforce and learns the real truth THEN chastises customers for not tipping in the conclusion of his article?

Yes, he talks about the tough conditions of the job and customer behavior and other things, but nothing about how MAYBE legislation should change for wages (hourly service workers relying on tips in the US actually make well below the hourly minimum wage).

Sorry, for once I want to throw some outrage around about this.

I think he's actually going through the exercise of confirming his prior beliefs with "experience".

Too true! Yes he's now in the workforce, and it's such a shame that he NOW sees how the system works AFTER dictating/enforcing policy about it for an entire state.

And there's an implication at the end of the article: tip more, customers. Policy is fine, it didn't cause this problem, customer behavior did.

Perhaps he needs more confirmation through that experience.

There’s a difference between understanding something and groking something.

Experiencing something yourself is very different than simply reading and empathizing about something.

I can definitely see why what would be your interpretation of the end of the article, but I don't think that's what the author was trying to convey. Earlier on, under the "The first and biggest is wages" header, the author implies that the policies around tipping are a big part of the problem. But the reality is that there have long been efforts to end the practice of tipping in the US, and they have all failed. Even if there were to be a successful push to change the culture around it, it would take years, and his argument is about what is causing labor issues now.

His argument is addressed to Austinites and others in similar areas who want to enjoy activities like watching a movie in a theater, and are now finding it harder than it used to be. In summary:

1. In order to survive, lots of theaters have pivoted to models where employees serve food and drinks to customers sitting in the theater.

2. Because they're serving food this way, they can get tips.

3. Because they can get tips, their wage is $2.13 an hour.

4. At the start of the pandemic, a lot of people took early retirement, opening up a lot of higher-end jobs that had been unavailable previously, since Americans are retiring later, and high-end job growth does not scale linearly with the population. This means low-wage workers now have more options, and it's switched from an employer-favored job market to an employee-favored market.

5. Low-wage earners cannot afford to live in Austin. Workers at this theater were either teenage children of wealthy Austinites, or commuting from less expensive areas. If the job gets too bad, the teenagers can afford to just quit, and the commuters can find jobs closer to home.

6. On one day given as an example, the entire tip amount was $3.80. Since tips are split evenly, every worker got $3.80 in tips for the day. Assuming they worked 8 hour days, that means the employees making a base salary of $2.13/hour got a total of $2.61/hour, or a total of $20.84 for the day, with no healthcare. That doesn't even cover the commute expenses for the day.

7. Because of all of the above, there are few people willing to work at a movie theater, and when a movie theater can't even keep a skeleton crew on staff to keep it running, it will have to close down.

Therefore, if you are an Austinite who wants to continue going to movie theaters, you have only one immediate way to keep them open: tip generously.

You might think the other option is to go to a movie theater that doesn't serve food and drink this way, and thus must pay the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. And this is more reasonable, but a total day's pay for a worker there will still be $58/day without healthcare. We're at the point where it covers the commute, but barely. The IRS estimates that commutes cost $0.56/mile in oil/gas/maintenance costs. For someone with a 30 mile commute each way, that's $33.60 in commute costs, leaving them with $24.40 for a day's work.

Raising wages would help, and the author did point out that companies that have been making higher profits than ever could afford it. Universal healthcare, affordable housing in the city, and more robust public transit could help, but those aren't coming any time soon. The only hope of getting a pre-pandemic theater experience in the short term is to tip so well that employees are making significantly more than the minimum wage, this attracting enough workers to a theater.

Even then, however, the author's point about customers being entitled assholes might still drive employees away. You could take tipping out of the equation entirely and most of the author's argument would still be true.

Tipped workers must be paid at least the untipped minimum wage. If the tips plus the base pay don’t add up to the untipped minimum wage, the employer has to make that up. I know some employers steal wages and don’t do that, but that’s a separate issue too. I’m assuming it’s not a factor here, or else it would be bizarre for him to leave out wage theft.

You're right, and I forgot to factor that into my calculations, because, in my experience, that kind of wage theft is the norm. Employees have to proactively petition their employers for the top-off if they make less than minimum wage, and in situations like this, where even the manager is working 12 hour days without breaks, that kind of thing falls through and gets missed.

But I don't think the author was trying to accuse his employer of that kind of wage theft.

These are very valuable points from the article and good observations about the condition that a HCoL area (really, any area) is subjected to. Thank you for that.

One area that is problematic is not the custom of tipping, but the policy around tip-based wage earners. Sure, people will tip. Is the concern that the practice makes untraceable tax revenue? We could do away with the policy practice of reduced minimum wage floors for tip-based jobs. It wouldn't introduce a barrier for the practice of tipping, but it also wouldn't tacitly condone tipping through policy, either.

Now, can off-books money change hands (undeclared, untaxed income)? Sure, but honestly someone can hand me cash right now and it wouldn't be trackable either. So from that, I don't believe that we can or should stop tipping, actually (I don't see the problem with it).

My problem is: I don't think that policy reliant on goodwill (suppressing minimum wage floors and hoping tips arrive) is a good strategy. I've had those jobs and I know that pain. It's * almost * like the author is saying that demand will meet the supply shortage in labor right now, but there's this ghost tip component of the equation that troubles me. Just do away with reduced minimum wage floors for "tip based" jobs. Then we don't have to send this message any way other than, "it's nice to tip for nice service."

The title of the article ("He thought tending bar sounded like fun. Then the entire kitchen staff quit on Christmas Eve"), the NH submission title ("Former Labor Secretary Found What Work Is Like Now") and your comment ("...joins the workforce and learns the real truth") make it sounds like the author experienced some deep revelation about the state of this kind of work.

I think the titles are a bit hyperbolic (to bait clicks, perhaps), as my reading of the article is different: I think the things described in this article are not surprising to the author and not supposed to be that surprising to the audience. I read the article a much more straightforward comment by the author to say "this is my experiences and I don't think they're unique".

Agree that the titles may distort the perception (you make an excellent point), but I was concerned about the conclusion of the article. Thank you for bringing that to light.

I also respect your reading of the article as a generalization of this predicament. This is also very helpful to reframe the article. But personally, I'm not so sure of that entirely. And that's because he's outlining tip practices, a voluntary operation, while offering no real conclusion beyond his observations (which I agree are universal) besides "please tip more." I would have also liked (unfairly expected?) someone who said "I have pretty much been in politics my whole adult life" to filter through that lens - policy enablement of the situation.

From the end of the article:

"As for customers… You want to see Spider Man? You desperately want to bring your kids to Encanto or Sing 2? And you want your popcorn, food, and drinks? Cool. But if you don’t tip or act like an asshole, taking your personal anger and frustrations on workers who don’t deserve it, workers will not be there to serve you.

"Good old Adam Smith and his invisible hand of supply and demand works both ways, and the reason why you won’t get what you want will be staring right back in the mirror."

I agree with the author: don't be an a$$hol3 is a good life principle. I actually agree people should tip, too, for good service. What I don't agree with is that, as a legislator, you should craft policy and policy enforcement around the concept of goodwill. Goodwill is a societal outcome of policy, not a requirement of policy. Especially when wellbeing through wage earning is at stake.

Also, supply and demand does work both ways, as the author says. Will policy be able to keep up? Meaning, if demand for workers increases, we should see adjustments in wages. Yet the "rely on tipping, take a lower wage" policy remains with know conditions of the system (that people might not tip).

I think you are saying that the conclusions you quoted are not really satisfying nor satisfactory. I agree with you on this. I personally think the end of the article was a bit "lazy" rhetorically, but maybe that's OK. Thanks for your comments on this, they helped my own understanding.

Supposedly he should know the ins and outs of labor law, yet he struggles to provide any applicable analysis how to solve the problems.

Obviously low pay is the biggest one, but things like lack of breaks to go to the toilet is something very solevable.

Yes! And how policy can have unintended consequence is HUGE. Why doesn't he really even mention that? It's upsetting that among the many observations that "people, tip more" ends up being the final thought and not "we created a system that affords all of this behavior, " not one that works with known conditions.

Sure, I personally think people should be more generous, but they aren't obliged to be generous, I don't really fault them for not being more generous, and if lack of generosity is a condition of the system, he doesn't really have a good argument for saying "we crafted a system knowing people aren't generous, please be more generous so our system works."

> Sure, I personally think people should be more generous

I think people shouldn't be expected to show generosity with an arbitrary subsidy.

Yes! There cannot be an expectation of goodwill, especially with policy. While I personally think people should be more generous, I can't believe that policy should depend on it. Thank you for pointing this out and I will work to be more clear.

He addresses the low wages right at the start. He also addresses shitty customer behaviour and shitty employer demands. And yes, he also touches on tipping. I think the article is pretty well-rounded.

You are right and thank you for pointing that out. He hits these areas but, in my reading, fails to fully close the loop.

I feel that policy supported wage floors for tipping isn't addressed enough, if at all. Sure, they tried to get rid of tipping, but tipping here is only a problem when a former policy maker says, "tip because the policy supports it." I don't agree that policy should be reliant on goodwill but rather policy should support outcomes of goodwill.

That's the only part I find missing, especially considering the conclusion which doesn't strongly suggest policy around labor and wages as a cause (or even a solution).

I don't think he's proposing policies at all; he's observing the problem, and explaining the problem for people who are unwilling to believe poor people. That serves an important purpose. There are plenty of other articles addressing policies.

To be honest, the former New Mexico Cabinet Secretary and current bartender seems to be quite a complainer: he left his job and NM out of a rather general fear[1], now inexplicably working as a bartender[2]; he then proceeds to basically complain about how shitty jobs are indeed shitty, and notably not making a cogent point regarding economic and societal root causes of labor shortage. He vaguely attributes them as due to older people retiring early (many indeed are), but in most examples of people quitting (i.e. the entire kitchen staff) don't fit his thesis. I'd expect more depth from someone whose cabinet post was focused on labor.

He's similarly dismissive with statements like "But since the kids out here don’t have to work because for the most part their parents are rich, getting them hired and wanting to stay is really hard." A little bitter, perhaps?

It seems to all be about his worldview and personal identity being based on being a victim; he and everyone he's working with are all fellow victims. And nowadays, victim-hood carries enormous cache -- they're today's heroes.

[1] "While the letter wasn’t threatening, “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that it was only a matter of time before my home address and other personal information was shared on social media..."

[2] nothing at all wrong with being one, but for a 'professional class' person to need a desperation job in the current market is surprising...and maybe indicative.

Let's see: a pandemic hits, and suddenly we see a rush of stories like this. Is there a connection, and a solution? Or is everyone ignoring the elephant in the room?

How about eliminating mask mandates & social distancing? Focus on protecting the vulnerable folks, and let everyone else lead a normal life. Let doctors provide meds for early-stage COVID patients that they believe work, and keep them out of the hospital. COVID is never going away.

Going out to eat or shop nowadays sucks, and maybe that's why customers are so nasty.

You do realize that healthy, young people who get sick can spread it to more vulnerable people, right?

> You do realize ... right?

maybe drop that condescending tone repeating the TV wisdom? You know, that "wisdom" that comes from "journalists" reporting on the latest "studies"?

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