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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Some (many?) countries have demonstrated that no-tipping can work just fine.

> makes them less competitive to any nearby coffeeshops that haven't raised prices

Maybe I'm an outlier but for me I'm sick of the mental game of "Am I good member of society for the % I selected, and how much will my date judge me if I choose what used to be the norm -- 10%-15%... and am I the sucker if I choose a high amount while other people groups select low amounts?". Some of you may be too young to realize but there has been tip % inflation that is when combined with price inflation the tip amount has grown geometrically.

To me a good customer service is I order my drink, I pay the stated price -- no more or less than the next person. Tipping makes me feel both guilty/ashamed and like a sucker knowing that certain groups of tip less. (and nothing to do with means)

Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?

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It seems different in the US, where everyone is expected to tip as part of the overall price, like the article describes, and there is tipping Europe where the tip is not needed to boost the wage to an acceptable level but is simply to reward people who have gone above and beyond.

In many restaurants in the UK, a "tip" is automatically included for large parties to reward the extra work required but can be removed on request if they didn't think your service was good.

I live in the US and I HATE tipping.

Just multiply all the menu items by 1.15, 1.18, 1.20, or whatever you need to ensure your wait staff is happy, and re-print the menu.

Don't make ME have to bust out a calculator and do math after my meal, and then have to decide which of the above numbers I should use.

I always tip 20, but I honestly hate doing it for many reasons.

I also hate separate sales tax. Just build it into the menu.

I just got back from Portugal. 99% of places took cards. When you are ready to pay the bill, they bring out the portable POS machine, you tap your card, and you're done. No awkward tipping screen. No separate calculation for sales tax. No pressure to buy bottled water or charging of table fee like in Italy.

What you see in the menu is what your final will be.

Eating out was cheap, fun, hassle free, and tasty.

> I also hate separate sales tax. Just build it into the menu.

Presumably this is in part for the same reasons as the article's take on tips. If one business includes sales tax in their prices and another doesnt, the one who doesnt is going to look cheaper to customers even though its actually the same price.

Sales tax is also surprisingly complicated in the US. At least where I live, there is sales tax from the State, County and City in addition to a variety of special sales taxes for things like transit districts. It means, for example, its easy to find places where the sales tax is different on two sides of the same street (because there is a city boundary there or something else).

> Sales tax is also surprisingly complicated in the US.

Sure but the sales tax number for your establishment's particular location is constant, so you can still build it into the menu.

>I just got back from Portugal. 99% of places took cards. When you are ready to pay the bill, they bring out the portable POS machine, you tap your card, and you're done. No awkward tipping screen. No separate calculation for sales tax. No pressure to buy bottled water or charging of table fee like in Italy.

Here in Japan, it's much the same.

After you're done ordering, the server leaves a slip of paper in a special holder on your table with the bill written/printed on it. It's just a total of the things you ordered, which are clearly printed with prices on the menu.

When you're done, you go to the cashier at the front with this paper, and pay. Most places take credit cards, plus various online options (PayPay, LINE Pay, etc.). Many also take Suica/Pasmo cards (the contactless cash cards you use to get on the subway).

Sales tax is included in the price.

Tipping *does not exist*.

Water is free. (It's tap water though, but it's fine. Water quality here is excellent for tap water.)

Table fees (cover charges) I think exist in some places but not in normal restaurants, and they're clearly shown before you sit down.

Japan has more Michelin-star restaurants than anyplace in the world outside of France. Restaurants aren't much more expensive than cooking at home, depending on what you order/make of course.

I honestly don't know why anyone bothers going out to eat in the US any more unless they're rich. It's a complete rip-off.

A default service charge is pretty common in the UK for sit-down food service at this point in my experience.

In the US, it's a very path dependent thing. High-end restaurants have tried experiments to eliminate it but front-of-house staff in particular didn't like it because in many cases they made less money.

>there is tipping Europe where the tip is not needed to boost the wage to an acceptable level

The internet gets the cause and effect on this backwards. Waitresses get paid 2 dollars an hour in much of the USA because they get tips. They don't get tips because they get 2 dollars an hour.

You could pay waiters 60 dollars an hour and Americans would keep tipping.

The solution seems clear, stop tipping...

The problem is, it requires everyone to stop tipping simultaneously for the owners to start paying wait staff properly.

If only a small fraction of people stop tipping, they'll get shamed as assholes and nothing gets changed.

Yeah. As an individual, if you stop tipping, a large chunk of (North American) society will think you’re a cheap asshole who’s disrespecting your server and won’t care that you’re taking a stance against a larger issue.

There’s nothing wrong with ignoring those people. But I think the average person cares much more about social norms and being judged by others than the people suggesting to just stop tipping.

For me personally though it's less about being judged (the shaming part) than it is about whether or not what I'm doing is actually causing change to happen.

If there isn't critical mass, the owners won't change anything, and it unfortunately does end up punishing the servers instead of the owners.

> society will think you’re a cheap asshole who’s disrespecting your server

Tipping in a restaurant where someone is waiting on you is different but, I have zero problems with refusing to tip at the register in retail stores, or for carry out orders at restaurants. I think we can collectively decide against that without fear of being ostracized by society. There's no "norm" right now that says I have to tip someone for a retail transaction, but there is pressure being put on us to normalize it so that businesses can save on labor expenses. Just say no.

Or you could change the wage laws and be prominent in announcing it and then people can stop tipping on a known date when the law changes

> In many restaurants in the UK, a "tip" is automatically included for large parties to reward the extra work required but can be removed on request if they didn't think your service was good.

This is often the case in the US where it's default 18-20% for parties of more than 6-8 in my extremely unscientific recall. What's funny is that now 20% is already the default so they just made it a bit easier on the diner is all.

basically the same up in Canada large groups of people 6+ in smaller venues, 8-10+ in other for the group tip... and some even ask for another tip afterwards...

Nearly every restaurant in London automatically adds ~12% even for 2 people. I don't know about the rest of the UK but it can't be drastically different.

What extra work required? It seems to me that the attention paid per individual is always less for large parties than, say, a party of two. It's much less personal.

> Some of you may be too young to realize but there has been tip % inflation that is when combined with price inflation the tip amount has grown geometrically

This is the most annoying part of many point-of-sale systems at counter-service restaurants today. You tap your card/phone/watch, and are then presented with big buttons for say, 35%, 30%, and 28% (I'm exaggerating, but not by much). The "custom amount" button is somewhere different for each POS vendor (Square, Toast, etc.) so you have to search for a moment if you want to tip a more traditional amount (or an amount that you might consider more commensurate with having to dispense your own water and bus your own table, for that matter).

What bugs me is with some of the POS systems is that if you make a mistake with the custom tip amount, you have to restart the transaction (i.e. hand it back over to the cashier). It's aggravating.

> so you have to search for a moment if you want to tip a more traditional amount

And kind of like cracking security where certain operations take more or less time, you have the embarrassing experience of the waiter immediately knowing you're not tipping the requested amounts.

> Some (many?) countries have demonstrated that no-tipping can work just fine.

Yes, but the reason it's difficult to implement when there was previously a tipping system is the fact that increasing prices to cover labour means a no-tipping place has a higher menu price than a place that encourages tipping.

Customers also have less perceived "power" over their dining experience.

France for example, (mostly) abolished their tipping culture through several pieces of legislation and to this day there's a 15% service charge on your bill in France. Even then they still tip, a little.

> to this day there's a 15% service charge on your bill in France

I can't think of any place that bills service separately. They just say the menu is €20, and you pay €20.

Yes because it's included. Like taxes and things. But it's there.

This happens in India. It’s called a service charge and is usually ~10% of the bill.

* Upper-mid to more expensive restaurants usually keep a service charge.

* Customers have the right to ask it to be removed.

* When there’s no included service charge, some restaurants’ waiters point this out, possibly expecting a tip.

* When there’s no included service charge, and the waiter doesn’t point this out, some customers feel free to leave a tip in cash.

* Some restaurants include a service charge and outright reject tips (politely) - this is rare but it has happened with me. Even when I tried to tip them after hosting a large party.

> Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?

We do and that's tipped wages. A career waiter in a major American city can make over 100k, which is several times more than what they would make in Europe. Even if you adjust for cost of living and median incomes, it's still going to be much higher. On the low end of the spectrum, tipped wages and untipped wages would be both at minimum wage.

> A career waiter in a major American city can make over 100k,

Yeah, but this is counter service we are talking about. The person making your latte is not making $100k/year. When I worked at a coffee place ~20 years ago, tips were about $1/hour per employee and that was like 10% of my income. Certainly wages and presumably tips are higher now, but these jobs still dont pay much over minimum wage.

I talked about waiters at high end restaurants because that's where the effect of tipping is most evident, but the same market dynamics exist for counter service as well. For employees and the restaurant itself, tipping is almost always going to be better than non-tipping. If these employees aren't getting paid enough, that's something that can only be solved by raising the minimum wage.

According to Google: As of Nov 2, 2022, the average annual pay for a Waiter in New York City is $35,180 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $16.91 an hour. This is the equivalent of $676/week or $2,931/month.

This presumably doesn't include tips. The tips are also untaxed, giving them an even greater advantage

> The tips are also untaxed

afaik tips are taxed as income tax. Yes I'm sure practically it gets underreported but servers definitely would raise suspicions if they reported $0.

It's not just waiters though, in fact the article specifically uses coffee shop employees as an example. I would be quite surprised if they're clearing 100k, even in a major city.

Coffee shop employees are not Tipped employees. They get minimum wage.

This conflation of actual legally tipped employees (who get a substantially smaller than minimum wage wage) and everyone else is leading to really stupid ideas.

You aren't, I genuinely try to tip well, knowing how stacked things are, and I'm lucky to be in a higher income bracket, but it sucks, and I wish we could end tipping via an outright ban (as to not cause weirdness in the marketplace). I'd rather the prices adjust accordingly, and everyone gets a fair wage.

Its so much more transparent. and I think thats really what it is, its a way to obfuscate pricing transparency to the broader market.

The folks who don't tip at all are the ones who win, I suppose, as its genuinely cheaper if you don't, but I suspect if you frequent a place alot, people will figure this out and it will actively work against you.

I have, in leaner times, not tipped at establishments I knew I wasn't going to frequent again or so little there was no way for them to really identify me, if the service was bad / subpar or just for pickup.

I always tip for sit down service though.

> You aren't

sorry, it's clear. I am not what?

>Maybe I'm an outlier

Rest assured, I don't think you are :)

>Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?

Define dignity first, maybe? A slave in chains can still have dignity, and the most wealthy and powerful of men can be utterly undignified.

I'm not going to go into a full definition here, but I guess I consider it undignified to have your material needs dependent on the good will of others who choose to follow a social convention to pay more than strictly required to.

We can, and should give employees dignity and a fair wage. We can each start right now by directly transferring a tiny portion of our wealth to the individuals that we interact with who could benefit from it (at least in this specific context, not exclusive of others who could also benefit).

I figure, I have it, they could use it, and I don't need to change everything about our economy and society to do it. I can just give someone some money. Simple and elegant.

I’m sorry but why should it be our wealth? Billionaires seem to have a lot more spare cash sitting around, let them pay for it.

Back in the occupy wallstreet days I did some rough calculations, I wondered "If we appropriated the wealth of every billionaire, how much of a boost in the economy would we have?" It turned out surprising low. It was something like (iirc) 3 months of the economy and the money would be gone. And then who are we going to rob? They are massively relatively wealthy, but accumulated wealth is nearly nothing compared to the aggregated flows of the economy.

What's missing in that analysis is that the billionaires not only accumulate wealth, they also redirect flows. It's not just a question of repossessing Jeff Bezos' private jets; it's also a matter of reclaiming the vast sums of money spent on a yearly basis keeping them flying (a nontrivial fraction of the cost of the jets themselves).

Or to put it another way - if you stripped away all of Bezos' liquid assets, don't worry - he'll have more for you to take next month, courtesy of the massive rent-seeking apparatus he would still sit atop.

I agree with your sentiment on tipping - I feel the same way. However I think the article did a pretty good job at answering your question of Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?. It's for economic reasons.

To make it work you'd have to collude on pricing with all the other coffee shops (which I think would be illegal but IANAL), or you'd have to use government force to ban tipping (which would without a doubt hurt many people in different areas). It's a hard problem, though I do hope we can figure it out because the status quo of expecting 20+% tip on an already expensive product is not good.

>the status quo of expecting 20+% tip on an already expensive product is not good.

Eliminate the expectation of a 20% tip and prices will basically go up 20% to cover an increase in base pay for the staff. So consumers probably won't actually save money if tipping were eliminated.

That is an acceptable outcome. Take out the social aspect and just pay people.

Tipping incentivizes good service. When I travel to countries without tips I always have to chase down someone for service..

I get a tip popup at the checkout register for my local frozen yogurt place, where the cashier just watches me put my yogurt on a scale and tells me how much it costs.

Many of the very best restaurants in the country have fixed gratuity and still have absolutely extraordinary service.

And when the service is relatively bad, ie too slow to come probably because they didn't have enough personnel in the kitchen this particular night (happenned to me yesterday), i don't tip, AND i don't feel bad for the waitress who isn't responsible for the lack of professionnal cook, because they are paid correctly.

What country are you referring to? Tipping is considered rude in Japan and the service there is almost always better than the service I get in the US for a comparable job.

Some how the country hasn't collapsed and all the hotels, restaurants, bars, etc continue to operate just fine and with good service.

I live in Japan, and this depends completely on your perspective and expectations.

The OP would disagree with you.

In the US, it's normal to have a server hovering around your table, and frequently "checking up" on you to see if you need anything. They frequently will interrupt your conversation to ask you if you're OK. Some people would find this annoying, but Americans like the OP love this kind of service.

In Japan, no one is going to come around to your table to see how you're doing, or to take your order. You need to flag them down: raising your hand, pressing a button on the table, yelling "sumimasen!" etc are all pretty normal.

Also, in Japan the service is extremely professional and courteous. The server will not tell you how their day is going or anything else about their life. Americans don't like this: they want the server to act like their best friend and chit-chat with them for several minutes. Japanese servers will never do this: they take your order and then go do other work.

Overall, the amount of service in a typical Japanese is much less than in America. It's one of the reasons it costs less to eat here. Instead of a huge waitstaff standing around ready to attend to customers, there might be just one server in the whole restaurant, and he also mans the cash register, and does various other things while not doing those. That doesn't happen in America. So of course the hourly labor cost to run a restaurant in America is huge with all these people, whereas in Japan you might only need 2-3 people to run the whole place.

Americans like the OP simply won't be happy with the kind of service offered here. It's minimalist and highly efficient, and not at all "warm" or "friendly" like they're used to in America.

The west coast states in the US have not had a lower tipped minimum wage for many years, and the social aspect still has not changed.

I'm all for that - and then you can tip in addition when you have a request that is above and beyond.

(Many restaurants I'm seeing have "18% gratuity automatically added" and yet still have a tip line for those who don't read.)

If you assume labor is 50% of the cost of a coffeeshop, and maybe only 30-40% of the cost when you factor out management, prices would have to go up only 6-7%.

And remember, you are assuming a zero-net-revenue change.

Maybe your former non-tipping customers would see that 6-7% increase and leave, but your former tipping customers (who may be price sensitive, but tipped because they believe in it) would see a decrease in pricing, from a 20% gratuity reduced to a 6-7% price overhead. And some of them would probably still tip anyway.

You can see a comment below where a bartender is saying that they earn much more from tips than they would ever get paid with wages. This is a pretty common sentiment from waiters when a place says it's going to give up tipping. So that money is going to go somewhere. Some to the owners, some to the consumers, some to the people in the back. Probably also some to people who wait tables/bartend and make little (this seems to be a situation where people who know how to work the system make a lot while others stumble).

It would also remove a fairly large mental burden on consumers.

This is why I find it odd that people get mad when the occasional customer gives a low or no tip. That's the system, and you're saying you prefer this system because it overall makes you much more money than the alternative, at the cost to consumers and others.

That's probably true. But so what? That just means that everybody pays the same amount rather than varying amount based on cultural norms around tipping. That's good! And it also means that bosses can't hide behind "oh, tips were just low this week" when their employees complain about pay.

> Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?

Apropos of nothing, I’ll just mention that the Fed is currently trying to decrease employment [1] and eliminate people’s savings [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/08/27/fed-chair-...

[2] https://twitter.com/schwarz/status/1587873284997218304

You are being downvoted because this is largely unrelated to the topic at hand.

It’s not. The point is that there’s an incentive among those who control capital to prevent most people from being financially secure. It’s why (for example) the tipped minimum wage exists, and why wage theft is rarely (if ever) prosecuted or covered in the news even though the amount of money stolen is orders of magnitude larger than the amount shoplifted.

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