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Comment by chadlavi | Hacker News Reader

Tipping is a scam business owners pull to underpay their workers at the direct expense of only the customers who aren't assholes. As a system, tipping fucking sucks and is unfair.

But please remember that the service worker you are considering tipping or not is not the one who put you in this situation and they are also getting a much worse deal out of it than you are. Not tipping will not matter at all to the person who controls the payroll but will matter to the person who relies on the tip as an important part of their income.

If you hate tipping, agitate for living pages. Don't just tut-tut at wait staff.

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People say that again and again but at the end of the day, unless everyone collectively stops tipping, or the government intervenes nothing will change. And since the government won't make any progress the only thing consumers can do is withhold their tip.

No. That won't effect change, it will just rob hard working people of their agreed upon payment for their work. It is assumed, and agreed upon, that we will tip. If we want to change that, we need to donis systematically at the soceity/government level, not by robbing people.

> No. That won't effect change, it will just rob hard working people of their agreed upon payment for their work. It is assumed, and agreed upon, that we will tip.

The article is talking about the proliferation of tipping. It is certainly _not_ assumed or agreed upon that all the places asking for tips should be receiving them. Furthermore, even the places that traditionally expect tips have never actually had an agreed upon amount.

So no people are certainly not being robbed when they aren't paid something that people never agreed to pay them.

I'm not speaking about places where tipping isn't expected. I'm talking about a sit down restaurant, where it is expected. It's not right to not tip where it is expected. If it's not expected, of course it's fair to not tip.

You’re talking about this as if it’s binary. Someone who tips 5% is still tipping, but the server isn’t likely to be happy about it. The point is that there is no agreement on tipping since “tip me something” isn’t really an agreement. So someone supposedly under tipping isn’t “robbing” anything since no agreement on a tip has been made beforehand. The only agreed upon price is what’s on the menu (plus applicable taxes).

That's simply not true. Minimum wage for a tipped employee in thr US is $2.13 an hour. Minimum wage for a non tipped employee in the us is over $7 an hour. So an employee that is expected to get tips needs to make up that difference to be able to live.

This doesn’t contradict a single thing that I wrote.

Yes it does

I don't know what to say but re-read my comments. You are clearly not understanding them.

Or, if you'd like, point out exactly (meaning quote) what statement I made which is contradicted by that comment.

This is your entire comment:

"People say that again and again but at the end of the day, unless everyone collectively stops tipping, or the government intervenes nothing will change. And since the government won't make any progress the only thing consumers can do is withhold their tip."

This is what I'm taking issue with:

"And since the government won't make any progress the only thing consumers can do is withhold their tip."

I didn't make that comment. /u/Beaver117 did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34523579

Business owners don't give a single flying expletive if you tip their workers. Stopping tipping would probably not even be something they notice, except in the context of someone saying "hey boss, people stopped tipping us"

They absolutely would notice, you are only allowed to under pay tipped staff under the assumption that with tips they rise above min wage. No tips and all of sudden you have to make the difference from 2.50 ish an hour to min wage which can be 16+ here.

these owners will likely just cut hours or reduce hours and jack up prices.

Shouldn’t that be the point?

If the argument is that tipping keeps their prices low (costs/wages), aren’t you just ending up paying the same price anyways in the end? Like, why all this extra BS?

Just pay decent wages, set fair prices, and make no more tipping “the norm” instead.

> Stopping tipping would probably not even be something they notice

Eventually they would. When the cashier at the yoghurt shop mentioned realizes that they can get paid more at some other shop / restaurant, the owner would realize they have to pay more to get employees.

Unfortunately, this would be a slow process.

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