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Comment by rapnie | Hacker News Reader

Plus you come to the restaurant, pay top price for food, for the setting and ambiance.. and the waiter taking the order is part of the experience you buy.

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I go to restaurants for every lunch break as they're affordable and serve good food in Germany.

I couldn't give a rats ass how they take my order as long as the food arrives timely and tastes good. I'm not buying some mystical pretentious dining experience. I'm buying food and a place to eat it at.

However I do care about not being tracked by my bank or some random app, which is why I pay cash and use paper menus.

A lot of people, myself included, really enjoy chatting with servers and absolutely consider it part of the experience that we’re paying for.

Consider that your experience is very anecdotal and the systems that have emerged surrounding dining traditions probably wouldn’t exist if everyone felt the way you did. There’s nothing pretentious or mystical about it, some people enjoy a pleasant conversation with a stranger :)

Big difference between a 45 minute lunch break and a nice Saturday night dinner.

For sure! Though if I'm on a 45min lunch break, I think I'd still prefer the 30s conversation with a server over 30s looking at my phone.

They aren't, and I wish we'd stop regurgitating this idea because restaurants use it as a justification to get out of paying servers proper wages. The person at the checkout at my local grocer is just as much "part of the experience" when I buy groceries, but their employer pays for them to be there, as opposed to expecting me to do so. This gaslighting of consumerism as an experience is damaging, and allows the greedy to foist the cost of doing business onto the customer more and more.

Are you comparing dining at a restaurant to grocery shopping?

The tips are an american issue as far as I can tell. The rest of the world has no mandatory tips and manages just fine.

The common thread between the two is calling consumerism an "experience." This isn't a theme park. The server, retail worker, or whomever is not an actor in a costume there for the amusement of the customer. They work for their employer, carrying duties that allow that employer's business to profit, and therefor, should be paid by the employer.

And yes, this is a distictly American issue, and needs to be abolished. In the US, I worked as a bartender for $2.65 an hour in 2005. Basically, my employer payed me nothing, since that was just covering taxes, and each customer that ordered a drink from me was my main source of income. It irks me to my core when people wave this off as some normalized "part of the experience" and not a problem of greed that requires correction.

It's still quite bizzare to me. The theme park employees are working for the employer too, just like the waiters and barmen working for the establishment. Going out for drinks with friends or for a dinner date is an experience, how could it be otherwise? I don't expect the staff to entertain me, sure, but that doesn't mean that it's just "engaging in consumerism" for the customers. I'm sorry if you have bad memories about the job, but your point of view is quite angsty and jaded.

> The common thread between the two is calling consumerism an "experience."

That is your interpretation, and tbh I expressed myself poorly. In Europe working in a restaurant earns at least minimum wage and likely more now, since the pandemic led to worker shortage. I am talking social in reference to experience. The waiter being a real person you talk to, who can inform you on menu choices. A restaurant isn't a McDonald's factory that serves calories at minimum cost price and maximum productivity. The automation trend will see people lose their jobs.

I would, personally. Not on the level of service, but on the way the worker should be compensated. I hate it when employees are pitted against each other at a workplace, like how they often do with sales people. I think this is exploiting them, and I don't like the idea of that, no matter what results it produces.

And you'd be wrong about tips. They are at quite a lot of places, in fact, I find that it's rarer when a system or culture explicitly does away with them. In Japan for example, people can even get upset and give back the tipped amount. And at many places, it's not called a tip, but it's rather a bribe, but frankly, I think they have a lot in common.

I get that everyone has different expectations, for a relevant number of people a restaurant is a place to eat nice food in the best state.

The US is something else altogether of course, but I can't rememeber many restaurants where I thought having a waiter a positive part of the experience. And I'm clearly not the only one, looking at the robot waiter development pace and actual sales data.

The customer pays for 100% of the cost of doing business.

This is the absolute last thing I care about. If they didn't have to be part of the experience I'd rather they not be. Using human language to convey what you want is, at best, an inconvenience. It is slow and error prone. There's no reason they need to take my order.

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