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Comment by cornfutes | Hacker News Reader

> I always figured pay was based on market condition for finding employees, not a companies specific profit.

It has parallels to this Doordash delivery person who expected their tip to be based on the price of the customer's house rather than the price of the order.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doordash-driver-curses-...

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I find delivery prices based on either to be weird. Delivery prices should be based on the complexity and difficulty of the delivery. If I get an iPhone delivered I don’t expect to pay a percentage of my house value or my iPhone value, likewise I expect to pay more for delivery of 10 gallons of milk than an iPhone. The price scale percentage is for restaurant service where the price of the food scales with the quality of the restaurants service. Delivery service more or less is entirely fungible and doesn’t vary in general with the price of the delivered item. The only thing I expect to vary with the cost of my house is my property taxes.

The idea that tips are based on price in general is weird. It only makes sense to me if I think about them less as compensation, and more as a power play. Given the history of tipping in the US (where it didn't gain traction until emancipation, where it became the way to pay some former slaves), this power play reading seams plausible.

> Given the history of tipping in the US (where it didn't gain traction until emancipation

There isn't great evidence for this. There was a burst of anti-tipping laws in the 19th century as aristocratic Americans imitated the Tudor English where modern tipping originated. It only became endemic in America during Prohibition, when a lack of alcohol-based income and the, ahem, two-way desire for favors, increased.

That's called price discrimination and almost all successful businesses do it.

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