Tipping isn’t a neutral activity, it actively supports exploitive work environments. I actively boycott such businesses, but even just scaling down tips is a positive change.
So that means the first $5.12 of tips each hour goes into the owner's pocket, not the employee's.
No matter what kind of BS justification people break out, usually styled as a righteous social protest supposedly in defense of the people they're screwing, not tipping employees making tipped wages is, morally, theft of services.
That's not "opting out of tipping" and isn't the behavior the OP described.
I boycott and recommend others tip less if they feel the need to go to such places.
Waiters or bartenders at some popular restaurants can earn an annual income in the 6 figures. So, these places, not exploitative but highly desirable, are fair game for you to visit and then not tip or scale down tipping.
Many businesses such as exterminators haven’t crossed that threshold, but still add a tipping line to bills because it’s got no downside to them.
Do I actively ask if a dentist office has a tip line, no I don’t.
I'm pretty skeptical.
Same with food deliverers. Brown, no English, possibly illegal? Does not matter: pay a full 15% tip if tip is expected. I have seen people give these folks $2 on a $50 order in heavy rain at night. If it's raining or shit weather or you live in a 5th floor walkup, boost it to 20%
I have only once in my 30 years of being an adult not tipped, and it was because the waiter disappeared with my $50 bill on a $14 check. After 20 minutes of waiting for change - at an extraordinarily busy, crowded, NYC restaurant- still assuming that she had simply forgotten, when I tracked her down and politely smiled and said "hello", she yelled at me that this was her tip. She knew better. She had tried to dodge me.
This is a deeply held value of mine: the people who serve you honor you, and you treat them well, full stop. The workers are there because that is their best option. Making their day a bit more shit by not giving them an expected tip will not make their workplace less exploitative or whatever you think it should be.
When GP says they recommend no tipping in order to put pressure on businesses not to be exploitative, I am already mortified. When called out that this isn't actually going to end tipping as a practice, they justify it the only way they can: that they don't tip because they don't use any services. Of that I'm skeptical.
No, I don't doubt that some people live the lifestyle of no restaurants, taxis, delivery or spas. That's effectively me these days.
It was rooted in racism and still used for this in some areas. It shifts the risk of slow business from the proprietor who is more able to affect it to the workers who aren't. It misleads consumers by making prices effectively false advertising when the tip which is allegedly optional is in practice not. It's a mechanism for tax evasion, but only by higher income people who make an unusually large amount of money from tips. Everything about it should be destroyed.
So I avoid establishments where this is expected, not because I think it's socially harmful not to do it -- I think it's socially harmful to do it. The reason I avoid them is that people get so upset when you tell them this, that it's easier to avoid the environment where it comes up. But even that feels like a cowardice because the result at scale would be to reduce the number of such establishments rather than to reduce the prevalence of tipping within those establishments.
Which is the other reason it feels right to promote this. If you evaluate it as your own individual contribution, anyone by themselves will make no significant difference in either direction. A single digit number of dollars to a stranger at an interval of months or years is not going to affect their life. But if you evaluate the effect at scale -- what if everybody did this? -- the effect of everybody doing it would destroy the practice, which is a powerful good.
So you would be fine if someone, or everyone, actually did this?
What if your issue is not with tipping whatsoever but rather with the default being 15% instead of 0%, so that tips are only for exceptional service?
If you hire a landscaping company, the workers are underpaid either because they're in the country illegally or because that hiring practice is widespread and suppresses wages. So these are exploited workers.
Tipping isn't generally expected for landscaping. Are you the exploiter if you hire one and don't tip the workers? If not, why doesn't that make you the exploiter? Should you also tip Amazon drivers and PhD candidates and women of every profession including ones who make more money than you?
The criteria can't be that they would be getting exploited without it, because that's arguably true of all of them. Probably of everyone in one way or another. So is your argument just status quo bias?
If a worker whose employer you're paying to do something is underpaying them, is it your obligation to make up the difference?
Choose: a) Establishment A charges 40% more and pays the workers fairly with benefits and actively refuses tips, or b) Establishment B has the same menu and quality, only charges normal prices and has an expectation of tipping the staff 15%.
Maybe from the inherently altruistic goodness of your heart you only ever go to Establishment A, lighter of wallet but warmed by your moral virtue, but most people will go to Establishment B and pay the tip.
That's your choice. You might not like it but that's the reality. What you don't get to do is have establishment B's prices with establishment A's tipping policy.
Maybe, being clever, you think
c) Establishment C charges 15% more and pays it directly to the workers but they must actively refuse tips
Believe it or not, C has been tried and it is universally disliked by staff and customers. Staff will happily go to work at B where they can earn more through hard work. Because most people are not no-tip assholes. Customers would rather go to B (and tip) where they can get better service for the same cost.
To answer you directly, yes. Yes. If the convention is that the business charges less and you make up the difference, then yes you do. You have an obligation to make up the difference.
Is it not? The status quo persists in the absence of some change.
You're essentially arguing that a local maxima is preferable to descending the slope to reach the global one.
> Customers would rather go to B (and tip) where they can get better service for the same cost.
The reason businesses charge $9.99 instead of $10.00 is that psychology plays a large role in consumer behavior. The "false advertising" component of culturally mandated tipping is a competitive advantage in the absence of something to counteract it.
It's like saying companies should just avoid hidden fees because customers don't like them. The trouble is the companies that use them get more customers because their prices appear lower.
> Staff will happily go to work at B where they can earn more through hard work. Because most people are not no-tip assholes.
So in order to make C work you need customers to make B unsustainable. (Also somewhat obviously, if staff "can earn more" the other way then you haven't added the amount to their base wages that makes up for the lack of tips.)
And you have a similar psychological component with workers as with customers, because it's harder for workers to evaluate the risk of slow business. Tipping is very casino psychology. People remember the time they got a $50 tip, not the time they stood around all day for $2/hour and there were no customers. They do the math for this week and don't consider what this compensation structure is going to do to them in an economic downturn.
If you knew C doesn't work without doing something to counteract the dark patterns in B, why did you recommend it as a solution? Do you have an actual alternate proposal that could feasibly lead to the end of tipping?
> If the convention is that the business charges less and you make up the difference, then yes you do. You have an obligation to make up the difference.
What if you want to change the convention?
Ok, I'm done with this conversation. I will read whatever response you have and it will likely be the last word.
Which would actually work. I might hire proportionally more black workers, but they're just as good and now I have lower average labor costs and can outcompete anyone not doing this.
Which would ultimately raise the prevailing wage for black workers, because in order to compete with me the other businesses would either have to lower their labor costs or raise mine, which they can only do by narrowing the gap between what they offer to black workers and white workers.
You're now upset with me and accuse me of wickedness because I'm not actually sacrificing anything, I'm only paying the white workers less. You say that in order to prove that I'm not just a selfish jerk I would have to pay everyone the prevailing wage for white workers.
But then it would be me who is driven out of business because my average labor costs would be higher rather than lower than the competition. Which doesn't help anybody, because a business that immediately goes under changes nothing.
Your criteria is structured to condemn effective solutions. If it has to disadvantage you then only affluent people with surplus to burn can do it, which inhibits widespread adoption and commonly turns it into a vapid virtue signaling exercise which is more about showing other members of your own social class what an altruist you are. The real test is whether it's a viable path to effective change.
That all you have to do is act in your own self-interest and not have to be a self-sacrificing social activist is a great advantage, because it enables you to get the people who don't care about that to do the thing.
I'm also not sure what self-interested benefit I'm supposed to be receiving by trying to convince strangers I don't otherwise want anything from to do this. If anything it would be the opposite, right? If I succeeded in convincing everyone else to stop tipping then the cost of paying workers would end up being reflected in the price of the services and I would lose the ability to pay less than other people.
However, "recommending others tip less" is also not boycotting a business. You're recommending people harm the people least in control of the situation to make a point to the people least harmed by the action.
It's ridiculous.
Boycott or tip appropriately. Those are your options.
If you feel the desire to leave an extravagant tip, resist the impulse.
PS: OP said, “Tipping shouldn't happen.” but provided no means to get to that point.
Interestingly, tipping became popular in the US just after slavery was abolished, since many people resented paying blacks, full stop. Tips allowed customers to legally only pay the white workers.
At least one deep-south state supreme court banned tip-based compensation, but the federal supreme court sadly overrode them.
(This context helps me understand why some waiters in Europe get offended if you tip them.)
If you want to change tipping culture, actively apply pressure by never purchasing services if it requires tipping, and following through by writing a letter to the company explaining your decision. Get other people to do it.
Or lead by example! Open a restaurant (or delivery service, or hotel, spa, whatever) and pay the staff a living wage and instruct staff to refuse tips. Encourage fellow establishment owners to do the same.
When you do purchase services that conventionally expect tips then tip and tip generously.
Tipping actively subsidies non tippers the thief’s you’re so concerned with. Boycott if you have conviction, tip less if you have the willpower, just don’t perpetuate this terrible system.
This is one of the best ways to get something to change. Convince people to do something that benefits them selfishly which at scale causes the evil to become unsustainable.
The ideal case is for everyone to adopt this practice as quickly as possible so the evil is eradicated quickly. The harmful thing is to advocate against it so it spreads less quickly and causes the transition period when some people tip and some people don't to last longer before the system is rightfully destroyed.
I outlined above the only ways to change tipping culture. You really care about the poor, exploited worker? Ask them and listen to what they think you should do to help them.
Purchasing services when tipping is the convention and then not tipping ain't it, chief.
> If you want to change tipping culture, actively apply pressure by never purchasing services if it requires tipping, and following through by writing a letter to the company explaining your decision. Get other people to do it.
Most other people don't care enough about the issue to refrain from patronizing services where tipping is expected, even if they agree, because they only care a little and that would increase costs on them rather than reducing them.
Asking owners nicely doesn't work, because it's this:
> Open a restaurant (or delivery service, or hotel, spa, whatever) and pay the staff a living wage and instruct staff to refuse tips.
As long as customers continue to tip elsewhere, doing this is a competitive disadvantage, because your prices will appear higher since they have to include the cost of paying higher wages, and the perverse risk shifting that imposes costs on workers alleviates them from owners. These industries are highly competitive and minor disadvantages are make or break, so it doesn't work in the absence of a culture shift.
Another unlikely avenue would be a law that bans tipping, but that is difficult to pass because it doesn't benefit the owners and it doesn't benefit the subset of workers who make the most from tips and customers are unlikely to change their vote over this. It's a standard case where the baddies care about something more and it negatively affects a much larger number of ordinary people but only a little, so we get the rules that benefit the baddies.
Which leaves a market-based change driven by customer behavior, i.e. people stop doing it. Which certainly seems like it would work if widely implemented, and people have the selfish incentive to do it, so the only thing preventing it is a harmful preexisting cultural norm that could be eroded through advocacy.