Don't want to tip, even though it's baked into the wage calculation? That's fine. The author is just pointing out that market forces means that folks aren't going to stay in those jobs.
Using tips as a substitute for paying a living wage needs to be eliminated everywhere, but I especially don't blame people for not realizing that a movie theater of all places is playing that game.
They pick based on the advertised price because hidden fees and culturally-mandated tips exploit weaknesses in our psychology, not because customers actually like to spend more than they'd planned on.
But my favourite thing: it gives weight back to tips. They mean something again.
HN has posting limitations.
Meanwhile the employees blame the customers, the customers blame the corporation, and the corporation blames the employees.
The corporation is the only one that is laughing all the way to the bank.
That's not what this conversation is about.
This is precisely why junk fees must die.
If you are about to run someone over in your car, you dont just say "well, the speed limit shouldn't be this high anyway.."
I don't think so, no. I don't think there is any ethical obligation to tip at all, and there never has been.
I am under no ethical obligation to be abused by companies using their employees as human shields.
If the tipping is actually mandatory, then build it into the price to begin with. That way, perhaps tipping can go back to being an actual expression of thanks.
If you don’t like this, don’t go.
Then there's the whole spectrum of space in between. What about order-at-counter but the food is brought to you when it's ready, but you then clean up after yourself? What about a buffet, where you pay at a counter, serve yourself, but someone comes and cleans up your plates?
An alternative heuristic that I've heard is that if you pay in advance than tipping is optional, while if you pay at the end it's required, but that doesn't cover Doordash.
There are clear cut cases where tipping is required, and a whole fuzzy mess in between. And that fuzzy mess gets fuzzier and messier each year as companies intentionally blur the line.
Isn't the whole thing about human shields that we don't want to hurt the humans in question?
But the situation here isn't a clear-cut case like a sit-down restaurant where tipping is expected. If I were handed a receipt like the one in the article for my family's tickets and food, it wouldn't occur to me for a second that the barkeep in the room next door was relying on me tipping on this popcorn purchase in order to make a decent wage on this kids movie night.
But, in general, this shouldn't even be the point. You should always assume that leaving a tip for someone in a position to receive it is a worthwhile gesture that means a significant amount!
I don't even know how this is so contentious to people honestly. Why make such a point about not doing something nice and relatively small? Your gonna spend $15 bucks on an IPA anyway, why not just help someone out too? Are you worried the bartender is going to get paid too much?
Tipping has become contentious lately because it's been asserting itself as an opt-out part of every Square checkout flow, even in situations where we never used to tip like fast casual order-at-the-counter. In the era of Uber we're also frequently asked to pick a tip before we even receive the service, which feels more like extortion than "something nice". Tipping is becoming more and more contentious because tipping is changing, and the version you describe is quickly becoming the minority case.
This attacks the custom of tipping directly: It prevents the management from being able to use tips in their scheme to pay workers less, and absolves the customer of the requirement to hurt the worker if they want to fight against tipping culture.
I find the assumption that everyone uses such apps interesting. For my part, I just tip with cash. No need to bring a third party into any of this.
Many bartenders and servers, especially in high end restaurants would actively be against this policy. Mostly because these folks can earn $300-500 a night, and moving to some low wage salary would never compete with this.
One of the real world problem that gets run into is, even for a large portion of people that want this, when one restaurant list $50 prices and expects $10 in tip and the other charges $60 and expects no tip people still go to the one listing $50 more often.
The same is true for stores listing prices including taxes. It simply won't be the most common method in the US unless it's a regulated requirement for every store to do. There is no way every store is just going to opt into it all at once when they know not opting into it will get them more customers than the ones that do. This doesn't mean people prefer needing to calculate tax every time they look at a price it just means it's not a naturally correcting set of incentives.
top 10% of restaurants are making TONS of cash and the servers are raking it in, sure, but even working in Loudoun Co. VA -- the overall richest county in America, btw -- my salary was easily less than half of what I pulled as a network engineer.
the single mother of 2 working in Applebee's in shit-tier Indiana is struggling because of tips -- they need to go. restaurants in Europe, or Asia, or the Middle East didn't stop existing without tips.
That's reality in large swaths of the US. One less work opportunity available now...
And a former state labor official of all people should be blaming the employers for not paying a proper wage (and proposing regulation to solve that) rather than the customers for not making uncustomarily large tips to make up for them.
(Also, in most of the world it isn't customary to tip bartenders)
The situation here is it’s a restaurant and bar that shows movies.
I wouldn’t expect to tip on the ticket prices, but it is surprising to expect to not tip full service waiters and bartenders.
I will be willing to wager $2 that the same people at a bar would tip their bartender as is customary in the US. The context mixture of theatre with bar is likely the cause of the anomalous behavior. And the authors point is: if you don’t want to tip your bartender at the theatre, then expect there won’t be a bartender at your theatre as they will work at a bar, where you would tip them.
That seems pretty fair?
Or maybe, just maybe, the venue selling the drinks at substantial markup could pay them properly rather than trying to extend the custom of staff wages being dependent upon the charity of customers to a venue where customers generally don't feel like tipping. You'd think a government official in a labor department of all people would get the idea that employers paying living wages should be the rule rather than the exception.
Tipping customs often vary according to venue, range of products served and how they're served (sometimes in nuanced ways that are baffling to outsiders). Honestly, I have no idea whether it's considered customary to tip at that sort of bar at that sort of venue in that state, but a complaint about making less than a dollar per hour at a supposedly busy event is a data point against.
Which I think you’re agreeing with their point. The employer could fix the situation but instead just barrel ahead oblivious to the reasons their people are quitting. It wasn’t the managers, it wasn’t even the customers even though the customers weren’t awesome. It was the owners.
So instead of losing all of their staff, they should simply pay to retain them and post a "no tipping" policy upon entry.
It really is easy, but too people on HN will contort themselves into knots to avoid having any company have any accountability at all in any decision making.
As a consumer, I make specific choices. If I am marketed a price, that should be inclusive. The change starts with my choices, since managers clearly are against setting high enough wages.
It's like hospital owners openly saying they know nurses won't strike even if they don't get treated fairly because their patients will die and the nurses, as caregivers, won't let that happen.
The apathy toward a system that not just supports that kind of thing but very actively encourages and rewards it is brutal to watch.
Just advertise the prices with the fees included.
That’s the rub, restaurant owners want to advertise one price and then actually charge a bunch more once they know people are committed. And that’s something that the US is really bad about in general - sales tax is handled similarly poorly.
This is where state should enforce capitalism by killing those badly behaving businesses.
Spitting in food or adulterating it in any manner is a criminal offence. Losing your job should be the least of your worries.
How does that work? For table service you usually tip at the end after you’ve already eaten your food.
Huh, I wonder how this works in restaurants attended by lots of foreigners. I knew America had a "tipping culture" and that 10-20% was customary, but I didn't know how bad not tipping was until this comment. Many clueless tourists probably know even less than I did.
Likewise I’ve noticed when I travel internationally Americans get a great deal of service and attention because unlike the local population because it’s likely they will tip.
To me, I don't think there is any way to change the custom beyond regulation. The incentives just feel too misaligned. The crowd of customers leans towards going to the place with the lower list prices, intentional or not. The restaurants will never collectively decide on their own accord to go against that flow themselves. The servers are never going to collectively force the restaurants to make that decision. Each option requires "everyone just decide to forever on operate this new way which forces no-tipping alignment all together" and that's just never going to realistically happen. Customers aren't going to form a long lasting collective which convinces the servers to press the business nor are they going to form a long lasting collective to boycott businesses directly. Businesses aren't going to care about anything but never optionally baking in higher prices on the menu since it's giving customers away to competition. What each group actually wants as a majority is irrelevant for something as minor as this. The only way it happens is if the majority are for it being regulated as such, which can happen with representatives deciding how the collective of restaurants need to behave.
tl;dr: I tip because not tipping isn't going to result in change, not because the only way to enact change is to make sure a worker is in no way ever affected during the change.
> On Christmas Day a family bought over $100 worth of tickets and food two days after Christmas.
I don't know how this family received their food, but it almost certainly wasn't at the bar from the bartender. Maybe it was delivered to them inside the theater as another commenter suggests, but it's just as possible that they got the food at the counter.
Further, the photo doesn't give any indication of how much money was spent on tickets vs food, which would be entirely expected to impact the tip calculation. If they bought $95 in tickets and one kid got some popcorn, a $2 tip is downright generous!
My point was if you imagine yourself ordering $100 in food at a full service restaurant with reasonable service, do you imagine yourself not tipping? I think most Americans can’t imagine that. It’s customary.
That said, I still think this movie theater is particularly shady on the tipping spectrum. The article calls out a family's food purchase and a kids' movie night as examples of bad tipping and implicitly criticizes the non-tippers, but it seems likely to me that the people involved had no clue that there was someone in the building relying on their tips that day.
The theater is guilty for blurring the line between tipping- and non-tipping locations, the patrons are just reacting as expected to the lack of clarity.
Overall, I think the business model they have doesn’t work for labor, and they suffer the consequences by being unable to hire. To their point, it’s not about workers being lazy, it’s about the business owner making a work environment that’s untenable but expecting people to be grateful for the opportunity. The tipping was only one issue, amongst a lot of others, but it’s also the one that would have cost the owners nothing to resolve by simply clearing the ambiguity.
The company socialising their wages out to their customers via tips is fucking absurd.
There is no government involvement in tipping, it is a social custom. And I don’t think the government can or should do anything about it.
As long as there are separate laws for tipped vs non tipped employees, the government is involved in tipping.
Also, note
> Since tipping is expected even in the states with no separate tipped minimum wages,
And if you believe that actually happens I’ve got a bridge in London to sell you.
Every person I’ve ever met who has ever lived on tips has been hosed on this. Employers will just adjust your hours to make the math work out rather than paying you more money. There’s a reason wage theft is a $50 billion dollar a year grift (though that’s not limited to just tipped employees).
I for one, do not see paying someone close to minimum wage in return for 40hr/wk of their time as 'supporting' workers. You want to really support workers? Pay them appropriately and provide them a good workplace.
I dont know so many people make those assumptions. If there is a more profitable buisness, why isnt it there already?
We're not discussing minimum wage here. If we were I'd point out that minimum wage should at a minimum be the amount where letting the store remain vacant is equally preferable. However to ensure alignment I consider it better to put it higher to the point where people earning minimum wage aren't a burden on society (I mean a store with as much value to society as a vacant one doesn't really deserve to exist, you're just shifting the problem there, don't ever let industry do that for you).
It was more of an addendum on the types of business that shouldnt exist, and business turnover in general. I agree that if a business cant make enough to attract talent, it makes sense that that it should fail (all other factors neglected).
If customers are willing to pay the price + tip to have a equivalent $15/hr salary, they should be willing to do so with just the price, e.g. $5 beers vs $4 beers +$1 tip.
Im sure there are some cultural issues around changing the norm in the US, but it works out mathematically, and there is evidence from all around the world where tipping is not the norm.
Note: this doesn’t change the fact that minimum wage is a pittance.
We also have no shortage of bars, tipping is entirely optional and often viewed as an unwelcome American import.
The accounting sleight of hand where they seem to pay less for the food and drink but actually don't because they must add a tip doesn't change how much income is going into the establishment.
I reckon there is a reason carnivals no longer thrive with the advent of public parks. Perhaps similar capitalistic creative destruction would occur for dive bars if the incentives were changed.
Fun fact: that's the *business'* problem. As a customer, if you don't pay your staff, which means your business has shitty service, I'm just not going to come back.
Pay your staff a living fucking wage.
Then it should be next to the price on the menu:
$x + minimum $y tip.
Whether payroll tax applies to tips depends on the municipality, but income tax always does.
Not tipping is effectively using those same market forces to fix the disaster that tipping has become. If folks aren't going to stay in jobs because they don't make enough money from tips, then that will pressure employers to pay people better.
When taken to the logical end, this is true… but who ends up getting hurt the most during the transition? The workers you ultimately want to help. I can’t see that as a good alternative.