Has gratuity culture reached a tipping point?

I once heard a lawyer explain that tipping is legally problematic.

Service quality affects tip amount very little (~1%), but what does affect it is race, age, and gender. The result is that people doing the same job are being paid meaningfully differently. While the policy isn't discriminatory, the effect of it is, which means that it would likely run afoul of EEOC rules.

The lawyer said if anyone brought a pay discrimination case to them based on tipping they would strongly consider taking it to court.

About a restauranteur who eliminated tipping and raised prices

> Prospective diners, seeing menu prices online, got sticker shock.

It seems like it would help some sort of tip-free certification and logo, just like we have with free trade or organic. If the customer knows that a) the price they see is the price they get and b) the staff isn't getting screwed, they might be more willing to visit an establishment.

You could put the tip-free logo on menus, marketing materials, and in the storefront window.

One thing that really grates with this high percentage tip system is that it sucks the authenticity out of the relationship.

I don't want someone pretending they're my friend when we've only just met, or trying too hard to please, it can come over as being just an act and sometimes the interruptions are jarring. The difference is noticeable if you're used to dining outside of North America.

Sure, usually if they're not busy I try to strike up conversation with the waiter or at least ask how they're doing. People should be paid and treated as equals and not rewarded like a dog for performing tricks.

I honestly don't think the service is significantly different between countries with high and low tipping norms. But higher tips result in a higher BS factor overall.

I want to hear a real argument against individual action, aka to stop tipping. I guarantee you that if we all stopped tipping today the system would change. There really needs to be a movement to reverse the shaming of customers and to fight hidden fees in the US in general.

Americans, please just stop tipping.

Thank you.

Gratuities are useful when they follow the service.

The porter carries the luggage, the waitress brings the food, the vallet retrieves the car, the technician fixes the furnace, etc.

Some of the payment is up to the consumer, who can pay more for quality service.

Tipping prior to service is dumb and pointless.

I feel like this became much more acute when Starbucks jumped on the bandwagon and forced every customer to opt in/out of tipping on the POS terminal. Obviously, Starbucks is ubiquitous and a frequent purchase and for decades tens of millions of customers who were accustomed to getting coffee without tipping…and everyone was fine. Then they changed things up and shoved these tips in customers’ faces when the notion of tipping for coffee was/is strange. To this day I find it really off-putting and that annoyance has bled into pretty much every other interaction involving tipping.

As an Englishman, I tip at restaurants as it is the only feedback I am able to leave with respect to the quality of the food/service. When the waiter asks "how's the food?" I am of course obliged to always say "very good, thankyou".

The major problem here is hidden costs.

Airlines, for example, are rife with "junk fees". My favoritre is "fuel surchages". That shouldn't be a thing. The service is just more expensive to provide and thus you need to charge more. Then there are checked baggage fees, choosing seat fees, wifi fees, etc.

Tipping is externalizing labor costs while underpaying staff. If you're at a restaurant that food and service simply costs more than the ticket price. You can say "you don't have to tip" but in a lot of cases that's not really true. More to the point, if you object to tipping, you're not hurting the owners. You're hurting the employees. Personally, I have a problem with that.

If you really object to tipping, the correct choice is not to partake in whatever that service is. Don't go to that restaurant. If you do go and cheap out on a tip to someone who is otherwise earning $7/hour, I'm sorry but you're just a POS.

Now some states mandate a (more) livable minimum wage (eg $15/hour). You can reasonably argue that tipping shouldn't be necessary but I guarantee you that you may well get yelled at for not leaving a tip. And I have a problem with that.

Oh, another favorite "junk fee": Uber introduced a "safety" fee. They simply pocketed it and did nothing [1].

I really object to the tip screens on touchscreen checkouts. These are even worse because typically the staff doesn't get any of it. Ask them. They'll tell you. It's just a pure money grab. You should never leave a tip like that. If you want to tip staff, give them cash.

There needs to be more government regulation on hidden fees and that includes tipping. We need to force employers to pay a minimum wage. If that means your business is no longer viable, then that's a "you" problem. Businesses that rely on exploitation and paying substandard wages should go out of business.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-safe-rides-fee-500-mill...

Title pun intended?

Tipping is great, if it is optional.

I feel in many parts of the US it is now expected, if not demanded.

This is bullshit. If your business model doesn't work without tips, you need to raise the base prices. And in pubs and bars and such you need to pay your staff a proper wage.

Tipping is great, if it is optional.

Not reporting income from tips is also extremely common. Cash income may as well not exist.

Betteridge’s law says no, it hasn’t.

> The filet-mignon crowd usually chipped in. Some customers couldn’t. (Food stamps can’t be used for gratuities.) “The tipping system is there to keep the base price affordable for folks like them,” Reed said.

This is stated near the beginning of the article but then doesn't, as far as I am concerned, get anywhere near enough discussion later on (in fact, it is an idea which seems to just get dropped).

It feels, to me, as if what we are really doing as a society with tripping, is trying to figure out how to deal with our crazy levels of wealth inequality using a social norm to establish a makeshift wealth tax used to subsidize costs.

While there are always momentary shocks and disruptions, over time the market always ends up taking this stuff into account: in the same way that restaurants realize they can lower the base pay if the server receives tips, the server is mentally weighing the compensation of being a server as including them (a premise that this article does explain near the end, with a story of the restaurant who realized that they have to keep bumping the pay of their kitchen staff to prevent them from realizing they should quit and get a front-of-house job).

While we stare at this often with how we pay people, it also affects the price paid by customers, driving the base prices down. A lot of people seem to refuse to do this analysis as they just assume that businesses can charge whatever they want, but a business that can charge whatever they want is a good sign that they are some kind of monopoly (a good test to apply to cases where the monopoly status is less obvious, such as Apple/Google and their app payment schemes).

If a restaurant is receiving a lot of tips, competition with nearby restaurants--which can be brutal and downright cutthroat--is going to cause the base prices see on the menu to be lower than they would be if no one were legally allowed to tip. Of course, competition isn't perfect and some psychology effects here lead to indirect price collusion, but the denser the market the more this effect is going to work...

...but, even if the revenue to the restaurant starts to equalize--with both the base wages to staff and the base prices of menu items going down--in the same way that specific servers are going to end up getting paid more for any variety of maybe-awkward reasons (the article early on mentions a pretty explicit one involving physical features), customers are also going to end up now paying different amounts.

And so, in a world with tipping, while on average we should expect most people to pay something similar for their meals (again: if you don't think this is true, you must not really believe in capitalism very much), some people are going to be paying less as they decide to feel OK not tipping (or maybe are forced not to, as in the example in the article I quoted involving food stamps) and yet are benefiting from the lower base price.

This, to me, makes the situation really complicated. Like, I sort of don't think I actually mind the wealth tax that I feel like this causes: I can tip and so I find myself tipping more than people who don't have the resources to tip the same way I do... but, it also feels unfair to me that I know there are people who do have the resources but are choosing not to tip, and my tips are going to subsidize their meals being cheaper.

Like, when you see someone saying they don't tip, you might think they are hurting wait staff... they actually aren't, really, as the existence of these people means the base price of menu items is going to trend a bit higher to compensate. What they are actually doing to wait staff is merely adding a force which equalizes their total compensation slightly by moving some of their wages from the tip column into the salary column: they are, very indirectly, causing people who tip a lot to attractive wait staff to also pay a bit more for their food and for that money to go to someone who fails to get as many tips.

They also are getting food which is massively subsidized by the people like me who pay a lot more via tips because we can and feel bad if we don't (and also probably like the weird social high it gives us, a thing I have written about in prior comments on this topic).

If you like the premise of tipping due to the wealth tax premise, this sucks, as we are actively paying these people to exist (by indirectly transferring wealth to them); if you want a wealth tax we should just add a wealth tax using government, so everyone pays for it fairly--and the people who benefit aren't heavily biased towards the most attractive people--rather than using awkward social pressure to make people feel bad for not participating in the broken simulation of a tax scheme. Remember: if you actively go out of your way to subsidize people who don't care about what society thinks of them you are just training people to be assholes on all sorts of topics :/.

(And, if you don't like the scheme--whether because you dislike the wealth tax or you dislike the broken de fact implementation of it and the biases it results in on the other side of the payments--maybe you can learn from this kind of analysis that you can have an outsized-amount of impact when you refuse to participate, as you aren't just benefiting yourself: that benefit comes from harming the people who disagree with you, and you also are actively contributing to the effect you wanted to see.)

You can call this "noblesse oblige" if you like, I don't care. You tip because you can afford it, and server needs the money more than you do.