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Comment by nextstep | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why, but this is a topic about which people often hold very strong views. I agree with the author, but I feel like this viewpoint is discouraged, at least in the US; tipping is mandatory, and it is considered rude not to tip.

But, if tipping is mandatory, why not just advertise the real price? Take a cabe ride for example: I pay the driver to take me from point A to B. He (or she) completes this task, and I pay them. Very rarely do I feel like I have received exceptional service, and often the drivers are rude and impatient. But I have to tip at least 10-15% or I'm an asshole.

Maybe we'd all receive better service if we stopped compulsory tipping, and instead only tipped when we receive good customer service.

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It's not "considered" rude not to tip in the US. It is rude not to tip. It may not make sense to you that restaurants underpay waitstaff in anticipation of tips, but they do. If you want to protest the practice, don't patronize businesses that encourage tipping.

For whatever it's worth to you, tipping isn't just an incentive scheme to get waitstaff to do their jobs well; it's also a commission and recruiting/retention practice.

I have no strong opinions about tipping cabs. I tip them, but the economics behind cab tips are not the same as for service staff. Cab drivers in Chicago are usually sole proprietors of their own businesses and can select their routes to maximize returns; about the most you could say is that they also have to deal with fixed fare rates, which themselves might be set in anticipation of tipping.

But refusing to tip restaurant servers is from what I can tell morally equivalent to taking money out of their pockets.

From the post, Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington require minimum wage for waitstaff. Do you think tipping should be mandatory in these states?

How about all of the other service professionals which are paid a decent wage regardless of tips?

Even in the minority of states that require minimum wage for waitstaff, waitstaff wages are adjusted in anticipation of tips. Service staff at good restaurants do not, as a rule, make minimum wage.

Other service professionals are paid a market wage. The bus driver, to continue with the particularly inept example used by this blog post, has in many localities also been compensated with a pension.

And for non-public transit bus drivers (e.g charter buses) tipping is more common.

> Other service professionals are paid a market wage. The bus driver, to continue with the particularly inept example used by this blog post, has in many localities also been compensated with a pension.

Which is the whole point, if pretty much every other service professional is paid a market wage, how are waiters different?

Waiters are paid a market wage that anticipates tips. Diners and restaurant owners are, along with servers, participants in the market. Just because the market for restaurant service is not organized exactly the way the market for bus drivers is doesn't make it not a market --- in fact, given the public pension situation in most US states, the market for restaurant service is far more efficient than it is for bus drivers.

City bus drivers are surly and, at least in the case of San Francisco, obviously not even properly incentivized to properly stop the bus and pick up passengers. But because you have virtually no role in determining the compensation of a bus driver, the fact that buses are driven poorly has little bearing on how much the drivers make; instead, public sector unions play the largest role in establishing wages.

>>Even in the minority of states that require minimum wage for waitstaff, waitstaff wages are adjusted in anticipation of tips.

So you're saying that in California, Alaska, ..., that waitstaff can't still earn under minimum wage if they report tips? I don't think this is true, at least in CA.

>>Service staff at good restaurants do not, as a rule, make minimum wage.

Yes, they often make more. Not substantially more, but I know waiters who work at good restaurants and they can make 9 or 10 per hour, plus tips.

I don't get what you're saying about bus drivers. We should tip them, too?

My point -- and I think the orignal point of this whole thread -- is that we (consumers) should be aware what we are expected to pay. The final price should be the price we read on the menu. If you feel you have received exceptional service, then feel free to tip on top of the base price. Otherwise, if tips are compulsory, then the price should reflect this!

No, I'm saying that the minimum wage issue is still largely moot, because servers in good restaurants make much better than minimum wage. But the prevailing wage for any given restaurant, which is set by the market and not by the government, anticipates tips.

The blog post asked why we don't tip bus drivers. I've never tipped a bus driver. CTA bus drivers have pensions.

You are expected to tip 15%-20%. This is not hard information to come by. You should assume that tips are compulsory, unless something very bad happened with service. I've never undertipped for service issues.

Please excuse my ignorance, but how is not tipping the servers considered rude ("morally equivalent to taking money out of their pockets"), and flat-out lying about the prices isn't? If I'm told one price, and am considered a thief if I pay it exactly, this is morally acceptable? I'm a bit confused here.

You're welcome to consider the 15% uplift virtually everyone in America knows is trained from adolescence to know is there is "flat out lying", but whether or not you think that has nothing to do with whether knowingly and willfully not paying it is immoral.

I'm pretty sure even in Europe they teach kids, young kids, about what two wrongs add up to.

I'm all hears for a solution to this problem. I've been thinking about it and failing at it. The system is really ubiquitous at the moment.

Many regions of the world work just fine without tipping, so the difficulty would be in the transition. Have any cultures successfully made the transition from tipping to not-tipping?

Seems like the only start toward doing so would be to force minimum wage standards to be applied to all workers. This would benefit some but cause significant hardships to some others, so it seems to me unlikely to be achievable.

What does 'just fine' mean? There is a large restaurant service disparity between the US and Europe.

Many regions of the world may "work just fine", but I'll put the service you'll get at an average priced sit down restaurant in an averaged sized city of the U.S. against a comparable establishment anywhere else on Earth. That's not to say there aren't friendly, competent staff everywhere, but at least my anecdotal experience has been that the U.S. and its tipping culture excels at providing good to excellent service on average.

The chief advantage of tipping is that it encourages people who are skilled at providing customer service to stay in the industry and those who are not to leave. Other feedback mechanisms might be possible, but they'd be much more complex.

How much of a problem is this?

You said that it wasn't money -- that it was just not knowing the cost. If that's true, I don't understand at all -- the cost is 20% more than the listed price. If you see a burger at $10, that's really $12 -- it's the same problem as dining in a foreign currency -- the exchange rate for $ to R$ (restaurant dollars) is 1.200.

For the longest time I was wondering why you were saying that the exchange rate from US dollars to Brazilian Reais is 1.2 when its actually closer to 2.0 ...

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