My summer as a dishwasher made it clear tipping, already deeply stupid, is wildly unfair even to service workers.
A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.
A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.
> That's not generally true. [...] in the 90's and was making
These are not contradictory?
"Tipping culture" has definitely gone too far.
What about the pilot and other members at front? Do the tipped flight attendants kick some bucks over to them?
It definitely feels like an abdication of responsibility (and obligations) of the company that those people work for.
Nurses don't get tips but it's very common for them to get thank-you gifts and treats.
As it stands today, if you're tipped and you work a shift where there are fewer customers, you implicitly get paid less (and have more of your tips soaked up by your employer) for exactly the same amount of effort. If you work a graveyard shift for eight hours and see $40 in tips from eight customers, you effectively worked minimum wage with $0 in tips, not minimum wage plus $40. For the people working those jobs, that's multiple meals or tank of gas.
There's no practical reason for having a lower minimum wage for tipped employees, it's literally just an excuse for employers to pay their tipped employees less. If we as a society actually believed that some professions should be compensated based on effort, there would be a different minimum wage for people compensated by commission. But that doesn't exist.
So to answer your question, you're not necessarily "directly compensating" the employee, because a non-trivial percentage of your tip goes towards subsidizing their employer.
Whatever your job is or was, are you not a professional who already gets paid well for your work? You're at my office as a consultant already getting paid a good salary by your company, and I try to flip you a 50, you just take it? Oh right, that's why you laughed at all my jokes. Well good boy. I like that.
Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute. The only people who are ok with that are people who like the feeling of being on the top side of that power dynamic.
I don't recall mentioning anything else. What your basis for making this claim?
> Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute.
At the end of the day, a prostitute is also a service provider engaged in a fee-for-service transaction. Scrape away the emotion-laden woo-woo here, and I don't see that there's anything much of a substantive argument -- it seems completely proper for a portion of a service provider's compensation to come directly from the party who the service is being provided to, regardless of whether there's some other middleman in the transaction.
You're trying to project your own prejudices onto others here, but I doubt the people who are happy to make higher income via tips than they otherwise would are going to agree with you.
From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?
They were entirely right but didn’t win, for whatever reason.
[edit] I mean, I don’t know why, but if I had to guess, based on the timeframe, I’d guess the reason was racism.
And why should they be getting less indirect pay?
You entice the customer with the lower price, and once they have committed, you can hit them with another charge or fee without as much ramification.
Restaurant customers can be price sensitive, so tipping is a way to advertise a lower price that isn't actually real. Also, it's pretty ubiquitous, so unless you heavily advertise a no-tipping policy like Kroger delivery, most people will assume tipping is required, and factor that into your now higher price.
I typically do tip because I'm never buying just drip coffee and I'd like to reward the person who took the time to make my drink.
In exchange there's typically some latte art which takes some skill to build up.
I replied "Can I see my dog first?"
It just shows that there's an expectation, and at that point it should simply be built into the advertised price.
Tipping seems terrible for restaurant owners since it lets waiters capture an unusually large share of the value of the product.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fac...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/minimum-wage-raci...
> I think that there are five basic motives for tipping. Some people tip to show off. Some people tip to help the server, to supplement their income and make them happy. Some people tip to get future service. And then other people tip to avoid disapproval: You don’t want the server to think badly of you. And some people tip out of a sense of duty.
So, it is complicated. The part about the owner to avoid paying their workers properly is a consequence of the tipping culture, not a cause.
I don't recall if the chef/cooks got any but I also believe they were salaried.
I posted this elsewhere in here, but this is not true. They are often tipped out of a tip pool, especially in pricey ($100+ a head) restaurants with a lot of tip money to go around. People I know have made $40/hr this way, and I even know a guy who dish washed at age 17 at a counter service place and still made $20-35 an hour this way just off the tips that the little payment machine asked for when you picked up your food yourself.
It is a complicated topic though, as it is actually illegal to include BOH people in tip pools in some states. This is because it is often a sneaky way for owners to steal tips by underpaying BOH compared to how they would have to pay them without a tip pool. So you might live in such a state.
I've always found it amazing a cook makes a meal, a waiter carries it to the table. It can be a $10 hamburger or a $100 steak. The waiter gets a 10% or 20% tip of the total value of the meal. All just for carrying a plate with different food on it food which they never made. The cooks and dishwasher get squat of that. Granted cooks are paid more than dish washers.
AIUI, front-end servers are supposed to kick some money into a pool for back-end staff.
> Tip out is the restaurant practice where servers or bartenders share a portion of their collected tips with other staff members who contribute to the dining experience. This can include bussers, food runners, and sometimes even kitchen staff, depending on local regulations.
* https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-tipping-out-guide/
This could be legally regulated, or it could be social convention.
What they paid me was totally up to them.