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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

I thought that tipping is mainly to enable the restaurant owner to avoid paying their workers properly.

It's a combination of things, but it's similar to why online stores advertise a price, and then add charges at checkout (like shipping, or credit card charge, processing fee, etc).

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.

Let me change that a bit: "it's pretty ubiquitous in the US". It's not common everywhere. My personal observation (in NL) is that with the transition from cash to contactless payment it seems to be becoming less common over time. Payment terminals here are not setup to ask for a tip (with very rare exceptions) - you just pay the amount on the receipt directly.

In Paris, the menu prices include tip and tax and—somewhat miraculously. it felt—the prices are generally less than a comparable meal in the U.S.

I feel tipping is still very common in Austria as well. Wife gives me a hard time when I don't tip a lot or at all but they're still very cash only here.

As someone also living in NL (Amsterdam though, may be different in other parts of NL), I have to partially disagree with you. It's not at the US level yet, but, my experience is that many if not most cafes/restaurants I go to now display a "Choose your tip %" screen on the payment terminal before paying, and anecdotally it feels like this is becoming more common over time with the newer payment terminals.

Is Square popular and/or growing? This is the biggest change I've seen in Canada and the US

I'm in the UK and we have this system too, although half the time the servers will just press 0% for you before they even hand over the terminal just because tipping isn't really a big cultural thing over here (at least compared to the states).

Uks a bit odd since Service charge is a thing as well and sometimes it's always added (at bill calculation) and other places only add it when it's a large group.

Same. But I always just chose 0%

In North America the growth of Square has pushed things the other way; tips are front and center for the most limited of "tippable service" - starting at 18% and up from there. Tipping on fast food or something like a latte were the extra labour is already priced in is ridiculous.

The drive through coffee shack that I get coffee from asks for a tip on its payment terminals.

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'm glad you feel supported in your payment of the extra socially expected tax that should be included in item prices.

At a coffee shop I'm sort of a regular at, I hate how they spin around the Square tablet whatever thing and it starts at $1, $2, or $3 for a 2.50 Americano. I usually tip a dollar but honestly, an americano is just two shots and hot water. Basically drip coffee. Sometimes I wonder why I go there at all when I could just make crappy instant coffee at work that more or less tastes same.

I went to pick up my dog from the groomer and they asked me for a tip as soon as I said I was there to pick him 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.

10%+ "service charge" added to the bill is almost ubiquitous in London now

for some (stingy) people it IS a lower price.

Also a nice little tax dodge, at least back of the day when tipping was predominantly done in cash that I'm sure was never declared on the waiters taxes.

The thing with the no tax on tips thing pandered by both major condidates is that most waiters don’t make enough to be paying income tax in the first place. On the other hand, more regressive taxes on income (OASDI/Medicare/IL state income tax) would apply, but none of these would be covered.

professional wait staff sure make enough to pay income tax; it's a skilled trade. In Canada the tax authority would audit service industry people who don't declare other income, where tips get captured.

That's not generally true. My friend worked at a waiter in the 90's and was making $200-$300 a night on tips on the weekend. Definitely not reported income either.

> don’t make enough

> That's not generally true. [...] in the 90's and was making

These are not contradictory?

The downvotes are perplexing. Could someone explain how a statement about income in the 1990s contradicts one about 2024?

No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you, even in the context of an organization managing the transaction. You tip people who are personally responding to your requests -- that's why the dishwasher and other people you're not directly interacting with don't usually get tipped.

So like the accountant filing your taxes, the person who fixes your bug in the bug report, the electrician adding power to a new room, the plumber fixing a leak?

No. Most of those people are self-employed, so you are usually already paying 100% of the compensation directly to them in the first place. Tipping is for when someone is doing work directly for you, but as an employee of another party.

Why is there a difference between somebody carrying a plate from the kitchen to my table and somebody preparing that plate just for me?

Do people in the US tip flight attendants who serve them meal?

Tipping flight attendants happens often enough that it wouldn't be considered bizarre, especially in business/first class. But it's not the norm, no.

This comment made me gag.

"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.

Does one leave a flight attendant tip in the seat or in that envelope in the seat pocket? (Handing a tip to someone directly feels so gauche, like I'm pretending to be some fancy person.)

Or the checkout workers at Walmart?

Do people choose to dine on airplanes? Do airlines even still serve meals?

I don't think I've ever had the electrician who showed up to my house or business be the owner. I guess it is possible, I've just never seen it.

I guess I will start tipping my dentist and dental hygienist. Also will tip at the DMV

Do you tip your nurses and your bus drivers?

What exactly does a bus driver do directly for just you? Everyone tips private drivers though.

Nurses don't get tips but it's very common for them to get thank-you gifts and treats.

In my city, it is common courtesy and sometimes expected that you say 'thank you' to the bus driver when getting off at your stop. It's not too much of a stretch to the scenario where bus drivers are tipped, except that most bus riders (at least in the US) tend to be poor. Maybe we'll have bus drivers tipping well behaved passengers instead lol.

Do you tip the mortgage specialist at the bank that prepared the mortgage for you?

No -- it's also not customary to tip people who get a commission from your purchase.

Most of those people are self-employed? Citation heavily needed.

That doesn't change the fact that it's near-universally used as an excuse to underpay workers.

If that was actually true, minimum wage for tipped employees would be equal to the standard minimum wage.

Why? I'm not sure I see how that follows.

Because the employee tips are effectively taken by the restaurant up to the point where they make "normal" minimum wage. If tipped employee compensation was actually about compensating those folks for their effort, they should received the tips they earn. (Tipped minimum wage gets increased to standard minimum wage if you earn fewer than the difference in tips—which is functionally identical to having $5 and a bit of your tips withheld every hour)

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.

This varies by state, though.

You don't seem to see a lot of things. If anyone ever tried to tip me when I was on-site I don't know what I'd do.

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.

> You don't seem to see a lot of things.

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.

I said prostitute, not sex worker or service provider. We all trade our time and even our bodies for money ultimately.

It is equal in 13/50 states, including everywhere on the west coast.

> No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for 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 ?

There’s a history in the US (in, like… the 1930s) of attempting to dismantle tipping culture on the grounds that it sets up a degrading servant/master relationship (you choose whether to tip, and how much) that’s inappropriate for a free people.

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.

Every couple of years someone attempts to tackle this but it usually goes nowhere. Just a few years ago it was Danny Meyer (one of the most well known restauranteurs in the country) trying to revive the no-tipping movement by eliminating tips at his restaurants. There was a big todo about it at the time but it seems to have fizzled out as I havent heard anything about it recently. Seems the tipping lobby (aka Big Tipping ie the workers receiving the tips) is too powerful on this one lol.

if you ask professional wait staff in the US you'll find that tips are more popular than set wages. They wind up making more from tips than they would via salary. Occasionally you'll read about a restaurant trying to eliminate tips and they lose good servers to their competition. Was just reading about this somewhere else.

Seems like the problem here would be that employers tried to pay too little.

They don't like increasing menu costs because they think it scares customers away. The employees know how much they're getting paid.

Good wait staff make more. Bad it isn't clear. Do you give a bad tip for bad service - you should

It’s also ludicrous and wildly inaccurate from an American point of view. I wouldn’t overindex on this take.

It's better to think of it as Americans being so wealthy that we just love paying everyone extra money. Compare US and UK wages sometime. It's not the American workers who are underpaid!

Why should I be favoring the specific workers that get within 5 feet of me?

And why should they be getting less indirect pay?

Culture is a complex thing and probably shouldn't be anthropomorphized like this. I see no reason to believe someone came up with this cultural norm for an identifiable purpose, as opposed to it having just evolved randomly in response to various factors.

Tipping seems terrible for restaurant owners since it lets waiters capture an unusually large share of the value of the product.

The actual origin would be hard to say but it took of in America for some very specific reasons https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...

But you're just making that up. It evolved almost instantly after the US Civil War as a way to employ newly released slaves without paying them. It was described as a "new idea that had just come from Europe."

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 bet that if this bit of history was more widely exposed, "tipping culture" would be exposed as the degrading practice that it actually is.

From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-do-we-tip

> 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.

It's a cultural norm that would persist (and does) regardless of whether or not there is a genuine purpose to it. That some restaurant owners use it to avoid paying workers doesn't mean that's "its" purpose. Others use it to supplement revenue (like when Starbucks and Uber and those places just keep the tips for corporate). If it has any purpose at all, it's a social signaling protocol to say "I am a good person" that servers use guilt to amplify as much as possible.

The point of tipping is to incentivize good service. You're supposed to vary your tip according to the quality of the service. It stopped working when people got too nice. Now people still tip well even when the service sucks. It's just a holdover from a better time at this point.

That's a popular myth because people don't want to tip, but tipping definitely gets workers like bartenders and waiters paid much more than otherwise. It also wouldn't really work in several states (like all West Coast states) because there's no tipped minimum wage.

Most of the people working in a restaurant don't actually get your tips.

Only in red states. Blue states don’t garnish a minimum wage for tips.

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