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Comment by liotier | Hacker News Reader

> 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 ?

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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 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!

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

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