I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.
1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.
2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"
3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.
4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.
5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.
In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.
The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.
tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the same number of hours, the higher skilled driver earns more because they get more tips.
this "work harder => more pay" incentive is pretty unique in the industry; in manual labor jobs where each day has a set limit on the amount of work that can be completed, like grocery merchandising, workers that work harder get paid less than average workers. stock incentives are the closest comparison, but it's too far removed from the individual worker's output when the company's size grows above 100 employees.
the point is, part of the problem is the lack of other incentives that reward the hardest/best skilled workers.
I’d love to seem them incentivize actually not putting a whole pizza’s worth of toppings on just 3 slices.
And also putting enough of a topping where it becomes visible. When I add “onion” to “pizza”, I don’t intend for them to add a single tiny spec to a single slice — finding it should be easier than Where’s Waldo.
2. Only people working front get tips. If you have a lazy busboy working front for the most talented chef in the world, the chef pockets $0.00/hr in tips.
3. If any computer science job ever contemplated adding tipping to my compensation package, I'd go get my pink slip within the hour.
im not saying that the current tipping system is a good design - your example is one of the most glaring flaws. to put it another way, my point is that the current system will stay in existence due to the lack of other incentives that reward harder working individuals. in order to get rid of tipping culture, you can't simply appeal to morality/shame tippers; you have to replace it with a new system that also incentivizes harder work.
I'm from a country where there're no tips, and I'm not defending tips at all. But I do think the tiktok gifts are basically tips right? Is it a good idea to live off the gifts like the tips?
Tipping, as an American culture, exists to reward "above and beyond" behavior from service workers. Tiktok performers, bedroom musicians and FOSS developers aren't service workers, and most of the time they aren't salaried either. Expecting to live off those wages is an unfortunate mistake.
over time, your experiences with any company will vary, due to the cycle of new workers joining the company and experienced workers leaving. tipping after a good experience incentivizes the skilled worker to stay longer in their position, thus increasing the odds that your future interactions will also be handled by a skilled worker.
There is also no massive and obvious corruption risk in me paying either of those people to do a job as there is with a support engineer.
Maybe I should tip customs officers too, for processing my passport quickly and not looking too closely at my luggage?
Or perhaps if I take a speeding ticket to court, maybe I should tip the judge based on the outcome?
this assumes that an org is able to perform a robust performance evaluation. i posit that the lack of a quality-based incentive, like tipping, decreases the accuracy of an org's performance review process.
organizations that are unable to retain skilled workers, will also experience a drop in the rate of skilled workers that transition to management positions. over time, management positions are then filled with individuals that do not have experience with the company's product. this lowers the accuracy of performance reviews, which causes a downward spiral: frontline engineers learn which KPI's are important in performance reviews, and focus on achieving those KPI's, rather than focusing on the customer experience. skilled workers are the workers most likely to spot the problem, and either adapt to lower the quality of the experience they provide to the customer, or they begin to seek greener pastures. this is textbook organizational collapse.
If anything; tipping leads us to “leverage information to ensure you get a large amount of high-tipping customers => more pay.”
Continuing that logical process, we might realize that “make your coworkers have to deal with the bad tippers => more pay.” Which might lead us to “socially manipulate management to get optimal shifts and locations => more pay.”
If you really want “work harder => more pay,” then just pay a high/fair/livable hourly rate, and add a bonus for number of orders fulfilled in the shift (or total sales volume during the shift). Certainly, some perverse incentives remain with this approach. But nothing nearly so bad as tipping. And like with tipping, the higher the hourly rate compared to the bonus, the more those problems are reduced.
But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.
The tipping process works for servers who have the performative and service skills to work a crowd of tables, modulo peculiarities of the patron population. There can be a very strong connection between a server who works tables hard and their tip take-home versus one who merely gets the food to the table.
I have had more than a few conversations with tipped service workers. Some are even friends of mine. While a lot of what you say is true (the manipulation of shifts and spotting/monopolizing desirable customers) it really fails to capture what most folks tell me about these jobs.
They like tips. The ones that hustle and build up a bank of "regulars" do quite well. It takes a lot of work, and if you hustle on your shifts you usually get more tables assigned to you or drinks poured per hour, etc. This means even more pay.
A slow unskilled bartender is making far less money than a highly skilled efficient experienced bartender with a stable of regulars taking up half the bar stool seats every slow night. It is a night and day difference in total pay rates - all to do with skill. This can be two bartenders behind the same bar on the same nights. The unskilled bartender is not going to be known in these closely knit industry circles as good talent, and will likely never get the opportunity for a position at the top-tier establishments known for good tippers. Those positions are highly competitive.
While we can pontificate about how businesses "should" reward the top tier employees, it isn't happening. In this area of work these are often the only types of jobs available that offer significantly more hourly pay by working harder or being better at your job than your peers. Tilting at windmills only goes so far - sometimes you take the only options available to you to immediately improve your lot in life.
And yes, some of that is "manipulation" of your work environment - just like how we call it "managing upwards" in our white collar world. Same thing.
Tilting at windmills doesn't pay the bills.
In part it's buying yourself a place without waiting.
I know a bartender who runs the entire bar area (the actual bar plus maybe eight four-top tables) at a nearby restaurant during lunch. I can text him at 10:30 and say I'd like a table for 2-4 people at lunch at 11:45, and there will be one waiting for me. He just brings one menu to the table, with our drinks (I'll have water, my wife will have Diet Coke, he already knows this) and we usually spend about ten seconds looking at the menu before we order.
We're both busy professionals, so getting us in and out in thirty minutes matters. And he does.
I'm directly paying the guy who provides service to me for a much higher level of service. I'm sure his manager would like a cut of that, but it's the price they have to pay to retain high-skill servers.
They like money. Service workers tend to like tips (which provide variable income) over stable higher wages mostly I think because the latter is one they just haven't experienced. Instead they get a choice between low wages and tips or low wages without tips. Hardly a choice.
Also, tips do not always go to the harder working employees. With tip request spreading far and wide, I often see them in places where there is little work even involved. If I buy a bottle of water from a take-out fast food place I'm expected to tip, but the same bottle of water from a convenience store I'm not expected to tip? Who was working harder here exactly?
Waiters/drivers/bartenders/barbers, all are classic tipped jobs and you tip them after they serve you.
Smoothie Shop instead asks for a tip before they do anything. And they are paid a full wage anyway.
Food delivery is the perfect example. Right before covid, and during lockdowns, in my country, it was a lucrative job with easy work that earned a decent chunk of change, while being so cheap for consumers, that I've once or twice skipped out on going around the apartment block to the pizza place and just ordered it to my door.
Nowadays, prices are sky high and the wages are so low, and the system so punishing, is the only delivery drivers you see are illegal immigrants hanging on for dear life.
and FAANG size companies dont have random bonuses for frontlines; stack ranking is supposed to reward top performers, but when manager kpi's conflict with work that benefits the customer experience, managers will intentionally rank the best performers as average.
The custom of tipping came to America from Europe after the First World War, and tipping was seen as deeply un-American until the 1950's.
It is sometimes mentioned in films and radio dramas of the period. See the Bettie Davis movie Petrified Forest for one example.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...
if I had anyone at all nag me over tipping them more than that as if it were something you're supposed to automatically do, id flat out tell them to fuck off without a shred of guilt. Luckily it's not so ingrained where I live.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work. It's supposed to seep into every crevice of society and pull money out of the poorest, weakest people and into the hands of the richest and strongest. This isn't a coincidence, it is in fact the most important aspect of the system.
Tipping went from some generous gesture to recognize exceptional service and it's turned into a mandatory, arm-twisting shakedown by businesses that simply do not want to pay their employees. Not just avoid paying a living wage (those days are long gone) but not even a _minimum_ wage. Many people involved in or invested in the restaurant businesses wouldn't have thought about getting in if they had to pay employees for an honest day's work.
Many restaurants these days aren't just local mom and pop family run businesses but large corporations who own many franchises and operate in the billions of dollars yet people like you and I are expected to pay most of the wages of the servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darden_Restaurants
Sure, you can never eat out or only eat at locally owned small businesses. But that's just one small slice of society. The only realistic solution for many of us is to try to run the rat race faster.
Markets are great when they are well administered by competent and uncorrupted authority. And this is not an oxymoron! Brooksley Born should win the Nobel Peace Prize or something, she saw the road ahead and gave everything in a bitter battle against Clinton's goons and if we hadn't kneecapped her we wouldn't be here today.
More recently Lina Khan was a one-woman nightmare calamity for scammers, thieves, and other assorted bottom dwellers, and if Trump's goons hadn't had their way she'be ramming data privacy laws so far up FAANG's ass that Lt Colonel Boz would think he actually had been through legit basic.
The system can work, we get excellent people in charge of the important stuff with some frequency, but we have got to drop this red/blue crap and get behind leaders like the ones I mentioned or this goes one fucking way.
And there's a pretty optimistic message not in what George wrote, but that people like George are starting to ask if they're the baddies. He's always been brilliant but I was starting to wonder if he had gone TESCREAL on us, and I think we can see he (metaphorically) sobered up off the kool aid. If he can, idk, maybe Lex can, maybe pmarca can. If those guys took a cold shower? The world changes that day.
1. You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.
2. You ARE hurting the underpaid, exploited worker.
This is just hope for the hopeless. If an adult needs the few dollars, they have bigger problems.
If you can solve the coordination problem between diners and the explosion of tipping (largely due to employers trying to fight for unskilled workers by promising some extra tip revenue) the tipping might be extinguished entirely and a correction can occur.
What? No, you're not hurting anyone. You're going out to eat and expecting to pay for what you ordered, not the life subsidy of someone whose employer can't be bothered to pay them well enough. Either way, it's not and shouldn't be your obligation even if it does screw with the waiter's finances. I too might have financial squeezes that make it difficult for me to fork over an extra 14 to 20% every damn time I've already paid for all that I bought.
Your claim just keeps reinforcing the foolish notion that it's a consumer's fault/responsibility if wait staff aren't paid enough by their employers.
>You're not hurting the big wigs who exploit workers. They don't care if you don't tip.
And I shouldn't have to care if they don't care. At bottom, like I said in my point above, it's not my job to subsidize their wages either way. I didn't make my argument as a description of protest, instead i'm saying it as a practical thing anyone should and has a right to do.
You are, and it's objective.
Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.
What you're arguing is if this harm is justified. Maybe, maybe not. In your opinion, it is. My opinion is that the marginal effects of me not tipping will have zero impact on the culture, so, for now, I play by the rules. The rules are stupid, I agree, but I still play by them.
You have, objectively, less money than before. Ergo, tipping is self-harm.
Like I said, the rules are stupid but, for now, I play by them.
You might as "why are you hurting yourself?". Because I can afford to hurt myself, the waiter probably can't. 5 bucks is a drop in the bucket for me, but, presumably, not for them.
And, on the topic of self-harm, we all make decisions every day that harm us. We sometimes get something in return, but often we don’t. We do it purely for the benefit of other people, often people we don’t know and will never see again.
Consider holding a door open. For me, I get in the building 10 seconds later. That’s worse than getting in the door 10 seconds earlier. What did I gain? Nothing. Some stranger got 100% of the benefit, with nothing for me.
Playing by stupid "rules" (which these aren't in any case, they're social tendencies that can be slowly changed) is the passively damaging thing, a logic of, "yeah, this aspect of the world is shit but i'll chide you for not participating in it because I myself am too inert to not do so".
>Does this worker have more, or less, money than before? It's not a matter of opinion. The answer is less, and we know that's the answer because that's specifically what you're seeking out.
Do you own a restaurant in which you underpay employees? I'd almost guess you do to come up with such topsy-turvy nonsense. The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own. You're paying for what you ordered, and stealing nothing from anyone; you're simply seeking not to be squeezed further for no good reason. The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.
A person having less money because you refuse to participate in a subtle bit of exploitation doesn't make you guilty of the exploitation or "seeking it out"
Again: does the worker have less, or more, money than before if you don't tip? It's not a trick question, it's not a rhetorical question, it's a very simple question.
Okay... they have less. So, the worker is worse off when you don't tip. Again, what you're arguing is that's okay and justified. Which is fine, and lots of people will agree.
> The worker having less money has nothing to do with any fault of your own.
This is blatantly not true.
When you don't tip 5 dollars, the waiter does not have 5 dollars. Who did not give them that 5 dollars? You.
You're arguing that isn't your responsibility. That's a different argument. But who didn't give it to them? You.
> The owner of the place is however literally underpaying because they're hoping to guilt you into subsidizing part of wages, and convincing their employees that this is the correct thing.
Correct, this is exactly right. And, I agree with you: this is absolutely what is happening. I want this to end 100%.
But, in my opinion, I do not believe, personally, for me, in my life, that I will be enacting any change or furthering this cause in any way by not tipping. So, for me, I tip.
If you do not want to tip, I think that's fine. Go for it. What you cannot claim is that this doesn't hurt your particular waiter. Obviously it does, you made his night a little bit worse. If you still don't believe me, just ask next time, the waiter will tell you.
And, notice my wording here, it’s very careful. That particular waiter is worse off. It’s possible to help waiters, as a group, as a collective, while simultaneously harming that particular waiter. You believe you’re deconstructing or undermining tipping as a system, ergo helping waiters as a whole. But in the process, you’re hurting that particular waiter.
Consider the negation: you’re not hurt if I give you 100 dollars. Or, rephrased, you're better off if I give you 100 dollars. Is this true? Yes. If I queried all 7.5 billion people on Earth, they’d all say yes.
Again, the tricky part is I don't care. That's a different thing.
I’m paraphrasing an old girlfriend of mine because you gave her a substandard tip.
I’m a regular at this bakery / coffee store and I buy a doughnut there every day and I never tip.
You can just do things.
What a depressing way to live…