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Comment by gommm | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, tipping the cook makes more sense to me than the waiter. I come to a restaurant for the food, I don't particularly care about the service beyond a certain baseline. It never makes sense to me that waiters can earn more with tips than kitchen staff.

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Yes it seems totally arbitrary. When I first visited the US I paid for our group, and didn't tip the waiter because he got our order wrong, and was met with aghast faces. I didn't realise you're supposed to tip EVEN when the service is bad!

The employer is shifting the responsibility of wages to the customer (you). It is customary in business to pay a wage even if an employee makes a mistake. The tipout structure of most restaurants, where the server tips out the kitchen and support staff, also collects a percentage of all *sales* from the server's tips, so not tipping results in a server paying your tipout from their tips just for the privilege of serving you, hence the agast faces.

Tipping should be illegal to substitute for pay. Majority-tipped restaurants are almost always predatory and take advantage of both customers and employees in order to further enrich the owners.

«Tip-pooling» is common many places. This implies that tips is shared between employees, for example including the kitchen staff.

I don't think that's true in the vast majority of establishments? Tip pooling usually means that the front of the house staff pool their tips. Not that they share with the entire restaurant.

Yeah, I don't know anything about the majority of establishments.

My single reference is the Norwegian upscale restaurant Theatercafeen, which introduced tip pooling across waiters and kitchen. It was highly contentious when introduced by the restaurant: The waiters took the case to the courts, and it went all the way to the supreme court of Norway [1], where it was decided that the employer could decide rules for tip-sharing.

[1]: https://www.arbeidsrettsadvokater.no/domstolsnytt/dom-deling...

That’s a very engineering viewpoint. But much of the world values the whole package, including clean and neatly set tables and place settings, advice on the menu, timing of courses, QA of prep and fixing issues without customer intervention, help with any mishaps like spilled drinks or dropped silverware, boxing of food to go, etc.

A utilitarian only interested in pure food quality is much better off cooking at home. You can do better at a quarter the price.

Food/software is only about 25% of the cost and value in these businesses, though perceptions on value differ of course.

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