Abolish Tipping: It's bad for servers, customers and restaurants | Hacker News Reader

Abolish Tipping: It's bad for servers, customers and restaurants

slate.com

19 pointschangdizzle10 comments

But restaurateurs, giddy at the prospect of passing labor costs directly to customers,

They don't already do this when they charge you? If they had to pay their servers more, wouldn't they need to charge more to make up for the difference?

Tipping does not incentivize hard work.

Maybe not when tips are pooled they don't. They sure incentivized me to work hard, and to develop a pleasing personality. I had a seriously teenager attitude problem when I was younger and working at grocery stores and whatnot, and had the classic "us vs. them" mentality when it came to customers. When I started delivering pizzas that changed. The harder I worked, the more personable I was, the more money I would bring in each night in tips. Not immediately, but imagine the surprise when you see someone actually requested you by name to deliver their food just because they felt that their food arrived faster when you did it, and enjoyed the short interaction enough.

The factors that correlate most strongly to tip size have virtually nothing to do with the quality of service. Credit card tips are larger than cash tips. Large parties with sizable bills leave disproportionately small tips. We tip servers more if they tell us their names, touch us on the arm, or draw smiley faces on our checks. Quality of service has a laughably small impact on tip size.

I would assume a server who takes care to do all those things is also taking care to provide a quality service. So in one side of the authors mouth they are saying that servers who go the extra mile get extra tips, and on the other side, they say servers who go the extra mile don't? Which is it?

Racism racism studies say this ethnic group tips less racism racism...

My personal experience was different classes of people tipped differently. Ironically, bigger houses typically tipped less. Drunk people either didn't tip at all, or in some cases, would tip multiple times, making up the difference for the non-tipping inebriated and then some. College students we're terrible tippers too. Doctors were probably the worst tippers of all. Ethnic group has little to do with it, but why let that get in the way of an opportunity to race bait?

IMO tipping is the best opportunity for someone in high school or college. It's one of the few options you have where you can get real-time feedback on the quality of your service. It's one of the few options where you can make beyond the minimum wage. If it weren't for overtime pay laws, it would be one of the only options someone had to get themselves out of a financial jam. I recall one week where I had put in too many hours, I was only focused on bringing home tips so that I could fix my car, but after 40 hours I was forced to go home. Imagine how frustrating it is to be killing it on a weekend and having to stop abruptly because the employer would have been legally obligated to pay you time and a half whether you wanted it or not.

Working for tips was a good experience for me and it was actually a natural stepping stone to eventually working freelance full time. When you experience the correlation of hard work to income, the transition is smoother than going from "paid no matter how hard you work" to not getting paid if you slack.

"It worked out great for me, so it must be ok".

In my country, we still have tips - but it's not some kind of obligation. You tip if you want to, but if you choose not to, then nobody is going to chase you out of the restaurant and demand extra money. And yet, somehow, service is basically always fine.

Of course, if given half a chance, I'm pretty sure restaurants would just love to adopt the American system - but then greed never knew any bounds.

"Working" class people are much more likely to have at some point tried to survive on a tip based job. So it's not surprising that they would be better tippers than more wealthy individuals whose only exposure to tips is being expected to provide them.

There's no tipping in South Korea (and many other places). You will get excellent service, if not better. Nobody leaves a restaurant or cafe feeling confused and staff never feels cheated. Taxi drivers still get you to your destination without any additional tip incentive.

Besides, if I've paid for something already, why should I give an additional, mostly arbitrary amount?

"We tip servers more if they tell us their names, touch us on the arm, or draw smiley faces on our checks."

We? I tip 20%, rounding slightly up. I have never worked as a waiter, but I did several turns as a busboy, getting a cut from the waiters' tips. I'm not out to impress waitresses, I'm not out to make a statement that affects somebody's main source of income; this is financial. (I once tipped damned near 50%, but that was after I took four fourth grade boys to lunch on one's birthday, and they left a very messy table; that wasn't a reward, but an apology.)

"Quality of service has a laughably small impact on tip size."

Quite. See above. I'm not going to penalize the wait staff for what might be the faults of the kitchen.

A few weeks ago, I had beers on a couple of occasions at a hotel bar in Boston. There the "gratuity" was included in the charge, and that was fine with me.

There's opportunity here. Exec, Über, Lyft etc get rid of tipping for cleaning, taxis and I love it. I am happy to know total cost upfront. Matter of time before this is extended to food service.

No formal rules around Tipping in Australia, but some places of service (cafes, restaurants, etc.) have tip jars as a "donation or gift" rather than the norm.

You work in hospitality, you get a minimum wage, usually $10-$30/hr depending on your position/experience etc. and usually the tips are evenly dispersed to all staff who worked that shift as one customer may tip $20, compared to $2 tips or $0 from other customers. Kinda see it as a end-of-shift bonus if you get $20 worth of tips to take as cash in hand.

Anecdotal, but I've found the quality of restaurant service in Australia is far below that of the US - there is little incentive for servers to do anything but the absolute minimum. I do think this is because there isn't a tipping culture here.

I frequently eat with someone who orders something like a hamburger with no butter on the roll, and maybe 30% of the time he will receive butter on it anyway, because the servers don't pay much attention. When we holidayed in the US, this didn't happen a single time, and we attributed that to the fact that if a server messes up an order like that, they're risking their tip.

I've noticed this also coming from New Zealand to the US - there is a distinct difference in restaurant service here, and also in people's expectations for service.

Couldn't agree more, I always hated tipping even when I worked as a waiter.

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