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If tipping is necessary in restaurants to promote good service, why isn't it equally necessary in other contexts? In businesses without tipping, managers have an incentive to please customers, so good managers[1] encourage employees (by various means) to provide good service. Why can't the same be done in restaurants?

I'm not claiming tipping is certainly useless. Just questioning the argument in its favor.

[1] Not all managers are good, and so we encounter businesses that provide poor service. Sometimes the market weeds those out, sometimes not. According to the parent commenter, that's what happened at the restaurant s/he visited.

> "If tipping is necessary in restaurants to promote good service, why isn't it equally necessary in other contexts?"

Maybe it is.

No Tips vs Tips:

  Delivery:
    Package/Letter (no tips): constant missed deliveries.  poor to
                              non-existent delivery scheduling.
                              crushed boxes.
    Food (tips): reliable delivery within the hour.  delivery person
                 knocks on the door more than once.  never found a pizza
                 carelessly thrown into the bushes beside my door.

  Luggage handling:
    Checked luggage (no tips): constantly lost.
    Porter/redcap (tips): the people you go to if you *actually* want
                          your luggage taken care of.

  Service/Repair:
    Cable (no tips): only able to schedule service during inconvenient
                     hours a week in advance, with service windows so large
                     that I need to take a day off work.
    Plumbing (tips/negotiable pay): I have gotten plumbers to my home in
                                    the middle of the night.
    Apartment repair guy (no tips): Ahahahahaha....

The one counter-example that I can think of is cab/uber service. There is a hell of a lot wrong with the cab industry though.

Sounds like bribes to me.

At least in the way John McAffee described bribery and corruption in the middle east.

You know what, here's the example I give you. Please have a look (may not happen in your place but happens everywhere else):

- You have got to get your store's license renewed but there's a huge lag and there are many people ahead line: Pay the officer, problem solved.

- Need to renew your passport: Pay the consul officer, you get it all expedited.

- etc etc

Yes, that's exactly what you are doing. You are bribing them to do something that they should do normally. They will basically keep misplacing other people's deliveries, treat other guests bad, losing others' luggage, making others take their day off, not do plumbing in time, not fix people's flats, while they do yours because you pay them some "extra money".

Rephrase it what you want but we are talking about clear bribes here.

If bribery is necessary for me to receive good service, then I will use bribery. Paying a bribe does not violate my moral code (although demanding one does) so that is not important to me. What is important to me is correctly getting the order that I payed for in a timely manner.

For the record:

Bribery, as you describe it, is alive and well in America. My brother wanted to go to the Naval Academy. In order to be accepted, he needed a nomination. How did he get a nomination? He volunteered for the reelection campaign of one of his senators.

Asking your senators/representatives for help expediting the processing of documents is fairly common too.

Well then I would just say "good for you" and then let's agree to disagree:-)

You can generally offer tradespeople/servers and the like extra money whenever you wish!

That is rather irrelevant. While I could reward the UPS delivery guy of the week with a few dollars, the offer would catch him by surprize. Tips cannot retroactively improve service; they only improve service if you are a recognized repeat customer, or if they are common.

Despite your personal anecdote, I found Porter's 6-part series last summer on tipping in the restaurant industry quite fascinating and enlightening: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

I remain unconvinced that tipping culture improves service, and it's most certainly sexist, racist, and ageist.

When I went to Finland, where tipping is forbidden by law, the service we got was on par with the service in other countries - minus some faked flirting, maybe, which is not a loss in my opinion. I think that a system without tips will need time to adjust, so that other mechanisms will be put into place to encourage good service, like bonuses for good waiters, where "good" could be measured with voluntary feedback from customers, via a short questionnaire you get with the bill, for example.

Brazil has an interesting variation on tipping: Restaurants add a 10% service fee, but which is still optional. Therefore, servers don't have to engage in the "parasitic side-business" of generating tips since the service fee of 10% is almost guaranteed, but the customer still retains a mechanism to punish really bad service.

Quoting from the article here:

http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Tipping,_fraud,_and_s...

it says, "The service fee when added is still considered optional. However, Brazilians do always pay it — except when the service was poor. If the service was poor, all you have to say is Eu não vou pagar esse (I will not pay that) pointing at the service fee, and then pay just the base amount. I've seen Brazilians do exactly that when the service was bad and it didn't cause a scene."

Sorry you had a bad time, but sample size of 1 is not compelling. "The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data."

The issue could easily be bad management, bad hiring, etc etc etc.

Apparently that's a misquote and it was originally "The plural of anecdote is data." [1]

Of course more data is better.

[1] http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...

Interesting, but like the author of that post I'm going to stick with "not data". Anecdote usually implies personal experience, which is easily confused and misled.

e.g. I know MANY people who claim to have seen a ghost, but I don't consider that useful data supporting the existence of ghosts. Technically it is data, but it's the LEAST trustworthy form of data, hence the dismissive expression.

The context is different though - the professor is stating that an anecdote is a data point, and plural data points can be referred to as data. Two stories are two datums, pluralised to data.

The "not data" version is saying that anecdotes are in such small numbers and uncontrolled circumstances, that even though they are data points in and of themselves, they're not rigorous enough to draw wider conclusions from. It's a different context.

So, the plural of anecdote is data, and data still isn't information?

I are at the Linkery once, as well, and had an excellent meal & service.

I ate there a couple times, and had excellent service both times.

My criticism of the headline is the same as your experience: just because you're not taking tips doesn't mean that the restaurant management is on top of their game. Running a restaurant is hard, and there's a thousand ways to screw it up.

Here's my anecdote: I ate in a tipping restaurant in Texas. The steak was late, lukewarm, and so small it slid across the empty plate. The only thing accompanying the steak was a pot of mashed potatoes about four times the size of a thimble. After being largely ignored, the waitress at the end of the meal made a ton of excuses while looking at the wall so as to get me to still tip, and zero effort was made to make me feel better about the situation. If we're making sweeping proclamations from single experiences, then this must mean that tipping restaurants make for very much worse experiences.

I don't like tipping culture for all the usual reasons, plus a couple more. I don't like the waitstaff's arms being constantly in my dinner conversation, as they refill water or keep checking how I'm doing. I don't like that in almost every other job you can have a crappy day but still come out of it with the same wage - tipping faults people for being human. Imagine if software devs had a variable rate largely based on how they were feeling that day? I mean, code and design when you're distracted or angry isn't as good as when you're focused and content, so it stands up to the same reasoning. HN would be in furore if a tech company proposed that.

For what it's worth, I'm another vegetarian who ate at the Linkery (in February 2013), and the service was totally different for me. The servers were nice and friendly, and there wasn't a whole lot on the menu that was vegetarian, but they helped me find something great. I never felt like anything was "off" about the experience.

Here's how it works in Australia: - no tips - if your restaurant provides bad service, you die - if your restaurant provides good service, you live

It's as simple as that. You don't get better service because of tipping, and the Linkery was obviously too far out of the comfort zone of the American workers who were used to working for tips.

Don't blame the poor service on the lack of tips until you've seen a number of tip-free restaurants fail and can attribute the failure to the lack of tips rather than poor management, and inexperienced staff.

Chez Panisse in Berkeley has been running with a 15% service charge since 1989, and you still have to call a month in advance to get a reservation.