Tipping is a truly toxic practice, and it's a burden on customers as well. Why would anyone want to be assigned extra work to evaluate how unhappy they are in order to calculate how much extra they should pay?
Could you please elaborate? I don't see how tipping can be involved in ripping off workers in the United States.
Employers are always required to pay their workers minimum wage - the federal minimum wage in the worst case, and sometimes the state minimum wage when it applies and is higher. See: http://www.dol.gov/elaws/faq/esa/flsa/002.htm
> If an employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages[] do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference.
Either way, they're the ones paying.
We see it as "that waiter was nice, leave a generous tip".
Employers see it as "if they don't do a good enough job they won't make any tips, and the problem will naturally work itself out." This is patently unfair because it treats tips as implied expected income, and wages are set so low that you can't make a livable income without them. This is patently unfair.
Which I found to be quite wrong. I didn't have a single experience of bad service in my week in Paris.
This arrangement isn't free or magical. It exists because of the cultural wrappings.
Countries without tipping happen to compensate their employees with something called 'wages'.
It goes a long way to developing a real service culture and not fake 'yes sir thank you sir' service in the US
Tipping is helpful when there is likely to be a high variation in customer service.
In a small-item delivery scenario the customer-vendor interaction is 0-15 seconds. How much tipping variation do you expect there to be?
What irks me the most is that tipped industry veterans will declare, very forcefully, that 20% is the minimum in all circumstances -- which is somewhat fair, as I do believe in fair wages. However, if a minimum exists, why are we even tipping?