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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

I find tipping culture really confusing. How is it that when your plumber saves the day and gets your leak fixed (saving you expensive flood restoration costs) you pay the price on the invoice, yet for a car ride from A to B it's worth paying 20% to 30% over the invoice price? Compare that to buying a new vehicle where, regardless of how knowledgeable and spectacular the salesperson is, you are considered to be getting a bad deal if you don't bargain to below invoice price.

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I think that the standard rationalization is that waiters and taxi drivers provide a subjective service. A good waiter will refill your drinks often, make sure you have everything you need, etc. A good taxi drive will get you someplace faster than a bad one, will know shortcuts and longcuts, and understands patterns of traffic to avoid them. A plumber, on the other hand, typically performs a pretty objective job, short of outright incompetence.

But yes, it's confusing, and it's probably a pretty bad deal for everyone involved.

  > A good taxi drive will get you someplace faster than a bad one, will
  > know shortcuts and longcuts, and understands patterns of traffic to
  > avoid them.

A good taxi driver optimizes the ride in order to maximize their fares. The more runs a driver can make between downtown and the airport, for example, the greater their income will be. Besides which, if tips impact the route the driver takes then passengers ought to tip up-front to avoid being "taken for a ride". And if the tipping percentage is to reward efficient driving, how would someone unfamiliar with the city (or drunk, or blind, or ...) know whether they got ripped off or not? Doesn't this ultimately result in tipping someone in order to prevent unethical behavior?

A lot of companies are giant faceless MBAocracies, and all their front line staff are designed to be minimum cost minimum fuss drones, which selects for checked out losers. The purpose of tipping is to bypass institutional apathy so you can deal with someone who will treat you as human for the right price

But you are supposed to tip even poor taxi drivers and waiters.

And, in my experience, taxi drivers displeased with your tip will make it clear, even if you have no idea what makes for a fair tip.

> A good taxi drive will get you someplace faster than a bad one, will know shortcuts and longcuts, and understands patterns of traffic to avoid them. A plumber, on the other hand, typically performs a pretty objective job, short of outright incompetence.

I find the opposite is true. There taxi drivers are barely different, but the quality of plumbers varies greatly.

In the US particularly, tipping is basically just making up for the fact that the person is underpaid. Plumbers are typically very well rewarded for the work they do - restaurant waiters, less so.

I agree.

And it's this tacit admission that those workers are underpaid that makes this particularly embarrassing. We can generally agree these people are underpaid (we all generally tip and agree on the reasoning behind it) yet we can't agree to raise the minimum wage to get them a livable income.

Waiting tables and other tip-based compensatory jobs are specifically granted an exception to the minimum wage, so I don't think raising the minimum wage would change anything.

Depending on where you work and how experienced you are, waiting tables or bartending can be very lucrative relative to the amount of education or experience required to do the job. I'll certainly not suggest that a Denny's waiter or a Wal-Mart cashier are not underpaid, but grouping all waiters together and labeling them underpaid is an oversimplification.

...but don't they get underpaid because they make it up in tips?

Vox said it well with "consumers should not be responsible for paying the incomes of a restaurant owner's employees. "

You've got the cause and effect backwards. They get paid so little because they are already getting tipped.

Otherwise you'd tip the poor son of a bitch at McDs who makes 7 an hour.

Link from a while back on the case against tipping: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/17/5888347/one-more-case-against-t...

Specifically with regard to vehicle sales, dealerships absolutely do not pay invoice price. Between dealer cash, customer cash, holdbacks and other financial things, it is all but a made up number.

For anyone interested in this topic, This American Life recently did a great hour long radio show / podcast on how dealerships work:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1...

"We spend a month at a Jeep dealership on Long Island as they try to make their monthly sales goal: 129 cars. If they make it, they'll get a huge bonus from the manufacturer, possibly as high as $85,000 — enough to put them in the black for the month. If they don't make it, it'll be the second month in a row. So they pull out all the stops."

In addition to the other reasons given, I think a lot of it is just historical. If an industry is traditionally tipped, there's a lot of inertia against moving it to be non-tipped. Employers won't want to pay more when their employees are getting tips, and customers won't want to stop giving tips until employers pay more. Likewise, there's a lot of inertia against moving the other way. I'd wager a lot of it is just luck of the draw over time.

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