10%? 20%? Apps Are Changing How We Tip
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I can only hope that tipping ceases to exist in the States someday. Not only for my own benefit; but for the benefit of most employees who rely on tips to get through their lives.
I understand the pay structure in the service industry in the US requires tipping for waiters and waitresses etc to make a living, but the whole thing seems sordid. Turning something that should be a gesture of genuine appreciation in to a meaningless ritual.
I've never been back, of course, but it always reminds me of the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs.
I am Mr. Pink. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qV9wVGb38)
Not everyone is like this. I have had a similar thing happen on one occasion[1]. I think that there must be some sort of correlation between people who thing that they are owed the tip no matter what level of service they give, and people that don't give a damn about the service that they provide.
[1] In the US (and Canada), it is 'customary' to tip larger for a large group of people. Many restaurants automatically add 18+% gratuity to the bill for groups of 8+ people. In this instance, the restaurant/bar did not do this, and the waitress gave us very poor service (e.g. disappeared for long periods of time). On the way out she complained that it's customary to tip 18% for large groups (in a sarcastic, "you're a bunch of assholes" tone). My wife (who has been a waitress) fired back that maybe she should talk to her manager about making it gratuity mandatory for large groups then.
Needless to say, I dislike tipping and I feel it should be a part of the salary. The servers need to be able to just focus on their jobs.
This is so weird. I'm European and last lived in Ireland for quite a few years. When I first got there tipping was basically not a done thing, at all, and then it started to creep in. When I left last year it had somehow become the standard in restaurants, etc.
It has crept into Europe from the US but without the conditions that made tipping necessary in the US and the customer service experience you get in Europe, despite the tipping culture having now been seemingly normalised, you do not get anything near the level of customer service experience you get in the US.
I'm a software engineer, people don't tip me for making good software, it's what is expected of me. When I was in college I worked in various retail positions. People did not tip me there because providing good customer service was expected of me. So why, when there is a decent minimum wage in place, are waiting staff somehow different?
It's incredibly frustrating.
I don't know. I have experienced both. Being a waiter is a proud occupation. People takes a sort of long education to become it and they really seem proud of making the dining experience a good one for their customers. And I guess this is true everywhere - not just when you work under the expectation that you get more tips the better you serve.
Now I do hate that in the States there are now tip jars at all sorts of establishments, but to me restaurants and bars I much prefer tipping culture.
It is expected, yes, but as a European with vast experience in customer service on both sides of the pond, even with expected tips the level of service in US restaurants/bars/etc. is far, far higher than what I'm accustomed to in Europe.
Now it can sometimes be overbearing but overall the experience is generally more welcoming, more friendly and more personal. When I'm eating in an up-scale place in Europe, the staff are generally very professional and quite quiet. Lower down the scale the staff are just "meh".
In the US, even if you go into a chain restaurant at rush hour I've found the staff to be totally engaging, eager to have a chat, find out what you like, recommend you things and then check up on you to see if everything is alright.
That's not to say that it's always great service in US and always mediocre in Europe, but there's definitely an overall different feel to the level of service offered regardless of a tip being expected.
Arrived back in Barcelona (where small change is usually considered a tip). Had a grumpy waiter who didn't even write down our order for tapas, forgot one of them. But his personality was real. I didn't feel obliged to tip him.
With tipping I view my server as my agent. They're their to help me and I'm going to pay them well for that help. Without tips, or in chain restaurants where the staff turns over frequently and that relationship is harder to establish, I miss the partnership and the experience.
Also, the problem with your "i'm a good boy because I tip 20%" just got downgraded to "meh". Gone to a Chili's recently? They default you to 20%, and use this clumsy poorly-reactive slider to change it. And you feel like an asshole for doing so anyway.
You want to be seen as a good tipper now? Time to cough up another 10%.
Chili's is a chain restaurant. I've been there, but don't enjoy it enough to want to go regularly and so establishing a relationship there doesn't make a lot of sense for me. Although I do typically tip 20% when I eat there I'd prefer to not tip at all and would rather just order my food from the machine and have someone bring it to me. Chili's knows this and is positioned to cut their wait staff drastically if minimum wage was required for service staff or if they find that people are comfortable working with the machine directly.
If restaurants paid a decent salary to their employees, and made them less dependable on tips, employees would feel safer, face less anxiety ("hey, I can make a good living without begging for money to clients!"), and would allow them to focus on their job.
I think restaurants are different in that the interaction is more frequent and personal than most other industries. It also seems like a very fluid job market where servers can change employers with minimal cost to themselves.
> It also seems like a very fluid job market where servers can change employers with minimal cost to themselves.
I've never heard servers talk about the fluidity of the job market, I don't know where this oberservation comes from. I'm trying to be objective here, but I don't understand how the rest of the world (Europe is a great example) can work without a tip system, and in the US this tipping system is indispensable.
As a university student I used to work at a pub, I did this for two years. I did it because I wanted to make some extra money. I think I was paid £5.20/hour (this was back in 2003-04). I never got tipped, and never felt I should have. I did the job to the best of my abilities (pouring pints, cleaning tables, and washing dishes) and tried to have fun with everyone. The pub ran like clockwork, half of all customers I would consider regulars, and service was superb (I might be biased). The same as any other regular pub. I couldn't have taken the job if I wasn't sure that I was going to get paid X/hour, I didn't want a "fluid job market", but I wanted a steady regular income for the job they hired me for.
I'm not saying "tipping" is the only way to run an economy, only that in my experience I've found that it can be a very useful way to get a very nice experience in a way that doesn't exploit anyone; me the customer, the server, or the business owner. I'm sure many people take advantage of this either as customers, servers, or business owners... which is shameful in my opinion... but, for me it's worked out ok enough to be something I prefer enough to now want to give it up.
Humans are social creatures, and they will create social relationships. No money needs to change hands for this to happen.
I'd be interested to hear where exactly you'd want to draw the line to bribery.
Also, i'm pretty sure that the mechanisms of being a regular are working just as well in countries without a tipping tradition. (I live in a sometimes-tip country and I have experienced the best service in a neighboring no-tip country)
I was neutral on tipping before listening, and now I'm staunchly against it. Not only is it discriminatory, it has no effect on the quality of service.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/06/24/137346289/why-we-t...
Having been to Europe and Asia a few times in last few years, I've seen the other side now. And yeah, what we do is just strange, and I don't think it's helpful at all. The service still has the usual variation of suck vs. fine.
The thing is that I feel like part of a problem. The truth is that even here I probably overtip (15-20% on -any- service, taxi, hair, whatever) mostly because I can't remember our tipping rules on all the various things you're supposed to tip for, and because trying to do calculations on the fly are a burden. It's either "the couple of bucks in my pocket" for stuff like carrying bags or "20% on the final bill" for almost anything else because that's what's easy to figure out quickly in my head.
Further, I don't carry cash anymore for the most part, so I'm constantly shorting delivery people, service professionals, all that, because I can't add the tip to the final bill but don't have currency.
So really wish we'd back off of it. I'd happily just bump up the portion of my payment on a number of things by 15%+ if that's what it took to compensate people fairly without my having to try to remember what's right. Then I could tip for actual exemplary service instead of just feeling mildly confused (or screwed) all the time.
I'm thinking of the rest of the staff - managers, busboys, cooks, cleaners, etc. All of those other roles have an impact on the service, yet, AFAIK, only the server has to deal with $2/hr-please-i'm-begging-for-a-tip situation.
Tipping has generally no effect on the quality of the rest of the service - food quality, cleanliness, speed, etc. Those are all outside the control of the server, but they're going to bear the brunt of the bad output from those other workers.
You tip the waiter, but they should be distributing that tip to the others. If they fail to do so, the cooks will deprioritize their food, the bartender will deprioritize their drinks, the buss person will deprioritize their tables, and they won't be making very good tips anymore.
As a customer, I tip 20% if the service is good, 10% if it is average, and I will leave a penny on the table for those who completely screwed up. I have walked a mile in their shoes, so I get to judge them. Was the kitchen slow with the food? Maybe that's because this waiter never shares the wealth with the back of the house. Leave him a penny if you think it's warranted. Don't forgive him for the inadequacy of the rest of the staff. He may have earned their slow down, so why should you reward him?
As for tipping vs non-tipping in general. When I go to Paris, I can feel that the staff doesn't care that much about how well they serve me, since they'll get theirs anyway. The incentives are different. In a non-tipping restaurant, it's to the staff's advantage to get you in and get you out, as quickly as possible, to turn over that table, regardless of the happiness level of the customers.
This whole "we'll deprioritize your drinks if you don't give me a lot of money" is just... INSANE. It's really bizarre.
"He may have earned their slow down, so why should you reward him?"
You have no way of knowing why in the first place. And giving him a penny ensures that if this sort of blackmail is going on, this server has now even less leverage in order to try to buy decent service from coworkers.
The restaurant owners that let this go on get hurt too. I don't particularly care if my service was bad because the cook was slow because he wasn't getting tipped enough to warrant cooking my food the way I asked for it. I don't care if the service was bad because the server wasn't able to curry favor with the bar staff. I just care the service was shitty, and I won't be back. Even less money for the bar staff, cooks, dishwashers and ultimately owners.
In tipping restaurants, the incentive is still for turnover as fast as possible. The extra $5 they might get from me is less overall than the extra $30 they'll get from packing in 3 more tables that night. And if everyone is sharing tips, they all have even more incentive for faster turnover, regardless of my happiness.
EDIT: if restaurants were transparent with everything up front - detailing where tips go, showing me a scoreboard of which servers had favor with bar staff and line cooks, and let me choose the 'best' staff, great. I don't get any of that advantage. I get a random server who may just have pissed someone off last week, and nothing I can do about it.
I never bother with restaurants that have mandatory tips on their checks, its a flat out markup and does not let me decide if the service is good or not. I do think many people suffer tip fatigue as the use of tip jars has become offensive to many, especially in the quick serve food industries.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/tipped.htm
#Note. The left-most column is the important one.
Even with generous minimum wages, tip culture has crept into Western Europe pretty rapidly. It's more than just a wage technicality that has to change to overcome or dismantle the established tipping culture.
I really, really like the idea of being able to just get up and walk out of a restaurant or bar without having to deal with money though. That said, so long as tips remain expected you're going to come across as a jerk if you don't leave something and it'll likely be remembered for the next time you visit.
If your just trying to be pedantic, then yes it's technically required for employers to make up the difference. But in practice, restaurants typically fire anyone who presses the issue.
So in practice, all states don't enforce employers making up the difference.
If people stop tipping, restaurants would be forced to increase wages, because nobody is going to work for $3/hour.
They can do whatever they want. I go to a variety of places for lunch. Some places have tips, some places don't.
When they have tips, I tend to tip based on extent and quality of service(I never tip with percentage). My average tip for a lunch service is about four dollars, when they go above and beyond, are especially prompt and helpful, or respond to my emotional condition, I tend to tip higher.
Lunch is my only daily meal, and service at lunch is just as important as the food in my opinion, whether I'm taking somebody along and want to be taken care of, or just trying to eat something that will relieve stress from work.
I don't experience any pressure while tipping; I just add my few bucks, and if something special has happened, I add a couple more; I don't bother myself with percentages, except maybe to keep above the bare minimum 20% gratuity so I don't get any funny looks out the door.
Now as someone who not obly worked in hospitality but also ran a few restaurants, this is an insane premise. How the hell could you rely in professional wait staff (not students but actual trained and comitted staff), if you cant guarantee them a good wage to vegin with.
Tipping is supposeto show your appreciated for exceptional service, to force your staff to assume its a guaranteed alotment is bullshit.
Also, im in japan now (out of hospitality yay), i get exceptional service everywhrre with no expectation of tips, and damned if i dont tip a hell of a lot more here.
#Edit. More info why I'd like this to be discussed on HN.
I say this, as I've discussed this topic many times with many individuals online. Frankly, most of them are very very hostile. I've received death threats from servers for suggesting the remove of the tipping culture. To be fair, it was on Facebook, but at the same time that is a bit disturbing. These are individuals making credible, violent, disgusting threats because they can't consider alternate views on something they are single-minded on.
I do generally find that HN discussion is quite a bit better. If not for the fact that downvoting is much more strict, then for the quality of ideas/insights that people here have. Sometimes, quite different to what I've been exposed to before. +1 for that.
Check out the link I posted elsewhere to the Planet Money episode on tipping.
However, this is a de facto rule because people will downvote such comments, so I thought it was worth warning people about.