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Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ythl on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:51PM (#11687047)
Liberals are idealists, not realists.

"Pay staff a living wage and abolish tips" is a great idea, but it doesn't work well in practice.

Cue the liberals with their new line: "Pay the staff a living wage in addition to tips!"

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by marssaxman on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:55PM (#11687080)
Works well in lots of places. Tipping is an obsolescent, faux-aristocratic relic of a social hierarchy I would strongly prefer to read about in history books and not to experience in daily life.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ghaff on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:00PM (#11687125)
I have no issue with tipping people who do things for me that go above and beyond. I'm much less in favor of building tipping into interactions where it's customary and expected (especially when different parties will invariably have different ideas about what is customary and expected).
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by 67726e on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:09PM (#11687207)
I hate how there are all sorts of random situations where I'm expected to tip. I've been told I'm supposed to tip at the car wash, when getting a tattoo, or using a food runner (do I tip the UPS driver?) - it's all senseless.and strikes me as a money grab against good natured folks.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ghaff on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:18PM (#11687246)
The US can be really crazy. Part of the issue is that you have to understand compensation models--for example, my understanding is that like waiters, delivery drivers largely work for tips (usually). But, especially when traveling, there are a gazillion situations where a dollar here or a dollar there seems to be routinely expected sometimes. I suspect that I don't leave tips in some situations where many people do. (No, I don't routinely leave a few dollars a night for my hotel room servicing.)

No to UPS driver. Tattoo? No idea but probably given that I tip my barber.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by thaumasiotes on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:28PM (#11687303)
In China, you're not expected to tip at restaurants, and you'll confuse people if you try.

You are, however, expected to tip your doctor before getting surgery.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by striking on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:57PM (#11687094)
I wonder if people would like tip-less systems more if they were allowed to rate the service on the receipt.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by marssaxman on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:57PM (#11687449)
I personally don't see why rating the service is any of my business. If the service sucks, I don't go back. If the owner of the establishment wants to know why their business is tanking, they can do the same thing anyone else would do and keep an eye on things, making changes as necessary. Maybe their employees would do a better job if they were paid enough to respect it.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ythl on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:57PM (#11687096)
Works well in lots of places != sit down restaurants as per the article
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by 6nf on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:53PM (#11687068)
It works just fine in other countries
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ythl on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:59PM (#11687118)
The logic here being "If it works fine in X country, it should therefore work well in Y country?"
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by toomuchtodo on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:10PM (#11687212)
...and that logic would be right.

Unless what you're saying is, "It won't work here because we'd prefer underpaying food staff because we can get away with it."

But that's not what you're saying, right? Surely it can't be.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by yardie on Thursday May 12, 2016 @09:33PM (#11688057)
That is globalization in a nutshell.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by jonny_eh on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:56PM (#11687083)
What does this have to do with politics?
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by EliRivers on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:08PM (#11687198)
I think you'll find that conservatives want to abolish tips because conservatives think people shouldn't rely on charity.

This political nonsense can be twisted any way anyone likes.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by kirykl on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:00PM (#11687122)
>Pay the staff a living wage in addition to tips

Isn't that a basic assumption for most pay? Living wage + performance bonus

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ythl on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:05PM (#11687168)
"Living wage" in and of itself seems to be a little too idealist.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by EliRivers on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:54PM (#11687075)
"Pay staff a living wage and abolish tips" is a great idea, but it doesn't work well in practice.

I work a job without tips and it works fine.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by ythl on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:56PM (#11687088)
The context here is restaurant waiters and waitresses. Are you a waiter or waitress that works without tips?
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by EliRivers on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:58PM (#11687105)
Oh, are we staying on context? I thought this had become an off-topic political cliche rant.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by nikdaheratik on Thursday May 12, 2016 @10:57PM (#11688353)
Well if you want context there's Australia and much of Europe which runs restaurants without tips and somehow the entire industry hasn't collapsed.
Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by kasey_junk on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:58PM (#11687102)
Restaurants largely want to abolish tips so that they can normalize the pay gap between their front of house staff and their kitchen staff.

It is against the law to payout the kitchen staff from the tip pool so the front of house tend to make lots more money than the kitchen, making it harder for them to find kitchen staff.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by dragonwriter on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:47PM (#11687403)
> Restaurants largely want to abolish tips so that they can normalize the pay gap between their front of house staff and their kitchen staff.

Abolishing tips isn't necessary to do this, all you have to do is set prices appropriately and pay the back of house staff correctly. (You know how some restaurants add a front-of-house "service fee" on large groups in lieu of free tipping, just do the same thing, except roll it in before computing prices, and that's your back-of-house volume-of-service pay. If you don't want to have it be a volume-based, on-top-of-hourly wage thing, do the same thing to calculate prices, but project your average volume and set your hourly wages appropriately to include what your existing wages would be plus the average amount the price increase would provide.)

It does mean that your price will have to be higher relative to your food cost than other restaurants, which might lose business. But if retaining cooking staff is valuable enough that you want to balance things, this should actually pay for itself. And, anyway, getting rid of tips and rebalancing pay between front of house and back of house means either you are going to lose front of house staff to other jobs more easily (because their total pay is cut) or increase prices just as much as you would without abolishing tips to boost back of house pay plus enough to replace the tips. Abolishing tips has no real effect here.

Re:Joe’s Crab Shack Tried Getting Rid of Tips – It Didn’t La... by kasey_junk on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:58PM (#11687452)
Sure, if your customers don't mind, raising prices helps everybody.

But by replacing tips with a 20% cost increase means the customer stays at the same cost to them.