Exactly. As a non-American tipping seems like such a crappy concept to me.

Why should service providers be subject to arbitrary decisions of random customers?

A service has a price. Either it is provided adequately and you are happy with it in which case you pay the full damn price for it and move on with your life.

Or there's a specific problem in which case you can complain specifically and ask for a discount or refund/partial refund.

From a business perspective tipping can also be seen as an admission of failure and weakness. In the sense that the business is admitting that the quality of the service is so variable that it calls for a variable judgement of its value. Like maybe you get a crappy waiter and you don't tip, maybe you get an excellent one and now you must leave a good tip.

It is also "lazy" because it dumps the responsibility to the consumer. "Just judge how well we do and tip accordingly".

Instead as a consumer I want to have certainty and confidence that a given service provided by a business has a predictable and consistent level of quality.

And also as a consumer I want the employees to not be subject to my arbitrary personal judgement on a day to day basis. If there's a particular problem I may complain, otherwise just move on with your life.

A lot of Americans, myself included, think it's a crappy concept too.

It's frustrating because everyone has different concepts of what a "good" tip is as well. I tip well now but it's mostly because I'm overcompensating for years of under tipping after getting advice from high school friends or cheap adults. However it's often just not clear enough what to give.

the percentage method is bad in my opinion. the most expensive cuisine typically hire more affluent staff and pay them more to begin with.

Personally I go with a $5 minimum, more if I am a bother or there for over an hour. Though, this makes me look like a jerk when people drag me to fancy restaurants, and a saint at coffee/fast food places.

Ultimately it doesn't matter how you tip unless you frequent the restaurant. Your service will be a result of the people who looked you and came in before.

So white, wealthy looking people will generally get better service by virtue of being white and wealthy looking. Doesn't matter if they skimp on the tip.

It's very racist and classist in practice.

As a non American, for jobs where the service makes a significant difference, a service charge or tips seems reasonable.

I live in London. I generally pay the service charge. Once out of every hundred times I eat out, I ask them to remove the service charge as I spent ten minutes trying to get someone's attention to order, rather than talk to my dining companions.

Service doesn't make a huge different for transport though. It's either on time, clean, and takes proper route or not.

pro tip: in london the service charge rarely goes to staff. service charge is not the same thing as a tip, which should usually be cash if you wish it to go to the waiter.

I don't know that to be generally true based on both my experience in the industry and those people I know still in it.

There were certainly places I worked where any credit card tips were declared for tax whilst cash tips weren't. This is one reason why staff preferred cash. Similarly in some places cash was distributed by shift whereas cards were distributed monthly based on hours worked.

As a final point, the idea of tipping the person directly is not consistent with anywhere i've ever worked. Even when distributing at the end of a shift, everyone would have put tips in the jar to be shared between staff.

> This is one reason why staff preferred cash. Similarly in some places cash was distributed by shift whereas cards were distributed monthly based on hours worked.

Let's call a spade a spade. It's for tax evasion purposes. That's the reason that the IRS assumes that you make 15% tips on everything if you're a server. (Otherwise people would never report it and to caught the large amount would never be recovered)

So is it obligatory to pay the service charge? If not, then I would prefer to deduct it and offer the same amount as a tip.

You can do that but it's a faff. I often think I should but don't get around to it. You are not legally obliged to pay the service charge in the UK at any rate.

Depends on the place. You can always ask staff if the service charge goes to them or is taken by management.

London here; You can ask, but on several occasions I've had them indicate they're not allowed to answer the question. Absolutely bullshit behaviour from an employer and in which case I'll insist it's removed and give the waiter/waitress cash.

I usually get the service taken off the bill and leave slightly more in cash. (Even if the server says, "it's okay, we get the service charge").

> for jobs where the service makes a significant difference, a service charge or tips seems reasonable.

I'm skeptical of even that. There are lots of jobs with a large range of quality in industries with no tipping, and the market ends up working fine as a way for the best to rise to the top. You wouldn't tip your lawyer or a freelance developer.

Why are some industries different?

When you think about it a bit more it doesn't actually seem reasonable.

What shop do you know of where they'll let you choose food, take a bite and then pay what you feel it's worth? Hmm, this donut's a bit stale, I'm not prepared to pay anything for it thanks Mr.Tesco.

Sometimes I buy fruit and it goes bad too fast. That's life. Sometimes you get a shitty waiter, that's life, but now you get to unilaterally decide you'll get that service for free? Because there's a significant minority of people who will always find fault just so that they don't have to pay.

> Hmm, this donut's a bit stale, I'm not prepared to pay anything for it thanks Mr.Tesco.

You go to the customer service desk, say "This doughnut is stale" show your receipt along with the partly eaten doughnut, then get a full refund or exchange as you prefer.

If you're doing it daily the rules will change. :)

>> for jobs where the service makes a significant difference

> this donut's a bit stale, I'm not prepared to pay anything for it thanks Mr.Tesco.

This is irrelevant. See quote from comment you're replying to.

> Sometimes you get a shitty waiter, that's life, but now you get to unilaterally decide you'll get that service for free?

No, the waiter still gets paid.

When you eat out and get shit food, there is a bone or something in your food, you usually can just tell them and they'll do something so you don't pay the full amount, it's common courtesy.

Your examples are not very good. Most grocery stores will let you take back bad produce within a reasonable amount of time.

I've gotten burned a few times when buying bags of things like potatoes and onions and not seeing a bad one in the middle that had started to infect the others. Never had a problem returning. Aldi even gives money back plus a new item

Same here.

Tipping also seems to lead into a more in-your-face service. A waiter might find tips go up if he/she draws attention to her work, starts conversations and offers all kinds of extras. In the end you can't argue that the service wasn't outstanding, but life would have been better for everyone involved if he/she just put the food on the table.

Amen!

It is not. The greed of the consumer prevents raising prices. Not advertising the true price is the new scheme.

Tipping hides the true cost of services by forcing the customer's guilt on the ability of the employee to make a worthwhile wage.

No tipping restaurants have to have higher prices and the hyper-price-conscious consumer will defer to the cheaper ones. You could make a quality argument, but on equal terms the no tipping restaurant will lose. It is because it has not hidden its true cost of goods and services like the tipping resultants.

Sales Taxes not being included in the price in USA is a similar tactic to hiding true cost to consumer.

Yes, it can be but sales tax is confusing in the US due to city tax, local tax (MTA in NYC, for example), county tax, state tax, etc. They are always changing too, amounts and types of items taxed. Your Big Mac costs 100s of different prices across the country. So its often easier and cheaper to just advertise the pre-tax amount (especially in national ads) and program the register to handle tax.

But you are right, it is also preferred to hide some of the costs. But, sometimes you get a place that includes taxes on the price. Very refreshing.

As an American living in China, I feel the same way. I also use Didi almost every day. It's so easy to pay too (using WeChat, AliPay, etc.), and there's no expectation of tipping. Kind of like a "black box" view of the payment process. It's even better than using regular taxis from the standpoint of giving feedback too. If I took a regular taxi without using Didi, there's almost no way of leaving feedback, other than calling the taxi company, which wouldn't do much. At least with the app, I might get a coupon to use on a future ride.

>It's so much easier to just pay people a decent wage, include it in the cost of things and then not have the pressure of tipping.

Yea but customers don't get to decide how much employees are paid.

What would really happen is that people who normally get tips would just lose income. Their pay will probably go up, but not enough to cover it. Waitresses make much more than regular unskilled labors.

Customers lose because we end up paying more, but it's at least going to a real person working for a living.

> What would really happen is that people who normally get tips would just lose income. Their pay will probably go up, but not enough to cover it. Waitresses make much more than regular unskilled labors.

This is very true. My sister and I waited tables in college and each averaged $20-$25/hour in just tips. Adding on the ~$5 wage, we each made enough to graduate with no debt (we both went to a state university). We did not work at very high end restaurants (we each worked at the same two at the same time).

If our employers decided to go no-tip, we would have very quickly quit and found new positions, because there's no way our employers would have paid waitstaff $20+/hr. No-tip would be a pay decrease for most of the waitstaff I've known.

What if we called it "pay what you can".

With 100% of the amount over the minimum ("the bill") going to the staff, not the ownership.

There's sharp disagreement among the patrons on whether to keep servers in rags or riches. Some of this comes down whether the particular customer sees the restaurant as 'good for a plate food' versus 'a part of the neightborhhod'. We allow people the option of choosing which they see it as.

In the EU, tipping is half legal -- technically it should be declared income and pay all income+social taxes ++ VAT(!) as the tip is not a direct salary but a service (and hence subject of VAT)

In the UK, which is still EU for now, you don't have to register for VAT until your income is £83k so most waiters will be ok on that one.

This is not true in every EU member state. For example, in the UK, tips paid in cash to wait staff are subject to income tax, but are NOT subject to either National Insurance (the UK's term for what you call 'social taxes') nor to VAT.

More info here: https://www.gov.uk/tips-at-work/tips-and-tax

You must work at the tax office.

nope, I have been developer for decades... just get to know stuff like that. Also tipping is usually cash (if it goes through a POS terminal, likely VAT would be paid -- the extra money is likely handed in cash by the employer, bypassing the law)

What do you mean that it's "much easier to just pay people a decent wage"? Do you mean that it's much easier to convince companies to pay their employees more than they have to, or that it's much easier to pass higher minimum wage laws?

Neither of these seem easier than "convince the public to toss in a few extra dollars when they use a lowly paid service".

I see "make sure that all working people are paid fairly" as a very difficult problem, and tipping as a moderately effective hack that's easier to implement than the cleaner fix of higher minimum wage of basic income.

Keep in mind that in both US and Canada there's a different (and lower) minimum wage for 'tipped workers'.

US Federal law states minimum wage is only $2.13/hr for someone that makes $30/month in tips (instead of normal minimum $7.25) [1]. If they don't make $30 in tips the employer must make up the difference.

At 30 hours/week (and 4.3 weeks/month), $30/month works out to $0.23/hr, so the effective minimum wage is still only $2.36/hr.

Some states are quite a bit higher (eg Hawaii is $7/hr), and in some (eg, Alaska, California) the minimum wage is the same regardless of tips.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...

You are grossly misrepresenting the situation and what your own link says. If wages + tips don't equal the normal minimum wage of $7.25, the employer is required to make up the difference.

They get, at worst, normal minimum wage.

Ack, sorry, I totally missed that highly important bit! Unfortunately too late to delete.

Other countries have solved the problem. Also there's a lot of other instances where US impossible to crack problem is solved... Not meaning to bash, but it seems evident. Other cultures just aren't so much into cut-throat competition, it's just not that fun.

> That, and tipping is akin to having paid servants

It feels like that because that's what it is - American tipping culture has its roots in slavery.

Do you have a source for that? I've generally heard that it has roots in Americans returning from Europe having acquired the practice[1].

>Lynn suggests that wealthy Americans traveling abroad to Europe witnessed tipping and brought the aristocratic custom back with them to “show off,” or prove their elevated education and class.

[1]: http://www.foodwoolf.com/2010/08/history-of-tipping.html

Reading up on it more, I guess its more accurate to say it was implemented post-slavery. It seems like it was a combination of what my source says and what yours says.

> Restaurants and rail operators, notably Pullman, embraced tipping primarily, Jayaraman says, because it enabled them to save money by hiring newly freed slaves to work for tips alone. Plenty of Americans frowned upon the practice, and a union-led movement begat bans on tipping in several states. The fervor spread to Europe, too, before fizzling in the United States—by 1926, the state tipping bans had been repealed.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/restaurants-t...

[citation needed]