A lifetime of being treated poorly by strangers because of my physical attributes.

The point is, if you interpret the policy properly, it's plainly obvious that a server can label someone a yellow (for any reason) and choose not to serve them.

Lots of servers have preconceived notions about who is going to tip well.

The restaurant doesn't stop serving the "yellow" customers; those customers are served by senior staff. Nothing prevents junior staff from providing worse service to minorities as it stands, so using a system in which your actions are documented and engage management to discriminate seems like an awfully dumb way to accomplish a racist goal.

Unless your management is also racist, agrees to serve them but "when they get around to it". As in "I'm doing payroll right now, I'm busy." (aside: Ask any low-wage employee across any industry whether they get adequate support from their managers and the answer is almost surely "no". That certainly was my experience in nearly a decade of retail.)

That's sort of how these systems perpetuate isn't it?

Maybe if you just had to just stfu and deal with serving everyone, you get the opportunity to realize that X person isn't bad and actually does tip.

You're no worse off with the manager-takes-over scheme, though. Without this scheme, you just end up with a shitty racist server that gives you shitty service. With the manager taking over when the shitty racist server abuses the system to foist off customers they're bigoted against, either you end up with a shitty racist manager (so you have the same situation), or a good manager that actually gives you good service. And the good manager also has the opportunity to see that you're a good customer and draw the conclusion that the server that dumped you did so for shitty, racist reasons.

> Maybe if you just had to just stfu and deal with serving everyone, you get the opportunity to realize that X person isn't bad and actually does tip.

That's the current situation though, right? Seems like it's not working.

The guy feeling up the waitress probably tips pretty well, too.

Sorry for the double reply but I wanted to separate this from my other comment...

For someone in the industry that you're/we're in, I'm a little bit surprised by your level of optimism; in this case, that a loosely-defined social system works as intended when almost always strictly defined encoded systems (software, hardware, legal, etc) do not. Either the intended system is not accurately defined or it didn't expect everything.

Almost all of my peers/coworkers in infosec are extraordinarily pessimistic, see the flaws first, and from very far away.

Racism doesn't require intent. It can manifest completely unintentionally by subconscious acts, especially when subtle racism is so prevalent and reinforces negative stereotypes.

Probably a good reason to ban tipping. There was a restaurant in new york that did that experiment, interestingly they reported some male customers getting angry that they couldn't show off via tipping.

100%. That would definitely solve that problem while introducing another.

The entire restaurant business is propped up by investor money and artificially low wages. We have a large multiple more restaurants than we actually need because it serves Wall St. and the government ("job creation").

Such a change could put 80% of the industry out of business in maybe a year.

Just raise the food prices by 15-20% to account for loss due to tips.

It's more than that. It has to be 25%-30% to also cover all the extra payroll tax that the restaurant now has to pay. In the end you lose customers to restaurants that aren't doing this. And if all restaurants do this, you just end up with people eating out less to the point where overall you're losing money.

The result of this is that people eat out less.

And worse, the places where people have smaller dine-out budgets are also where all of the low-wage chain restaurants are clustered. All of those youth and unskilled labor jobs in the suburbs are pretty much in restaurants.

It's inexcusable that people in restaurants are being exploited for their labor, but I think we absolutely have to figure out an alternative before putting them out of work.

The customer ends up paying the same amount just the tips are added into the prices.

More. The restaurant can't just raise prices 15-20%, they have to raise them more. Tipped workers make their money working hours when it's busy, but restaurants have to be open and have staff during hours that are not.

If you give wait staff a normal wage, restaurants have to have more workers on hand when it's less busy and there are more other labor laws regarding wage and hour minimums that they'll lose exemptions from.

How about commission-based pay, where wait staff get a base wage plus a per-table commission. So basically just like tipping, but without the customer discretion part of it.

It's pretty trivial to get "(perhaps unintentional) racist says black dude doesn't look right" out of this, given how prevalent racism is in our society, and how the default reaction to non-whites is generally more negative in any given context.