You could order food through the tablet from the restaurants close by.
I loved the experience. You could browse the menu, fine tune an order, get a drink, then pay (with tip) on your credit card. Someone then brought your food to you in under 10 min.
Seems simple enough, but Jesus it was a way better experience than a normal airport restaurant. Avoided all those problems you mentioned.
I have no idea how good or extensive those translations are, but assuming these are OTG terminals it's a pretty tightly integrated vertical so I imagine pretty good.
Doordash does this, which I always find kind of backwards. Just the point of a tip to reward better service?
They have table service. I would go there much more frequently if they had counter service. The servers are very friendly and generally attentive, but the table service aspect just makes no sense, especially at lunchtime when it's all solo diners with limited time.
Do you want inflated taxi fares of old, or do you want supply and demand? You can't have both.
Before or after paying the costs of driving?
There's tons of examples where supply-and-demand gets balanced with other considerations. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.
In Australia, the standard for a nice restaurant is that you get full table service, and when you're finished, you just walk up to the front counter to pay.
That way you get the best of both worlds.
Every single egift card fails. And the bonus cards don't even have QRcodes, and there is no way for the patron to enter them. It's just stupid.
Better-than-Chipotle dining experience is not a definition of a high-end restaurant. You at most hit the bistro-class.
15% - 20% is standard, and always has been, for a full service, sit down restaurant. The tip makes some sense, based on the service given to you, some level of tip being roughly commensurate with the amount of service.
But what percentage am I supposed to tip in a restaurant where I order at a counter, bus my own table, and merely have someone bring the order to my table? (FWIW, some McDonalds now do this, yet nobody would ever tip at McDonalds.) What about if they come around and fill my water? What if I order at a counter but they still bus my table?
Moreover, in many places (coffee shops, ice cream shops) there is no wait service at all, the person at the counter merely draws a coffee or scoops some ice cream, yet tips are apparently still expected. Am I really supposed to tip 15% just for someone to scoop me an ice cream cone? Which leads me to another question that has bothered me since way back in the day: Why are bartenders tipped so richly simply for pouring a drink?
15-20% has long been standard for full-service. For lesser service I don't understand why anybody would be expected to tip the same amount. Am I missing something? I gather the younger generation might not think of things in these terms, but why not?
If you can afford a big tip, and social mechanisms shame you into giving it, then great! The restaurant makes a lot of profit.
If you can't, then the restaurant can still make a small profit off serving you anyway.
As for why it'd increase over time... maybe that's just an effect of people getting a bit richer, but the marginal cost of serving a meal not so much?
You could argue that, but only by ignoring practical matters of effort/level of service/value that attends a different price.
I'm 40+, and when I was in elementary school, pretty much every source I encountered was consistent with 15% as the norm, 20% as a reward for exceptional service, 10% as a signal for tolerable but substandard service, and anything lower as a signal of “abysmal service and I'm only tipping to let you know that I did not forget about the tip to avoid ambiguity.”
I pay $3600/month in rent for a studio. So you need like $120/day post-tax in order to just make rent (and 2-3x that to qualify for the lease in the first place). So let's say you need $300/day in tips to live here. (That works out to about 109.5k/year -- a respectable entry-level tech salary, but that would be just above the poverty line in SF if you were trying to support a family of four on it.)
Suppose that you have a ramen restaurant that's only open for dinner, seats 29, always has a line out the door, has a cycle time of half an hour, is open for 6 hours a night, and has three servers. Assuming 100% of seats are full (let's say you're the best ramen place in town), that means that each server will get tips from 116 customers a night on a $14 bowl of ramen. To make $300/day, you need an average $2.59 tip on the $14 bowl of ramen for the server alone (never mind any haircut for back staff/tip sharing/the owner takes some to cover fixed costs of the restaurant). $2.59/$14 works out to 18.5%.
In a world where entire apartments in the Mission cost $500/month, sure, you can tip 10% on a meal. But given market rate rents in SF now, the math of a 10% tip just doesn't add up.
That'll help a struggling service industry worker make ends meet, right?
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Realistically, odds are our hypothetical service industry worker isn't paying a market rate for a studio in the Mission. It's much more likely they're rooming with others in some fashion, and their monthly rent is at most half of $3600. And likely doing the traditional thing and under-reporting cash tip income by a non-trivial margin.
You pay higher to have waiters in the first place.
Essentially, the story of SF is the story of no high density housing.
This and delivery from a shop you order often from are the only form of tipping that makes any sort of sense whatsoever to me (at least common forms of tipping).
It's bribery so you get good service the next time. At a busy bar it's worth every dime to tip 100% that first drink and then a dollar or two after that. You will jump the 10 deep line at the bar no problem.
Same goes for food delivery - get to know the couple drivers at the local Thai place and be known as a great tipper - you'll get service above and beyond.
Any other tipping seems like it's utterly pointless as a consumer. Why tip after the fact - typically at 15-20% for merely acceptable service. Even if I'm a heavy tipper, the server has zero way to know it so I get just as good of service as anyone else.
I'd prefer to see the 'tip' build in to the prices, workers paid a living wage, and any tip being purely an optional thing for great service.
I know plenty of servers who pull in an equivalent hourly wage of $30 on a good night. They’d get screwed if tips went away and they were paid a living wage of $20 per hour.
If there is a minimum wage, no field should have an exception for it; that includes the labor working at places that aren't having a busy night with expensive meals.
This is also about benefiting the customers; simple transparent pricing. No variable things added later. I also want /taxes/ to be included in the advertised price (at least on the local menus; national / widely targeted ads should include large text disclaimers)
The jist was that the /minimum/ wage was what the worker was required to take home, tips inclusive, and that if they couldn't clear that bar (the restaurant had to pay them more) they were retrained and/or otherwise moved around until they either could or quit on their own.
the worst part being the loophole around minimum wage is that it incentivizes the widespread practice of tip pooling by restaurant owners.
nowadays when you tip your waiter you're also tipping the busser, foodrunner, hostess (and with the recent law change allowing it, the line cook).
it is too easily used as a tool to skirt wage laws by making every employee a tipped one.
In fact I don't think there's anywhere in California where 15 percent is considered normal anymore. Where I'm from (small town) nobody will be offended if you tip 15%, because you're more likely to be poor than cheap. But even there, 15% is undertipping in 2018.
The math is the smallest part of the tipping problem, IMO.
Alternately, in cities with ~8-10% sales tax, you can double the sales tax and round up.
It's like the difference between an old-style Taxi and an Uber, with the latter you just get up and go when you're done. The whole dance of flagging down the server to request the bill, get the bill, oops the server disappeared before you could pull out your card, wait for 10 minutes while they are off exploring Narnia in the kitchen cupboards. Finally they come to take the card and disappear again, what should have taken 30 seconds is now at 15 min+, hope you're not missing your show... ah, finally they're back! Now try to figure out the tip line, with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in your head while your house is burning down.
Waitstaff-less high-end restaurants expand the audience and frequency of visits of people who can now enjoy these better-than-Chipotle dining experiences. Much like Uber, which doesn't only cannibalize existing providers but actually creates a whole new category of short rides that you would never have previously considered using a Taxi for.