Hey, the pricetag on the shirt at Walmart says $10, but you should really pay $13 because otherwise they'll just not pay their staff. But hey, your choice, you can (if you choose) cause their staff to have no money for food for their families.

The problem here isn't the person not tipping, it's the broken culture where ensuring a livable wage for the poorest in society is a choice the wealthy get to make based on how they feel today.

[1] specifically, that means tipping under the average and/or in accordance with a lower scale or tougher standards than is generally expected.

Right, and it's undermarked because you are expected to tip.

The only differences are - You can choose to pay less if things aren't good, or pay more if things are great. - If you're someone that is heavily impacted by other people's opinions, then you may feel bad tipping less. But all that means is that you don't get one of the benefits.

You get the "benefit" of lower prices... and you're expected to tip to balance the scales.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjA...

Anecdotally, it remains true.

Tips don’t go on the official pay reports that go to the Canadian government since it isn’t actually employment income paid by the employer.

Why would sales taxes be inconsequential?

Overall, businesses will charge what they can. And if they don’t have to pay taxes, they can keep that $ for themselves.

The whole tipping system is insane: I'll allow you to provide services in my restaurant and if the customers like you, perhaps you'll earn some money.

I'm still waiting for the restaurant holders to come up with the idea of charging for this unique opportunity. "Don't think of it as paying to be allowed to work, think of it as investing in your revenue-generating activities! !"

Actually, it wouldn't matter if lowest price was the sole factor for picking a particular restaurant. Because all restaurants would be lowering their prices by the same general percentage.

However, it does impact the choice of whether or not to go out to eat.

Unless you're talking about the case where some restaurants discourage tipping (and charge more) but others don't. In which case, there's many cases of that happening and the restaurants closing or switching back. Because price, which not the sole factor, can be a very important one. It certainly impacts my choice when I go out to eat.

You tip in the US because the employees are paid a sum that assumes tips are coming. You can pay less than minimum wage because the actual compensation comes from tips.

Of course, this is different in other countries...

And yes, 15% is standard for "acceptable" service and food. You can tip less if you really have a complaint, but with the proliferation of Yelp and Google Reviews, it's easy enough to avoid bad places.

On a road trip, that can be a little different, but...

This type of justification has always seemed very Stockholm Syndrome-y to me. This is not a valid or acceptable reason.

You tip in the US because everyone is complicit in the horrendous industrial relation laws.

Part of their vulnerability does come from near worthless job-injury/termination/severance pay because, on paper, take-home pay is far less than actual.

However, even in the jurisdictions that don't have a minimum wage exemption for tipped positions (such as Oregon), you're still socially expected to tip.

At this point, the only thing tips are good for is letting business owners pay staff less than what they would normally have to, which the staff doesn't mind because they get to evade taxes on cash tips, and they sometimes make more money than if they were to be paid a wage and didn't get tipped. The customer gets the raw end of the deal as they frequently overpay.

In food service, never say “cannot”!

It's not my role as a customer to support workers at a paper mill with lax safety standards because the workers won't go to OSHA, why should it be my role to ensure you have a livable wage because you won't go to to L&I to report wage theft/other practices?

And if they do award you back-pay, it may still be on you to follow through on collecting.

There is big structural barriers for the system to work in favour of employees that aren’t being paid properly.

Once with my hosts, I took care of the dining bill myself. Just when I thought I figured it all out, they’re like “oh, that was the owner of the restaurant with the cheque at the end, you really don’t have to give him a tip”.

D’oh.

I've seen lots of restaurants implement "no tipping" policies, only to revert back to tipping within a year or two. The reasons:

1. The higher base prices do have a negative impact on sales. 2. The best servers usually want tips, because they can make more at a tipping establishment.

In the past 10/15 years I've changed my attitude around tipping now that pretty much every place I go to "flips around the iPad", asking for a tip. I no longer really think of it as a reward for good service. At the end of the day, I can't imagine trying to survive in a major city on barista wages, and I can afford it, so I tip.

It’s not the “best” servers according to studies, it’s often the most attractive and non minority servers.

I don’t have any opinion either way about his conclusion/opinion but this is the first article I could find. I first heard about this on Freakonomics

http://www.opportunityinstitute.org/blog/post/im-going-to-ti...

For me as a syseng that's getting enough sleep, staying ahead of my field and basic hygiene. I'm not in the best health but I'm also not in a position where I can get a lot of people sick.

I'm overweight and as a result my skin is terrible. Not so much that people notice but I certainly don't think that I should have my hands in anyone's food.

I noped on out of there. No thank you.

It starts with minimum wage laws changing so that waiters and bartenders are not exempt from normal minimum wages. Start there.

[1] https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standa...

There was some talk about if people would stop tipping. Nope, people still tip!

Most places in the US require businesses to "make up" the delta between minimum wage and what the employee receives through wage+tips. Seattle just codified this more clearly by having a "minimum wage" and a separate (higher) "minimum compensation". So while wait staff have a minimum compensation of $15/hr, that number is inclusive of tips they receive. Their minimum wage (what the business has to pay regardless of tip) is lower at $12/hr.

People may have considered no longer tipping because of the publicity behind the new-to-them-but-not-actually-new concept of minimum compensation but it's effectively the same system at a higher number.

I find it frustrating to read time and time again "but it will never work". Having lived the reality, where employees are paid a decent living wage with no tipping, I say to you that such a response is simply untrue.

If anything, the US has moved 180 degrees in the opposite direction in the past 15 years. This is largely a result of the growing inequality and huge increase in expense in major US cities. Up until about 20-25 years ago, 15% was the "standard" tip amount at restaurants, now it's more like 20%. Virtually every place I go asks for a tip now (even places like a bodega where the person behind the counter does practically nothing - I pick out my food myself, I don't need a bag, and I pay with my phone) as a result of the Square/iPad tip phenomenon, and tipping in many of these places was unheard of just 10 years ago.

Flipping to fair wages will only happen after a massive publicity campaign and coordinated change.

those parts that I've been to or lived in.

Choosing where you will buy based on those fictional "base" prices and then tipping just supports that world which is detached from reality.

If people stopped tipping, eventually things would right themselves: workers would stop working for establishments that do not pay enough, businesses would need to raise prices, people would need to start accepting the realistic pricing.

Restaurants are in one physical place, taxes aren't a mystery, there's no real excuse for the price printed on the menu not to be the actual price. Encouraging your employees to make side-deals with customers for cash... maybe we should start treating that as tax-evasion on the part of the restaurant. Putting a guess down in the books isn't OK for any other transaction.

Don't even get me started on the idea that FOH employees are often making 2 or 3X what the kitchen staff is bringing home. Sure the servers want the tips, but why wouldn't cooks want that money to be in the pool of money that can be allocated to them as well (since most servers aren't required to tip the back of house, and any money that isn't guaranteed can't be counted as part of your pay rate).

Eliminate the tipped employee rate entirely. Give the culture 10 years, and everything will be fine. It will be a long painful 10 years, but fixing omelettes and breaking eggs.

You think this is based on logic and sensibility? That's not how government works in the USA. The null hypothesis is that capitalism rules; all else, democracy and logic and truth, come a distant second.

Very few restaurants would pay an hourly wage that is equivalent to what waiters are getting tipped now. So the waiter will just get less. Just look at what non-tipped restaurant workers get paid, not well.

Restaurants in the US are run like a factory assembly line, with every person manning a portion of the line being incentivized to get the table out of the door as fast as possible in order to maximize the amount of scraps they get out of tips. In a fixed system, you might sometimes have to flag down a waiter rather than have your glass endlessly refilled even when you're done drinking, and folks might stop walking by asking (if you're lucky) to take your plates away before you're ready.

If you're a person who travels, count the amount of visible staff at an average German restaurant, and compare that to what you see in the US. It's drastic. Orders of magnitude drastic.

Tipping incentivizes servers to care about getting more tips. This is why there is a stereotype of American servers rushing you out of your table to seat the next party, upselling on more drinks/food, and constantly interrupting the setting by "checking on" the party.

A good waiter gets the main plates on the table after appetizers are finished and responds when I flag them. They are a queuing manager that synchronize orders to the kitchen to optimize delivery to the table. Tipping does not inherently incentivize this, and I'd say it actually incentivizes the worse service in the form of clearing the table as fast as possible in order to acquire the next table's round of tips, or as is often the case, crowding a table up with every appetizer, side dish, entree, and drink the table wanted throughout the dinner.

I find tipping makes many customers treat "servers" like faceless servants, making them feel like prostitutes forcing fake smiles and gritted teeth at bad behaviour.

In a non-tipping culture you learn to treat waiting staff as more human. Arseholes get kicked out, not "smiled" at.

The last German restaurant I went, I was in a party of five. Four of us got our orders somewhat promptly while the fifth waited nearly half an hour… for a frankfurter. Between that and the trains I got this sense that German efficiency was overrated.

One bartender I talked to made the (astute) observation that people feel more generosity toward individuals than to restaurants -- it de-personalized the transaction from the customer perspective, which turned the service charge into a food tax.

In other words, someone's being dishonest.

In most cases, still, the model I seem to see (and I live in the PNW) was a 15/18/20 tip model, and for personal services (nails, hair, etc.) 25.

Food servers would have us believe that poor tipping and other practices have them one shift away from being homeless, or "I have to pay the IRS to serve you, because they assume I'm getting tips I'm not"...

... and yet, when a 20% "tip"/surcharge (which would be on the high end, I feel, most of the time) is added on to every order...

"This sucks, we're making less money".

The only reason I tip at all is because some restaraunts will remember me and you tip or get to wonder if they spit in your food. What a wonderful system.

I tip nowhere else and, since I'm not remembered, I face no negative consequences of this.

I've been told by several waiters and bartenders that worked in these restaurants that there was an employee revolt. People earned noticeably less money under the mandatory 20% service charge than with tipping. Consequently, no one wanted to work for restaurants that didn't have tipping. It was seen as a socially conscious move but it backfired for the people it was supposed to help.

The behavioral and economic dynamics with tipping in the US seem to be more complex than people account for.

I've seen people make moral arguments about it, but I will not pay twice.

I think some places don't give the delivery charge to the driver (I hear Papa John's pockets it, but maybe I heard incorrectly).

I agree in that I think tipping in general needs to change. But I was reading the other day where a bar owner was saying he could pay $X. But with tips, his employees were bringing home more than he was. It's hard for me to say this is wrong. What I find wrong, as you point out, is that everyone is asking for tips now. What I don't know is where to draw the line on who can ask for a tip and who can't.

... and gives you a dirty look when you don't tip for "service".

If you knew everyone was getting paid the minimum wage, would you still tip on a regular basis?

I recently learned that in states like Washington, California, Oregon this is the case [1], and have been tipping less as a result, but still feel slightly bad about it (societal conditioning is strong!).

[1]https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped

People get the cause and effect backwards on that. The minimum wage is lower because lawmakers knew they were already getting compensated by tips. It's a social custom, not charity.

Those reduced minimum wages are justified because the jobs include tipping.

The reason you tip your waiter is (ostensibly) because it creates a direct incentive for better service, by leaving some of the compensation up to the customer.

Let's not have a bunch of replies that ignore my caveat please.

Funny how service is as good if not better in the vast majority of the rest of the world, despite a lack of tipping culture.

I think its more of a cultural thing than an effect of tipping, but service in the US is usually pretty high quality.

"service with a FORCED smile" which I find far worse than service without a smile.

and

"PRETEND the customer is always right" which happens in non-tipping culture too (do whatever makes the least trouble for yourself at work).

Any Asian country I've been to had much better service than the US. France (Paris) had excellent service. Greece had extremely nice service. These are all low- or no- tipping places.

If the server is unhappy with the lack of a tip, and accosts me verbally (which has happened), I will explain my reasoning.

Vote with your wallet, and all that jazz.

If enough people stop tipping for crappy or non-existence services... perhaps eventually it will become more and more difficult for businesses to hire people to work for less than minimum wage... and the world will change.

One short tip at a time.

I am fine with other people thinking I am an asshole, they're free to do so. Most do not.

I have worked in restaurants for years, and I worked my ass off for every tip I received.

If you're serving me a microwaved burger, I don't care if that's the way they do it at this restaurant, I'm not tipping.

To the downvoters... what solution do you propose?

Legislation to be enacted to force restaurant employers the continent-over to start paying their employees more than twice what they're currently getting paid by the company, and increase food prices?

That's never going to happen imho, we tip in North America, and the restaurants pay their employees less than minimum wage, that's just the way it is now.

Here's how that results in a lose-lose for both you and the server.

Normally, if your food does not meet expectations, the best recourse is to let the server know what the problem is. The server can then either have the kitchen resolve the problem or talk to a manager, who can intervene to make things right. The end result is that you end up with food that meets expectations, or perhaps get a portion of the meal comped, and you walk out satisfied.

By being passive aggressive and expressing your displeasure with a zero tip, you don't give the restaurant an opportunity to make things right, so you walk out unsatisfied.

You also punish the wrong person, because it's not the server who is preparing the food. And keep in mind that the server is working a low-paying, often high-stress job, and your withholding of a tip might hit hard.

And perhaps the reason why you've been accosted by servers is that nobody knows the reason why you're refusing to tip unless you tell them. If someone works hard but you stiff them because you didn't like the texture of your burger and didn't bother to raise the issue during your meal, it's not unreasonable for them to assume you thought there was something wrong with their service.

Have you eaten in many low-quality restaurants lately? And complained about the food to the server?

The last time I had a problem with my food (the vegetarian pasta that my partner ordered... who has been vegetarian for decades because of strong personal beliefs against harming animals... had chicken in it which she ended up eating and feeling terrible about)...

I brought that to the attention of our server, who just said "oh sorry, I'll bring out another one".

There's one example of a server who didn't get a tip.

Another time we were eating pizza with olives on it and the olive had a pit in it that almost broke my tooth... am I supposed to ask that the server please inspect every olive on my pizza and make me a new one?

Or ask the server to take back my stir fry that has almost as many ants in it as there is rice, and ask them for another one?

No, I wouldn't think so...

A restaurant is a team (who typically share tips amongst everybody in the restaurant in my experience), and if the team screws up, the team doesn't get tipped.

When I worked at a restaurant and served food, it was on me to make sure that everything that was served to the customers was perfect. If it wasn't, I would send it back to the kitchen.

I don't care what people think of me and my levels of compassion for restaurant staff.

If I am not enjoying my time in your restaurant, I am not going to submit to the gauntlet and tip on the way out the door.

If the waiter isn't checking that they got your order correct, then who is?

Should I be double checking with the manager that everything I ordered is exactly as it should be before I put it into my mouth?

Yes, I did.

>If a customer stiffed you on a tip would that encourage YOU to give them better service next time they come in?

You shouldn't need any encouragement to do your job properly and professionally the first time imho.

And I wouldn't consider it being stiffed.

The couple who I poured an entire pitcher of water onto just as they sat down to dinner one night didn't tip me, and I am not confused or upset as to why.

Likewise, the sever chose to work at that restaurant, so they knew what they were getting into as well.

But pizza is a delivery food. Dominos doesn't even have seats. 90% of what it does is delivery. So the "overhead of running a delivery program" is just a business expense that should come out of their revenues.

Not sure if that happens in all cases, but I can see the case for charging a delivery fee. Baking it in to the cost of a pizza in general would unfairly charge people eating in or picking up. With delivery, you are paying for the pizza, and then an additional service.

I still think tips should be eliminated from the equation, though.

- the establishment that I frequent (they remember)

- uber (they affect your rating)

- I knew for sure that it will give me extra service.

In most situation I didn't experience negative affect.

I suspect it is true since I never tip on Uber and I have a 4.96 out of 5 star rating.

They initially billed themselves as no tipping necessary. I refuse to subsidize driver wages on behalf of Uber. There is no way Uber is not benefitting from tipping by being able to keep wages lower as a result.