Tips are an awful way to incentivize good service.

I'm neither qualified to judge my server's performance, and I've got very limited and potentially misleading information about what a reasonable expectation is. I've got no idea what small crises my server had to deal with, or how other customers are treating him.

And because tips are everywhere now, nobody knows the going rate for most tips. Obviously tourists have no idea how much to tip.

If I reduce the tip, the waiter is only finding out that I was unsatisfied after it's too late to fix anything. But tipping up front makes the exercise entirely pointless.

And the moralizing of tips is stupid.

Many moral arguments paint people in the service industry as paupers or victims, but a basic level of respsect has to assume they're competent professionals who chose this line of work.

A tip is not an act of generosity, either, you're paying a fee for a service rendered. And that's why, as a system, the morality of tipping is entirely backwards: it rewards people who rip off their servers.

The thing that really bothers me are the awful motivations behind tipping: being control freaks, conspicuous consumption and all the slimy business incentives to push their payroll onto their customers.

I mean the one time I was in the US having breakfast or lunch at some random place. They had at least five staff milling around for twenty-five customers, probably more (staff I mean). You don't need to have two teens frantically going around with pitchers of water, just plop one down on the table and pay the remaining employees a good wage.

A good wage is not minimum wage either. Minimum wage is a "what is the least I can legally pay this employee", while as an employer your mindset should be "how much is this employee worth and how can I make them feel appreciated"

In the UK tipping is very hit or miss. Especially now that cash payments are becoming rare. I've noticed that food delivery drivers will be half way down the street by the time I open the door these days. They obviously don't expect anything. If there is a service charge on the bill I typically don't leave anything in particular, and I'd prefer it this way.

Often there's an 'optional' service charge on bills now (well, before) which we'll always begrudgingly pay. Only once have we asked them to remove it.

I once took a cab from my hotel in Zhengzhou (in central China) to the airport. It was during rush hour, so what would otherwise have been a 15-minute drive took over an hour. But the meter was obviously set to work only on distance travelled, and the fare seemed to me to be obscenely low for over an hour of work. I knew in China that tipping wasn't a thing, but having been raised in the US, I felt obligated to try in this situation. You should have seen the insulted look on her face. She was doing an honest job for an agreed-upon price, and didn't need any "largesse" from me.

of course, "illegal" is very different from "doesn't happen" in the restaurant biz. the owner of the place I worked would often reach into the tip jar to pay himself back when we made mistakes.

haha, right. I've seen it done in most places I've worked when I was younger.

It's also illegal to clock people out during their shift when business is slow and yet many many places do it (because it's not enough to underpay and have employee rely on tips/charity from customers).

I'm genuinely curious what you think the factors are in their difference because when I live in Denmark (as I do now) it feels like the waiter could give less of a s** whether the service is good or not whereas when I live in LA or NYC I feel like I am the golden child of their day.

The mind first reaches to "it must be tips" but I am genuinely curious what you think the primary factor of this yawning gap in service is if not tips.

I mean I even worked for a Danish guy who was Noma's head chef's former sous chef (he had just opened a new restaurant in NYC at the time) and the American staff he employed there was just leagues beyond anything I had ever seen in DK.

There's this anecdote of Walmart opening a store in Germany and people were horrified by the greeter an the entrance, to a degree that many reported them to the store because they thought he/she was some random weirdo from the street, not an employee of the store. Ditto for baggers, the very idea was appalling for the locals, and Walmarts expansion ultimately failed because of these US service culture imports.

This boils down to the cultural norm: If the behaviour is endemic in the local culture, it comes across as natural. If not, it comes across as fake friendliness in one direction and baseless rudeness in the other.

Absolutely not in my experience. Only visited America a few times but nearly universally the service was about as good as anywhere in Europe not any better or worse, but it was made infinitely worse by the fact that no matter what, the tips were expected. It left such an incredibly sour taste in my mouth - like, the service wasn't special in any way, the waiter came, took our order, the food arrived, we had it....and now I have to leave like $10 in tips? Like, literally, honestly.....wtf. I do leave tips in europe ocassionally but only when going to really fancy restaurants when the service is exceptional. Tipping everyone everywhere every time is just....crazy.

>>I mean I even worked for a Danish guy who was Noma's head chef's former sous chef

Funny, I know a Chef who actually worked at Noma, he now runs a restaurant in the UK and I'm somewhat familiar with the staffing woes. But in summary from everything he told me - it's like any other business. If you want good employees who are engaged and doing a good jobs....you need to pay well. Pay waiters above the bottom of the barel wage...and suddenly you can find people who give a shit about the job. Pay minimum wage and you get people who'd rather spend half their time outside on cigarette breaks.

I've been reflecting on my restaurant experiences in the US and Europe and I'm not sure, is it really "astronomically better"? On balance I've probably had people screw up my order and tab at least as often in the US as in Europe. Waitstaff in the US don't seem more knowledgeable about the menu or the wine list, in fact on the whole they tend to be less knowledgeable (probably due to high turnover and restaurants not investing as much in staff). Kitchen 'failures' and food not arriving on time isn't less common in the US and so on.

Sure US waitstaff will be a lot chattier, smile a lot more, ask me more about my day and my meal many more times and say "I am SO sorry" a lot more when things go wrong. But on the whole they don't seem to handle the mechanics of making sure I have a smooth and stress free dining experience any better.

One 'plus' I will give to the US which might account for some of it is that due to wait staff being basically free there are a lot more of them pr. customer which sometimes speeds up service.

In the US you have cashiers bagging stuff for you and not being allowed to sit down (!!!).

When I go to a restaurant, I want good food. I don't particuarly care about the service. That's not to say I want the wait staff to spit on me when I eat my delicious meal, but I'm not really looking for people to constantly suck up to me throughout the meal so they can afford rent.

Mainly I think it is cultral differences in perception of quality. The very American "The Customer Is Always Right" attitude of service staff being there to serve the customer's every whim doesnt really translate as much overseas.

Were the dishes served appropriately together or was one person’s salad served 5 minutes after the others? Were the courses paced appropriately? Were the drinks continually available? Were the main dishes served hot and together?

I don’t need a server asking me every three minutes if everything is okay, but I do need them looking things over and ensuring that the things that would negatively affect any diner’s enjoyment are being silently taken care of.

There are good restaurants and bad restaurants in every country. I've found no correlation between what you've called service and tipping.

Sure, tipping may be an incentive as well, but most people I know won't go below 10% even if the service is terrible.

Again, I am curious, not combative, so please take care if applying disdain to my comments.

I would guess that what I consider to be amazing service isn't the same thing as what you would consider to be amazing service.

Really awkward as well. Basically the whole staff was waving at us until we went around the corner and they couldn’t see us any more. Didn’t know what to do - ignore, acknowledge, turn back and keep eye contact while still walking forward, smile, stop, wave ...

This was a high-end restaurant though.

Outside of that it's on an establishment by establishment basis. I know an amazing restaurant in a less touristic Paris arrondissement that will provide stellar service no matter who I show up with or how terrible my French is. Their menus are only in French. If I'm not fast enough the staff notices I'm using a translation app and starts translating it into English.

This in the city of famously terrible service.

Not my experience, at least not in Copenhagen compared to New York and New Jersey. (speaking as tourist)

I'm also told that the coyness of the server in bringing the check comes from the feeling of community a restaurant strives to foster: "we would rather you stayed here a bit". Getting pushy about turning a table over simply doesn't happen in France.

I’m curious why ‘good service‘ is important for you? Have you worked a service job yourself? It’s long gruelling hours.

Because the whole point of going out to eat instead of cooking at home is to have an enjoyable and stress free experience.

If it takes 20 minutes before someone asks what I want to drink, then 60 minutes to get food, you cannot answer any questions about what is on the menu and half the people get the wrong thing and then that completely ruins what should be an enjoyable experience.

Waiters in Europe are not necessarily slow or less knowledgeable, and waiters in the US are not necessarily fast or knowledgeable. What US waiters are, is visibly polite (obsequious, even?) and ever present.

In Europe it's perfectly normal to have a rather rude waiter who takes your order quickly and your food not long after that. They can also be efficient and know the menu in detail, albeit being colder when you discuss with them.

The shock Americans experience is probably due to the frequent stone faces of waiters in Europe.

That's what real people look like when they're not conditioned to always smile and instead they smile when... they feel good :-)

Say no to PanAm smiles :-D

I'm not advocating the US way of doing things, and certainly don't think the service in the US is better on the whole, in fact in many ways it's worse. However what I have found is that the worst service I've had in the US is far better than the worst service I've had in Europe. I've never had terrible service in the US, and I certainly can't say the same about Europe.

When I choose to spend the money I have, I want a good experience. Service is a very big piece of that. My stepfather is a restaurant owner. He has always been the model of politeness. Articles have been written about the magic he'd pour out as maître d' in the early aughts. I learned from him the transformative impact good waitstaff can have on a dinner which is in many ways staged theater with you acting your best (honestly, dishonestly, you are still presenting a face of you) for your date you've held in enough esteem to offer this piece of your life to.

As a european, I really don't think that's true.

That's why you're not allowed to tip 0% if the services rendered were worth 0%.

That's ridiculous. If you're not qualified to judge the value of service to yourself then your probably not qualified for a lot of spending decisions in your life.

Reasonable expectation ? If you're a reasonable person you'll have reasonable expectation and it's really easy to notice when someone makes the experience more pleasant.

And if a car mechanic returned your car smelling like shit would you not be mad because he had digestion issues ?

I can trivially judge the necessity of service but unless I am an expert in the domain I cannot judge the quality of service and very often the entire point of the service is to outsource expertise.

I sent my car in for an oil change. They didn't replace the clogged oil filter and it started leaking a little. I had to sent it in again.

Clearly I know that I need an oil change but unless I do my own inspections (the very thing I am paying for) how am I supposed to know that something went wrong?

The entire point of this service is to improve your subjective experience - if you can't evaluate that then you probably need a legal guardian.

The waiter is the face of the establishment, but there are many things out of the control of even the best server.

Which gives them the incentive to kick things off in the kitchen, and good places share tips with kitchen staff for that reason.

It's their job to make the experience pleasant for me - I don't care how - tip reflects how good of a job they did.

If I don't like a place I let the owner know and reduce my spending. If I like the place I tell the owner and spend more.

Tautology anyone?

The topic of the post is alleged blatant theft of tips. The question of whether there should be tips in the first place could be a diversion from the more immediate topic.

A related topic might be all the people suffering the same theft while working for much smaller players.

From there, it moves pretty rapidly to, "get rid of tips and pay a wage that funds people existing reasonably and showing up for work" rather than start a fairly expensive and difficult enforcement effort.

Maybe the idea of just avoiding all this mess to prevent what did happen, and what is happening to a ton of people is popular because it is relevant?

I would be going to jail for the rest of my life.

Who is going to jail for this theft?

The hassle is that even if a place charges more for food, you don't know if they pay their service better. So if you're going to support the "no tips" agenda you'll have to put in the additional effort of looking up wages to decide Starbucks is better than Tim Horton's

I just....don't see why. I honestly don't get an argument why. When you get a plumber do you check how much they earn per hour and decide accordingly?

Like seriously, it's the biggest scam the restaurant industry has managed to pull off - they are making customers a) worry about this stuff at all, even though you wouldn't for pretty much any other industry b) make them feel bad for not tipping if the company pays poorly. That's incredible. And it's so incredibly condescending towards the workers too "oh you poor slave, you are paid so little, I'll give you some extra cash so you can actually live like a normal human being". There's probably some kind of syndrome that fits this situation.

I worked ice cream vending (https://serprex.github.io/w/Ice%20Cream%20Biker if someone wants to read a very dry recount of my first day) where half my income was from tips. The prices of the items were generally like 2.75 to encourage getting me the extra quarter. It's a weird way that the business can leverage advertising a lower price while allowing tips to average out to cover a shitty wage

Here's a cbc article on the topic where a no tips experiment failed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/caf%C3%A9-linnea-all...

But....why should I care about this as a customer at all. Again, I'm baffled how did the responsibility for the wellbeing and income of restaurant workers has been shifted to the customers. The employer should be responsible, not me. It literally doesn't work like this anywhere else. As a customer I also don't check if there are rats in the kitchen or if the chef is pouring grease into storm drains, yet I'm expected to be responsible for the salary of employees?

>>Here's a cbc article on the topic where a no tips experiment failed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/caf%C3%A9-linnea-all...

So I've tried to see why it failed:

"After several months working at Café Linnea, he also found he was making less money than if he were receiving tips.

"I think that the wage ended up working out to be like ... an average of what one might expect to make on a slow night, but it didn't adequately make up for the busy nights.""

So sure, people who benefit from the broken system complain if it's being changed. What a surprise. Of course people who happen to make really good money on tips will complain about removal of tips. Shocker.

Somehow elsewhere in the world tips are just not expected and restaurants still manage to hire and retain staff.

Another quote: "Fox said the no-tipping policy meant management couldn't end up sending servers home early on slow nights."

And....? How is this given as a downside?

And another:

""My employer paid for less than half of my total earnings," he said. "Most of the burden of my earnings was on the customer and thus didn't have to be reflected in prices."

Café Linnea never increased prices enough to make up for the higher staff wages, he said."

Like, I could have told you the outcome of this "experiment" before they even started.

And jesus, if this is not late capitalism then I’m not sure what is. Through the phenomenon of tipping everyone becomes a Caeser-like philanthropist, making life or death choices based on the perceived suffering and performance of their precarious underlings. Meaning waiters, and other service industry workers, compete for crumbs by trying to make other people feel like "the golden child of their day", in a system that systemically undervalues and underpays them (that's putting it very lightly).

David Graeber has a great name for service workers, he calls them 'the caring classes'. [1]

In another article he writes about the British working class:

"In other words, the historical defeat and humiliation of the British working classes is now the island’s primary export product. By organizing the entire economy around the resultant housing bubble, the Tories have ensured that the bulk of the British population is aware" [2]

In a talk he gave he says despite technology increasing the productivity and therefore some wages, "in the caring sector the exact opposite has happened. Digitization is being used as an excuse to make lower productivity so as to justify the existence of this army of administrators" [3], in Britain this has created a "cheerful, creative, and subservient working-class population who, drawing on centuries of tradition, know exactly how to be butlers" [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/caring...

[2] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber

[3] http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/managerial-feudalism-r...

Janitors and custodians making sure everything is clean? No tip.

Person that brings you food? Tip.

Nurse/plumber/electrician/Government employee? No tip.

Delivery driver? Tip.

Grocery/hardware store/department store employee who helps you find what you need? No tip.

Person who brings out your online order to your car? Tip.

EMT that saves your life, but makes $12 per hour? No tip.

The whole thing is insane.

It's extremely arbitrary which service employees "get" tips and which do not. Not everyone agrees who society "expects" to be tipped. The whole thing is absurd and profoundly unfair.

If people understand that tipping is actually less of a thing, then the pressure will be on the employers, not the customers.

I know I'll get downvoted for saying that, because we're still much in a "if you don't tip you're an asshole" culture. But I personally have decided that I will contribute to the solution by not tipping.

The worst part about tipping culture is that somehow bosses have convinced their staff to be upset at customers.

also this ties into something that a lot of people don't seem to take into account when arguing for abolishing tipping. servers tend to like tipping. they don't enjoy the behavioral pressure, but they generally believe (correctly or not) that they make more money with tipping than they would in a counterfactual world without.

Their employers is screwing them over, not me. I am not.

You want to force me to tip you? Make it mandatory then.

And yes, unfortunately the way to fix the tipping problem is to stop tipping. It will be miserable for people like yourself, but if you can't afford to live on a shitty non-tipping wage, you will leave and do something else. Your employer will run out of staff, or will get the worst staff on earth willing to work for a dollar an hour. Even if you decide to stay and live out of your car, you won't be happy. The restaurant will suffer because the staff won't care any more and it will start hitting the owners directly. So wages will increase. It's not rocket science. That's how unions are formed, that's how people revolt, that's how people start caring about the political side of things and finally make the change happen - they have to be unhappy about the current system first.

And it is a parasite system on some societies - I'm glad you're on the happy side of it, but the system needs to change anyway.

I guess same thing now with food deliveries, but at least I can change the tips (I think?) afterwards if something wasn't good.

And, the cashier tells the customer to go ahead and pay, then walks away to fetch their order, leaving them no obvious option other than to select 10, 15 or 20 percent, or the awkward position of asking how to manage the tip.

I have not gone back. I tip, because of the system and the position the labor is in, but I do not appreciate the aggression. I do, however, understand why.

Would much rather see everyone paid well, move bad service to a social issue, and proceed from there.

That should read, "This one did not give the option on screen. Button that worked was not indicated in any way."

Sheesh

This one did not, and the interaction was planned so there is no opportunity for discussion, until after payment.

Other parts are still running all manner of those little POS terminals and they vary widely.

I still advocate tipping since it's a nice thing to do and probably improves your happiness, but I think it's healthier in the context of a no-tipping culture where wages are sufficient and baked into the price of the service.

No it’s not. You would not tip any less if you knew there were other people at the restaurant who had no intention of tipping.

It’s strictly a lost potential income to the server when they land a cheap customer. It may not actually cost them anything at all if it’s not busy and they were able to take on the additional customer without losing a potentially higher paying customer slot.

Prices for basic services are lower in tipping cultures, ceteris paribus, since staff wages are a component of price, and staff wages are lower in a tipping culture since they make part of their income from tipping.

Hence, the cheap customer benefits to the maximum in a tipping culture since the prices they're paying are artificially lower as they've been subsidised by tippers. That's why it's a transfer of wealth from the generous to the cheap.

It's got little to do with whether the generous decide to tip more in the presence of the cheap (although that may be a small part of it), it's about the indirect and hidden subsidisation through service price.

Presumably it's a combination of both, where on a diverse platform like Uber it weighs more heavily towards socioeconomic drivers and in a more homogeneous environment like an expensive restaurant it comes down more to personality traits.

Agree with the first part, but would rephrase this second part as: If people aren't able to live off a minimum wage salary to do the job for the hourly with no tips, raise the minimum wage until they are.

This isn’t an issue people can solve on their own by changing jobs. It’s a systemic problem where the minimum wage has been stagnating for years, while the cost of living has been skyrocketing, and thus felt most by non-knowledge workers.

This would be the case in a normal free market, but unfortunately the labor market is not a free market as people don't have the choice to work or not to work - they need to work to survive.

As long as millions of people are out of a job, there will be millions desperate to work even for under minimum wage, ready to replace anyone who quits.

This is why there are two things needed - first, a minimum wage not defined in dollars (to account for rent and other CoL differences) but in "is enough to rent a decent home in the area and live without a second (or worse, third) job or government assistance programs", and second, a universal basic income that fulfills the same requirement. Only then, when people have the freedom of choice between working or not, will labor prices reflect the true value of the labor.

Anyone can be a waitress or waiter. The labor is inherently low value because it's an easy job. Raising the minimum wage will just subsidize jobs that have less actual value and it will be a net loss to society.

UBI could work because it redistributes the overly concentrated wealth gained from technology from the ultra rich across society. But raising the minimum wage does not.

Having done a stint in barkeeping myself, it's not an easy job at all and there are many people who aren't cut for it. You have to be resilient enough to deal with all kinds of customers (the "Karen" meme is based in way too much reality) and their issues no matter how you are feeling yourself, it's a job that's quite taxing on your body and honestly it's exhausting.

> Raising the minimum wage will just subsidize jobs that have less actual value and it will be a net loss to society.

That reminds me of "A brief history of corporate whining" (https://i.imgur.com/NBSaqzi.png). When Germany introduced the minimum wage for the first time years ago, we had the same argument, and as expected it turned out to be nothing but whining.

Right now, the taxpayers are subsidizing jobs anyway: 70% (!!!) of SNAP/food stamps or Medicaid recipients work full time, with McDonald's and Walmart being in top spots (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...). These companies could also pay their workers a living wage and provide them with medical insurance and still be profitable!

Your second argument is just, not a real argument. It ignores why the minimum wage could be raised. Subsidies work when other places of the economy can provide said subsidy. When the rest of the economy starts to suffer the subsidy can no longer be provided and the economy collapses - the USSR is a great example. The economy couldn't sustain itself, it collapsed. Now you want to raise the minimum wage, whenever the fed is pumping billions into the economy. The value of the dollar would plummet and inflation would go out of control.

> Right now, the taxpayers are subsidizing jobs anyway: 70% (!!!) of SNAP/food stamps or Medicaid recipients work full time, with McDonald's and Walmart being in top spots (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...). These companies could also pay their workers a living wage and provide them with medical insurance and still be profitable!

The reason this works is because cheap foreign labor/goods can subsidize walmart paying potential higher wages. If, globally, this minimum wage was mandated, walmart would not be able to afford it, no.

It is indeed. But still, someone working on a farm full time should be able to live off of that income. If the farm cannot pay a living wage, its products are too cheap. If the farm can't get more for their product because foreign competition undercuts them - well, that is precisely for what tariffs were invented, to protect domestic industries from wage dumping.

You're asking a farmer to be subsidized by everyone else, but you're not saying why we should. Because economically, it's great that the farmer can have a living - not so great for the poor family that can't afford his overpriced produce.

Everyone cares for everyone else, until it's their pocketbook. That's why it's easy to say "raise the minimum wage!", it's just the new "pass the back." No skin off the rich SV developers back, as he types on his $1100 iPhone made with slave labor in china, in his slave labor clothes, etc.

The argument about "would I do this job" is the wrong argument. The argument is, CAN I do this job. And yes I can, and yes, most people can. Most people can not be developers. So why bother with the worthless platitude.

Also to - it is a strawman to suggest I don't want a world without servers. I just suggested that over-subsidizing them is bad for society, as a whole.

> Most people can not be developers

I don't agree with you there. I'm not 100% sure the numbers, but there's really nothing special about being good at programming. These arrogant attitudes give our profession a terrible reputation, then I have to go back to the real world, and deal with people that assume I'm like you before I even say a word.

The business and customer are getting an excellent deal because the model is anti-competitive and driven by human desperation and inequality. Which is why we have a minimum wage to limit the exploitation. The job isn't easy, and it is an important one. Restaurants for better, but mostly for worse, are staples of our society. They're valuable jobs.

These people are giving up their entire lives basically. All you have is time on this earth, and they're asked to give all of that for nothing, so you can live in the lap of luxury. I don't want to live in a world without bartenders and servers. I consider their work valuable, and think they deserve fair pay.

AKA, an easy job. A job that most people can do.

> The business and customer are getting an excellent deal because the model is anti-competitive....

No, they get an excellent deal because they're easy jobs that anyone can do. If being a waiter was like being a mechanic, they'd get paid more. Pretty basic.

> These people are giving up their entire lives basically. All you have is time on this earth, and they're asked to give all of that for nothing, so you can live in the lap of luxury. I don't want to live in a world without bartenders and servers. I consider their work valuable, and think they deserve fair pay.

I hear you - but raising the minimum wage hurts small restaurants a lot. And don't pretend like it doesn't. It will. They'll feel it instantly, and many will fail because of it. It's better to redistribute wealth in other ways. This drastic min. wage hike will just end up being a regressive tax on the poor.

Unless you think it’s a scam and most companies could afford to pay you the higher salary but decide not to. I’m not sure that would be very sustainable though.

1) its entirely possible and common to make a living wage in the tip system. my wife and i just ran the numbers and she grossed ~17$/hour between her two restaurant tip-based jobs - during COVID with capacity restrictions and lack of patronage (for cost of living reference, our house is ~$125/square foot so we're certainly not in NY or SV).

2) the tip system provides opportunity. it is a way for someone with no skills, education, prospects, or CV to start making steady money. eliminating it increases the risk for hirer as they their hiring cost changes astronomically from ~3$/hr to 10-20$/hr. this will close a window for advancement as taking chances on under-performing employees is more expensive; this results in an increase in heritable wage stratification as another path to the american dream is closed.

3) performance incentives are good by definition. you want all systems to have incentives aligned with the desired outcome. i dont see how removing the incentive structure improves the outcome for anyone except bad servers.

4) restaurants dont get a cut of tips. it is a direct transaction between customer and server (less taxes, obviously). this is the peak of efficiency. by forcing restaurants into being a middleman, you are creating a rent-seeker and lowering real economic output.

5) 2 and 4 make it more dangerous to open a new restaurant. raising the bar for entry into any business scenario is generally undesirable and produces less competition and creativity. less success and more expensive failure.

It's also entirely possible and common to make a living wage without tips. Most people do.

> the tip system provides opportunity. it is a way for someone with no skills, education, prospects, or CV to start making steady money.

So does every other entry-level or unskilled job. There is nothing magical about tips.

> eliminating it increases the risk for hirer as they their hiring cost changes astronomically from ~3$/hr to 10-20$/hr.

This is not a risk that should be eliminated. It's your job as a business owner to pay your employees. It's not your customer's problem. Every other business that is not a restaurant seems to be able to manage this, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to as well.

> performance incentives are good by definition. you want all systems to have incentives aligned with the desired outcome. i dont see how removing the incentive structure improves the outcome for anyone except bad servers.

Performance incentives should be provided by the employer. If I go to a restaurant, I'm not interested in taking on an unpaid job as a restaurant manager. I just want to eat a meal, not conduct employee performance reviews.

> restaurants dont get a cut of tips. it is a direct transaction between customer and server (less taxes, obviously). this is the peak of efficiency. by forcing restaurants into being a middleman, you are creating a rent-seeker and lowering real economic output.

The restaurant is already a major component of the transaction. The transaction would not even exist if not for the restaurant, why shouldn't they be a part of it? I didn't personally hire some guy off the street to fetch food for me. They're the restaurant's employee.

> 2 and 4 make it more dangerous to open a new restaurant. raising the bar for entry into any business scenario is generally undesirable and produces less competition and creativity. less success and more expensive failure.

It's no more of a bar to entry than any other business that doesn't depend on tips.

Tips are a kind of direct income redistribution. If I think someone deserves more money, I can directly give it to them. There's no middleman, no politics, and no stigma about charity.

A better thing to fix would be to improve people's general happiness by paying them a dependable wage and giving them good health care - you'll probably find they are happier at work and better at their job.

One of my first jobs, I worked in a private members-only clubhouse where tipping was prohibited. The service was held to a higher standard than most restaurants open to the public. If you didn’t do your job well, you’d no longer have a job.

We were paid quite a bit higher than minimum wage, so we were fine with it. Most people are fine doing their job well for a decent hourly wage.

If you’re the kind of employee that acts out with poor service towards a customer because you’re upset with the wage your employer pays you, then you need to find a job that isn’t customer facing.

What kind of crappy attitude is that? "I know you hired me and you're paying me and I'm here to do this job, but I'm going to do it really poorly unless you pay me extra"

> really poorly

Your words, not mine. Obviously if you're consistently terrible at your job you can get fired. But what's the incentive to go above and beyond, vs "good enough"? And how are tips for a server different from an annual performance based bonus for a white collar worker? I don't hear people raging about that one.

> and how are tips for a server different from an annual performance based bonus for a white collar worker?

Because the bonus is provided by the employer, not the customer. It's done by someone who is familiar with your work over the course of an entire year and who is much more aware of all the surrounding circumstances, not someone who met you for an hour or two while you were also doing 10 other things they knew nothing about.

It's also subject to all the same labor laws and regulations as a wage. A company can't say "we're not going to give bonuses to black employees" without getting sued out of existence. Any customer can decide they aren't going to tip based on whatever reason, valid or not, that they want. Or no reason at all.

For an American who is used to the standard “Drink? —> Order —> Refill —> How’s everything? —> Refill —> Anything else? Dessert? Just the check?” cadence to dining it is strange and may seem like the service is more rude, though I’ve heard from folks unfamiliar with the American style that it’s overbearing, high pressure, and feels like you’re being hustled through the dining process.

What you describe is fairly common in American restaurants where people tip. Between a third to a half of the times I eat out I cannot rely on them checking up on me and I do have to flag them. And waiting is common in about 100% of them.

(And no, I don't think they're doing it only to me because I'm a nasty brat - I've observed this to be normal with the other customers as well).

This argument always feels weird to me, because most customer-facing jobs in the US aren’t tipped, and most of the people working in them still work hard and try to do a reasonably good job.

Extreme generalisation of 50+ countries, each having own cultural identity and internal/local differences. All from a third party you heard. Are you sure that's information worth spreading / relying on?

(tipping exists in multiple countries in Europe BTW, it's just not that common)

Maybe other factors like culture matter more than tipping?

This would be better described as "tips are _intended to_ incentivize doing a job well", as I'm not clear there's a strong relationship between tipping and performance.

I've seen/had this happen. Bosses had to go to bat for their long term workers because even with raises, they wound up making less than people hired in the past month.

It's really low. I've worked in a place where people will literally throw away money equalling an hours worth of the wages of a service person into a pool of water for good luck.

Do you tip other service positions like the employee that helps you at best buy or the cashier at the grocery store? Why are they different? If people staying in one job longer is a good thing and tipping helps that why wouldn't you?

I've yet to find someone who pays tips for excellent customer service in the big mall stores. I'm sure they exist, but almost no one does it, and this is acceptable. Why?

There also never is enough staff. The staff doesn't have time to provide customer service in meaningful ways; they more or less clean, stock, cashier, and do everything instead of be dedicated sales people. They literally cannot do so unless its very high value sales where the service is the key to making a big, infrequent sale over many small ones.

Like the whole gamestop debacle-go into the store and you'll find maybe they have barely enough payroll to have more than one person in the store on non-peak days.

Also, as someone pointed out, they typically get paid commissions, but my there are lots of other places where one does get pretty good service without tips or commissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26023514

Actually, in stores like Nordstrom, you get a lot more service (if you want it) than at a restaurant - even when you don't want it. I avoided them for years for this reason. They have a fair number of people who spend much much more time providing these services than doing the other stuff you mentioned.

Getting back to my original question: I often get better service from grocery store workers (depending on the chain, of course), than I do from restaurant workers. Yet no one pays them a tip. Same goes for Costco employees. Often the worker at the REI store will spend an inordinate amount of time helping me. No one pays them a tip, and they don't get a commission. From my perspective, all of these people are actually providing a service to me that I actually want, when I want it. Whereas with waiters, they are typically forced upon me. It's usually the exception that I want some service that requires a waiter.

The point being: There are more ways than tips to build a culture of good service, and it's inane to think tips are needed to maintain quality.

Why not? I live in a country with no tipping culture and we have no problem paying service industry workers this much.

As for cost of living, my first job was doing 20 hour weeks at a McDonald's as a teenager. It paid enough for me to live very comfortably just 5 minutes outside of a major city (>1mil population). Obviously that's not too relevant to the tipping discussion since fast food workers aren't typically going to get tipped anywhere, but it serves as a demonstration of the living conditions a developed country should be able to provide, and tipping is entirely non-existent here so it's clearly not necessary to ensure that those working in service industries are fairly compensated.

The amount of Americans I see casually mentioning that they need to work multiple jobs scares the crap out of me.

And the COL still stands. $30/hr won’t get you far in Sydney.

I really don't see how you pay them that much.

But they're apparently already getting paid that much! Either people are drastically misrepresenting how much waitstaff take home in tips, or there's enough money in the economy to pay them that much.

This is part of why we don't make sales based on commission in retail stores any more; usually sales in general aren't boing to be affected by service as much as volume of customers into the store. Same I bet w tips

These two points mean there’s no guarantee a tipped wage would convert 1:1 into an hourly wage if we simply removed tipping, even if the value provided by the tipped employee stays constant.

I don't really see how this is any different to me going into an American restaurant today and having the waiter's pay be at the discretion of myself, and in competition with what could be my money. At the end of the day it's still a person deciding how much money to give the waiter, knowing that they can keep any that's left over.

> I’m probably paying more too because of being guilted into feeling like I must tip x% because I’m directly responsible for the person’s wages.

Entirely plausible, but I see eliminating this consequence of tipping to be a huge positive. If a significant portion of someone's pay relies on guilt, then clearly the actual service they're providing isn't worth what they're being compensated for.

The change is, that by default everyone earns a fair wage.

this is all the employer actually has to pay. Everything else is the customer. Now imagine the employer has to pay $15 an hour. Thats 6+ times what they pay now if its a decently busy place.

You still think it's going to be baked into the price?

I'll give an example:

$8 item + $4 (50%) tip = $12

$10 item + $2 (20%) tip = $12

$12 item + $0 (0%) tip = $12

In any scenario, the wait staff's pay comes from the customer. All we are doing is, setting the price, such that you no longer calculate the tip. If the actual price doesn't actually change, you can bake in whatever you want.

For a tech comparison look at Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It probably is closer to the $2.13 minimum wage in practice than the $7.25 one for what I hear. Now imagine they had to raise what they paid to make sure its an effective $15 an hour based on spending an hour.

You think it would still exist? Would you pay that much? Or is it's value proposition precisely because you can pay them shit wages overall?

https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped

Figure out what your expenses are, and make sure you charge enough to cover them, plus profit. If you can't manage to do that you shouldn't be running a restaurant or any other business. It's not rocket science.

So your universe already exists: every restaurant in the state of California already ensures a minimum wage more than 6x the federal minimum.

I don't think Healthy SF coverage is mandatory. From what I've read, businesses have two other options: provide a regular healthcare plan, or set aside a fund to reimburse employee healthcare costs as they arise. Restaurants usually go for that last option.

"usually passed onto patrons as a 4% fee on their bill, though this isn’t dictated by statute"

I find the last part of what you wrote interesting. It's true that this isn't dictated by statute. But it would be surprising and unusual for a statue to dictate that a business must make its customers pay a specific business cost.

Of course, there are instances where businesses are responsible for collecting taxes from their customers (notably sales taxes and recycling fees) but these are explicitly taxes on consumers that the business is collecting for the government's convenience, not taxes on the business that the business is tricking consumers into paying, by making them believe they're responsible for them.

So restaurants basically run their own health insurance company?

More info here: https://sfgov.org/olse/sites/default/files/2021%20HCSO%20Pos...

On the “dictated by statute”, I actually mentioned that because so many people figured it was! Much like sales tax, it’s often on the bill as if it’s a thing that the city has specified and that it was a city program (rather than the city mandating that larger businesses provide coverage). Many restaurants are quite clear about it “we use this money to pay for healthcare for our workers”, but the biggest surprise for me was that the “market rate” ended up settling at about 4%. When some restaurants instead do an $X/patron or $Y/ticket add on, it catches people by surprise.

Either way, I find it amusing what people are “willing” to pay for things, especially if we can get closer to living wages for everyone. (I’m all for more “taxes” on bills that somehow people prefer over menu items going up in price).

tl;dr: good point, clarified my statements!

If someone works only a few hours per week, the 'Healthy SF' coverage can cost more than the minimum employer spend. So it's not always the cheapest option.

Apparently, he didn’t find evidence to suggest a strong effect there. But it’s got me curious to follow up with other territory or county vs state differences in the data. My suspicion is that the current very low minimum wages are just too low to see effects anyway, but that a federal $15/hr would be enough of a jump to see many county-level area median wages suddenly tip over.

Australia does not have tipping in it's culture. We pay our wait staff fair and reasonable rates (legally mandated btw).

I don't really think our food costs are too much higher than the USA. And people eat out ALOT here.

Food tastes good, service is good. People want to come back.

Please expand your horizons.

But the societal norm is to still expect to tip 15% (although some would say 20%) in tips.

Japan, on the other hand, has incredible service and absolutely no tips.

Most people I know in Melbourne who worked in restaurants said they got less than minimum wage with cash in hand. Almost all these people were on a working holiday visa or students.

Interestingly waiters tend to ask Americans for tips in France, while they don’t expect anything from Europeans, that’s because American tourists tip when they travel there.

The solution is to stop tipping.

And I’d argue that people who would complain about that here are people who don’t tip and save a bunch of bucks thanks to us suckers.

It’s actually one of the few ways people can make a lot of money for doing a good job. What you describe punishes hard work, the people getting tips would hate it.

In reality, it’s a gesture of pity for those who earn little, and who we don’t want to pay properly via decent wage regulations and increase product prices, but we want them to dance for us and have them hope we will toss a few coins their way. In the process, we get to feel good like benevolent dictators who have chosen to be generous and share their wealth.

Subsidized by us, who pay twice?

The people who could "steal the difference" are usually the owners, right? Not sure why GP put the owners and kitchen staff in the same bucket.

From my experience as a client in bars (without actual kitchens) in Paris, France, where tipping "isn't expected but kinda is" [0], most of the time tips are split between wait staff. So I kind of get the issue that if some waiter is going above and beyond and is nice / helpful / quick to serve / etc, whereas a colleague will do the bare minimum, when someone tips, this is diluted.

As a client, I'm tipping X for the service, but this particular waiter will only get a fraction of that, the same as his low-effort colleague. I'm not really OK with that.

Most places I usually go are rather small and the waiters seem comparable, so I guess it's not usually an issue I have in practice.

However, there are other, usually larger places where quality of service varies much more, and I'm usually much less inclined to tip in those places. I've also heard from bar staff having worked in such places that there indeed is more tension between staff, along the lines of "so and so just waits around / doesn't do anything". Wouldn't be surprised that the complainer wouldn't be all too happy to split their tips in such a case.

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[0] Technically, in France, prices are "all-inclusive", that means service is already included in the price, so you don't have to tip. However, at least in bars around Paris, I've noticed that it's somewhat expected to get a tip, especially when clients are considered "difficult" (though I'm unable to exactly quantify that).

Because the parent was talking about rewarding good job. The kitchen staff and the owners are both a factor in your good time and invisible during that time. If that's a honest opinion about the purpose of tips, then I don't see why owners/managers shouldn't share the pool. They run the place, created the environment, hired the people interacting with you. Then there are managers who deal with day-to-day issues in the place, right?

But that's not true of course - it's about owners not paying people properly.

Kind of astounding reading all these comments because I don’t think any have worked in a kitchen (or perhaps a fast food joint)

This now includes Uber, Lyft, Instacart etc. getting filthy rich from employing AI to maximize human exploitation and misery.

Because they can.

I'm not saying all bonus-based comp is bad, but it's rather out of place for nominally unskilled labor especially when it is a huge portion of total comp.

The fact of the matter is the economics of much restaurant work it totally wack.

I look forward to a cyberchill future of near-fully-automated cheaper-than-cooking-at-home not-cooked-to-order restaurants with an owner-masterchef as the only human in the operations.

Drivers, who don't work in close proximity to each other, may have it differently, of course.

A: 80 B: 80 C: 80

A would logically prefer a situation where the following benefits accrue even with total outcomes being on average worse because A is logically and understandably primarily interested in their own well being.

A: 100 B: 50 C: 50

Tips are better for the employer because they fan advertise a price n where the customer will be expected to pay n+10-25%

Pooled tips are better on average because the extra tax the employer is able to levy accrues to everyone. Non pooled tips are better for attractive people or those who are much more competent than their peers.

No tips and actually paying employees what they are worth is even better.

There's plenty of resistance from the servers themselves, though. Whenever this subject comes up on kitchen-pros related subreddits, IIRC this just came up not too long ago (/r/kitchenconfidentials, I think?) servers don't want to take straight wages over tips. I always think qualifiers like "better" doesn't mean better for everyone. Some servers make so much in tips, or think they can exceed their straight wages in tips, that they believe the current system favors them. Much like the majority of SWEs on HN are vociferously resistant to the idea of a SWE union.

I want them to do a adequate job.

Good enough is good enough for me.

-Incentivize doing your job. I don't expect anything crazy and give 20% as long as you did the baseline properly. If you can't be assed to read or follow a two sentence delivery instruction that says how to find me then I'm not rewarding that.

-Result in taking home much more money than otherwise in many cases, else the company still has to make up the difference to minimum wage but that almost never happens in practice

-Let lower income people keep more of their pay, if cash

I really see no compelling argument for eliminating it. If multiplying a two digit number by 2, rounding, and moving a decimal is too hard, we all have calculators in our pockets all day.

Surely keeping your job is a good incentive to do your job?

> Result in taking home much more money than otherwise

People are still willing to pay the same amount of currency for the same product and service.

> Let lower income people keep more of their pay, if cash

I don't find "this system is good because it enables tax fraud" to be a strong argument.