Let me guess Switzerland? $30/hr there is less than $20/hr in the US adjusted for COL.

No, Australia.

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.

Australia pays $30/hr to wait staff?

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

Um..medium hourly income in the USA is $21 an hour or so. I live in a decently expensive state and skilled trades, managers, and various lower-tier technical people make $30 an hour, and that's double the state's upcoming minimum wage.

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

> 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.

I don't think they are getting paid that much. I think in general people exaggerate. Maybe at peak times it hits $30 an hour, but a lot of the week it can be dead or slow.

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

It is a difference in who decides how much they’re paid. In a traditional business their pay is at the discretion of the business and thus in competition with what could be the business’s profits. Tips are inaccessible to the business, so they get paid more closely to what consumers are ok with paying. 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.

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.

> It is a difference in who decides how much they’re paid. In a traditional business their pay is at the discretion of the business and thus in competition with what could be the business’s profits.

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.