You were frustrated the customer didn't pay you an arbitrary amount to live off based on their mood instead of frustrated that your boss didn't pay you a legally mandated amount to live off.

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

We’ve got to stop thinking about tipping as “the customer giving money to the server as a reward for good service.” and start thinking about it as “the customer subsidizing the business owner so he can save money on wages.” How did making payroll become the customer’s job and moral duty?

vouched this because it more or less matches my experience as a server. also want to second this point. do not "protest tipping" by refusing to tip employees who expect at least 15% to make ends meet. you're not making a point; you're just screwing over some random person.

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.

> you're just screwing over some random person

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

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

no one said anything about forcing and I don't currently work as a server. I'm strongly suggesting that not tipping doesn't make the point you think it does, and it definitely doesn't help that particular service worker. you're not pressuring the owner to change shit. you're sending home a low income employee with less than they reasonably expected to make off serving you dinner. servers who routinely complain about low/no tips tend to get fired (it's taken as a proxy for poor performance), not given a raise.

It's a good theory but I don't agree with it, sure it may cause harm in the short term but in the long term not tipping will benefit people

This reminds me of some old people in my country who say that communism was the best thing in the world, they had most things provided, they never had to worry about a job or having a place to live, the collapse of the communist government was the worst thing that has happened to them. Sure, there were some problems, maybe you couldn't buy a new car and only had oranges once a year and people elsewhere were going on holidays to the balearics while you had to content with the black sea if you were lucky and the local police station agreed to let you borrow a passport for a couple weeks, but the advantages overall outweigh the disadvantages. To them, people trying to change the system were the bad people - after all, communism REALLY worked well for them, and the winds of change came and the government-secured factory job or subsidized apartment, gas and electricity disappeared. World went to shit for them. Of course change was bad.

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.