Now tips are requested upon payment before service rendered. In front of workers and next customers. Minimum wage subsidies passed on to the consumer through social coercion, and maybe some insurance that nobody will spit in your coffee after you pay (but do the barista and the cook actually know how much you tipped?)
You might tell your low tipping friend they’re being rude, driving the bottom end up, making average higher, meaning a really generous tip has to be even higher.
What constitutes rudeness is evidently more variable than I realized. Even among friends.
However, as I've become more wealthy, I think of it as a (happily paid) extortion tax. _Fight Club_ taught me that the service class can anonymously hurt me. I strive to be overly polite and non-demanding, and tip 20%+ to be the good customer and avoid any vengeance.
I'm not cynical about much in life, but with tipping, I view it as cheap insurance.
Another commend focused on the difference between median wages and waitstaff wages - in my mind I tip more not because they make less, but because I have more discretionary income.
That, and cultural forces in some political circles (which are fairly popular in New York) that encourage tipping to make up for what are perceived as unfairly low wages. It's an instance of people attempting to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.
1. 20%
2. 25%
3. No tip
4. Custom tip
Dark patterns.
In a more brazen example I've been promoted to take my seat and use a qr code to order, it then requires me to pay up front on my phone (while providing my PII in the form of an email and phone number), and then asks me to tip before I've even had a server so much as introduce themselves or bring me water.
I'm all for servers making a living wage and paying higher prices to support it, but the current path this seems to be taking is really an unpleasant experience as a customer.
* Buying social prestige amongst your group by showing generosity.
* Buying better service by showing generosity.
Both these result in motivation in favor of tipping more and against tipping less. Both of these require your tips to be above average, and not everyone can be above average.
What makes it somewhat tricky is that tipping to show generosity is a type of virtue signalling. And virtue signalling generally doesn't work if you admit you are doing it for self serving reasons. Since the best liars believe their own lies, our brain is resistant to acknowledging that these are the true reasons behind tipping. It prefers to pick justifications that align with the virtue being signalled.
AK, CA, MN, MT, NV, OR, WA
So no principled justification to tip in those places, unless you like to tip for every service for some reason.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
While they may make minimum wage, in this day and age, minimum wage is well below what you might make otherwise at a non-tipping establishment. Tipping is still expected at restaurants in Washington state, and is still the main source of income for most servers (the minimum wage they earn is less than the tips they receive, and if it weren't for tips, they wouldn't bother doing the job for minimum wage).
I'm against the requirement to tip as a way of doing business, but will do it as long as it is expected. Ideally, we'd do things more like Europe or Japan.
However, these days, everyone barring McDonalds asks for a tip. I eat/take out less because of it, but I'll tip at least 10% even if there is no service involved.
We got to this because service worker wages grew slower than necessary-for-life expenses like food, shelter, medical care, childcare, education, etc.
Meanwhile, many professional wages grew much faster than all of those things.
This is also the reason for why many ski towns in 2022 are unable to find enough staff to keep either the resorts, or the restaurants open. Nobody working those jobs can afford to live in those towns anymore, so you get a bunch of millionaires going off to vacation in their winter dachas, only to discover that there's nobody there to cater to them.
This seems like a price stickiness problem. If there’s demand from tourists buy food, but not enough staff, the restaurants can raise their prices and raise the wages they offer. At some point, either demand to go to restaurants goes down because people don’t want to pay (so the staff aren’t needed), or wages increase enough that the staff can afford to live. The end state isn’t peachy for everyone (the ski area becomes a place that only the most wealthy can afford to visit) but at least the problem of understaffing is solved.
1. Towns are located in space constrained location that you mostly want to reserve for paying guests 2. It is a seasonal business and cannot guarantee wages throughout the year 3. The jobs can be very hard to do 4. A large portion of the staff is full of young people who want to ski a lot and make money to support the lifestyle
In fact, ski towns and resorts do much more for workers than you realize
1. Beyond wages, you get subsidized housing and food either on prem (If your job is crucial enough) or in the nearby towns 2. Resorts pay for a continuous well oiled public transport system better than all of the country, mostly to make sure the employees can come in on time very easily. In certain locations, these rides are free or subsidized to employees 3. For the young kids that take up jobs on resorts because they just want to ski for a couple months, if they're employees, they get access to the lifts and other perks that supports their hobby. 4.Some resorts also guarantee year long pay and better benefits if you are one of the specialized staff (the person who operates the snow plow up the mountain)
Ski resorts rely heavily on H2-B visas (temporary foreign workers) but as more and more companies recognized the benefits of such workers, the total number of applications grew far beyond the available visas... meaning ski resorts get fewer and fewer successful applications granted.
Epic Passes have significantly lowered the cost of a season ski pass. Getting a free pass was a big part of the wage equation when such passes were very expensive -- less so when they only cost about 700.
Since the pandemic, housing prices in secondary/tertiary locations has exploded, more than in central cities. Lake Tahoe area, for example, is through the roof... decent housing is in such demand that it's unaffordable.
When restaurant servers don't get any tips it makes steady-wage jobs like warehouses or grocery stores relatively more appealing compared to customer-facing jobs.
Not a great cycle.
Tips are better for the business, because it lets them price-differentiate, and thus serve more customers. The more meals a restaurant serves, the more money it gets, regardless of how well or poorly the customers tip.
Over the past 40 years, businesses had a lot more bargaining power than service workers, and have obviously optimized their operations in a way that benefits their bottom line.
If you don't like these outcomes, you have a few options.
1. You can curtail business bargaining power by empowering workers.
2. You can curtail business bargaining power across the board, by raising wage and benefit floors through legislature.
3. You can curtail the rising delta between service wages and living costs, by having someone else (the middle class, the rich, corporations, Uncle Bezos, importers, ???) pay for the difference.
4. You can curtail the rising delta between service wages and living costs, by setting price ceilings on living costs through legislature.
5. You can curtail the rising delta between service wages and living costs, by bringing costs down, via creating a competing low-cost provider through legislature.
... Or you can shrug your shoulders, and just pay your 20-25% gratuity for the exact same level of service that used to earn a 10% gratuity.
It doesn't make it good, at a system level.
Isn't a dacha a summer house?
Since it's an Eastern European term, and since winter in much of Eastern Europe sucks, it's commonly associated with a seasonal summer home - but can refer to any vacation property.
20% is an easy mental calculation, so that's what I do most often these days. I round up to the next dollar or sometimes next multiple of 5 depending on the total amount of the check.
The graph at the bottom of this article may be interesting this context, it's from 2014, but it's all I could find with a quick search: https://www.epi.org/publication/waiting-for-change-tipped-mi...
The tipped minimum wage hasn't changed since 1991. At around 88-89, the difference (in 2014 dollars) between tipped minimum wage and the minimum wage was 40% in 2014 it was 71%.
That depends on the state. For example, all west coast states have the same minimum wage regardless of tipped or non-tipped. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
> In the state of Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, same minimum wage are applied for both tipped and non-tipped employees. Tips collected by employees in these states will not offset employer's obligation to pay the wage, and tips is the additional income beyond the wage paid by employer.
It amazes me that people can't calculate this, even roughly. Its a tip, it doesn't need to be exact
/s because the ship has sailed.
Do you tip the cashier at the grocery store? What about the people replenishing the shelves? Why not?
The only people who would be shafted are servicepeople, not owners. Even with a successful boycott servicepeople would still be getting paid less, even if from the owner's pockets.
What pressure do you imagine would reach those in power? Why are you trying to shove market-based thinking where obviously no reason exists?
Tipping is an unegotiated unilateral contract. It is basically a power trip.
A local restaurant chain here adverised that they had increased staff salary and would automatically charge 15% (normal tip around here) of the bill for service to everybody to compensate. This way, the prices on the menu stayed competitive with other restaurants, they were able to pay their staff better, and customers would end up paying the same as before. They had to stop the experiment within a month of two because people stopped going to their restaurants. Why? What's the difference? Basically people no longer had their little power trip.
Yeah the tips-being-power-trip thing holds true too. People love to make their opinions known. But of course so few of the things customers usually have issues with are the server's fault: food's not cooked right, rice costs extra, etc. Customers take their anger out on servers and the owner/manager doesn't care either way because they're still getting paid.
No, fast food workers shouldn't be tipped. No one "should" be tipped. If people are paid a living wage then scrabbling for tips becomes obsolete and tipping leaves the realm of "should" and progresses closer to its Platonic ideal of being a purely voluntary act used to express exceptional appreciation for a job well done.
Do you tip cashiers at the grocery store? It'd be really easy, why are you not doing it?
it would be more compelling if you made arguments to explain your statements of certainty, and left out the weird generalizations about "typical HN comment" as if HN is some monolith as opposed to a discussion board comprised of individual commenters
Maybe you mean to say that the base hourly rate was not inflation adjusted?