Maybe not tipping at all would increase pressure for better labour laws and minimum wages and everybody could benefit from it rather than following some weird social norm of who gets the tips.

Do you tip the cashier at the grocery store? What about the people replenishing the shelves? Why not?

What? That doesn't put any pressure on the situation for better labor laws.

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?

People refusing to work for salaries that are too small, employers jack up their prices by the equivalent of what used to be tips and offer better salary.

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.

A strike makes a lot more sense then, because the workers have cause to negotiate for backpay. Withholding tips only shrinks their claim.

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.

Worth noting that waitstaff would have a lower minimum wage than cashier or shelf-stocker, with expectation that they make it up in tips, so it's not just social norm.

Not all states have a lower tipped wages though. Also should fast food workers get tipped?

Love this question because it puts the issue in very stark relief.

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.

Are you racist with some people but not others?

Do you tip cashiers at the grocery store? It'd be really easy, why are you not doing it?

The same complaint can be levelled against the "faux hubris" of your comment, but it doesn't make for great discussion.

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

And now the hyper-individualist "there is no such thing as statistical tendencies nor homogenizing feedback loops" take-haver rears its head. Welcome home, HNer.

As for the arguments you demand, I think it would be more efficient for everyone if you -- individual you! -- took up the mantle and accessed (for yourself!) the copious amounts of research and analysis present across the known universe, instead of repeating exactly the mistake that GP makes in assuming this conversation is not happening everywhere all of the time.

i made no demands, I'm not the one making the initial assertions, and you don't even have any idea to what extent we may agree/disagree on these issues

More specifically on moving the needle though, I think it was restaurants (and later, apps) optimizing their prompts to change consumer behavior.