No tip says "I am an asshole"

Very small tip says "You are an asshole/incompetent"

It is a deliberate insult.

And who cares if an asshole thinks you're an asshole? If someone is a complete asshole to you for no good reason, don't reward them. This is giving them way too much space to live inside your head. It smacks of a guilty conscience on the part of the victim when it should be the other way around. But in the absence of that, the least you can do is spend your money on people who will do better with it.

There are many shades between someone who is grumpy, having a bad day, in the weeds, maybe doesn't smile but still brings your food and gets the job done well (I've been this person), vs someone that directly insults you while bringing it cold after clearly ignoring you for a prolonged period (I've had this happen to me–guess what? No tip for you!).

I look at the converse situation the same way. I get pissed when places bend over backwards to accommodate customers who clearly are assholes and exploit the fact that corporates will hand out gift cards, regardless of the absurdity of the complaint or the inappropriateness of their behavior. Why would you invite someone like that back?

Signed, waiter in America for 7 years. I was stiffed twice in that time, once by an entire family that skipped the entire bill, the other by a rowdy table I had to cut off from alcohol who then threatened to shoot me after my shift. Once or twice I had some foreign tourists tip me like 4%. Even then, I averaged maybe 19% tips over the entire tenure. Everywhere from dives to white linen tables with 4 different glasses and forks; chains and indie. Never more than $2.13/hr salary.

I've never heard what parent poster said. But now that I have, I must say that I didn't think the foreign tourists thought I was an asshole or incompetent, as everything went swimmingly between us, and I also didn't think they were assholes. I worked with a ton of people who complained plenty about that kind of thing, profiled people, etc. I still wonder to this day whether the family that skipped had some sort of emergency to tend to. It sucked at the time, I wound up having to pay it out of pocket, but in the end I made bank overall. C'est la vie.

That's all to say, the world isn't so black and white, learn how to spot outliers on either side of the average, and reward the good and disincentivize the bad as best as you can. And don't get too caught up in what you think assholes' opinions of you might be.

I don't understand such (American?) tipping system

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

Of course, very convenient to state that they don't, or that the "owner" doesn't pay them the mandated difference if their tips don't add up to minimum wage, etc.

Instead of just cancelling the ride, he reported me for being maskless in order to get a free cancellation that didn't hurt his driver profile. When I wrote Uber Support to explain I was wearing a mask (and had completed a mask-photo before I could request my next ride), they lectured me on mask-wearing and essentially accused me of lying. Note that I have a 4.9 star rating over 5,000+ Uber rides, so it's not like I'm an infrequent customer or repeat trouble maker.

No need for a ban, I'm outta this hellhole.

When I get frustrated by inexplicable behavior of strangers, Hanlon's Razor helps a little distancing myself and limit the pain brooding about it would cause...

"Non masked rider" is probably a way of getting a fee back or invalidating a bad review or something.

The more you question this norm, the higher the likelihood for change to more healthy business practice.

I am sure they would be all for a $15/hour minimum wage, as long as tips were still on the table. However, $15/hour and “we don’t accept tips” sign…you would get a big nope. I doubt you could convince them that it would be better for them to earn $300 for their 20 hours of work.

In Europe we are still tipping, but the waiters do not depend on it. This is a much sweeter situation if you ask me, voluntary good service, vs. forced good service, when you have to worry about rent for the next month.

The question of should their employer pay them more per hour? Well, I think the market does a pretty good job of managing that, especially now that in many places in the country restaurants are having a hard time finding the help they need. If I need a server, and my offer is I’ll guarantee them at least $10/hour…that is going to attract workers to me over the restaurant next door offering only $7.5/ hour. If I am fully staffed with good servers, I can attract the customers who will pay my tip earners for me compared to the place next door with lousy service.

I was like.....but surely.....the whole idea of a tip is to reward good service, right? If the service was bad, then why would you tip?

I still think about it sometimes. It's like the whole idea of tipping "maybe" started with good intentions(rewarding good service) but now transformed into some kind of idiotic virtue signalling(because at the end of the day, what if we look like jerks for not tipping? literally none of us will ever enter this restaurant again, the only thing we achieved by tipping was rewarding bad service, nothing more nothing less).

Unfortunately, minimum wage laws in the US have exemptions for workers who are expected to make most of their money through tips, which means that most restaurants pay them well under the "minimum". The question I'd ask in this situation isn't whether the service was good, but whether it was so bad that I think the employees involved don't deserve to even get paid minimum wage. I've yet to ever come to the conclusion that no tip is deserved, and in practice I struggle to think of any circumstance in which the service could be bad enough to deserve that. I guess if I was actually physically harmed due to malicious intent or something then it would maybe warrant that, but I don't think I'd realistically stick around to even eat in that case.

But ensuring the minimum wage is paid should be the responsibility of the employer, not some random customer. Everything is backwards here.

Minimum wage is still the floor. The restaurant has to pay the difference if they are under.

No waiter would accept minimum wage in lieu of tips. This is all bogus talk.

Not sure what the real point of this is but I wish people remembered that in the restaurant hierarchy servers are nowhere near the bottom.

Some folks are making around minimum wage anyway, and some employers steal tips. At least a steady wage gets you something easier to fall back on.

It should be said that minimum wage is low enough that fast food often pays more. So yes, you are correct that minimum wage isn't competitive enough. You'd have to pay more.

Few might trade tips for minimum wage, but trading tips for a steady income? Sure. No more getting shafted. No more getting stuck with low-tipping shifts because someone else is more liked by the manager (folks get punished with low-tip-earning shifts). Customers won't be able to have so much leverage over you because they will no longer be directly responsible for your week's wages.

Not if the wait-person believes that their low pay + tips averages out to a good amount more than the steady income would.

some restaurants have slow days, and the waitstaff doesn't have a choice. They get minimum wage because there are no tips, or there are so few customers as to make the tips meaningless vs the hours spent.

Actually you just made it bogus, by bringing up a strawman argument. Who mandates that waiters should only be paid minimum wage? Or that they would have to yield tips in exchange for a fixed wage?

Unless of course you think people who are bad servers don't deserve to make minimum wage.

I think that it shouldn't be the customers responsibility to even know what the server is making, and logically it shouldn't be their responsibility to make sure they are paid X or Y. You come in, order food, pay for the food, leave. The business owner should be responsible to keep their employees compensated well enough that they don't want to leave.

But like I said in another comment - the situation in US is a result of literally decades of social conditioning, where the population has been told by business owners that it's their(customers) responsibility to make sure that service workers are compensated well enough to not be in poverty, and it's your personal responsibility to tip or the person will starve.

It's gotten to the point where people make this argument in absolute earnest, and truly believe what they say, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. It really is a marvel of social engineering, and a boon for American businesses I'm sure.

>>because even though things didnt meet your expectations doesn't mean you should take advantage of the fact that the state makes it legal to pay servers only $2 an hour

That actually furthers my point above - the side taking advantage of $2 minimum wage is the employer, not the customer.

> It's gotten to the point where people make this argument in absolute earnest

Because the way the pay works at the moment is the way the pay works at the moment, and we tip based on that. The fact that people believe the pay _shouldn't_ work that way is no excuse for not tipping your wait staff at all _today_.

> That actually furthers my point above - the side taking advantage of $2 minimum wage is the employer, not the customer.

Not really, at least not in most cases. If tips went away and the employer paid more, the prices of the meals would go up to compensate. The restaurant owners aren't making more money because of the current system; most of them aren't making a large profit. The owners aren't paying sub-minimum wage because they want to pocket the difference; they're doing it because to do otherwise would drive them out of business (because their competition is also doing it). You need to change the rules for everyone in order for almost anyone to do better.

There are so many instances where the government allows people to be exploited here in America. If youre taking advantage of that and exploiting them -- you are a part of the problem -- it is that simple.

The only side expliting anyone here is the employers exploiting their employees. It's that simple. But we don't have to agree on this.

>> If you disagree with tipping then dont go to a restaraunt in a state that requires it.

Like I said in my comment above, I was only visiting America - and I did tip while I was there, for your information.

>> Your self righteous arguments fall on deaf ears of people who work for tips and have to put up with jerks like you.

All I have done so far is made my arguments here on HN, not sure that deserves being called a jerk.

Why should the responsibility of paying a bonus (a tip) to the server fall on the customer? Why shouldn't the business be held responsible for paying them the bonus? As someone from Europe, I find it difficult to wrap my head around the fact that it is somehow customer's responsibility to pay them a bonus/tip even if there has been a bad service. In my mind it should clearly be the responsibility of the business to pay them what they deserve.

Sorry for being obstuse but I still don't understand. How as a customer I would know whether the place where I ate at is paying less than minimum wage or not?

Can one really claim that when, in the same breath, one also claims tips are near-mandatory?

What this situation actually means is that the business entices you in with a low price in the menu, but that price is only tangentially related to the amount I end up paying when it comes time to pay. The thing that is "lower" is not the amount of money that leaves my wallet at the end of the meal, and I am never told up front what that total will be. This is actually true of most transactions in the US, because taxes also work in a similar fashion.

Elsewhere, the norms are different. In some places, when, as a customer, you see a price for goods and services, that is exactly the amount of money you pay; it is the responsibility of whoever is setting the price to set it at an appropriate level so they can appropriately compensate whatever third parties they need to compensate. In other places, the norm might be to haggle; but even there you know what the agreed total will be before you receive the goods or services.

That said, the US approach is actually not entirely an unfamiliar experience to Europeans: budget airlines operate on the same principle of "quote low price up front then the customer pays way more at the end for things that are technically but not really optional" here - and we hate those just as much.

Instead the state and the restaurant should take advantage of you and the employee?

You say this as a bad thing, as if basically every other country doesn't do this?

No but I do think the establishment has the responsibility to list the actual price of services rendered

Of course this is coming from an European, so the whole tipping culture is foreign to me.

It's not my job to fix laws and it's not my job to make sure a person has a good wage.

https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...

Once you use this definition, everything becomes much simpler.

Only if use a similar newspeak definition for "simpler".

I wouldn’t say the IK really has a tipping culture. We do it in restaurants occasionally, especially ones where drinking is a big part of it, but nobody will get annoyed if you don’t. My daughters work part time waitressing at a restaurant near us that’s pretty expensive and sells a lot of cocktails and such, and they sometimes come home with £30 in tips.

On the continent it used to be required. Waiters at cafes would get very upset if you didn’t tip, or didn’t tip enough. The guys that helped with luggage at hotels too. Then it just stopped. You still can and some do, but the passive aggressive pressure just went, everywhere as far as I can tell.

My friends and I still leave tips when service is exceptionally good.

Do Americans apply the same logic to other areas of life? If your plumber comes over and messes up the installation completely so you have water leaking every time you use a shower, do you still pay them full price for the service? After all maybe they just had a bad day, and that shouldn't condemn them to poverty?

Of course I'm reducing it to some absurdity, but to adress your argument in seriousness - it's incredible to me that American businesses managed to successfully shift the perception of responsibility to you(customers) rather than business owners. It's a result of decades of conditioning and being told that it's up to YOU, the customer, to make sure our employees are not "condemed to poverty". It's a feat of social engineering really.

This is a wrong analogy. If the plumber came in pissed off and was swearing all the time but got the job done then yes I would pay. Would probably not call him again if I was that bothered.

If I got served uncooked food I would not pay, but if the waiter was rude and I had to wait long I'll still tip them - less then I would otherwise.

And context is a lot here as well - if I see the place is packed and there's like two people doing a shift I can understand they are stressed out and I'm waiting longer cause it's super busy.

Am European and honestly feel like tipping vs not tipping says more about you than it does about the service. When I see someone penny counting at the restaurant it usually makes me think less about them. I don't like socialising with miserly people (if I think you have the money to cover it, naturally). Depends on the setting too, if it's just grabbing lunch at the cafeteria then I just pay by card and usually don't tip, but when it's a social thing then yeah - it's a luxury thing you do and share with others.

Dining out simply isn’t just about being fed. The restaurant can’t just say “hey you consumed the calories, so MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!”

If I have a bad experience, I’m being stiffed by the establishment. I mean think what else is baked into the food’s sticker price: restaurant decor, music, ambiance, etc. Those are things you’re paying for. It’s why the price of food is higher than the grocery store.

On the other hand I don't go to normal restaurants to get entertained by waiters, and they have to be pretty terrible to cross the threshold where they are affecting my experience to the point where I'd leave (failing their purpose like the plumber example).

That's all good but why does this logic apply to the customers and not the business owners?

Which is brilliant, because 1. they are able to show "discounted" food prices on the menu, with the expectation that the customer will end up paying an extra 20% in tip and x% in taxes on top of it 2. they can pay their staff less than they would have to otherwise.

The consumer gets screwed. The staff gets screwed. The business owner does ok, but the restaurant industry is pretty rough anyway, so it's unclear if they're laughing all the way to the bank anyway.