Tipping should be for exceptional service. Nobody should need tips to make ends meet.

This is heavily diluted when you expect tips for anything else, and it makes it very obvious it's just a hidden fee that may or may not even be going to the workers. Wage theft is the largest type of theft in the US, and a non-insignificant amount comes from tip pooling schemes where owners and managers take a dip.

I tip my barber because they took extra time and attention to ensure I had the perfect hair cut and beard shaping to look good in my workplace or on a date, or whatever. I am not generically tipping for having done a business transaction, the person who took my appointment over the phone is not the person who cut my hair. I am giving a thank you gift to the barber because they took time and attention for /me/ /personally/.

FWIW, I appreciated restaurants that had a menu option to buy a round of beers for the kitchen. I would do that every time it was presented to me, above and beyond a tip. To me, when I tip someone who rendered me a personal service (especially a service where I have a conversation with them), it's me saying "I'd buy you a beer and say thank you, but I can't do that right now and you have other customers, so here's some cash as a thank you.".

Diluting that meaning eliminates the reason I'm willing to tip in the first place.

That's a direct 1-1 transaction. You are getting a hair cut, so if it's good, you'll come back. If it's bad you won't. Charge what it costs and give the best service possible.

Granted if they go above and beyond maybe I would tip (buy yourself a beer as you say, but it would have to be more than "they cut my hair").

That's the slippery slope though, whereby if you don't tip you are deemed to not be happy with the service, and so the emotional imperative is to tip to not offend.

Possibly related, I moved last Summer and it took me until January to find a barber I've now been to repeatedly. I have really high expectations and before moving I had been going to the same shop in my previous city for more than a decade, and was on a first-name basis with my barber there and his wife and eldest son and sometimes hung out with him outside of work (mutual interest in classic cars). For me, the tip is absolutely a direct and personal thank you gift, because I have very high standards not many people can meet, and few that do get it right the first time and as a matter of course. I generally tip well, though.

All barber shops are different, but usually the person cutting your hair is renting space from the owner of the shop, who may set prices. You can use this knowledge to affect your willingness to tip (or not), just in case you're not tipping because of an assumption that may or may not be valid.

> charge for what it costs

I think that's a bit tricky, I don't think the true cost of a haircut is fixed day to day. On slow business days when there is no line, a slow and careful haircut doesn't really 'cost more' than a quick haircut because the daily throughput is the same. But on days when there are a lot of people lining up for cut, slow haircuts will reduce throughput and therefore have an opportunity cost. (This is for a walk-ins only barber.)

In America, this is the law. It’s poorly enforced, unfortunately.

Now, while individual state may have their own laws around minimum wages above the federal minimum, I find the idea that there two in the first place abhorrent. The current rates are US$7.25 and US$2.13. Neither are remotely livable, but the one for tipped staff is essentially peonage.

So no, this isn't a matter for enforcement. The law is set up to encourage this behaviour.

In effect if the law is actually enforced the minimum wage is $7.25 for both tipped and non-tipped workers, but if you are tipped the first $5.12 of tips goes to the employer.

My understanding is that enforcement of this is not the best.

Also, wage theft is a huge issue in the US (and part of the problem is tipped employees not receiving the difference between what they actually made and the minimum wage) and is poorly enforced - https://wageadvocates.com/wage-theft-huge-problem-infographi...

0 - https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/faq/esa/flsa/002.htm

Here's a law in PA: https://www.dli.pa.gov/Individuals/Labor-Management-Relation....

Minimum should be just that: minimum. For higher COL cities, the minimum (and tipped minimum, with an obligation to make the minimum if tips prove insufficient) should be higher.

Raising the minimum nationwide to New York City’s COL basically depopulates lower COL places; this is a source of generally misrepresented rural backlash against these broad-based schemes. Imagine if Germany and Greece had the same minimum wage; the latter would get screwed.

(Not arguing that the federal minimum shouldn’t be raised. Just that it should be too low for most of the country, because if it isn’t, it’s too high for some, and that’s a policy failure for a minimum. I haven’t seen a scheme for a dynamic federal minimum; that would make sense.)

In my wasteland of a state, TN, our minimum wage has not increased a single cent since 2009, and it is still the same as the Federal Minimum Wage at $7.25.

You make it sound like an acceptable practice. What's your reasoning behind not questioning these "customs"?

If you do not like it, get out.

I remember being confused about paying both a service charge and a tip around 2002 or so in Maryland.

Service charge is like not tipping, actually I kinda prefer this to having to look the cashier in the eye and choose which tip button.

The biggest issue is it is mandatory and its impersonal. If it's mandatory and impersonal, it's /not/ a tip, and it shouldn't be percentage based. If the business wants to raise prices, raise prices. Tacking on additional costs that are not correctly and appropriately represented in the price is basically fraud, and it's doubly uncouth because my understanding is that most businesses don't give this service charge to the workers, it's just treated as revenue.

As a European living in the USA, the distinction always seemed made up for me. If someone delivers a take-out order, why is that less worthy of tipping, than if you're in a restaurant? What about the person who bundles the order together for delivery? What about the person doing the cooking? Etc etc etc.

The answer is that you're used to tipping at a restaurant and never questioned it, but when some other tipping is introduced you rightly recognize it as an abuse.

It's not. If you were at the restaurant, you'd tip the server. If you were home, you'd tip the deliverer. If you picked it up yourself, why then you could tip yourself :)

> you're using to tipping at a restaurant and never questioned it

Now that's a bold assumption :) How about, tipping at a restaurant is part of the culture, and many people do so begrudgingly?

Dissecting this meme reveals that people are comfortable tipping for the act of waiting on them (the so-called service). The person who cooks and the person who bundles supposedly serve the institution, and so they should be paid by the institution.

Or so it would seem. The waiter and the driver also ultimately work for the institution, so one could argue that they, too, should be paid adequately by the institution. Tips should be reserved for exceptional service to you beyond what they're expected to perform for the institution.

So if the cashier at the takeout place made you happy and you wanted to tip him/her for that... you could knock yourself out. It's worthy of tipping because you felt like it.

This does not match my experience at all. You may see tip jars in those places, but there is never an expectation (in the soft-obligation sense) that anybody tip into any tip jar ever. The only place where tips are considered soft-obligatory are waitresses and food delivery, and in those cases you leave the tip on the table or hand it to the person yourself. Tipping into jars may be desired but is never expected.

Are you perhaps an immigrant to or tourist of America? I can see how foreigners might get confused by the tip jars and not pick up on this nuance since it isn't explicitly spelled out anywhere on the jar, but I don't think people integrated into American culture perceive any sort of obligation to tip into jars. If you sit in a shop and watch people order, you'll surely see that the overwhelming majority of people never put anything into the jar.

(From what I have seen in Canada, all of this is true there as well. Tips for waitresses are socially obligatory, while tips into jars are not.)

I don't think tipping on those screens is considered soft-obligatory in America, but maybe I'm guilty of a few social faux pas in Canada..

> This does not match my experience at all. You may see tip jars in those places, but there is never an expectation (in the soft-obligation sense) that anybody tip into any tip jar ever. The only place where tips are considered soft-obligatory are waitresses and food delivery, and in those cases you leave the tip on the table or hand it to the person yourself.

What about taxis? I've been harassed by taxi drivers when I forgot to add a tip because I've not been in a country with tipping for a while.

> Are you perhaps an immigrant to or tourist of America? I can see how foreigners might get confused by the tip jars and not pick up on this nuance since it isn't explicitly spelled out anywhere on the jar, but I don't think people integrated into American culture perceive any sort of obligation to tip into jars. If you sit in a shop and watch people order, you'll surely see that the overwhelming majority of people never put anything into the jar.

I don't know where in the US you are but every time I'm in california all the electronic payment systems (essentially an Ipad running some special software) ask you for a tip when paying by card. The minimum selection unless putting in manually is usually 15%. I haven't seen a top jar in the US in ages, they are very common in countries without tipping culture like Australia and NZ (funnily enough I feel much more inclined to put something in those instead of tipping in the US).

The lines are so blurry

As I said, it's not black and white.

And don't get me wrong, I'd ban tipping if it was possible.