As far as I can see, tipping is not adds frustrating unpredictability to their income, but it also exposes them to discrimination.
As a customer, I find it annoying because it makes paying for my meal a math problem, particularly when dining in a group.
I see nothing wrong with a true gratuity for stellar service, but when it's just an unwritten (or written) extra cost, it's absurd. Just charge me what it costs to pay your service people.
No, it wouldn't. It would be exactly the same. Because their employer knows exactly how much they will get in tips and subtracted that same amount from their salary. The cost of labor is constant, regardless of how you divide it.
If servers were paid entirely by the employers directly, they'd be paid the least amount that got an acceptable level of employee. Same as all other service industry jobs.
Since the payment was coming from the employer, it would be included in the meal price. Meal price is a competitive factor for restaurants, and all else being equal, those restaurants with lower meal prices will do better than equivalent restaurants with higher meal prices. The pressure to have lower meal prices would lead to lower pay for the employees. That would be one of the easiest places to cut costs, and thus prices.
Customers don't, as a rule, include tips in their evaluation of meal prices. So it removes the downward competitive pressure there.
What this really boils down to is that customers are more generous with direct payments to servers than their employers would be. Do you think this isn't true? Why?
Plenty of study shows that generosity or level of service have very little to do with tipping on the whole. People typically tip based on personal habit relative to their interpretation of local custom. (I can try to find sources if you doubt this.) I don't think there's any reason to believe that customers don't take gratuity, and tax for that matter, into account when deciding when and where to dine out.
I'm not suggesting that the situation would be the exact same for every server if tipping went away. Some would benefit, others would suffer. On the whole, it would be less discriminatory. But I don't see why we would expect to see a macro change in waitstaff income.
I suspect, given your taste and profession, that you might be talking to more servers at the kinds of places where they'd be happy to collect tips that exceeded, say, minimum wage.
People who work tipping jobs do so because they pay better on average, not because it's the only job available. Tips scale tremendously. If you work at a high-volume restaurant or, better, a restaurant with high prices, you'll be pulling in decent cash. And every once in a while, you'll get that mythican high-roller who decides to be charitable and drops a wad of cash on the table. Hell, a server at a fancy restaurant will be pulling in so much money that it would be absurd to categorize them them with other retail employees (once you get into super-fancy restaurants, serving is treated more like a concierge job than anything else).
Restaurant staff has a pecking order, much like high school. Of all the non-manager positions, servers are the most prestigious. Why? Because they make the most money.
With tips you get some clear advantages over non tipping. The waiters have a huge incentive to give you a pleasant meal experience. This is very annoying to go to a restaurant and it appears to be more complicated for you to get water than it is when you're eating at home. This is what you often experience in no-tipping-countries restaurants. The tip is like an implicit contract with the waiter: Deliver me a good service, I will pay the price.
The cons: What about the kitchen staff, the host/hostess, do they get part of the tip? What happen when the food is terrible but the service awesome, or vice versa. But most important, as acjohnson55 mentions : but it also exposes them to discrimination. Sadly discrimination is real and tipping here doesn't help.
I think you are mistaken here.
In tipping countries waiters basically beg you to leave as soon as you've eaten. They are always around you to upsell something (bigger tip) or to passive aggressively bring you your check. Eating out for only an hour is common.
In non-tipping countries however, the waiter simply leaves you alone to eat in peace. They don't ask you "Do you need anything else" every 5 minutes. People on average stay out more because of this.
Which is why you feel ignored. Different cultures.
I grew up in a non-tipping country, this isn't a culture issue when some waiters are clearly hard to find in the restaurant, good waiters will leave you alone, but when you need them they will be here, or at least know when they need to take a look from far away and see if water/bread seems lacking.
This is annoying to just be frustrated when you planned to have a good night, and know that other people are going to be frustrated by that bad waiter too.
If I am unlucky and have to get a terrible waiter, I appreciate the fact that he/she is going to provide a minimum service because of the tip.
Fortunately, for non-tipping countries, reviews like Yelp/Foursquare/... kind of help the market I think, you can see what the reviews says about the service.
More generally, if a country seems to have poor restaurant service overall, that's a cultural thing. Introducing tipping would be unlikely to change it. To think otherwise is to think that waiters are only doing their job on the hope that they get a consideration, and that without that financial lure, they'd become lazy do-nothings. And that's both highly insulting and also illogical, because there's nothing unique about the job of being a waiter that would cause people to be lazy who would otherwise perform their job adequately in every other industry.
waiters with good work ethics will offer a great service no matter if there is a tip involved in the end or not. Those with poor work ethics however would care less about providing a good service. I didn't mean to sound insulting to waiters, a lot of them do a great job, but I think that for some waiters the financial lure is important.
This is not true, in my experience. I have dined extensively in the USA and in many other countries and have not noticed any difference in the level of service provided.
I understand what you mean. I used to find it odd. But in the US it's just part of the custom. My understanding is that tipping is expected and nobody really thinks about it. I consistently tip "tax times two" in New York, regardless of the service quality.
BTW, I also don't tip based on service quality; I generally won't go back to a place if I don't like the service, but it's kind of expected that you're tipping... to the point where it's an ethical mandate.
I've come to see tipping as a form of slavery, the only twist being it's paid - albeit very lowly.
It's a way for people with money to say "Hey peasant: If you do what I want, and if I'm happy about it, and if I feel like it, I might give you a little of my money. Or not".
Sort of like a work contract where the employer has ultimate power and absolutely no rules to govern if they even have to pay their employees at all. Of course, there are labor laws against that sort of thing in developed countries, so tipping is just a way to circumvent those labor laws.
It would be much better if those people were simply paid what they should be paid by their employer in the first place, and the terms of that were bound by labor laws.
I personally feel dirty every time I tip - it almost feels like being at a strip bar or something similar.
(To be clear, I always tip, because the people in those jobs rely on it. It's not their fault I don't like the system.)