Better to be rid of tips altogether. Businesses subsidizing their employee’s wages by exploiting their patrons is bullshit. Just fucking pay people a livable wage.
I hate that the primary reason this can’t be done is because of a combination of how stupid American consumers are and because way more servers than will admit are bad at maths and think they would need to be paid $30 an hour to make the same as if they were tipped.
Eat a dish that costs $15, tip $3, no problem. Abolish tipping, raise the waiter’s pay and then charge $18 for the dish, now people complain about how it’s so much more expensive.
Similarly, most servers make most of their money on weekends, and on those days the pay can shoot up into the high $30-40 range, but then you have the weekdays where it’s just a slog earning half of that. On top of that almost every server I know dodges tax on their cash tips or would dodge tax if their employer didn’t have a system set up that prevented it.
There’s a burger place in my city that has a sign proudly saying “No tips allowed”. The food is good, actually, but nobody I know wants to go there because “they charge $12 for a burger”. And now I haven’t been there for so long that I’ve forgotten its name and I don’t even know if they’re still open. I hope they are and are doing well, but this is in the same country where a ⅓ pound burger was outcompeted by a ¼ pound burger because people thought ⅓ < ¼
