Would fucking love it if we just got rid of tipping all together. Employers -not customers- should be responsible for providing employees good pay.
Factor the difference into up front price of the food/service and be done with it.
Tipping was never the problem, subsidizing owner profits out of worker pay was.
Tipping is freedom of expression for the customer. Wage is the obligation of the employer.
If it isn’t a living wage the company shouldn’t exist. Full stop.
But it should be a hard opt-in, no “decline tip” bullshit, social engineering is still at issue
If Businesses don’t get a share of tips Square’s model dies and SE with it.
That said their model dies if you grow a pair to hit zero tip and backcharge on poisoned delivery.
Social engineering only works in this situation if you are a bitch.
Definitely. In my country, tipping aren’t expected but it’s a pleasant thing to receive in service industry, in US of A, tipping is expected and people will vehemently defend the status quo.
It’s expected because waiters can’t make minimum wage without it. It’s not defended because people like that waiters are paid so little, it’s defended because they’re paid so little and politicians, until now, have seemed to have no interest in changing that. Like so many things in this country, the people have to come up with a patchwork solution just to keep others alive because the politicians don’t care.
So yes, I will defend tipping until this is fixed everywhere in the U.S. And I doubt it will be fixed any time soon. I’ll be surprised if it’s even fixed in these five states.
and people will vehemently defend the status quo.
Well, server employees will, because they don’t want to deal with the loss of pay and/or the upheaval in their salary intake. No one likes a negative change to how they make a living and pay the bills.
Having said that, generally speaking, is it people, or ““people”” (aka corpo shills/bots) that are defending the status quo? Certain corporations have a big interest in maintaining the status quo and shaping the narrative towards that end.
We’re not defending the status quo we’re stuck with it. But yes, going to another country and ignoring their customs would make people look at you like an asshole because you’re being an asshole unless you genuinely didn’t know. We’re not dancing around delighting in tipping people. We just know that not tipping hurts absolutely nobody except the server. Maybe you’re comfy with making someone else suffer to prove a point but I’m not.
Unless “we” change it via legislation, that’s never going to happen. Let’s explore how it would play out as an individual restaurant initiative:
Restaurant raises staff wages, raises prices to cover the increase. Even if you disclose it on the menu, customers don’t care: they see prices 20% higher, they choose to eat somewhere with cheaper menu prices. This is frequently what happens when restaurants try to do that.
If the restaurant increases server wages less than what they would make in tips, the servers will leave for another restaurant. The benefit of tips is that the harder you work, and more tables you take, the more money you make. Good servers can make $50+ an hour if they hustle.
Source: 8 years experience in the industry.
The benefit of tips is that the harder you work, and more tables you take, the more money you make. Good servers can make $50+ an hour if they hustle.
I shouldn’t be paying my server’s wage; the restaurant should.
Name one other job (that isn’t in the food service industry) where the buyers subsidize the worker’s salary voluntarily.
Literally every other contractor. But that’s irrelevant to the point.
This is the way it is. Whether or not it’s a good system, it’s the system which exists. Changing the system will require a transition. If that transition comes from individual restaurants changing their policy, they will have 1) staffing issues as no server will stay when they could make more elsewhere, 2) customer issues as customers will prefer restaurants with lower menu prices, even if the total is the same.
This isn’t a value judgement, or a defense, this is a statement of fact. The only change that will stock would have to come from legislation. Societal systems have considerable inertia.
The only people who have the power to eliminate tipping are the customers. Even if employers randomly started paying servers $50 an hour, people could still tip…and many probably would to get that feeling of moral superiority. And that is sort of irrelevant anyway because how the fuck are the customers supposed to know the servers wage anyway? I literally have no idea what my server (or hostess or line cook or after hours cleaning crew staff) makes at the last place I ate at. Do you?
It’s really not complicated. If customers stopped tipping, and servers can’t support themselves and therefore they are forced to quit and move towards literally any other industry with a higher/stable wage. Then employers either go out of business altogether or, more realistically, raise wages to replace those workers who quit since the employer would like to keep making money instead of not making money. And thus, menu prices go up to account for the lack of tipping.
No one has ever been able to provide me a scenario where tipping ends without servers quitting due to inadequate/unstable income. But I’m certainly open to suggestions!
Couriers (DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc.) are not employees. They are contractors.
There is no minimum wage for contractors. The base pay for these services don’t quite cover the $0.655 per mile that the IRS allows drivers to claim in travel expenses. The only money these drivers actually take home is customer tips.
If you, as a customer, do not believe in tipping couriers directly, that’s perfectly fine, so long as you DO NOT use these services. As these drivers operate almost exclusively on tips, using these services without tipping is socially equivalent to begging in the streets.
As these drivers operate almost exclusively on tips, using these services without tipping is socially equivalent to begging in the streets.
Imagine a system so broken you say shit like this lol.
They’re employees being exploited by a loophole. DoorDash n’ friends are predatory businesses, and are a great example of why we need better regulations on this kind of shit.
It’s not a loophole or predatory, it’s just something the people doing these one-off job knowingly agreed to. I myself certainly agreed to it years back each and every time I accepted another order. The key was to not agree to orders that don’t make any fucking sense. It was all optional.
I don’t know how we could ever regulate away the issue of people who decide not to act in their own best interest. Probably best to focus on education or something?
This is why I don’t use those services. They are both predatory, and taking advantage of regulatory loopholes
They do need to be fixed somehow though. I have elderly relatives with mobility issues who can really benefit from these services. Beyond more transparency and fixing the regulatory gaps, I don’t k ow how to make it both more fair to the gig worker and more affordable to those who need it though.
Maybe a subscription model? I’d pay Uber Eats a fixed price for my Mom to get as much delivery as she needs, assuming an even playing field we’re established
The “contractor” model is valid. When you hire a kid to shovel your driveway, for example, you are not “employing” that kid; you are contracting him to perform a specific task. Landscapers, builders, roofers, plumbers, lawyers, accountants, DJs, wedding planners… Most small businesses operate on a contractor basis.
The real issue with these services is one of semantics. DoorDash gives drivers a few pieces of information. They are told where the pickup location will be, where the dropoff location will be, the total distance they will have to drive, and, critically, the total amount of money they can expect to receive for performing that task. The driver is (ostensibly) free to accept or reject that offer. DoorDash may bundle (“stack”) your delivery task with other delivery tasks and offer the entire bundle as a single task.
In a contractual arrangement, the money offered in compensation for performance of a task is the “consideration”. The offering of money in exchange for a service is a “bid”. That’s the semantic issue: most of the money being offered to the driver is being called a “tip”. It does meet the IRS definition of a “tip”, but it does not meet the colloquial use of that term.
DoorDash is not actually a courier service. DoorDash does not operate a single vehicle used for package delivery to customers. DoorDash is a broker of courier services. DoorDash connect customers to vendors and drivers. DoorDash takes the customer’s task and offer of compensation and offers it to contract drivers. If they find a match, the customer gets their food. If they can’t find a match, it sits on the vendor’s shelf until closing, then gets thrown away.
You and your elderly relatives are free to use the service. You can use it ethically, simply by understanding that what they are calling a “tip” is actually a “bid” to the driver. So long as you are placing a reasonable “bid”, your use of the service is fair and ethical.
I don’t see how it’s my responsibility to give my money that I earned doing my job to someone else for doing their job and I shouldn’t have to avoid the service because of that. If I want to use the service I should be able to because, why not, I want to. I shouldn’t give that up just because someone wants me to pay their wages.
A kid comes to your door, asks you what you would be willing to pay for his older brother to shovel your driveway. The older brother is going to be doing the job; the kid is asking you what you are willing to pay. Is it your “responsibility” to “give your money that you earned doing your job” to the older brother for shoveling your drive?
DoorDash is not a courier service. DoorDash is not shoveling your driveway. DoorDash owns and operates neither a shovel nor a delivery vehicle. DoorDash is a broker of courier services. DoorDash is the little kid, asking you what you’re willing to pay. The drivers are the older brother actually doing the work.
Paying DoorDash’s delivery fees and not offering a tip is the equivalent of paying that little kid $3, offering nothing to the older brother who will actually be doing the work. and still expecting your driveway to be shoveled.
The older brother is forced to honor the agreement the kid made with you. If he doesn’t, the kid will have to give back the $3 he got from you. The kid will then pout and refuse to line up any additional work for the older brother. The brother “tolerates” this, because most customers are reasonable people and either offer a reasonable amount for the older brother, or decline the service entirely. The older brother makes all kinds of money from reasonable people.
If the “reasonable people will pay the older brother” argument isn’t enough, continue the analogy: the kid got money from you. The kid is going to keep trying to get your business so he keeps getting money from you. But the older brother isn’t getting paid for his work.
You’ve found a loophole where you can get your driveway shoveled without paying the guy doing the shoveling. The kid wants to keep doing business with you, but it would be far better for the older brother if you never talked to the kid again. So, you’re going to get your driveway shoveled for a pittance, but all that snow is going to end up in front of your door, or burying your car.
What do you suppose would happen if everyone all at once just stopped tipping and kept using the service? Like I’m serious, what do you actually think would happen?
I think DoorDash would convert it’s drivers to employees. I think those employees would earn less than they did as contractors. I think DD would be forced to offer healthcare and similar benefits, which would be contingent on continued employment, making them extortion rather than benefits. I think they would use those benefits as a bargaining chip to secure non-compete clauses. I think employed workers would be strictly limited to 40-hour weeks at lower pay, with rigid schedules. I think they would enact quotas, and strict deadlines.
I think employee drivers will be pissing in bottles to meet quotas and deadlines. I think instead of stacks of 2-3 orders, they will be stacking 5-8 orders, and delivery times will be longer and longer. I think employee DoorDash drivers will be treated as employee Amazon drivers.
I think that switching to an employment model would hurt drivers and customers, and benefit DoorDash and vendors.
Thing is, no one would accept to pay what’s written on the menu if they charged enough to cover what people pay in tip, it’s all psychological manipulation.
Prices would need to increase by about 20% and you wouldn’t have a choice to pay it anymore, contrary to tips. Or you accept that servers now only make minimum wage.
That’s interesting. In It works all across the world exactly how you say it wouldn’t work.
To be fair, in the rest of the world there aren’t tipped establishments competing with next door no-tipping establishments. People are bad at math, a menu of $13 + tip options seems cheaper at a glance than a menu of $15 no tip options. We are talking about the country where the 1/3rd pounder burger failed after all
Service expectations across the world are drastically lower than in the US.
Do servers make over 70k/year everywhere in the world?
That’s something people don’t realize in North America, restaurant servers make fucking bank! If they complain about not having money it’s because of the restaurant culture of going out after every shift.
That’s the thing though, they already charge enough to cover what people pay in tip but guess what? That doesn’t make them enough money. Next time they raise prices. They won’t take responsibility for it, they’ll blame it on the economy, but never the owners and shareholders that are making more profit than ever.
As a person who’s been in the restaurant business, no, the vast majority of restaurants in North America don’t make a large enough cut to pay their servers 35$/h. Most are always a couple of bad months away from closing. There’s a reason why it’s the type of business with the highest “turnover” rate for the business itself.
Now if you want restaurants to give servers the same wage they’re making now it means all prices need to be marked up about 20% (since people tip based on price after taxes) and in the end the customers pay the same thing, they just don’t have a choice about it.
Please! For the love of God! Get rid of tipping!
I hate tipping! As the consumer I should not be responsible for proving a living wage for someone else’s employees!
as a European I have to say both the Tipping culture and the not showing the full price in stores with VAT included is just mindblowing.
It’s literally a culture of hiding true costs, weird af.
Hotels too. The advertised price is never accurate because their stupid resort fees.
It’s literally a culture of hiding true costs, weird af.
Makes me happy though in this day and age that people are waking up to this fact, and are starting to push back on it.
In the past corporations/governments thought people were a lot more unaware, than they are today.
It’s a culture of trying to get away with whatever makes the most profits. We also have that, but there are some reasonable laws working against that. One of my favourites is the duty to display per kg or per litre price. Before that, shops made the package sizes deliberately confusing.
We actually do have that in the US as well, but it’s typically in very fine print and a lot of people don’t even know about it.
It’s really not that weird at all. It’s a simple consequence of the EU having better consumer protection laws. Unfortunately the far right in the US is a lot stronger than in most of Europe and has been since the post-war era.
We also, in the US, have an old and antiquated system that was deliberately designed to be difficult to change because the founders had to convince the slave-owning class that abolition couldn’t be forced on them if they agreed to join the newly-formed union. How did they do that? You guessed it! By making the Constitution almost impossible to change, which is one reason why it required the bloodiest war in our history to end slavery.
Again, there’s nothing especially “weird” about it. As is true of a lot of contemporary reality, it’s largely a consequence of history.
Interestingly, tipping culture is also at least tangentially a product of slavery as well, but that’s a bit more complicated so I’ll save it for another comment.
And if you’re starting to suspect that a ton of what ails the US can be traced directly back to slavery, here’s a hint; you may be on to something!
That said, it was the European colonial powers who brought slavery to North America in the first place, which kind of brings us full circle.
Have lived in both eu and us.
Agree, but the challenge on tax is that it’s not harmonized across municipalities. This means that stores that are across the street from each other may have identical prices/profit margin and a different net price to the consumer. This would lead to consumer preferences biased by physical location and have lots of other weird side effects. You can see this in areas that border state lines when the tax is appreciably different.
Step one is a harmonized tax rate, but that’s easier said than done.
I was going to say this but fear of mass downvotes kept me quiet. Glad I’m not the only one. I’ve worked for tips but I’d rather just work for a reasonable wage instead, remove the guesswork and chances for abuse.
One way or another, you’re paying those employees wage. One of them doesn’t get taxed or advertised is all.
Yes and no. All tips are supposed to be reported to the IRS. Whether they are or not is not really relevant. What really matters is that the customers aren’t forced to do an owners job. If an owner needs their customers to prop up their employees then the owners shouldn’t be in business.
I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.
I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.
I think that should be the point, employees should not be taking on the risk of a business doing poorly. That’s the business owner’s responsibility and risk, to be mitigated by them. Not screwing over a waiter because it was a slow night. Or because they were unlucky to work a tuesday night over a busy Saturday night.
It’s not okay. I can hear some of my customers’ anxiety when they struggle to tip me. Some people lord it over me like I should revere them for their blessing. There is an unnecessary layer of stress to the customer service routine for everyone involved except the owner who benefits from this system. Not to mention some businesses pool their tips and share it with everyone, sometimes redirecting these funds into unscrupulous items like snacks without consent. >:(
Tips don’t motivate me to provide great customer service to my customers. Tips serve to maintain cheap labor, but more important to me is how they erect social barriers. I can’t blame someone for wanting or being motivated by tips when they’re stuck near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. I’m there too so I understand, but there’s just no reason for tips when we can get/provide great service without adding layers of paranoia; When we can provide a satisfying quality of life for everyone in the process with a not-so-simple wage increase (and God forbid, better budgeting and management from business owners).
They also in general make my job harder, especially when an old person who’s basically blind can’t find any of the buttons or follow simple directions (PRESS 3 FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MARIANNE)
I’d like to supplement that I’ve had access to my various employer’s records multiple times… because why lock the admin computer.
With my current employer, my entire wages for the month are paid for with net profits in a single day thanks to the skeleton crew we operate. I get to work knowing every other day is going straight to my boss’s luxurious life-style because it’s certainly not coming back here.
Don’t be surprised when you hear of another staff walk-out~
Fuck tips, support good living standards for everyone!
No. I actually kinda do. Like if I’m out with friends I literally get judged if I tip poorly let alone if I don’t tip at all which is social suicide.
And if I have a coupon for a meal, say 50% or something like that I still have to tip on the original amount before the discount was applied.
Moreover, and most importantly in some restaurants tipping is the only source of income the server gets. Regardless of how I feel about it I am still responsible for this person’s wage.
I hate tipping culture.
As a german the whole tip system in the US is both redicilous and hilarious to me.
We have tipping here, too (we literally call it “drinking money”). With the difference, that it’s pretty much voluntary and if you don’t have much money (e.g. as a student) noone will expect you to tip.
Having tips be part of the actual wage totally defeats the point of them…
Are you a true American if you don’t shaft your employees for every penny that you can though?
This is actually a great reason for ending tipping. I used to feel like I was on the server’s side, slipping them cash the business couldn’t steal, but I never use cash anymore so have no idea who it’s going to. Also, businesses are getting more sleazy with required “tips” and fees, and it’s all one giant tax fraud no matter which way you put it.
Actual prices on the menu are better for the customer, actual pay is better for the server, accounting for everything is better for the business and accurate reporting is better for all of us who depend on services paid for by taxes
I totally agree with you and my comment was sarcasm.
The price should be upfront and the only thing you have to pay.
Are you a true American if you don’t shaft your employees for every penny that you can though?
No, but a true Capitalist, yes.
(Sad of me to write that, as there used to be a time where companies made good products and accepted reasonable profit margins, going for the win-win scenarios. Today’s Capitalism seems all about the win-lose scenarios.)
Germans are professionals at telling other people what they’re doing wrong
https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurants-civil-war/
After the Constitution was amended in the wake of the Civil War, slavery was ended as an institution but those who were freed from bondage were still limited in their choices. Many who did not end up sharecropping worked in menial positions, such as servants, waiters, barbers and railroad porters. These were pretty much the only occupations available to them. For restaurant workers and railroad porters, there was a catch: many employers would not actually pay these workers, under the condition that guests would offer a small tip instead.
“These industries demanded the right to basically continue slavery with a $0 wage and tip,” Jayaraman says.
As an American and former tipped employee, living in a country without tips is so much better. However, there are some groups trying to make tips happen here in Japan. If you get good service, tell the manager or corporate. If you’re a regular, give them an actual small gift (this happens anyway because people exchange gifts when they go on vacation and such). If it’s a bar employee, buy them a drink. I like this much better.
“Ballot measures pending in Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Massachusetts, and a bill being reintroduced in Connecticut”. There.
So that should cover everyone in this day and age since everyone asks for a tip now /s
