Honestly fuck the American tipping culture in general.
I tip in a lot of cases, but there are several where I wonder if I should stop - specifically in the case where I’m simply picking up food that I had ordered. I saw some people saying the “rule” is something about 10% in that case. I have no idea what others do.
I’ve heard some people tell me they never tip - period, including when dining in. Often they just seem like misanthropes and/or extremely petty and cheap; more recently, it’s been something something woke libs, “no one wants to work anymore”, Gen Z/Gen Y or some other alt-right horse manure.
However, I do wonder if I’ve been tipping too much for situations that don’t require any tipping at all.
I absolutely will not tip for carryout or counter service, and I’m a very generous tipper otherwise. The only exception is if I’m for some reason paying cash, then maybe I’ll drop the change in the bucket.
You don’t get an attaboy for pouring me a coffee or grabbing a bag off a shelf and handing it to me.
What about if they made a coffee drink (not just black)? Just curious. I’m on the fence about tipping at coffee shops already tbh
I stopped going to a restaurant after the employees said I was a shitty person for not tipping a girl who walked the food to my car $5. It was a $15 order. All she did was walk 50 feet. I get $10 an hour to break my back all day. Fuck you.
She probably got paid like $4 an hour to serve people food.
You’re not wrong for not tipping $5. She wasn’t wrong for wanted/needing/hoping for a 33% tip.
The employer is likely in the wrong for running a restaurant where it’s staff are specifically underpaid to put the burden on their customers to pay them so don’t go broke/stay broke.
So don’t work that job. Shit pay should result in nobody working there.
It shouldn’t result in an expectation of the customers to pay your wage in an unspoken random amount on top of their bill
So don’t work that job. Shit pay should result in nobody working there.
Oh yeah everyone can just go to the job store and get a new job at-will and there are absolutely no external factors that could impact that. Clearly they work for minimum wage + tips at a thankless job serving people like you out of their passion for the work.
It shouldn’t, no. But there’s a $2.13 an hour minimum wage for tipped employees. Employers have to fill the gap to $7.25 if tips don’t cover it, but the simple matter is the law facilitates the expectation customers pay tips.
Is there some world where the cost of increasing employee pay isn’t also going to “burden” the customer with commensurate higher costs for the service/goods? Getting rid of tipping is a fine idea for many reasons, but not because it’s a cost burden for customers. The customer will partially pay the wages of employees for services they use and goods they consume, either through tipping or increased costs.
The reasons to get rid of tipping is not to save customers money.
The burden I meant wasn’t the money spent itself but the responsibility to cover it directly.
In the context of wages not rising with the costs of living, employers increasingly are passing the responsibility to pay their tipped employees onto consumers, intentionally or not.
If the employer pays their employees a living wage and increases their costs, then they are taking direct responsibility. In that environment you don’t even need to eliminate tipping. Tips would be the bonuses they’re (culturally) intended to be.
A an European, where mandatory tipping is not a thing, I find this practice of outsourcing the payment of restaurant employee’s salaries to customers absolutely stupid.
I really can’t understand how either customers or employees are letting this go on.
If one isn’t able to pay their employees a living wage they should just pick another fucking thing to do tbh.
At the very least this needs to be spoken out loud and understood by everyone.
The customer is forced to subsidize the employer and those that suffer from this, the employee, typically blame the customer. The employer is the problem here, not the customer.
The employer is the problem here, not the customer.
That’s the first place I would apply the blame to, but, also a little bit on the employee, for either not being able to negotiate their salary better, or for not being part of a union that can do the negotiation for them.
The employer should share the wealth better though, that’s for sure.
As an European, I have made the mistake of leaving a tip… and I have been given a tip… and have talked to others who got tipped… and our consensus is that it’s an offensive way of attempted slavery.
If I do a job, I’m doing my job as specified, for the agreed upon price, take it or leave it. I’m not lowering the price to lure a customer, expecting they’ll suddenly appreciate my work so much that maybe they’ll decide to pay me more. If they don’t think I’ll do a good job from the beginning, they can go elsewhere. If for some reason I don’t do a good job, they can have their money back, that’s on me to make sure it doesn’t happen. If I did a good job, and they don’t think so, we can meet in court.
Mandatory tipping isn’t a thing anywhere at all. And if it were, it wouldn’t be tipping at all…it would just be a component of the price. It’s socially expected, but not mandatory.
I also don’t know how people let this go on though. The craziest part is tippers think they have the moral high ground over a person who doesn’t tip, when in fact it’s the opposite. Tipping is fundamentally unethical.
Mandatory tipping isn’t a thing anywhere at all.
Not true, I’ve been to several restaurants that have small print on their menu along the lines of “a gratuity of X% will be automatically added to your bill”, sometimes for parties over Y, sometimes after Z o’clock, sometimes just in general
That anger would be better directed at the corporations who have used propaganda to get people to subsidize the wages of their employees further and further.
The person you’re shitty with is just trying to get by, same as you.
Then why would they direct their anger towards him for not tipping? It’s not his fault. It’s not like they’re forming a union and demanding appropriate wage. At this point, steadily increasing tips are just shifting more corporate responsibility onto consumers.
I agree, both of them should be directing their frustration on the corporations that have forced them to subsidize wages.
So the solution is for you to stop tipping people yet still continue giving your money to the business that expects tipping?
I mean, two way street wouldn’t you say? Even with that perspective I wouldn’t go back to a place that shames you for tips. I’ve never in my life heard of giving a tip for curbside pickup, every major restaurant chain is doing it free these days. By all means I’ll tip a driven delivery or waited table, but curbside pickup?
Call it whatever you want, it’s what corporations have done in the U.S.
I’m just saying, have a little compassion for people who are very likely in the same boat you find yourself in.
I get $10 an hour to break my back all day.
That’s a you problem. Walmart starts at more than that.
This whole thread is people railing against a strawman/implying they’re somehow sticking it to businesses to justify their not wanting to tip. It’s pathetic.
Service people: “I hate when customers stiff me on a tip or leave a really lousy one.”
Me: “Ok, let’s eliminate/discourage tipping then and just factor a percentage increase into the item prices on the menu instead.”
Service people: “No way, I’ll make less money that way!”
You can’t win, man. I’ve tried to argue with them before. They get one table in a blue moon with added gratuity plus somebody who tips really well on top and they don’t want to let that go. Bartenders are especially contentious about giving up tipping because whale drunks subsidize their entire paycheck.
Essentially, they want all the upside of guilting people into leaving a bigger tip without the downside of occasionally getting somebody who decided that the price on the menu is exactly what they’re going to pay when the bill comes.
Seriously. If you ever want to reconsider your job, ask a waitress how much they make (when they’re not on the job). I was an ugly overweight nerd and still made about $30/hr averaged over the week, working as a part-time uni student. It’s some of the best short-term money someone can make without a degree or connections.
Doubt. Unless you were working at a high end place or a really high traffic place.
Best I ever hit was 12/hour, which sure. Over minimum, but not over what minimum should’ve been at the time. And for the most part it was like 9/hour. Still over minimum but previous point still stands.
Current minimum wage should be slightly under what you’re claiming you made, based on inflation and such. So to fix the tipping problem is a two point issue, raising minimum wage to reflect an appropriate wage based on inflation since inception, and then removing the minimum wage nonsense for tipped employees.
You people that keep claiming they’ll make less with this change is what helps keep this nonsense in pepertuity. It makes the employees think that the employers are the ones that are actually helping them by giving this deal. And painting the customers as the enemy.
The real enemy is corporate. Worker wages haven’t raised since Reagan, but upper management wages have gone through the roof. Because they just pay a modest amount to Congress to keep worker wages stagnant so they can reap huge profits, and then they perpetuate class nonsense like your spewing to keep the target off of their back and onto your neighbors.
My hourly pay as a waiter was nearly doubled that of my first corporate job in the same city. Granted, it was fine dining.
Still worth the switch. The job was soul crushing and the 2nd shift, underachiever drug culture wears thin. Everyone should wait tables for a year. Nobody should wait tables for 10 years.
Sounds like you were a bad waiter or at the very least worked at a slow restaurant. I worked evenings and bar tended once a week at a national chain that rhymes with Boutack working in the evenings in a college town about 25 hours a week. I said nothing else about minimum wage, etc. so I won’t respond to the rest of your comment but I’ll tell you that no one wants to keep tipping culture more than servers
And you know what’s the worst part. It’s the owner refusing to pay him proper wages that forces this tipping culture in the first place. It’s absolutely atrocious and we shouldn’t even be responsible for making sure they get a living wage. That should always be up to the owner
The owner will 100% always raise wages versus just pack up shop and go out of business entirely if forced. But not out of the goodness of their heart lol.
Yep. California pays their servers the state minimum wage of $15 an hour. They still get tips, and basically no restaurants went out of business when they “suddenly had to pay minimum wage.”
If you want to protest the owner’s business model then boycott businesses that have tips. But refusing to tip at a tipped business is still giving 100℅ of your money to the owner, supporting their business, and leaving the employees out to dry. It’s not morally righteous, it’s cheap.
Downvoted for being correct I see.
For the downvoters: Any argument against this? He’s clearly right, if you patronize the restaraunt they still get paid and they still don’t have to pay the server shit. “Not tipping” that person didn’t change the culture, it didn’t even hurt the business, the business responsible for this shit to begin with, who got their money. Our only recourse is then to A) Stop eating out all together until the industry collapses and rebuilds tipless, or B) Only go to “no tip” restaraunts if there are any in your area. Any of this half-assed “well the industry needs to just change but I’m not going to do my part to help, I’m just gonna piss off servers and do nothing” bullshit won’t accomplish anything.
Real life example:
https://www.denverpost.com/2023/06/27/casa-bonita-hiring-jobs-no-tipping-reopening-lakewood-dining/
Backlash against going hourly ($30/hr) for servers and no tips:
https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2023/06/24/casa-bonita-employee-pay-tips-reopening
Exactly, additionally isn’t the entire appeal of tipping because you will on average attain more and higher tips by being better at your job? How can people not see that it inherently means your paycheck will fluctuate, it may be higher or even lower than last weeks.
Servers should be paid fairly, and they arent in a lot of places right now but that doesnt mean they should feel entitled to x percentage of the bill every single time.
Whale drunks, I watched a bar tender at a concert make a killing on tips because most people use a credit card and the payment process gives you only so many options, easy to click options besides no tip. 18-22% tip on top on drinks that cost 3 times more than they should. When I use cash and buy drinks you get a dollar if that from me, less than ,10% tip.
Well then if $5 is as good as zero, then you’ll get zero.
This is a big problem with the growing popularity of service fees. Instead of raising wages employers are adding service fees to push labor costs on to the customer; which is already what tipping is. So, they raise the cost of goods for more profits, add service fees to increase wages without increasing labor costs, and then the customer has to decide if they’re going to top or not. It’s a hell of a decision because the worker and the customer are both already getting fucked, and the customer then has to decide which one of them is gonna get a little more fucked than the other.
Labor costs are already entirely on the customer. Employers don’t pay their employees with money that grew on trees; they’re paying with a chunk of the business revenue, all of which originated from the customers to begin with. There’s no functional difference in the finances between abolishing tipping but bumping up all your prices or maintaining tipping, except that tipping represents one additional exchange of money, and people don’t like that. When people have already decided to buy something, it feels bad to be asked for money a second time, even if, in the alternative situation where that expense was included in the original price, they’d be spending the same amount of money.
When people have already decided to buy something, it feels bad to be asked for money a second time
Sounds like a functional difference to me that impacts the transaction. And the psychology involved is more than that because most people are manipulated by the up front prices and don’t properly factor in the more hidden secondary fees. Not to mention that when it comes to tips this second ask is technically voluntary and just against social and moral expectations to refuse, so it essentially rewards the people who don’t care about the employees and refuse it.
It is meaningful, I agree, but the objections should be on that basis, not that tipping represents some kind of gross economic injustice. I think, fundamentally, being asked for money feels bad, and people are trying to re-interpret that as some kind of injustice imposed on them, rather than acknowledging that it’s just a slightly different and mildly annoying way to distribute essentially the same cost. When you actually poll tipped workers, they tend to be against removing tips because it allows them to make substantially more than a fixed rate would.
I don’t want to blame the individual too much, but it’s really not that hard to factor in a potential tip into your decision making process, or to simply hit $0 on the iPad if you don’t think the interaction merited a tip (no, I’m not going to tip you for ringing up a bag of coffee that I picked up off a shelf at a cafe, for instance). My loose understanding is that customers have started to reduce or decline tips for a lot of these more trivial interactions, so I’d expect some kind of market equilibrium to emerge at some point. It does somewhat represent those more easily guilted or manipulated effectively subsidzing those who aren’t, which is perhaps a little iffy, but I’m not really gonna shed any tears over it.
Employers don’t pay their employees
We knew that, no need to comment about it.
An incredibly common complaint when people discuss tips is the perceived injustice of having to pay employees’ wages when the onus of that should be on the employer. It’s literally been brought up in this thread multiple times, including the comment I replied to.
So no, I’m not actually that convinced that people really understand it. While there is a social and psychological difference in tips vs raised prices that is meaningful, the economics are essentially the same, so appealing to some sense of economic justice really doesn’t make sense. People continuously talk about how employers simply need to abolish tipping and pay their workers more, seemingly unaware that that would be directly financed by higher prices roughly equal to the tips they’re already paying.
