Tipping: How Gratuity Replaced Fair Wages in U.S. Restaurants

I hate tipping. The last think I want to do after eating is math. And don’t get me started on the inefficient payment ritual we have to endure: flag down the waiter for the check, wait for the check, wait for them to take your cc, wait for them to ring it up and bring it back, then do some math. Unnecessary.<p>That said, minimum wage is minimum wage. If an employee doesn’t make that up in tips, the law is that the restaurant needs to make up the difference. So it’s a complete non sequitur that $2&#x2F;hour isn’t a living wage.<p>If that isn’t happening, the article is burying the lede: the problem isn’t tipping, it’s rampant wage theft. And I don’t need the complete history of tipping to know that wage theft is bad.

As a European, I can safely say that tipping in American restaurants is one of the most unusual things I remember about America. The amount of tips is huge and they are demanded of you everywhere

The service in most American restaurants isn&#x27;t good; it is obsequious. It is disturbing how many Americans don&#x27;t notice this.

One random idea that I had for a while to replace tips: when I get a bill, that&#x27;s the total amount I need to pay. There should be a line asking me to fill in a percentage. That percent of my bill goes to the service.<p>And most importantly, set the percentage limit to 50%, so owner would have to raise menu price by 100% if they want to simply offset it.<p>This way, customer don&#x27;t feel like they are paying twice, the service team still get tips to supplement their lower income.<p>Of course the restaurant owners won&#x27;t agree to this because now they are the ones subsidizing the waiter&#x27;s salary instead of the customers. Just like it should have been.

Ask any server if they want to get rid of tips, even given an hourly wage that would be comparable, and the vast majority will say no. Those regulars who come in and slip you a $50 bill every now and then blows any kind of &quot;fair wage&quot; a restaraunt could pay you out of the water.<p>It&#x27;s like working on comission. Americans are rich (comparatively, globally). For all of our gripes we still have the highest disposable income by a long shot. Many can and do enjoy tipping their waitsaff gratuitously in exchange for their service. It&#x27;s the only way serving can possibly ever be anything more than low wage drudgery, given the margins of food service.<p>If you can&#x27;t afford to tip, you cant afford to eat out, plain and simple. Go to the grocery store.

It&#x27;s just incredible how the entirety of the American public got brainwashed into believing that it&#x27;s their responsibility for subsidising restaurant staff instead of the company that hires them and ultimately reaps the reward of their work. It&#x27;s so pervasive it&#x27;s impossible to even have any kind of reasonable argument about it, at best it just ends with &quot;well it is what it is&quot;.

For a long, long time, I ate at whatever restaurant was nearby. And for delivery, I had a huge stack of menus at home, and I&#x27;d order whatever tickled my fancy that day.<p>Since I suffer from PTSD, it has been very difficult for me to discern when I was receiving bad service, disrespect, outright contempt from &quot;the help&quot; because of who I am or what I look like, or what my name&#x2F;address was. I really just put up with it every day, as an unavoidable fact of life.<p>And it really came to a head during the pandemic; I was using GrubHub extensively and they were systematically stealing my drinks. I&#x27;d order one drink--missing. I&#x27;d order two drinks--missing. I was having a meltdown during each reimbursement call, 3 times a day every day!<p>And my friend counseled me that perhaps I just shouldn&#x27;t return my business to a place that treats me like that. And I was like, hmm, could it be that easy?<p>And I began to test it--I switched to DoorDash and they&#x27;ve been fair and honest every day.<p>I began returning to restaurants where I had noticed they smiled to me and treated me kindly, like a human being. And the difference was amazing.<p>Of course this worked out to mostly Catholic proprietors around town, whether Italian, Vietnamese, many Latino-run kitchens, whatever.<p>And yes, &quot;obsequious&quot; sort of describes the experience sometimes. They really do value my business, especially at the struggling Irish Pub downtown, or when I pay cash to the elderly Vietnamese lady on borrowed time in the dilapidated shopping center.<p>I can still sort of put up with thinly veiled hate when I walk into a really basic fast-food joint. But I&#x27;ve really curtailed my explorations of new restaurants.<p>And I feel much better tipping the drivers and the waitresses who really do give me good service, and you know, treat me as a human person. I had begun to think it just wasn&#x27;t possible.

Really bad practice. Prices should be flat without any expected extra payments and workers should be paid fair wages.

I tip because I know that the servers are getting shit pay because business owners are counting on tips to make up the rest.<p>But I hate it. It&#x27;s not &quot;tipping&quot; - which is to give some extra to show appreciation for service. It&#x27;s an underhanded guilt trip to make you pay more than you thought you were going to pay for your meal.<p>I especially hate &quot;tipping&quot; for cases where no service was provided. It&#x27;s really just a surcharge on the coffee&#x2F;whatever.<p>Raise prices and drop the tipping.<p>I ate at a restaurant recently where they did just that. They had a little sign on the table that said something along the lines of &quot;we&#x27;ve raised our prices 20% to pay living wages and we don&#x27;t encourage tipping&quot;. I left a small tip anyway, but it was a true tip.

As a European I visited US last December for the first time in 11 years.<p>What was shocking how many places I would say 80-90% have the &quot;tip before service&quot; payment terminals.<p>Many of these type of places were those I would not associate with classical service tipping - food counters, bagel, donut, coffee places where you pick up the order from counter.<p>Then there were some serious restaurant style places with this same type of payment system.<p>My American friends informed that technically you can skip tipping in these places.<p>Still this &quot;tip ahead&quot;&quot; seemed really a bit of dark pattern - you feel like if you do not tip you get Tyler Durden clam chowder treatment.

One of the reasons often given for why one must tip in US restaurants is the rampant wage theft in that industry.<p>In law the restaurant must make up the difference if tips fall short of the minimum wage but, we are told, wage theft is so common that most restaurants simply don&#x27;t pay it. Some will even fire staff for falling short on tips.<p>Why are we supposed to just look the other way while we tip to support criminal wage theft?<p>Fair and honest pricing would remove a huge enabler to this wide spread criminal activity.

Today, there was a great video from Honest Guide about the tipping situation in the US compared to the Czech Republic:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KHDpVPKuwjY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KHDpVPKuwjY</a><p>Also, this is my favourite skit about tipping:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KHDpVPKuwjY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KHDpVPKuwjY</a>

I hate tipping. Especially the practice of tipping _before_ service is rendered.<p>I hate even more that “taking a stand” against tipping doesn’t solve anything and just hurts the people I’d like to be helping.<p>I work for a POS company, I hate tipping screens, but there is no way to not offer that feature.<p>I run my own food festival payments company, I was forced to add tips for Bar payments but managed to hold firm on not adding tipping to the food vendors (even though they complain constantly about it, the entitlement is insane “how am I going to get people to work without tips?”, uh, pay them more?).<p>My sister owns a bakery, they added tipping because they couldn’t entice people to come work for them even at $15-16&#x2F;hr unless they also could make tips. This front of house we are talking about, not the people actually making the products (though tips are pooled for back of house), they are talking items out of a case and putting them in a box to hand to customer. Why that deserves a tip I’ll never know, especially since most can’t be bothered to do anything to increase sales and thus their tip.<p>For the _first_ time in my life I clawed back a tip from a delivery app about a week ago. I’ve had many bad deliveries and bad shoppers but turns out my line in the sand was: 7hr late delivery and the meat and cheese was 70F when it arrived. I hate that _this_ is the only thing that’s caused me to remove a tip. Maybe I should be quicker to clear the tip when the delivery person messes up (happens often).

&gt; However, even if a tipped worker provides excellent service, studies have shown that certain biases can affect tipping, especially against women and women of color. Tipping creates a dining system where people of color, elders, women, and those of foreign descent get worse service.<p>Because those groups typically tip less or not at all. Although I never found that to be true with women. And “people of color” in the article really means black people. Asians and Hispanics seem to tip normally in my experience.<p>And for those thinking “omg how racist” — you clearly never worked in the restaurant business in the United States before.<p>Here is an interesting thread about black people and tipping: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Serverlife&#x2F;s&#x2F;MGkkDmZgYq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Serverlife&#x2F;s&#x2F;MGkkDmZgYq</a>

HN threads on tipping turn me into the Joker. This stuff is so hard for me to read.<p>Yes, you can trace tipping back to demeaning pre-enlightenment service worker dynamics. But you can do that with almost anything. Talk to a socialist Google worker about the morality of their $350k comp package. As I have learned the hard way trying to convince a local polity that zoning is fundamentally racist (it is), to confront a system you have to address what it is today, not what it was historically.<p>And yes, tipping is widely abused, especially in the fast-casual and low-mid casual segments of the market. You want to set a N0% plus-up over minimum wage on front of the house jobs? I&#x27;m here for it. We&#x27;re going to put a lot of restaurants out of business together with this plan --- the most abusive sectors of the restaurant business operate on the knife&#x27;s edge of profitability --- but maybe that&#x27;s for the best.<p>In high-end casual and fine dining, though, tipping has nothing to do with master-serf relationships, or really any kind of exploitation. A fine dining server&#x27;s comp package looks a lot like that of a sales account manager: an untenably low base with a variable comp package on top. The reasons are the same in both cases: because of principal-agent problems. A flat salary for servers (the &quot;living wage&quot; system) breaks incentives: if you&#x27;re going to make the same money whether the restaurant is packed or empty, why would you ever want to work a Friday? Put differently: tipping gives service staff exposure to the gross upside of the business, and aligns that exposure to the server&#x27;s own agency in the business --- managing the customer relationship, monitoring the products being delivered from the back of the house.<p>This is part of the reason that expert servers quit when fine dining restaurants try to flip to no-tipping models.<p>People complain about how manipulative or stressful tipping is. I think that&#x27;s pure applesauce. Divide the check by 10 and multiply by two. Or double the sales tax. Your check probably has the 15-20% line figured out for you already. You go into an American restaurant knowing you&#x27;re on the hook for the tip, like adults in America have done for generations. If it&#x27;s a scam to fool you into thinking prices are lower than they are, we&#x27;ve all had more than enough time to metabolize and work around it.<p>Tipping subsidizes owners. But <i>everything you spend in a restaurant subsidizes owners</i>. You&#x27;re where all the revenue in this industry comes from.<p>This not the system I would design if I was the Pope of Chili Town. But it&#x27;s not the moral calamity nerds like us make it out to be, either.

Tipping has been forced into Sweden for around 10-15? years now. I do not like it one bit. No one pays by cash, so they baked the tipping into the payment terminals. They usually come with 4-5 pre-made options with percentages, and _sometimes_ a &quot;no gratuity&quot; option, which will input your original total. IIRC it&#x27;s always possible to skip it by pressing the (usually) green button to &quot;continue&quot;. It&#x27;ll always input your total and you can skip the entire thing and just blip your card.<p>Some customers started to input their PIN code (which you sometimes have to do) instead of their total when this was a new thing. It made for some hilarious totals.<p>One of the most egregious examples I can remember was a restaurant where you order digitally, and when done, you go and get your food&#x2F;drinks yourself from the serving window. And they asked for tips... ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>Sigh... I do sometimes tip though, never for lunch, but sometimes for dinner.

Always tip for quality service, and tip with cash, directly. This way you know it is going to the person who rendered the service (and the person who likely needs it, as opposed to the owner of the business)

1) I want all restaurant workers to just get a fair proper wage...<p>2) So that tipping is no longer subsidizing the restaurant owners.<p>3) Also, FFS, when demand is inelastic, the only way to lower prices is MORE SUPPLY (where it&#x27;s needed). Build the housing, do not stop, just keep going until after we all die.

Excellent service above expectations - tip.<p>Normal service as to expectations - no tip.<p>Service below basic expectations - manager.<p>How hard is it to make this the standard?

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