Works well in lots of places. Tipping is an obsolescent, faux-aristocratic relic of a social hierarchy I would strongly prefer to read about in history books and not to experience in daily life.
I personally don't see why rating the service is any of my business. If the service sucks, I don't go back. If the owner of the establishment wants to know why their business is tanking, they can do the same thing anyone else would do and keep an eye on things, making changes as necessary. Maybe their employees would do a better job if they were paid enough to respect it.
I have no issue with tipping people who do things for me that go above and beyond. I'm much less in favor of building tipping into interactions where it's customary and expected (especially when different parties will invariably have different ideas about what is customary and expected).
I hate how there are all sorts of random situations where I'm expected to tip. I've been told I'm supposed to tip at the car wash, when getting a tattoo, or using a food runner (do I tip the UPS driver?) - it's all senseless.and strikes me as a money grab against good natured folks.
The US can be really crazy. Part of the issue is that you have to understand compensation models--for example, my understanding is that like waiters, delivery drivers largely work for tips (usually). But, especially when traveling, there are a gazillion situations where a dollar here or a dollar there seems to be routinely expected sometimes. I suspect that I don't leave tips in some situations where many people do. (No, I don't routinely leave a few dollars a night for my hotel room servicing.)
No to UPS driver. Tattoo? No idea but probably given that I tip my barber.
Restaurants largely want to abolish tips so that they can normalize the pay gap between their front of house staff and their kitchen staff.
It is against the law to payout the kitchen staff from the tip pool so the front of house tend to make lots more money than the kitchen, making it harder for them to find kitchen staff.
> Restaurants largely want to abolish tips so that they can normalize the pay gap between their front of house staff and their kitchen staff.
Abolishing tips isn't necessary to do this, all you have to do is set prices appropriately and pay the back of house staff correctly. (You know how some restaurants add a front-of-house "service fee" on large groups in lieu of free tipping, just do the same thing, except roll it in before computing prices, and that's your back-of-house volume-of-service pay. If you don't want to have it be a volume-based, on-top-of-hourly wage thing, do the same thing to calculate prices, but project your average volume and set your hourly wages appropriately to include what your existing wages would be plus the average amount the price increase would provide.)
It does mean that your price will have to be higher relative to your food cost than other restaurants, which might lose business. But if retaining cooking staff is valuable enough that you want to balance things, this should actually pay for itself. And, anyway, getting rid of tips and rebalancing pay between front of house and back of house means either you are going to lose front of house staff to other jobs more easily (because their total pay is cut) or increase prices just as much as you would without abolishing tips to boost back of house pay plus enough to replace the tips. Abolishing tips has no real effect here.
Have you ever eaten out in your life? How many times have you left a 20 percent tip for a waiter who forgot to put in your order, brought the wrong food, was mean to you, etc.
Always. If I have an issue with the service, I take it up with management.
I don't short change someone's wages because of a perceived or actual deficiency. What am I? Some sort of monster? Just because the rest of society is cheap and short changes service workers because they can get away with it (until labor law gets fixed), that does not make it right.
And if you say, "I can't afford to tip 20 percent all the time", well then my friend, you can't afford to be eating out.
Why do you think its more costly to eat out in Europe than the US? Because staff are paid a living wage there.
Sure you can take it up with management but why are you giving extra money to the person who just gave you bad service? Tipping is for the quality of service you receive, and if it's bad service it's absolutely pointless for you to reward that shitty behavior. By all means go ahead but I'm not sure you quite understand the point of tipping in the first place
> I'm not sure you quite understand the point of tipping in the first place
The point of tipping is to prevent the employer from having to pay a fair wage. Someone who works in such industries depend on tips for their livelihoods. Not performing at 100% resulting in a significant drop in earnings isn't really fair.
Given the typical audience on here, a reasonable comparison would be for employers to be docking wages based on time spent not working. Given how many of us visit this site at work, that could be a substantial drop in wages.
Then again, you might be making so much money that it doesn't impact you. Servers aren't. They might just be having a bad day. Their mistakes on serving you will have less of an impact on your life than your not tipping them.
Most of them are human beings trying to survive. Most of them are not making enough to do more than that.
I tip pretty much the same unless the service is out of this world extraordinary. If I truly have a problem that I think would deserve a lower tip, I'd be speaking to the management.
> Forgot to put in your order, brought the wrong food, was mean to you
These are all descriptions of under adequate service and this server should be reprimanded, potentially fired if this keeps up.
Examples of under adequacy removed; You and the parent seem to have similar outlooks. As soon as a server meets the bar for adequate service, the customer is obliged to tip 10-20% based entirely on what they can sustainibly afford.
Rarely does one go higher than 20%, for the truly grand experience.
My parents always told me that if you intend to tip less or not at all then you have an issue worthy of management, if it's not worthy of management, then proceed normally even if not completely thrilled with the staff. Their logic being the tip is part of their pay, if you're docking their pay, it must be severe and management should be involved.
So, I've tipped 20 percent to mediocre waitstaff plenty.
I also have this bleeding heart issue where I feel like maybe I was there on their bad day and I tip well because I've had those days :)
Of course I'm going to leave a regulation tip. I'm not going to be the ass in this situation. (And if the mistakes were due to things like "the restaurant is incredibly busy" or "one of the other tables is full of jerks", I'll tip more because they're probably having a worse day than I am).
The research is clear the the tips have very little to do with quality of service, and much more to do with who the customers are and who the servers are. More, waiters getting low tips tend to think their customers are cheap and not that their service was poor.
So when he says that this doesn't happen it's a claim that is well supported by research.
"They wanted to inspire good service with their tips"
Friends of mine who have been wait staff have unanimously concluded that tips appear random to them. There's no pattern of behavior they can interpret from patrons or which patrons want, other than simple competence.
It makes sense that it seems to work better in higher-end restaurants. People aren't choosing those restaurants based on price (within reason). Mainstream chains are probably subject to a lot more quick glances at a menu by people who then decide the food there is too pricey and move on.
It's also hard to change a system that people are used to.
McDonald's employees prepare your food. What's so special about refilling your soda that it requires tipping while preparing your food can be done without tipping?
Fast-food restaurants don't have servers. The (yes, weirdly specific) restaurant tipping expectations in the US (and, generally, where tipping is the custom) revolve specifically around tipping the person who brings you your food at your table.
> To be honest, unless I'm leaving cash, I have my doubts about whether the tip actually makes it to the server.
I would be shocked to hear of any restaurants that do that. A warning sign would be the owner running the register.
And for one data point: the restaurant I worked at would convert all tips on credit cards to cash that the servers could take home that day at end of business.
A previous employer of mine was a hotel. All banquets had a builtin gratuity, and they took 50% off the top before it was even split up among the servers and porters.
The proper allocation of tips left with a credit card are trivially auditable by the IRS, and indeed is one of the Small Business Division's focus points when auditing restaurants.
It's not just a tax matter; if the audit uncovers fraud, they refer the case to the DOL and the DOJ.
Certainly not a faux pas. Nothing wrong with giving some extra money to workers who aren't paid much. Probably not something that I would do though. If I pickup a pizza or sub, no I don't tip. And I don't think that's the normal expectation other than some extra pocket change--which increasingly doesn't exist.
I've seen this debate hashed out on food sites for years. The argument against is "why?" and the argument for is "they're taking time out of their otherwise tipped workday". I realized that the division really seems to split on urban vs non-urban.
In the former category people are primarily doing carryout from places built around carryout in that there aren't servers waiting tables and bagging up orders. In the latter category people tend to more frequently do carryout from actual restaurants and in those cases they really are interacting with an otherwise typical server.
I'm sure that I'm doing it wrong somehow, but I typically tip 10% for carryout that involves "significant" effort in packaging. Sushi or Chinese food with sauces and rice boxed separately from the main dishes gets a tip. Pizza tossed into a box does not. I also tip 10% at a buffet restaurant since there is some service involved, but it's not quite "full" service. More typical restaurant service usually gets 20% from me.
I realize it's completely arbitrary, but so is tipping culture in general.
That's kinda my point. There's nothing special about servers that they alone require tipping while other employees like cooks and cashiers do their jobs without tipping.
Tips that servers get are generally shared with the staff that don't interact directly with customers, but are part of providing the service that's being tipped.
In the case of fast food restaurants there were never any tips to begin with. That proves that it is possible to get rid of tipping altogether at low-end restaurants.
No, its proof that there is a distinct class of restaurants where tipping was never a convention; it doesn't say anything about the ease or difficulty of getting rid of it where it has been a convention.
> No, its proof that there is a distinct class of restaurants where tipping was never a convention
The existence of such a class of (low end) restaurants without tipping proves that it is possible to get rid of tipping altogether at low-end restaurants. Which is exactly what I said.
> it doesn't say anything about the ease or difficulty of getting rid of it where it has been a convention.
This is besides the point. I didn't say anything about the ease or difficulty of getting rid of tipping.
> The existence of such a class of (low end) restaurants without tipping proves that it is possible to get rid of tipping altogether at low-end restaurants.
No, it proves that there is a class of low-end restaurants (and "fast food" is not coextensive with "low end" restaurants, its a subset of them) where there is no tipping to get rid of, not that it is possible to get rid of tipping in any of the places where it exists.
No, I said it is possible to get rid of tipping at low-end restaurants, i.e. it's possible to have low end restaurants without tipping. Do such low-end restaurants exists? Yes they do. Fast food restaurants are examples of such restaurants.
My brother has been in the food industry for about 20 years now. He's mentioned multiple times that all tips go into a common shift pool and are shared between the servers, cooks, and cleaners. He's worked in many different mid to upper tier restaurants across two different states (one in the southeast, one in the midwest). So I assume this is a standard arrangement.
His first complaint with this particular approach has been that when he's gotten a good tip as a server, he has to share it (i.e. the customer gave "him" a large tip because of "his" service). The other is that when he's been a good cook or good cleaner, but there's a bad server, he's penalized because the server is given bad tips.
Ironically, we've never directly discussed whether he would prefer tips or a more traditional wage. Based on the conversations we have had, he would definitely like the ability to earn more while working in the industry (he loves cooking and he loves serving). He's hit pay ceilings in multiple restaurants, which has been a huge problem. It's such a big problem that he's transitioning to work in nurseries, because he can make more money with much less effort, and he hopes to save enough to open his own farm-to-table restaurant with some friends.
Mandating the pooling of tips is, as far as I know, illegal. I've heard of many lawsuits about it. You're free to volunteer to pool your tips, but it can't be policy.
But then shouldn't we tip 20% to the chef and not the person who brought the plate from the kitchen. I can see paying a flat fee for it for the server then.
Unfortunately, that's not the social norm. Yes, you can specify this money you left is for the back of house, but from what I've seen if you just leave money on the table/recipt the courts say you've implied that you left that for the "service" (the wait staff).
Carl's Jr. is a fast food restaurant, has (or had, last time I was in one instead of driving through) table service of the same style as fast-casual restaurants where tipping is common, and yet I've never seen anyone tip at Carl's Jr.
I think "one does not tip at a fast food restaurant" is a culturally-accepted rule that trumps "one tips one's server at a restaurant".
There's also a class of restaurant where you order at a counter, typically are given a flag with a number or whatever, and someone brings the food to your table when it's ready. In general, there isn't tipping in those situations either.
Not working at such a restaurant and given the prevalence of credit cards it's hard to be certain, and in any case it's anecdotal and not structured, but tipping seems that common (at least moreso than in fast food) in that type (fast casual) restaurant.
I suspect that, as well as the bills being smaller, the average tip percentage is smaller than at full-service restaurants.
I don't know if this is a nation-wide phenomenon, but I've observed in Austin over the past 10 years a growing trend towards having tip jars at establishments which don't have servers of any kind. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Both of those things can't happen at the same time. That's how we ended up with servers wages getting cut and forced to depend on tips.
If tipping is acceptable at all, it won't stay reserved for only truly excellent service. It'll become expected for good service, then adequate service, then any service at all.
That's not necessarily true. I won't tip the concierge at a hotel for telling me how to get to a nearby restaurant (OK, that's an anachronistic example :-)) but I probably would tip for scoring me some difficult ticket or reservation.
Yeah, it's weird how quickly I've forgotten about tipping once I moved to Australia. It's more of a hassle on the customer than anything, but it's cultural I suppose.
> "Company research had found that 60 percent of the restaurants’ customers disliked the change in tipping, Mr. Merritt said. They wanted to inspire good service with their tips and they didn’t trust management to pass on the money to its employees, he said."
Ugh, people are idiots! Paying an employee an actual wage will guarantee them income in a way that tipping does not. If an employee is hired at a particular hourly wage, we have labor laws to ensure they are receiving their pay. In contrast, tipping provides no guarantees and actually enables the abuses these same people fear. For example, legally a restaurant has to make a waiter whole if their tips+ low hourly wage does not get to actual minimum wage. Despite this requirement, many restaurants violate it BC tipping as the default puts the burden on the waiter to bother their boss when they didn't make enough.
Imagine instead if when you checked out at Target, you paid the cashier directly because you didn't trust target to pay them?! The idea seems ludicrous but apply it to tipping industries and it somehow is normal.
The real culprit is people feel comfortable with what they know and fear change.
I'm pretty sure the number of servers who say "Oh, the previous table tipped low. I must have done something wrong" is many orders of magnitude lower than the number of servers who say "Oh, the previous table tipped low. Cheap bastards".
As you say, I don't understand why people think that tipping actually helps w/ service. OTOH the masses still drag out that incorrect tale of To Insure Prompt Service
When my wife and I went to Japan, we received the best service we'd ever had in every single restaurant, from random burger joints to classy Shabu Shabu restaurants. (Classy for us, at least.) None of them accepted tips. They just did their jobs well.
It was just proof for me that tips didn't have anything to do with good service, not in the long-run or the short-run.
Of course, I tip still, because it's part of their wages and they deserve it. But I don't for a moment think that it actually teaches them to serve people better.
I think this part of the sentence is key: "and they didn’t trust management to pass on the money to its employees, he said."
Meaning, no tip restaurants usually have higher prices, but customers do not trust that the higher prices went to the staff. Management needs to make some statement of wages (high wages) to prove that the tips are sufficient.
IMO distrust of management's greed is the real culprit
It often reminds me of retail establishments that pay profit-shared wage vs. commission-based retail wage. I've actually had very earnest interactions with Apple retail employees, and they will recommend me products they personally like; Fry's Electronics employees will constantly try to sell, to the point of annoyance (the one guy even pressured me by saying he was short of electronics extended warranty sales quota by 1 sale, and that I would move the needle for him).
I'd like to share some anecdotes from my experiences as a waiter.
1. The people who demand the most service ("This is too cold, take it back", "Bring me a different fork, this one has a spot on it", etc) tip significantly below average, and sometimes not at all. This pattern is present just about everywhere- I see it in IT all the time.
2. Groups, especially business meetings, are the highest tippers. Serving a table of 8 isn't significantly harder than serving a table of 2, yet groups usually still tip based on percentage.
3. People who use coupons are universally small tippers. I also suspect that folks with coupons are not likely to be return customers.
Yeah- the money per person is lower, but a lot of the effort of waiting is in managing tables- ie, the entire table usually pays a bill at the same time, and then the table needs to be cleared and prepped for the next customers.
From my experiences on the eating side, I'm not surprised that business meetings tend to be large tippers. Everyone is (usually) having a good time on the company dime and the tip is other people's money anyway. The problem with a group of individuals--specifically where everyone is paying for themselves--is that some people often don't end up chipping in enough and after a couple rounds of "we're a bit short here" the waiter ends up eating the shortage.
Even if it doesn't happen a lot, the effect on the waiter who makes 5% off the group of 25 they've been serving all night can be considerable.
More anecdote from another ex-waiter: #2 was the complete opposite at the one place I ever worked, serving 8 people was much harder than 2.
The variation in sentiment might have to do with that my restaurant didn't have runners, and it was an Indian restaurant. We did food delivery ourselves, and customers needed at least two things to come for dinner (an entrée, and naan), making it stressful because once a table got to 6+ people, you had to run two massive trays of food from the kitchen to the floor, as quickly as possible.
> 3) The Linkery’s most transgressive act was not in implementing a service charge. Our most transgressive act was refusing to allow our guests to pay our servers anything more beyond the service charge — this is where the angry came out. A certain small number of very vocal men (and it was always men who were vocal about it) resented that we were not letting them try to exercise additional control over our team members. This was true even though compelling research has shown that servers do not adjust quality of service as a result of tips; instead the idea that the restaurant was not offering our servers up as objects of control, was heresy. For these people, the primary service they wanted from the restaurant was the opportunity to pay for favors from the server — much like the patron at a strip club pays the club for the opportunity to dangle bills in front a dancer for individual attention. The idea that a restaurant could legitimately want to be in a different business than a strip club, was not an idea these guests could countenance. Thus, I was ever subject to witty takedowns like you are a douche, along with other well-thought-out gems.
This is the real reason I suspect. I worked in restaurants for 8 years as a cook. One place I worked had an admittedly attractive 19 year old waitress on staff. Lines formed in front of her to give her a tip. All these 40+ year old drunks (it was a dive bar) lined up to speak with her for a few moments than hand her a few dollars. She didn't even provide them with anything, they just seemed to revel in the idea that they get to hand this woman a few dollars. Very odd.
The author makes a huge leap by making assumptions about intention. Some men may have wanted to give tips because they didn't trust management. Others may have done so because tipping is a social norm. And yet others may have not wanted to tip, but objected vocally so that they didn't appear stingy.
Sure, meanwhile in part 4 he makes another leap making assumptions about server intention:
> Our sense was that our weak team members looked at their tips — which of course were close to normal since most people don’t adjust their tips much for bad service — and concluded that, in spite of what we were suggesting, they were already doing sufficiently good work. If I’m good enough to make my tips, it’s obvious that I don’t need to improve.
Which from the business perspective, is a real problem.
Or to break it down without the assumption of motivation
> Because tipping correlates weakly to service quality, and because individual tips are always subject to interpretation, tipping removes the incentive for poor performing servers to improve.
EDIT: or read part 5 if you want some explanation behind the leap in intention. It helps to read the complete articles! :)
I think tipping is so culturally engrained in America that the odds of us completely switching to a gratuity-included system is about the same as switching to driving on the left side of the road. Americans will always lament tipping, but Americans will always view tipping as leverage over the restaurant. Americans want to have their cake and eat it too (no pun intended).
I certainly want to see the practice end--I'm constantly reminded by Larry David's awkward tipping interactions in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Ending tipping will require a lot of mindshare among restaurants for it to work. For the most part, these restaurants are special snowflakes, and I don't think the practice will become mainstream anytime soon.
In a business context, I've never understood the ethics of tipping. It has a bias for youth and feminine gender and thus I must not use qualitative inputs when determining my tips without fear of a subconscious bias to cause me to improperly spend my companies money in a way that may be unethical or possibly illegal (as both age and gender discrimination are real and I'd like to avoid them). For this reason, I tip 10% on business trips always when it is requested and regardless of service quality.
Anything else just seems too close to the definition of graft or bribery for me to feel comfortable.
Tipping is the brilliance of the restaurant industry. Keeps overhead low and allows them to churn through "employees" with promises of tips.
Some say restaurants can't survive with more costs. Baloney. If you can't pay a decent wage you don't deserve to exist.
The only people that care about prices going up are the no tippers because the tippers are subsidizing salaries. The tippers wouldn't notice prices going up much if any.
This is similar to the musician's plight of rarely being able to guarantee a 'flat rate' for their performance services - both originals, covers, or a mix of the two.
It also lets the restaurant advertise a lower cost of goods to the customer upfront to get them in the seat and the true cost isn't presented until you're done.
And that might be why the non-tipping restaurants noticed a drop in revenue. If you look at the menus side-by-side, especially if you are familiar with the place and what things cost there, the non-tipping one will appear to be much more expensive.
I ate there several weeks ago, and asked one of the wait staff about this. Person said they were making less money. Glad to see this decision gone. BTW, service was still very good.
I was a fine dining server for a couple years. One thing that I saw work well at another fine dining restaurant was tip-pooling among employees. This way tipping stays but the waitstaff make a more stable wage - which cuts down on things like fighting for tables/sections and leaves mental space for employees to focus on customer service.
When I was little, my parents told me to always tip 10%. When I grew up, my peers told me that 15% was the right amount. These days, the servers tell me that anything less than 20% is an insult.
Here is a piece from a server arguing for this steady rise. I don't agree, but there it is. http://dpo.st/1Tb3rlN
I'm an American, but have lived in many countries, often where tipping is not the norm. In general, my experiences with service personnel have been vastly more pleasant in non-tipping countries. I feel that when people have to angle for a tip, it poisons the interaction. It's irritating for the customer and demeaning for the worker. I even avoid going to restaurants when back in the USA because I expect it to be much less pleasant than I'm accustomed to in Asia.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] thread"Pay staff a living wage and abolish tips" is a great idea, but it doesn't work well in practice.
Cue the liberals with their new line: "Pay the staff a living wage in addition to tips!"
Unless what you're saying is, "It won't work here because we'd prefer underpaying food staff because we can get away with it."
But that's not what you're saying, right? Surely it can't be.
I work a job without tips and it works fine.
No to UPS driver. Tattoo? No idea but probably given that I tip my barber.
You are, however, expected to tip your doctor before getting surgery.
It is against the law to payout the kitchen staff from the tip pool so the front of house tend to make lots more money than the kitchen, making it harder for them to find kitchen staff.
Abolishing tips isn't necessary to do this, all you have to do is set prices appropriately and pay the back of house staff correctly. (You know how some restaurants add a front-of-house "service fee" on large groups in lieu of free tipping, just do the same thing, except roll it in before computing prices, and that's your back-of-house volume-of-service pay. If you don't want to have it be a volume-based, on-top-of-hourly wage thing, do the same thing to calculate prices, but project your average volume and set your hourly wages appropriately to include what your existing wages would be plus the average amount the price increase would provide.)
It does mean that your price will have to be higher relative to your food cost than other restaurants, which might lose business. But if retaining cooking staff is valuable enough that you want to balance things, this should actually pay for itself. And, anyway, getting rid of tips and rebalancing pay between front of house and back of house means either you are going to lose front of house staff to other jobs more easily (because their total pay is cut) or increase prices just as much as you would without abolishing tips to boost back of house pay plus enough to replace the tips. Abolishing tips has no real effect here.
But by replacing tips with a 20% cost increase means the customer stays at the same cost to them.
Isn't that a basic assumption for most pay? Living wage + performance bonus
This political nonsense can be twisted any way anyone likes.
"They wanted to inspire good service with their tips". It's nice that they want something. I want a pony. Neither of these things happen.
Neither of these things happen.
You are saying tips aren't based on quality of the service?
Can you provide a citation? Because all data points to tipping in no way being connected to the service you provide.
The best way to receive a tip (based on research)? Be female. Be blonde. Have large breasts.
So lets dispense with this nonsense that tipping incentivizes service workers. Its a thinly veiled, widespread (successful) attempt at wage theft.
http://www.tippingresearch.com/most_recent_tipping_papers.ht...
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-tipping-be-banned-a-n...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/17/abolish-tipping_n_5...
Have you ever eaten out in your life? How many times have you left a 20 percent tip for a waiter who forgot to put in your order, brought the wrong food, was mean to you, etc.
Always. If I have an issue with the service, I take it up with management.
I don't short change someone's wages because of a perceived or actual deficiency. What am I? Some sort of monster? Just because the rest of society is cheap and short changes service workers because they can get away with it (until labor law gets fixed), that does not make it right.
And if you say, "I can't afford to tip 20 percent all the time", well then my friend, you can't afford to be eating out. Why do you think its more costly to eat out in Europe than the US? Because staff are paid a living wage there.
The point of tipping is to prevent the employer from having to pay a fair wage. Someone who works in such industries depend on tips for their livelihoods. Not performing at 100% resulting in a significant drop in earnings isn't really fair.
Given the typical audience on here, a reasonable comparison would be for employers to be docking wages based on time spent not working. Given how many of us visit this site at work, that could be a substantial drop in wages.
Then again, you might be making so much money that it doesn't impact you. Servers aren't. They might just be having a bad day. Their mistakes on serving you will have less of an impact on your life than your not tipping them.
Most of them are human beings trying to survive. Most of them are not making enough to do more than that.
These are all descriptions of under adequate service and this server should be reprimanded, potentially fired if this keeps up.
Examples of under adequacy removed; You and the parent seem to have similar outlooks. As soon as a server meets the bar for adequate service, the customer is obliged to tip 10-20% based entirely on what they can sustainibly afford.
Rarely does one go higher than 20%, for the truly grand experience.
So, I've tipped 20 percent to mediocre waitstaff plenty.
I also have this bleeding heart issue where I feel like maybe I was there on their bad day and I tip well because I've had those days :)
So when he says that this doesn't happen it's a claim that is well supported by research.
Friends of mine who have been wait staff have unanimously concluded that tips appear random to them. There's no pattern of behavior they can interpret from patrons or which patrons want, other than simple competence.
If someone does poorly, I give them a baseline tip. Probably 10%, but still 15% if I'm in a good mood anyhow.
If they do well, they'll get 20%, up to 30% for really, really good service.
But the guy next to me might go from 0% to 10% for awful to great service.
There's just no way to know what a tip means.
It's also hard to change a system that people are used to.
To be honest, unless I'm leaving cash, I have my doubts about whether the tip actually makes it to the server.
I would be shocked to hear of any restaurants that do that. A warning sign would be the owner running the register.
And for one data point: the restaurant I worked at would convert all tips on credit cards to cash that the servers could take home that day at end of business.
It's not just a tax matter; if the audit uncovers fraud, they refer the case to the DOL and the DOJ.
In the former category people are primarily doing carryout from places built around carryout in that there aren't servers waiting tables and bagging up orders. In the latter category people tend to more frequently do carryout from actual restaurants and in those cases they really are interacting with an otherwise typical server.
I realize it's completely arbitrary, but so is tipping culture in general.
Culture is path-dependent.
The existence of such a class of (low end) restaurants without tipping proves that it is possible to get rid of tipping altogether at low-end restaurants. Which is exactly what I said.
> it doesn't say anything about the ease or difficulty of getting rid of it where it has been a convention.
This is besides the point. I didn't say anything about the ease or difficulty of getting rid of tipping.
No, it proves that there is a class of low-end restaurants (and "fast food" is not coextensive with "low end" restaurants, its a subset of them) where there is no tipping to get rid of, not that it is possible to get rid of tipping in any of the places where it exists.
His first complaint with this particular approach has been that when he's gotten a good tip as a server, he has to share it (i.e. the customer gave "him" a large tip because of "his" service). The other is that when he's been a good cook or good cleaner, but there's a bad server, he's penalized because the server is given bad tips.
Ironically, we've never directly discussed whether he would prefer tips or a more traditional wage. Based on the conversations we have had, he would definitely like the ability to earn more while working in the industry (he loves cooking and he loves serving). He's hit pay ceilings in multiple restaurants, which has been a huge problem. It's such a big problem that he's transitioning to work in nurseries, because he can make more money with much less effort, and he hopes to save enough to open his own farm-to-table restaurant with some friends.
I think "one does not tip at a fast food restaurant" is a culturally-accepted rule that trumps "one tips one's server at a restaurant".
I suspect that, as well as the bills being smaller, the average tip percentage is smaller than at full-service restaurants.
If tipping is acceptable at all, it won't stay reserved for only truly excellent service. It'll become expected for good service, then adequate service, then any service at all.
Ugh, people are idiots! Paying an employee an actual wage will guarantee them income in a way that tipping does not. If an employee is hired at a particular hourly wage, we have labor laws to ensure they are receiving their pay. In contrast, tipping provides no guarantees and actually enables the abuses these same people fear. For example, legally a restaurant has to make a waiter whole if their tips+ low hourly wage does not get to actual minimum wage. Despite this requirement, many restaurants violate it BC tipping as the default puts the burden on the waiter to bother their boss when they didn't make enough.
Imagine instead if when you checked out at Target, you paid the cashier directly because you didn't trust target to pay them?! The idea seems ludicrous but apply it to tipping industries and it somehow is normal.
The real culprit is people feel comfortable with what they know and fear change.
As you say, I don't understand why people think that tipping actually helps w/ service. OTOH the masses still drag out that incorrect tale of To Insure Prompt Service
It was just proof for me that tips didn't have anything to do with good service, not in the long-run or the short-run.
Of course, I tip still, because it's part of their wages and they deserve it. But I don't for a moment think that it actually teaches them to serve people better.
Wage theft is a thing tho.
Meaning, no tip restaurants usually have higher prices, but customers do not trust that the higher prices went to the staff. Management needs to make some statement of wages (high wages) to prove that the tips are sufficient.
IMO distrust of management's greed is the real culprit
1. The people who demand the most service ("This is too cold, take it back", "Bring me a different fork, this one has a spot on it", etc) tip significantly below average, and sometimes not at all. This pattern is present just about everywhere- I see it in IT all the time.
2. Groups, especially business meetings, are the highest tippers. Serving a table of 8 isn't significantly harder than serving a table of 2, yet groups usually still tip based on percentage.
3. People who use coupons are universally small tippers. I also suspect that folks with coupons are not likely to be return customers.
Although you do seem to be phrasing it in a money vs effort angle than just the money.
Even if it doesn't happen a lot, the effect on the waiter who makes 5% off the group of 25 they've been serving all night can be considerable.
The variation in sentiment might have to do with that my restaurant didn't have runners, and it was an Indian restaurant. We did food delivery ourselves, and customers needed at least two things to come for dinner (an entrée, and naan), making it stressful because once a table got to 6+ people, you had to run two massive trays of food from the kitchen to the floor, as quickly as possible.
I found the series of articles, "Observations From A Tipless Restaurant" was a really interesting analysis.
http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...
That's a very interesting take.
Good article, thanks for sharing!
> Our sense was that our weak team members looked at their tips — which of course were close to normal since most people don’t adjust their tips much for bad service — and concluded that, in spite of what we were suggesting, they were already doing sufficiently good work. If I’m good enough to make my tips, it’s obvious that I don’t need to improve.
Which from the business perspective, is a real problem.
Or to break it down without the assumption of motivation
> Because tipping correlates weakly to service quality, and because individual tips are always subject to interpretation, tipping removes the incentive for poor performing servers to improve.
EDIT: or read part 5 if you want some explanation behind the leap in intention. It helps to read the complete articles! :)
I certainly want to see the practice end--I'm constantly reminded by Larry David's awkward tipping interactions in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Ending tipping will require a lot of mindshare among restaurants for it to work. For the most part, these restaurants are special snowflakes, and I don't think the practice will become mainstream anytime soon.
Anything else just seems too close to the definition of graft or bribery for me to feel comfortable.
Some say restaurants can't survive with more costs. Baloney. If you can't pay a decent wage you don't deserve to exist.
The only people that care about prices going up are the no tippers because the tippers are subsidizing salaries. The tippers wouldn't notice prices going up much if any.
And that might be why the non-tipping restaurants noticed a drop in revenue. If you look at the menus side-by-side, especially if you are familiar with the place and what things cost there, the non-tipping one will appear to be much more expensive.
Here is a piece from a server arguing for this steady rise. I don't agree, but there it is. http://dpo.st/1Tb3rlN