Impossible? Maybe. Necessary? Absolutely.
Tipping was originally a way to get your food before everyone else. It's not an economic business model.
Raise prices and be transparent with pricing - which is difficult with tipping since most people are bad at math and don't take out a calculator to see what $127 meal will really cost.
Tipping is a service tax and becoming an entitlement to a generation of workers who have never and likely will never have to really work.
No. Tipping is going away. Learn how to pay your employees properly.
> It seems like the only way to get rid of tipping in the US is for every restaurant to do it simultaneously, either by mutual decision (ha!) or through some kind of legislation (double ha!)
Another unmentioned way is if customers just get fed up with paying tips and start tipping less. I get annoyed with any digital payment screen that only offers default tip options of 18% or more and take my revenge by sometimes selecting no tip.
The thing is that customers don't have to stop all at once. If one restaurant stops all on its own then it will go out of business. If a customer stops tipping then they suffer no consequences cause they are freeloading off of everyone else who hasn't stopped yet. Once the rest of the customers see that people are freeloading off of them then they will be tempted to stop too.
The problem with taking "revenge" is that you only hurt the employees. Assuming the employer is not stealing tips, not tipping doesn't affect the bosses at all. If you want revenge, stop visiting the place.
This is certainly one possible long-term outcome too. Restaurants seem to be going for the triple whammy of raising prices+adding opaque fees, and also soliciting tips more frequently and expecting to receive them in higher amounts, and also automating/paring down more and more of the restaurant's processes. This is all very exhausting and irritating to experience as a consumer especially knowing I could eat about just as well for 1/8th the price at home, so I limit eating out as much as I can.
Yep. The person who's getting punished here has literally no influence over what percentage is being suggested on the tip screen.
Also 18% is diddly. I pretty much tip 20% or more with very few exceptions. Times are hard, prices have gone up, but I still make tech money and service folks make a lot less.
I did restaurant work in my teens and 20s and have no interest in doing it again. But I do like being able to eat at restaurants and get carry out, so the least I figure I can do is tip generously to support the folks who make that possible.
Refusing to tip or tipping less does affect restaurant bosses, but the effect is one step removed. By not tipping or leaving smaller tips, customers reduce the total take-home pay of the servers, which pressures restaurant bosses to increase the base wage in order to retain the servers.
On the other hand, leaving excessively high tips encourages restaurant bosses to keep the base wage low, since you are relieving the bosses of the market pressure to pay a competitive wage.
Just last week I ordered Dominos pizza, I do carry out because the 3 minute away location is not worth $12 more with the tip. So I come in, talk to the kid at the counter, tell him my name, he grabs the order, brings the order up on the system and tells me "You can insert your card after answering the question on the screen!"
There it is. I'm picking up my pizza and there is a tip screen. Four large tip options at 18, 20, 22 & 25%. I have not taken a bite of the pizza. I'm the one picking up the food and delivering it to my house. I ordered it via the app, never conversing with a person. I paid the carryout pricing. The only interaction I had with a human was ~15 seconds at this point and it was purely to remit payment. Nobody in this establishment is a waiter so they are all required to be paid above min-wage.
The tiny 'no tip' button was tapped and the kid looked sad. I am made to feel/look like a jerk for not paying an unexpected fee. What a bizarre world.
Really bothersome that the one example cited here is Pecking House, which has a months-long queue. His strategy requires a certain amount of abundance, and will not necessarily work for every dumpling shop and deli in America.
Customers, on average, do not like it. And of the ones who do, a portion of them like it because they can deny people the tip. So they like tipping essentially because they don't.
Anyone telling you that customers "enjoy the agency" is selling you a line of bullshit. Servers will sell you that. Restaurateurs will sell you that. Customers will not.
Servers like it because it gives them more money, but so would paying them properly. Business owners like it because they save money on not paying their employees good wages. Customers do not like it because it's, essentially, a hidden fee. If I had bad service, I should not be obligated to tip. But society has decided that I owe a 15-25% service fee to my waiter even if the service sucked.
>If I had bad service, I should not be obligated to tip. But society has decided that I owe a 15-25% service fee to my waiter even if the service sucked.
Says who? Just don't tip if you hate the service. That's what I do.
I left a quarter once for service that deserved it. The waitress threw it at me.
Culturally, the tip is part of the price. They just can’t call the police for a dine-and-dash because it legally isn’t. So I don’t think just not tipping is a realistic option. So it’s what you owe in all but law.
Which is not me defending tipping. I find the thing ridiculous and distasteful enough that I probably just won’t eat where tips are at that level of expectation more often than not. It’s not such a necessity that if I don’t have line-item veto that I won’t veto the whole thing.
"If I had bad service, I should not be obligated to tip. But society has decided that I owe a 15-25% service fee to my waiter even if the service sucked."
I wish folks with this attitude got docked some of their pay when their co-workers or boss decide they weren't happy with their work.
I just consider tipping the surcharge for not having to do service / restaurant work myself any longer. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.
> I wish folks with this attitude got docked some of their pay when their co-workers or boss decide they weren't happy with their work.
That's unnecessarily hostile. I worked customer service up to a year ago, and I never felt obligated to tips. I did my job and got my money. Every once in a while, a customer would tip me for good service, but it was never required. Tips were on top of my wages, not part of them.
> I just consider tipping the surcharge for not having to do service / restaurant work myself any longer. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.
Then what am I paying for? If $6 is a more appropriate price (for the item) to cover wages than $5 is, then the business should charge $6, not $5 plus a "hidden" fee.
Tipping forms a special relationship between the restaurant and specific customers. Sure, regulars get better service, but it is more common for big tipping regulars to get these benefits and more (get seated quickly, food comes out quickly, staff comes by to chat, here's a free drink, etc). In this ideal scenario everyone is happier assuming the big tipper isn't strapped for cash.
I think there is a 3rd possibility in how tipping ends: people get sick of tipping and stop doing it. It seems like every single transaction asks for a tip these days. I tip heavily, but even I am getting weary of tipping so often. Most of the time, it feels like the tip shouldn't be necessary; the employers should be covering the cost of the employee. If people get used to declining tip prompts, it's possible that we see this change in behavior make its way into the restaurant industry.
At least for me, personally, I'm nearly at the point where I want to stop tipping entirely. It just seems so unnecessary and just another way that the capital class deflects blame for inadequate employee pay.
Especially post-pandemic, I've come to view those flip-around screens as an opportunity for direct, voluntary, progressive income redistribution, or price discrimination, if you like. Paying an extra couple of bucks for falafel or a slice of pizza really doesn't mean anything to me, it presumably means a good bit more to whomever's behind the Square terminal.
The only reason I continue to tip is out of fear for being called out, or something done to my food. So much of tipping has been about constantly badgering them then guilting and shaming people who don't do it.
Yeah I'm done with those screens that flip around and ask you to tip everywhere. My default is now 'no tip' unless its a traditional tipping situation. Most of the time those 'tips' aren't going to the employees, it is just predatory capitalism exploiting another revenue stream.
The odd thing is how specific to restaurants it is, and only a handful of other industries.
You dont tip in any other context. If you want the deluxe experience you order the deluxe option.
To me this seems wrong. If tipping were so great then why isn't it universal? What is special about restaurants?
Taxis/Uber/Lyft want tips. Same with barbers/salons/spas.
I know that the gray market is a big factor. Untaxed cash transactions under the table. But it is weirdly institutionalized and normal.
We have just decided to politely tolerate certain kinds of trivial illegal activity. But all-cash businesses do become a key vehicle for money laundering, and thus does have wider negative impacts.
It's not just that some low wage employees get tax-free funds. It aids organized crime.
I'm not exactly sure why it works like this, and contrary to the title this article doesn't really explain why.
Cash is needed for a free society as it's one of the last ways you can actually have transactions without being mercilessly tracked by large businesses and governments. Getting rid of tipping is another step closer to "cashless societies" that I absolutely never want to take.
> The odd thing is how specific to restaurants it is, and only a handful of other industries.
I believe that generally it's in industries that directly replaced personal servants: people who cook and serve your food, carry your things around, make your bed, do your hair, chauffeur you around. I'm not sure why tipping happens in those jobs though.
I think you've sort of answered your own question. Servants used to be sort of an extension to the household and they tended to be given some extra money at Christmas if nothing else. Now that a lot of this sort of thing is time-sliced, it mostly got shifted to an ongoing gratuity.
I do give my monthly housekeeper something at Christmas and I've seen other contexts where there's the expectation of contributing to a Christmas bonus for staff as well.
Most folks working in restaraunts don't "benefit" -- in several states their hourly wage is $2.13 an hour plus tips. If no tables come in then that's literally all you get. Their "benefit" is, occasionally, a living wage.
There are a handful of very hot, busy venues with high prices and turnover, but those are the exception, not the rule. FAANG salaries vs. the average IT / tech worker.
Yes, I know how tipped wages work. However, I've never seen servers advocate for just working under normal minimum wage laws. That's a complete non-starter for them. And their reasoning is that they make more with the tipped system.
So, no, I don't think I'll listen to people in the restaurant industry tell me why I have to pay mystery wages to the employees.
Make no mistake, tipping continues in America because most Americans like the system. If you don't like to tip, there are plenty of restaurants where tipping isn't expected; specifically those where you carry the food yourself from the counter to your table. If enough people hated tipping, restaurants that don't have tipping would eventually out-compete those that do. They may yet do so, but presently most of the public seems okay with tipping.
Anecdotally, the culture gap between America and Europe when it comes to obligatory tipping is wider than the issue of tipping. Americans seem to generally value superficial pleasantness more than Europeans do. If a waitress in America is having a bad day, people still expect her to put on a pleasant face for the customers, while in Europe people seem to think it normal that a waitress having a bad day would treat other people in a natural fashion, clip and surly. For my part, I prefer the American culture and try my best to reciprocate. If I'm having a bad day, I try to remain superficially pleasant when interacting with waitresses, or anybody else. My bad day shouldn't become somebody else's bad day.
Tipping is not necessary for that sort of culture, but I do think it helps to reward it, and washes out those waitresses that can't manage it.
There are restaurant employees that expect a tip because they prepared your food then packaged it up. This is an insane concept to me. In that case these same employees should tip the grocery store clerk that rang up and bagged their groceries, or to their amazon delivery driver, or to the dental assistant that cleaned their teeth. It's absurd to me that the burder of closing the pay gap is on the customer. I'm not opposed to tipping for service but lets taper those expecations a bit. If you already get paid for doing the job, don't expect the customer to foot the rest because the owner doesn't want to participate in profit sharing (the business does good, so do you, hence bigger effort in making sure the business succeeds)
> There are restaurant employees that expect a tip because they prepared your food then packaged it up.
'Expect', one word with two very different meanings.
1. To predict or believe that something will happen
3. To consider reasonably due. Synonyms: hope, want, wish
They 'expect' a tip in the sense that they want one, but they don't 'expect' tips in the anticipatory sense, because tipping glorified cashiers just isn't part of the American tipping culture. Baristas and the like put tip jars on the counter but I'd guess that only 1 in 10 people ever put anything in those jars. I never do.
That's only if the employee has earned more than $5.12 in tips. For what it's worth, I know many illegal aliens making $+20/hour in tips. Minimum wage here is not a problem.
It becomes an issue for waitresses who consistently cannot get tips; the law says their employer has to make up the difference, but in practice such people don't last long in the business. If a waitress is consistently unable to get enough tips to clear minimum wage, there's probably a good reason for it and they're just not cut out for the job.
Consider that single 20% tip on a $40 order once an hour is enough to clear the federal minimum wage. It doesn't take much, if you can't make that much in tips then either the restaurant is dead or you're consistently fucking up orders.
You're basically describing the system as it is intended to work. If a business cannot survive without paying someone minimum wage, we've decided as a society that it is not worthy of existence. On the other end, if the person sucks at the job and is costing the business money, I don't know why there is an expectation the person keeps the job. I certainly don't receive that benefit.
> If a business cannot survive without paying someone minimum wage, we've decided as a society that it is not worthy of existence.
An appeal to the decisions of society? I'm not sure that's the argument you're looking for; American society has decided that it works differently for waitresses.
Even for establishments that do pay more... so many fast food/takeout places have tipping on their checkout process now. Starbucks in my city, as an example, pays a baseline well above most similar positions in the area, but they still expect tips above and beyond.
I don't blame someone for wanting and accepting more... It just feels weird to tip when the service is baseline, vs say a waitress where they take your order, bring drinks, refills, corrections, additions, etc. and generally with a pleasant personality.
With respect to Europe, in the UK it's pretty common to see a "voluntary" 10% added to the bill for table service these days.
The expectation of tipping for more and more things and the ratcheting up of default amounts in digital payment systems are somewhat annoying. But knowing that you'll be paying 20-25% more or so in a lot of situations between tipping and sales tax isn't really that much more of a mental burden. Honestly, I'm more bothered when restaurants also tack on various fees for "living wage" or health insurance or whatever.
I'm actually ok with that if it's clear and up front - as in, written on the menu, which in my experience it usually is. It's not like you have to guess the additional expected fee at the end.
Well, yes, but how many people going into a sit-down restaurant in the US don't know that they're on the hook for about a 25% add-on when they get the bill? Maybe if it's the first time visiting but certainly not in general.
> If you don't like to tip, there are plenty of restaurants where tipping isn't expected; specifically those where you carry the food yourself from the counter to your table.
Idk where your at but where I'm living in America, these kinds of places still very much encourage a tip and will still give you some dirty glances if you skip the tipping page at checkout. On principle, I won't tip these places, but there's very much still a social expectation.
> If enough people hated tipping, restaurants that don't have tipping would eventually out-compete those that do.
What makes you say this? As another comment points out, minimum wage is lower for restaurant workers in most (all?) states. How would a restaurant without tips outcompete in this system?
Restaurant wages are lower for waitresses, not for cooks, cashiers, etc. Fast food/etc restaurant workers get the normal minimum wage at the least.
Such restaurants can out-compete restaurants with waitresses by simply offering the sort of self-service that most people prefer, if in fact most people prefer that. It's not as though these restaurants are forced to pay their waitresses more; they don't have waitresses at all. That's one less expense they have to worry about.
>If you don't like to tip, there are plenty of restaurants where tipping isn't expected; specifically those where you carry the food yourself from the counter to your table
These places still ask for a tip. Even to-go only places practically demand tips.
I was recently told by a friend that it was just as socially expected to tip for counter service as it is to tip at a sit down restaurant.
Your friend is crazy, or rather it seems they fell victim to the scam. Businesses want you to tip for counter service because you're helping to pay for their labor expenses and they get to pocket the difference. The person behind the counter hopes that you'll tip because they were told when they were hired that tipping would help make up for their low wages.
They want to push the perception that society thinks you should tip for counter service, but it's not real (at least not yet). I don't tip for carry out or for retail transactions. Tips are reserved for people who perform a service (waiting on my table, cutting my hair, etc) and not for every employee I interact with who handles food.
There was an exception made at the height of the pandemic for restaurants that had few if any indoor diners. We tipped them for carry out because it's money they would have been getting if it were safe to eat inside like we wanted to. Now that most people are back to their old habits (safe or not) I think it's fine to stop tipping for carry out orders.
I don't agree with my friend, but she was incredibly outraged that I choose a tip of zero at a donut shop, this is how this came up. If you're being intellectually honest there's no logical justification for why a server "deserves" a tip and counter staff don't.* Half the time the server isn't even the one physically bringing you your food/drink - that's often done by a runner or a bus boy.
Because the entire tipping culture is based upon shame if a non-insignificant amount of people feel that they are expected to tip whenever asked for a tip, it ends up being the the same as if there was an actual social obligation to tip. Then there can become one.
*There actually is a social obligation to tip counter staff - only if you're ordering an alcoholic drink though.
Waitstaff put in more time bringing food (if they do that, but tips are pooled anyway), topping off drinks, handling odd requests, and then taking care of checkout. They also make $2 an hour while the person handing doughnuts gets at least minimum wage which seems like a good justification for hitting 0% at the bakery register.
You're right about bartenders being the exception. That I tend to view more as an outright bribe for better drinks and faster service which is honestly not ideal either.
I do think businesses are taking advantage of our guilt and conditioning to try to normalize tips where they never existed before. Hopefully your friend can be brought around to see that. The fewer people who accept it, the slower it will spread. I really hope "tip creep" pisses people off enough that we start to question the entire culture of tipping.
>They also make $2 an hour while the person handing doughnuts gets at least minimum wage which seems like a good justification for hitting 0% at the bakery register.
False! In my locale waitstaff make the same (high) minimum wage as everyone else.
As someone who visited America on a business trip - my biggest shock was when we went to a restaurant, and the server we had was downright rude(and it wasn't even just my observation, our American hosts also agreed with this). So at the end of the meal, I said - well the server was rude, that means we don't tip, right? To which our American hosts went "no no, that would make you look like a dick - just tip less, like 10%, that will show them".
I still think about this interaction to this day. I don't think the system "washes out" anyone - because(based on my single and anecdotal experience) people will tip no matter what, because otherwise they might look bad.
I think the reaction from your American hosts was either unusual, or they privately disagreed with your assessment of the server's rudeness. Maybe that is a restaurant they wanted to return to later and didn't want to burn bridges.
I don't hesitate to refuse a tip if the server is truly rude, but I'll also not return to that restaurant for a long time. This has only happened a handful of times in my life. If the service is neutral then I'll leave a neutral tip, usually 15% unless the total is low and rounds up to a nice whole number.
> If you don't like to tip, there are plenty of restaurants where tipping isn't expected; specifically those where you carry the food yourself from the counter to your table.
Generally such restaurants serve significantly different kinds of food, and are typically lower quality. You can't expect these kinds of restaurants (typically fast food, food trucks, buffet food, etc.) to out-compete restaurants that they are hardly even competing with in the first place (e.g. fancier sit-down restaurants).
Plenty of people simply choose not to eat at those sort of restaurants. If this is an issue you feel strongly about, it is within your power to choose not to eat at restaurants with waitresses. Such restaurants are a luxury you choose to indulge in.
You think restaurants are bad... you should see services like UberEats and DoorDash drivers.
I have had orders cancelled by the driver because they found something that tipped higher despite me tipping $7 for something down the street less than 1 mile from my house. I have also tipped $20 only for instructions to be ignored where I put my gate code, unit# and ask for it to just be dropped off at my door step but the driver is so lazy they leave the food on the ground outside the gate on the street.
Friend of mine started driving for Door Dash recently and when he told me they can see up front what the tip is going to be I was just flabbergasted. That's not how it's supposed to work, at all.
My personal favorite is that DoorDash started a $2.99 'Express' fee. The idea being like UberX vs Uber Pool: If you don't choose this option 6/10 times your driver will pick up other orders and deliver them prior to yours. Might I add that it is a brutally cold area here and zero of the drivers have any sort of keep-warm bag. So at the last minute it is a $3.99 fee that I'm assuming, mostly pays DoorDash's bills. Just so my food is not frozen and soggy. I stopped using the product, it sucks to pay 50% more for cold food or 60% more to maybe have it not be as cold.
Bidding is fine and will drop process and balance out long term, but seeing the tip before delivery creates the bad incentives described in other comments i.e. canceling an accepted order for another with a higher tip or not following instructions. I know I've been peeved after waiting 30 minutes only to find out my food isn't coming.
That makes sense. The problem sounds like that some vendors let the delivery be cancelled mid-way through the delivery process, rather than making people commit to making a delivery that they have accepted. I'd think if we were serious about bidding to discover the price, there would be a queue of open orders, and then someone would accept, and they would absolutely have to do the delivery or be banned or whatever. For the customer, your order would either sit in the queue forever, or be accepted and you'd be guaranteed to receive your order. (This is challenging in practice because there are two concurrent processes going on; preparing your food, and then delivering it. You want to get the delivery driver en route to the restaurant so they show up right when the food is first ready; waiting on either end is lost money. The food delivery provider is walking a fine line where they'll have to pay for food that's prepared and thrown away if no driver is willing to transport it. And, I'm sure restaurants will want in on this price discovery mechanism, making it too complicated and unreliable for any consumer to actually use.)
I've had delivery drivers give me my order only after explicitly telling me to tip more - which was frustrating because I actually increased my tip from $5 suggested by the app to $7 cause it was a snowy night. Some people won't be happy no matter what you do for them.
$7 seems pretty good to me, though it's pretty mileage dependent (I assume the suggested tip is probably taking that into account), but I wonder, how much would I have to offer you to complete a Doordash order?
The tip isn’t the price of delivering the order though, you’re conflating the price and the tip into the same thing, which they’re not.
For the record, I’ve been a delivery driver before. Getting tipped at all was amazing, so I literally can not imagine pounding on the door, handing the person their pizza and telling them that they should tip more because I want more money.
When you were a delivery driver, were you a W-2 employee? Doordash is not that - it's more like a live service market where you bid for delivery from a driver and Doordash attempts to match your order to a driver, all of whom are self employed (1099). They've got to pay all their vehicle expenses and in theory get something for their time, meanwhile Doordash is a middle-man and trying to squeeze both sides of the transaction. When it works, it is pretty impressive, but mostly it just seems like a Mug's game.
For the modern food ordering app, the tip is the price of delivering. It's really a misnomer. More accurately, it should be called a bid, since you're placing a bid on your order and hoping a delivery driver will pick it up.
The idea of tipping before the service is given is ridiculous. At sit-down restaurants you get to taste the food, see the care put into it, the presentation, service, etc. But at your local sandwich shop or with UberEats, you pay and tip before receiving the wrong order or bad quality food. Tips are supposed to be the incentive to provide a good service/product, not a custom which renders you the asshole when ignored.
The same reason why so many other corrupt practices in America are not considered a bribe. It would require those who benefit from it to also lobby against it.
I’m not sure if that’s true? Back then in the 50s in most Asian countries, you wanted water at a hospital? “Tip” the nurse $1. Want fresh blood transfusion, “tip” the nurse and doctor $10 on top of the cost of the blood. I’m not sure the outcome needs to be nefarious and unethical for it to be considered a bribe.
Which countries? I’m super curious since I have work/school friends from all over and afaik it’s mostly just a US thing due to federal minimum wage set to less than $3. And Canada just follows suit.
Yea tips exist in other countries but not the regimented 15-18-20-25% and is usually only given for large groups at a fixed rate.
"Customers looked at the higher prices ($25 for the chicken instead of $21, $17 cocktails instead of $14) and ordered fewer and less-expensive items, even though they were paying exactly the same amount for them by tacking 20% onto the check at meal’s end."
You know what, I worry about this sometimes. We think that we're so evolved and advanced race - that we have poetry and literature, modern medicine and rocket science. That we deserve to explore the stars, and if we met alien intelligence we'd sit at the table as equals.
But turns out a normal human has emotion overriding even the simplest logic and basic arithmetic defeats most of us - I imagine it's not even just the "average" Joe - a lot of very intelligent people will see that $25 burger and decide that they'd rather go somewhere where the burger is $20, because it "feels cheaper".
Monkey sees banana, monkey wants banana. Except this monkey can build rockets and nuclear reactors.
Back in the day, I used to oversee a lot of usability research for a well-known travel engine. Every single time, people would choose the lowest possible base price. It did not matter if you explained to them how uncomfortable it might be, any add-on fees they'd occur, quality of product, or literally anything else. All that mattered was the first number they saw.
I don't know if it's a uniquely American thing, but the ability to wrap one's head around future cost additions or commensurate value is just completely not there, at all.
Almost certainly not uniquely American. I don't remember any behavioral economics research on this particular topic but it seems to be a pretty fundamental cognitive bias. (Of course, if someone is really just looking for the lowest price it's reasonable to expect that they'll mostly ignore the fact that they're going to be riding in the luggage compartment.)
Hidden fees are a strategy as old as time - what's uniquely American is the lack of regulation regarding them.
Look at something as simple as sales tax - in the US, that's not included in the price on the shelf, but in most of the developed world it is. It's not like there's some centuries old custom at work there - it's regulation.
my 10th grade AP History teacher offered snacks to the students. 25 cents a piece, or 3 for a dollar. Most of the year went by of people taking the dollar option before a student asked if they could have 4 for a dollar, to which the teacher said, "of course, they are 25 cents each."
It was A&W and it's almost certainly BS. The only source for this was a single restaurant that hired a marketing firm to identify the reason for the failure. The marketing firm conducted a single focus study, whose methodology remains unknown but reported that one participant in the study asked why they should pay more money for a smaller product.
Let me tell you something about marketing firms, many of don't exactly hire competent statisticians or people with a rigorous scientific background to investigate matters, and I doubt the situation was any better back in the 80s. Even today I've seen such firms ask leading questions, push people to give certain answers, have incredibly biased or non-random focus groups, or many other very basic mistakes.
> The firm eventually conducted a focus group to discover the truth: participants were concerned about the price of the burger. "Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?" they asked.
> It turns out the majority of participants incorrectly believed one-third of a pound was actually smaller than a quarter of a pound. [1]
Sure maybe only a single person asked the question but it sounds like they then polled the entire focus group afterwards. I'm not too sure what leading question to ask to get somebody who understands 1/3 > 1/4 to answer the inverse.
My position is to remain highly skeptical of this story. The single source of this entire anecdote comes from a book written by A&W's owner at the time (Alfred Taubman) that is left almost intentionally vague and has a clear conflict on interest.
The book makes a lot of unsourced and unverified claims about how A&W's burger tasted better than McDonald's in blind tests, and a bunch of other claims about how A&W should have outperformed McDonalds, but all because Americans are too stupid to know that 1/3 is larger than 1/4, A&W failed to capture market share and that's why they had a major decline in the 80s.
There is no other source for this story whatsoever other than the literal owner of A&W. The marketing firm (Yankelovich, Skelly and White) never released any details, no one else at the company ever wrote about it, and there's no way to independently verify any of these details to really understand what actually happened.
As an FYI, McDonald's had a third pounder burger on their menu for 6 or so years and never seemed to have any issue with customers reporting feeling ripped off because of it. They removed it along with all of their premium menu items as part of an effort to simplify their offerings.
I’ve come to believe that most people are not cheap but they have an aversion to feeling like they were suckered out of their money.
They will pay $65k for a truck that is known to have incredible margins for the manufacturer, and be delighted to do so, unless they find out they could have gotten it for $59k.
One I remember from Richard Thaler years ago was that, if you were comparison shopping in physical stores (this was pre-Web), if you saw a TV in a store that was $1 more expensive than in another store you had shopped in, you'd probably just shrug and buy it. But if some $2 item were $1 more, you'd probably go back to the first store even if it cost you more than $1 to do so--because fairness/being ripped off. (And I think most people are cheap at some level in many contexts.)
I don't see an emotion vs logic dichotomy being applicable here; we just don't process numbers like calculators because the world is messy and everything is a context-dependent guess with imperfect information.
If 99.9% of the time I go to a restaurant the number I see is eventually adjusted by sales tax+tip, my mental "value" heuristic is going to be comparing that number to how hungry I am, how soon I think I'm getting the burger, how good I think this place is, etc.
If half of restaurants abolished tips I'm sure I would develop the ability to incorporate that into my heuristic.
And sure like any heuristic it has its failure modes but in general, if you look at a whole population, those heuristics tend to be pretty astonishingly effective in aggregate.
This assumes everyone is tipping the same, "fair", unified rate; they aren't, though: people who tip more--for a variety of reasons that might have nothing to do with the wait staff--are subsidizing the prices for people who tip less. I wrote more about this in my adjacent comment below:
Anna Gunn played the emasculating wife of Walter White in "Breaking Bad". She was not a popular character (and wasn't supposed to be, at least at first).
She received a myriad of death threats on social media for that portrayal.
I cannot express how bananas that is that people can't separate fiction from real life in this way. That these people are such emotional creatures that it never occurs to them that the way they feel towards the character is invalid towards the actress.
(To me) it's abundantly clear that a certain percentage of the population is no better than feral beasts trained to live in society. For instance, some people report having no inner monologue. If such people are not introspectively evaluating their thoughts, then what are they doing? Most likely mindlessly going through the motions of their life as a simple stimulus/response machine.
I have no inner monologue, unless I'm specifically thinking about what to say or write. Language is non-essential for thought. It's a way to map thoughts into a communicable form, but it's not thought. The concepts language describes exist independent of the language.
Interestingly for me this translation of thought into language is much slower for writing than it is for speaking (with typing intermediate but closer to writing). I was diagnosed with Dysgraphia[1], as part of that evaluation I was given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Third Edition (WAIS-III) when I was 16 years old, it gave me a verbal IQ of 147, a performance IQ of 125, and a full-scale IQ of 143. So I think I'd serve as a counterexample (sample size 1, though I know there are others) to the "left side of the curve" correlating with a lack of inner monologue (at least for this particular measurement, there are many others). Perhaps it goes the other way around, and the people who have to slow their thoughts down to translate everything into language are the left side of the curve, but more likely they're uncorrelated aspects of cognition.
No, I have no inner monologue in the usual sense of some "voice" in my head that I think in. I just translate thoughts into words when I need words. I certainly don't narrate my own day or anything like I've heard others describe their inner monologue.
> For instance, some people report having no inner monologue
And some people have more than one voice in their head.
It would be interesting to compare the total number of voices in the collective heads of humanity with the total population to see what the average number of voices is in a head.
There was that side character in The Office called Cathy Simms who tried to get Jim to cheat on Pam when they were at a conference together. This scene led to fans threatening the actress who played Cathy and they still harass her to this day despite the show ending in 2013 (OMG has it really been 10 years?!)
> a lot of very intelligent people will see that $25 burger and decide that they'd rather go somewhere where the burger is $20, because it "feels cheaper".
Isn't that the whole foundation of capitalism?
If I'm the best at making widgets I can pump them out at $4/pop while the competition needs to do $5/pop and eventually my process for widget making is the dominate one. Maybe somebody innovates and gets down to $3/pop but in the end society is able to get more widgets/$.
IMO, the real problem is all of these hidden fees. The idea of a price is that it's how much something will cost. The fact that you can juice your sales by providing a non-total price is a market distortion and should be corrected.
I was totally fine with tipping for 30 years of my life until I recently encountered a gas station checkout with a tip prompt. I heard Captain Picard in my head telling me the line must be drawn here. Now I only tip at dine in restaurants where I eat often and generally the bare minimum because of the inflation of base menu prices. I am not paying anyone $25 to bring me food and drinks.
Incidentally I've known plenty of people over the years who have worked in food service who never seemed to be lacking in cash for drugs, big car payments, expensive clothes. If just one sucker is willing to tip you 15% once per hour you're doing fine. If you're going home with hundreds of easily tax evadible dollars in your pocket at the end of the day stop complaining to me.
What tipped me over the edge on my acceptance of tipping culture, was seeing a tip screen pop up on a display after paying at what was essentially a local fast-food place. What service am I tipping here for? That I liked the 1 minute I talked to worker?
When I was younger, It made sense to me to tip housekeeping if you make a small ask of them, or to tip a service worker if you make a request outside the norm; you're asking more of them than most people after all, and you want to add some grease. But what is with tipping for doing the standard of exchanging money for goods and services?
For context : restaurant and bars in many ( most ? ) countries function without tips. Function=do not go belly up too much.
More context : the state take over some employers responsibilities by providing healthcare, unemployment, and retirement insurances. ( none of that is free, it’s been pay by both employers and employees )
More context : prices are fair, in the sense that middle class folks in those place can afford to go get intoxicated in bars and eat food in restaurant.
Now the question, dear American friends : what type of exceptions make those things unreal in your place?
It’s not a trick question, I live among you since a while. I don’t see tips going away like I don’t see firearms disappear.
But I’m merely an experienced watched of your society, so maybe you can explain me why tips are still a thing.
It's not that it's unreal to remove tipping. It's that there is no big incentive to do so. If anything, there is pretty big incentive to keep it. Restaurants like it as it allows them to appear cheaper by offloading the visible cost into the tip. Many servers like it as cash tips are frequently used as untaxed income.
"Customers looked at the higher prices ($25 for the chicken instead of $21, $17 cocktails instead of $14) and ordered fewer and less-expensive items, even though they were paying exactly the same amount for them by tacking 20% onto the check at meal’s end. It’s just economic reality: lower posted prices with added fees will encourage people to spend more money because the posted price is what gets stuck in their heads."
Okay, so make all added fees, including tips, illegal. All prices everywhere include sales tax. All meal prices include gratuity, or everyone in the restaurant is paid a tipless wage. Let people get over the sticker shock.
Increasingly, everything in this country has three prices: the sticker price, the price with sales tax, and a third price which depending on the industry is either the price with gratuity, the price with fees, or the subscription price.
Terrible idea. What incentive do restaurants have to increase their wages to make up for lack of tips? They restaurant owners are already not getting the tip money. Net effect is just going to be poorer servers and richer restaurant owners.
Worth noting that the us dept of labor only changed their rules recently to make it clear that back of house staff _can_ participate in tip pools.
Prior to that the only way to equitably pay them alongside front of house was to pay them a higher wage out of the food costs. Those increased food costs put the restaurant at a disadvantage in the market even if the total take (food plus tip) was the same.
Could include a default 15-20% gratuity that gets tacked onto the bill at the end? I’ve been to places outside of the US that do this. It’s ‘opt-out’ tipping.
Doesn't a compulsory service charge solve this problem? The prices of the items on the menu, remain the same, the but the cheque adds X% to the final charge. AFAIK here in Ecuador restaurants are required to add a 12% service charge.
That's still a hidden charge that makes the menu pricing mildly dishonest. Adding X% to all the prices is clearly the right solution. The problem is that all restaurants need to do it to make it work.
I delivered pizza back in the day, over 10 years ago now.. I still remember the few people that went above and beyond and gave me a really good tip.. today I don't work for tips, but those feelings have influenced how I tip today and I hope that the pizza people whom I tip well will remember my acts of kindness and some day when they are more fortunate as I am now, will pay it forward to the next pizza guy, and the stream of goodwill will continue for the rest of time, or until pizzas are no longer delivered
Everyone should have to do a couple of years at a service job. Teaches you a lot of humility, and changes how you view a lot of folks.
A summer or two working in a food truck where the internal temp was around 49C will teach you appreciate jobs where you sit on a few softball meetings and write documentation.
I think part of what is causing the "customers pay more" effect is that tipping manages to do the thing where it captures "whales"; and this is critical for business in America due to wealth inequality, and is similar to the numerous often-frustrating-but-maybe-justifies attempts at maximizing payments in other industries (such as games, music, etc.).
Like, I don't think it is the right lesson to say that the higher price points scare away people in the abstract, as if everyone who is eating is paying the meal plus 15% and they are just being dumb by not realizing they are paying "the same" in a world where tipping doesn't happen. (edit: And yup... I now see other comments leaning into "Americans are bad at math").
It isn't that uniform: a lot of people tip 10% while many are tipping 20%; there are people who aren't tipping at all and people who routinely tip 30%... and it doesn't stop there! There are also people who at least occasionally throw in some massive tip... I myself have, for various reasons that made sense at the time, thrown down a >100% tip on small checks.
Sure, some people like the awkward "control" over the wait staff, but that is also simplistic: there are people who make it a status symbol and proudly are known among their friends--the wait staff doesn't matter--as "big tippers"; and there are people who get into friendly competitions with their friends over who tips the most.
The result is that this turns into a kind of "pay what you can" at best and an awkward gamified mechanic to force people to stretch to pay more at its worst, resulting in people who have the money to pay subsidizing the people who don't, which maybe is actually a good thing? If nothing else, I see why it is profitable, even if customers ALL kind of dislike it.
(It also, though, causes people who "feel the weight of society" and feel a need to tip to ensure people get paid to subsidize the people who have the money but are selfish and don't give a shit. My guesses as to the balance of people who don't tip much because they can't and those who don't tip much because they won't affects my personal feelings on whether it is "fair" or not.)
The annoying part are all the tipping-adjacent restaurants trying to get 'in' on tipping. Like burger joints and pizza carryout defaulting to 15% tips at checkout.
I could see it eventually going the way of internet advertising.. so noisy that a significant minority rejects the system altogether.
One other problem is tips are more tax-efficient for restaurants. A restaurant that charges more and pays more in wages has a higher revenue (but not profit). There are taxes and regulations that scale on revenue that don't allow for offsetting wage deductions, so going no-tip can increase other expenses.
148 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadRaise prices and be transparent with pricing - which is difficult with tipping since most people are bad at math and don't take out a calculator to see what $127 meal will really cost.
Tipping is a service tax and becoming an entitlement to a generation of workers who have never and likely will never have to really work.
No. Tipping is going away. Learn how to pay your employees properly.
Another unmentioned way is if customers just get fed up with paying tips and start tipping less. I get annoyed with any digital payment screen that only offers default tip options of 18% or more and take my revenge by sometimes selecting no tip.
I think it's easier for restaurants to stop tipping simultaneously than for every customer in America to stop.
This is certainly one possible long-term outcome too. Restaurants seem to be going for the triple whammy of raising prices+adding opaque fees, and also soliciting tips more frequently and expecting to receive them in higher amounts, and also automating/paring down more and more of the restaurant's processes. This is all very exhausting and irritating to experience as a consumer especially knowing I could eat about just as well for 1/8th the price at home, so I limit eating out as much as I can.
Also 18% is diddly. I pretty much tip 20% or more with very few exceptions. Times are hard, prices have gone up, but I still make tech money and service folks make a lot less.
I did restaurant work in my teens and 20s and have no interest in doing it again. But I do like being able to eat at restaurants and get carry out, so the least I figure I can do is tip generously to support the folks who make that possible.
On the other hand, leaving excessively high tips encourages restaurant bosses to keep the base wage low, since you are relieving the bosses of the market pressure to pay a competitive wage.
There it is. I'm picking up my pizza and there is a tip screen. Four large tip options at 18, 20, 22 & 25%. I have not taken a bite of the pizza. I'm the one picking up the food and delivering it to my house. I ordered it via the app, never conversing with a person. I paid the carryout pricing. The only interaction I had with a human was ~15 seconds at this point and it was purely to remit payment. Nobody in this establishment is a waiter so they are all required to be paid above min-wage.
The tiny 'no tip' button was tapped and the kid looked sad. I am made to feel/look like a jerk for not paying an unexpected fee. What a bizarre world.
Anyone telling you that customers "enjoy the agency" is selling you a line of bullshit. Servers will sell you that. Restaurateurs will sell you that. Customers will not.
Says who? Just don't tip if you hate the service. That's what I do.
Culturally, the tip is part of the price. They just can’t call the police for a dine-and-dash because it legally isn’t. So I don’t think just not tipping is a realistic option. So it’s what you owe in all but law.
Which is not me defending tipping. I find the thing ridiculous and distasteful enough that I probably just won’t eat where tips are at that level of expectation more often than not. It’s not such a necessity that if I don’t have line-item veto that I won’t veto the whole thing.
I wish folks with this attitude got docked some of their pay when their co-workers or boss decide they weren't happy with their work.
I just consider tipping the surcharge for not having to do service / restaurant work myself any longer. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.
That's unnecessarily hostile. I worked customer service up to a year ago, and I never felt obligated to tips. I did my job and got my money. Every once in a while, a customer would tip me for good service, but it was never required. Tips were on top of my wages, not part of them.
> I just consider tipping the surcharge for not having to do service / restaurant work myself any longer. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.
Then what am I paying for? If $6 is a more appropriate price (for the item) to cover wages than $5 is, then the business should charge $6, not $5 plus a "hidden" fee.
Ha! It’s hostile if it’s coming out of your pocket. It’s okay if it’s someone else’s. Got it.
Even if the people with nothing but their own dislike of it have only that, it's still more. Because they are customers.
The only thing you can really use as proof is that customers don't hate it enough to collectively stop. Which is hardly an endorsement.
At least for me, personally, I'm nearly at the point where I want to stop tipping entirely. It just seems so unnecessary and just another way that the capital class deflects blame for inadequate employee pay.
I'm way less likely to tip when I see a flip-around screen. I hate them.
You dont tip in any other context. If you want the deluxe experience you order the deluxe option.
To me this seems wrong. If tipping were so great then why isn't it universal? What is special about restaurants?
Taxis/Uber/Lyft want tips. Same with barbers/salons/spas.
I know that the gray market is a big factor. Untaxed cash transactions under the table. But it is weirdly institutionalized and normal.
We have just decided to politely tolerate certain kinds of trivial illegal activity. But all-cash businesses do become a key vehicle for money laundering, and thus does have wider negative impacts.
It's not just that some low wage employees get tax-free funds. It aids organized crime.
I'm not exactly sure why it works like this, and contrary to the title this article doesn't really explain why.
I know people who have explained how being a cabbie etc was only lucrative because of cash tips.
But yea, electronic POS is now more common.
I believe that generally it's in industries that directly replaced personal servants: people who cook and serve your food, carry your things around, make your bed, do your hair, chauffeur you around. I'm not sure why tipping happens in those jobs though.
I do give my monthly housekeeper something at Christmas and I've seen other contexts where there's the expectation of contributing to a Christmas bonus for staff as well.
Personal servants being distinct from your lawyer or your doctor or therapist.
If tipping were good and respectable and promoting better market dynamics or service... then it would actually be more important in the medical field.
If I get better food service by tipping, then I definitely want better medical service by tipping.
There are a handful of very hot, busy venues with high prices and turnover, but those are the exception, not the rule. FAANG salaries vs. the average IT / tech worker.
See also: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped
So, no, I don't think I'll listen to people in the restaurant industry tell me why I have to pay mystery wages to the employees.
Anecdotally, the culture gap between America and Europe when it comes to obligatory tipping is wider than the issue of tipping. Americans seem to generally value superficial pleasantness more than Europeans do. If a waitress in America is having a bad day, people still expect her to put on a pleasant face for the customers, while in Europe people seem to think it normal that a waitress having a bad day would treat other people in a natural fashion, clip and surly. For my part, I prefer the American culture and try my best to reciprocate. If I'm having a bad day, I try to remain superficially pleasant when interacting with waitresses, or anybody else. My bad day shouldn't become somebody else's bad day.
Tipping is not necessary for that sort of culture, but I do think it helps to reward it, and washes out those waitresses that can't manage it.
'Expect', one word with two very different meanings.
They 'expect' a tip in the sense that they want one, but they don't 'expect' tips in the anticipatory sense, because tipping glorified cashiers just isn't part of the American tipping culture. Baristas and the like put tip jars on the counter but I'd guess that only 1 in 10 people ever put anything in those jars. I never do.Federally that wage is $2.13 per hour.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
Consider that single 20% tip on a $40 order once an hour is enough to clear the federal minimum wage. It doesn't take much, if you can't make that much in tips then either the restaurant is dead or you're consistently fucking up orders.
An appeal to the decisions of society? I'm not sure that's the argument you're looking for; American society has decided that it works differently for waitresses.
I don't blame someone for wanting and accepting more... It just feels weird to tip when the service is baseline, vs say a waitress where they take your order, bring drinks, refills, corrections, additions, etc. and generally with a pleasant personality.
The expectation of tipping for more and more things and the ratcheting up of default amounts in digital payment systems are somewhat annoying. But knowing that you'll be paying 20-25% more or so in a lot of situations between tipping and sales tax isn't really that much more of a mental burden. Honestly, I'm more bothered when restaurants also tack on various fees for "living wage" or health insurance or whatever.
Idk where your at but where I'm living in America, these kinds of places still very much encourage a tip and will still give you some dirty glances if you skip the tipping page at checkout. On principle, I won't tip these places, but there's very much still a social expectation.
What makes you say this? As another comment points out, minimum wage is lower for restaurant workers in most (all?) states. How would a restaurant without tips outcompete in this system?
Such restaurants can out-compete restaurants with waitresses by simply offering the sort of self-service that most people prefer, if in fact most people prefer that. It's not as though these restaurants are forced to pay their waitresses more; they don't have waitresses at all. That's one less expense they have to worry about.
These places still ask for a tip. Even to-go only places practically demand tips.
I was recently told by a friend that it was just as socially expected to tip for counter service as it is to tip at a sit down restaurant.
They want to push the perception that society thinks you should tip for counter service, but it's not real (at least not yet). I don't tip for carry out or for retail transactions. Tips are reserved for people who perform a service (waiting on my table, cutting my hair, etc) and not for every employee I interact with who handles food.
There was an exception made at the height of the pandemic for restaurants that had few if any indoor diners. We tipped them for carry out because it's money they would have been getting if it were safe to eat inside like we wanted to. Now that most people are back to their old habits (safe or not) I think it's fine to stop tipping for carry out orders.
Because the entire tipping culture is based upon shame if a non-insignificant amount of people feel that they are expected to tip whenever asked for a tip, it ends up being the the same as if there was an actual social obligation to tip. Then there can become one.
*There actually is a social obligation to tip counter staff - only if you're ordering an alcoholic drink though.
You're right about bartenders being the exception. That I tend to view more as an outright bribe for better drinks and faster service which is honestly not ideal either.
I do think businesses are taking advantage of our guilt and conditioning to try to normalize tips where they never existed before. Hopefully your friend can be brought around to see that. The fewer people who accept it, the slower it will spread. I really hope "tip creep" pisses people off enough that we start to question the entire culture of tipping.
False! In my locale waitstaff make the same (high) minimum wage as everyone else.
I still think about this interaction to this day. I don't think the system "washes out" anyone - because(based on my single and anecdotal experience) people will tip no matter what, because otherwise they might look bad.
I don't hesitate to refuse a tip if the server is truly rude, but I'll also not return to that restaurant for a long time. This has only happened a handful of times in my life. If the service is neutral then I'll leave a neutral tip, usually 15% unless the total is low and rounds up to a nice whole number.
Generally such restaurants serve significantly different kinds of food, and are typically lower quality. You can't expect these kinds of restaurants (typically fast food, food trucks, buffet food, etc.) to out-compete restaurants that they are hardly even competing with in the first place (e.g. fancier sit-down restaurants).
I assume you haven't eaten at any of those kind of restaurants since 2019.
I have had orders cancelled by the driver because they found something that tipped higher despite me tipping $7 for something down the street less than 1 mile from my house. I have also tipped $20 only for instructions to be ignored where I put my gate code, unit# and ask for it to just be dropped off at my door step but the driver is so lazy they leave the food on the ground outside the gate on the street.
Edit: Reddit says the driver gets ZERO.
My biggest complaint are services that don't show the driver the tip until after they deliver. I want them to know!
For the record, I’ve been a delivery driver before. Getting tipped at all was amazing, so I literally can not imagine pounding on the door, handing the person their pizza and telling them that they should tip more because I want more money.
I tend to tip high when I do - but recently I've just been questioning it since the tip request has gone up even more.
Tipping is the standard in America and other 3rd world countries. The rest of the world should just get used to it and stop complaining.
Which countries? I’m super curious since I have work/school friends from all over and afaik it’s mostly just a US thing due to federal minimum wage set to less than $3. And Canada just follows suit.
Yea tips exist in other countries but not the regimented 15-18-20-25% and is usually only given for large groups at a fixed rate.
You know what, I worry about this sometimes. We think that we're so evolved and advanced race - that we have poetry and literature, modern medicine and rocket science. That we deserve to explore the stars, and if we met alien intelligence we'd sit at the table as equals.
But turns out a normal human has emotion overriding even the simplest logic and basic arithmetic defeats most of us - I imagine it's not even just the "average" Joe - a lot of very intelligent people will see that $25 burger and decide that they'd rather go somewhere where the burger is $20, because it "feels cheaper".
Monkey sees banana, monkey wants banana. Except this monkey can build rockets and nuclear reactors.
I don't know if it's a uniquely American thing, but the ability to wrap one's head around future cost additions or commensurate value is just completely not there, at all.
Look at something as simple as sales tax - in the US, that's not included in the price on the shelf, but in most of the developed world it is. It's not like there's some centuries old custom at work there - it's regulation.
Are there hidden fees that most people don't know about? (Most people know about sales tax.)
Do a lot of people just ignore the fact that they're going to have less legroom and won't be able to reserve a seat if they can get a lower price?
Those are different things. The former is a dark pattern. The second just means a lot of people are very price sensitive.
Because 4 is greater than 3.
Let me tell you something about marketing firms, many of don't exactly hire competent statisticians or people with a rigorous scientific background to investigate matters, and I doubt the situation was any better back in the 80s. Even today I've seen such firms ask leading questions, push people to give certain answers, have incredibly biased or non-random focus groups, or many other very basic mistakes.
> It turns out the majority of participants incorrectly believed one-third of a pound was actually smaller than a quarter of a pound. [1]
Sure maybe only a single person asked the question but it sounds like they then polled the entire focus group afterwards. I'm not too sure what leading question to ask to get somebody who understands 1/3 > 1/4 to answer the inverse.
[1]: https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...
The book makes a lot of unsourced and unverified claims about how A&W's burger tasted better than McDonald's in blind tests, and a bunch of other claims about how A&W should have outperformed McDonalds, but all because Americans are too stupid to know that 1/3 is larger than 1/4, A&W failed to capture market share and that's why they had a major decline in the 80s.
There is no other source for this story whatsoever other than the literal owner of A&W. The marketing firm (Yankelovich, Skelly and White) never released any details, no one else at the company ever wrote about it, and there's no way to independently verify any of these details to really understand what actually happened.
As an FYI, McDonald's had a third pounder burger on their menu for 6 or so years and never seemed to have any issue with customers reporting feeling ripped off because of it. They removed it along with all of their premium menu items as part of an effort to simplify their offerings.
They will pay $65k for a truck that is known to have incredible margins for the manufacturer, and be delighted to do so, unless they find out they could have gotten it for $59k.
One I remember from Richard Thaler years ago was that, if you were comparison shopping in physical stores (this was pre-Web), if you saw a TV in a store that was $1 more expensive than in another store you had shopped in, you'd probably just shrug and buy it. But if some $2 item were $1 more, you'd probably go back to the first store even if it cost you more than $1 to do so--because fairness/being ripped off. (And I think most people are cheap at some level in many contexts.)
If 99.9% of the time I go to a restaurant the number I see is eventually adjusted by sales tax+tip, my mental "value" heuristic is going to be comparing that number to how hungry I am, how soon I think I'm getting the burger, how good I think this place is, etc.
If half of restaurants abolished tips I'm sure I would develop the ability to incorporate that into my heuristic.
And sure like any heuristic it has its failure modes but in general, if you look at a whole population, those heuristics tend to be pretty astonishingly effective in aggregate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34459678
Anna Gunn played the emasculating wife of Walter White in "Breaking Bad". She was not a popular character (and wasn't supposed to be, at least at first).
She received a myriad of death threats on social media for that portrayal.
https://www.vulture.com/2013/08/breaking-bads-anna-gunn-conf...
I cannot express how bananas that is that people can't separate fiction from real life in this way. That these people are such emotional creatures that it never occurs to them that the way they feel towards the character is invalid towards the actress.
Look at page 9 of this PDF.
[1]:https://www.westga.edu/academics/research/vrc/assets/docs/th...
Interestingly for me this translation of thought into language is much slower for writing than it is for speaking (with typing intermediate but closer to writing). I was diagnosed with Dysgraphia[1], as part of that evaluation I was given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Third Edition (WAIS-III) when I was 16 years old, it gave me a verbal IQ of 147, a performance IQ of 125, and a full-scale IQ of 143. So I think I'd serve as a counterexample (sample size 1, though I know there are others) to the "left side of the curve" correlating with a lack of inner monologue (at least for this particular measurement, there are many others). Perhaps it goes the other way around, and the people who have to slow their thoughts down to translate everything into language are the left side of the curve, but more likely they're uncorrelated aspects of cognition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
And some people have more than one voice in their head.
It would be interesting to compare the total number of voices in the collective heads of humanity with the total population to see what the average number of voices is in a head.
[1]:https://netflixlife.com/2020/08/12/the-office-lindsey-broad-...
Isn't that the whole foundation of capitalism?
If I'm the best at making widgets I can pump them out at $4/pop while the competition needs to do $5/pop and eventually my process for widget making is the dominate one. Maybe somebody innovates and gets down to $3/pop but in the end society is able to get more widgets/$.
IMO, the real problem is all of these hidden fees. The idea of a price is that it's how much something will cost. The fact that you can juice your sales by providing a non-total price is a market distortion and should be corrected.
Incidentally I've known plenty of people over the years who have worked in food service who never seemed to be lacking in cash for drugs, big car payments, expensive clothes. If just one sucker is willing to tip you 15% once per hour you're doing fine. If you're going home with hundreds of easily tax evadible dollars in your pocket at the end of the day stop complaining to me.
When I was younger, It made sense to me to tip housekeeping if you make a small ask of them, or to tip a service worker if you make a request outside the norm; you're asking more of them than most people after all, and you want to add some grease. But what is with tipping for doing the standard of exchanging money for goods and services?
More context : the state take over some employers responsibilities by providing healthcare, unemployment, and retirement insurances. ( none of that is free, it’s been pay by both employers and employees )
More context : prices are fair, in the sense that middle class folks in those place can afford to go get intoxicated in bars and eat food in restaurant.
Now the question, dear American friends : what type of exceptions make those things unreal in your place?
It’s not a trick question, I live among you since a while. I don’t see tips going away like I don’t see firearms disappear.
But I’m merely an experienced watched of your society, so maybe you can explain me why tips are still a thing.
It seems like a common theme here.
In regards to worker liking the untaxed incomes: I live in a US city that rely on tourism and thus the service industry.
I had countless conversation with industry worker about this and it seems like a chicken and egg problem.
They need it because the base pay is shit, but they also hate the irregularity of it. ( triple pay in season, not worth to work outside of it )
They also would take more stability in order to raise family.
Most stop to find « a real job » when they reach their 40 or so.
Okay, so make all added fees, including tips, illegal. All prices everywhere include sales tax. All meal prices include gratuity, or everyone in the restaurant is paid a tipless wage. Let people get over the sticker shock.
Increasingly, everything in this country has three prices: the sticker price, the price with sales tax, and a third price which depending on the industry is either the price with gratuity, the price with fees, or the subscription price.
Prior to that the only way to equitably pay them alongside front of house was to pay them a higher wage out of the food costs. Those increased food costs put the restaurant at a disadvantage in the market even if the total take (food plus tip) was the same.
A summer or two working in a food truck where the internal temp was around 49C will teach you appreciate jobs where you sit on a few softball meetings and write documentation.
Like, I don't think it is the right lesson to say that the higher price points scare away people in the abstract, as if everyone who is eating is paying the meal plus 15% and they are just being dumb by not realizing they are paying "the same" in a world where tipping doesn't happen. (edit: And yup... I now see other comments leaning into "Americans are bad at math").
It isn't that uniform: a lot of people tip 10% while many are tipping 20%; there are people who aren't tipping at all and people who routinely tip 30%... and it doesn't stop there! There are also people who at least occasionally throw in some massive tip... I myself have, for various reasons that made sense at the time, thrown down a >100% tip on small checks.
Sure, some people like the awkward "control" over the wait staff, but that is also simplistic: there are people who make it a status symbol and proudly are known among their friends--the wait staff doesn't matter--as "big tippers"; and there are people who get into friendly competitions with their friends over who tips the most.
The result is that this turns into a kind of "pay what you can" at best and an awkward gamified mechanic to force people to stretch to pay more at its worst, resulting in people who have the money to pay subsidizing the people who don't, which maybe is actually a good thing? If nothing else, I see why it is profitable, even if customers ALL kind of dislike it.
(It also, though, causes people who "feel the weight of society" and feel a need to tip to ensure people get paid to subsidize the people who have the money but are selfish and don't give a shit. My guesses as to the balance of people who don't tip much because they can't and those who don't tip much because they won't affects my personal feelings on whether it is "fair" or not.)
I could see it eventually going the way of internet advertising.. so noisy that a significant minority rejects the system altogether.