Comment by ferrouswheel
4 hours ago
Americans are beggers because they don't have employee rights. Some people euphemistically call this "tipping culture"
4 hours ago
Americans are beggers because they don't have employee rights. Some people euphemistically call this "tipping culture"
Every time there is an initiative to require paying living wages, food and bar service representatives fight to get it killed because they make _more_ money from tips than they would from regular wages. Tip-earning workers in America are well represented.
Could always do what we did in Canada: pay living wages but still inexplicably keep tipping culture
Several states do that.
> pay living wages
But have you thought about the poor shareholders? /s
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This is a dummiest reason tippers come up with. "require paying living wages."
Except the actual workers don't: very very few consistently earn a higher wage, instead on a "good night" they count the win and ignore the losses when it's not.
Even with reliable good nights the off nights eat away at that margin.
It's a false economy.
Few talk about the Skinnerian mechanics behind tipping. It's the addictive element which keeps gamers gaming, microtransactors microtransacting, pattern day traders day trading, and gig drivers gigging. The excitement of the gamble. The irrational belief that the next customer may be George Soros and they'll leave $10K on the table.
Could ban tipping by law. Businesses where employees are caught accepting tips get fined. The price on the menu or shelf must be the final price at payment (including sales taxes and other fees).
I would say that America has a culture oriented towards rewarding performance. A good waiter's tips net them more pay that their foreign counterparts.
It's the same as looking at an American engineer's bonus that's 3x a foreign engineer's whole pay and calling them a beggar.
Given that tips are a percentage of the overall bill, could you explain the potential performance difference between pouring a $7 bottle of wine and a $700 bottle of wine? Assuming that the customers already clearly know what they want to purchase, so the waiter didn't offer recommendations of any kind.
But even if we take that last point into consideration, a good waiter that cares about their customers can offer a cheaper, more suitable bottle than something expensive. How can they receive a higher tip than the person who does not offer suggestions but merely pours a more expensive bottle?
This is not even mentioning that the baseline of "performance" is sub-par indeed. Americans tend to gloat about how their tables never receive water top-ups or someone never asks how their food is going so they have an opportunity to ask for condiments or napkins. But most people in the world typically know how to ask for themselves if they require something, and don't need a pseudo-butler hovering over them. Not to mention that when it comes time to actually pay the check and leave, Americans tend to be some of the slowest at actually fulfilling this process.
Generally the place serving expensive stuff has more staff per customer so they should get a larger tip as they have time to give better service while the cheaper staff have to rush to to he next customer.
That doesn't explain the $7 vs $700 though. It would $10 vs $40
Isn't that interesting? Here is another human who is unaware of traditional tipping culture.
In traditional tipping culture, the tip is calculated on the subtotal for food and drink, minus your bar bill. Therefore, alcohol, taxes, fees, whatever? Those are not part of your tip calculation at all. For tipping a bartender, or if all you did was drink, I'd usually drop a fraction on each drink served, whatever they were.
The POS tipping prompts are all wrong, and they're encouraging more than just mandatory tip-shaming: they are forcing a shift in the basic calculations which was never intended by ordinary tipping customs. A $700 bottle of wine in a restaurant warrants an identical tip to a $7 bottle.
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