>"The effect on society can be much, much worse than neutral. If it happens enough, all of sudden it's expected and then people will start intentionally delaying service/making it difficult unless you pay them. (for reference, see any country with petty corruption/bribery problems)"
A mitigating factor is that restaurant owners/managers will only tolerate this behavior from their employees when customer demand exceeds seating supply. If a hostess has an empty table and refuses to seat a party until they bribe her, she will be fired.
>"What's the difference between this and say slipping the building inspector a hundred dollars to "not have any problems"?"
The hostess's job depends on allocating scarce tables to customers with no good indicators of customer quality. The inspector's job is to only certify safe buildings, and he has loads of indicators to make that determination, and the certificates are not scarce.
That said, I don't see what's wrong with a system where you can pay to short-circuit some slowdowns. It would be worth $20 to me to go from a half-day's wait at the DMV to a 30-minute wait, and I'm sure there are parties willing to pay tens of thousands to put their building plans at the top of the pile (without circumventing any inspections or anything, just getting the next available inspection). The downside to this is that, while it raises revenue, it detracts from government's duty to serve all citizens equally.
