Restaurant owners love it because it hides costs from customers and allows lower pay for workers (it does do both of these things very well).
Workers "prefer" it because they have stockholm syndrome'd themselves into thinking that drawing a smiley face on receipts will get them higher pay (it won't.)
Once that became a thing, yeah, a lot of other places took advantage of it. It wasn't hard to turn on the tipping feature on your payment processor, so they did -- even if the reasoning was much less clear.
And of course it's a ratchet. Nobody turns it off even as the pandemic normalizes.
I know restaurant owners in Germany sometimes are able to pay a smaller wage to waiters and compensate with tips, because they don’t have to pay taxes for the tips.
Employees pay income taxes on reported tips. When tips are paid in cash, employers sometimes require employees to turn in these tips for distribution on their paychecks. Tips are of course paid via paychecks when tips are paid by credit card.
Finally, employers can claim a business income credit for the taxes paid on employee tips.
(I work in hospitality services)
https://dol.ny.gov/minimum-wage-tipped-workers
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Though that doesn't always work. A lot of places pool tips. Everybody puts their tips together and it's distributed as part of your paycheck -- and the IRS knows about it.
5-10 years ago I also lived in such a country, and it was very nice. Now, not so much (despite not having moved). More and more places are adding the tipping menu to the card reader, making you jump through hoops to not tip. In another 5-10 years I wouldn't be surprised if tipping isn't almost ubiquitous.
That said, I rarely eat out anymore, and when I do get food I order takeout. The obsession with service when I don't really give a damn about it has basically destroyed my desire to sit down in a restaurant and pay even more to have my water occasionally refilled. The constant "thank you"s and "how's the food" and pushing menu items on me is basically the opposite of how I'd prefer to spend my time eating in a restaurant. Just bring the food and a water pitcher and leave me alone, please!
> The constant "thank you"s and "how's the food" and pushing menu items on me is basically the opposite of how I'd prefer to spend my time eating in a restaurant
should mostly go away, I think.
(I eat out all of the time and am 100% with you. It's SO MUCH BETTER outside of the United States. Restaurants by and large don't have TVs (pubs/bars do, but it's usually one or two, not SEVEN THOUSAND of them, in every angle). You only see servers when you order your food, when you receive your food, and when you pay. They don't pretend to be your friends or whatever. You're there to eat; they're there to serve; the relationship is understood. They also don't ask for tips and will usually not accept it if you try, unless you're in a touristy area, BECAUSE THEY ARE FAIRLY PAID AND FIGHT TO PRESERVE THAT RIGHT. And I say this as someone who tips 50-100% when I go out.)
What might work instead would be making a 20% tip mandatory, followed a bit later by including the cost of that mandatory tip in the upfront price.
On the contrary, I do it frequently and very separately from the bill. Of course, it is not yet embedded into the culture.
(Edit: quote the part I am responding to and remove some remarks.)
One can only hope it never embeds itself into the culture. One country in the world with this madness is enough...
To me, it sounds like a problem of restaurant visitors who use tipping(if I am to believe this article which despite data and claims, I have doubts about) to justify their perverted behavior. The problem needs to be solved by the employer ensuring proper protection at workplace and more surveillance(sometimes it is needed) to deter and gather evidence of such harassment.
When I(hopefully a decent human), tip a wait staff(regardless of gender or ethnicity), it is a thank you gesture for their good service, not as a pervert intent to grope them. Now if someone is perverted, they will find ways to practice their perversion, now it is the tip, next it’ll be the “bad service for which I am paying”. The fix is not where the article’s expert is looking at, it is somewhere else.
Unfortunately, many gross people treat tipping like dropping a coin in the jukebox: give me the service I want if you want this $20 (or whatever).
I've seen people yell at or be otherwise disgusting towards service workers and tip >100% as an apology. I've heard of servers/FoH be asked for their phone numbers or to do lewd stuff for outrageous tips. People not receiving tips for the most minor inconveniences happens all of the time.
The Morning Show (amazing TV show) actually had an (extremely, but probably believable) example of this as a plot point in one of their episodes during Season 2, I think.
2. This article is exactly why "Tipping is stupid, so I'm not going to do it" is exactly the wrong response to take with tipping. Tipping IS stupid, but given how food service is structured today, not tipping is markedly worse for the livelihoods of the people making/serving your food than doing so. Voting for local candidates who will push changes that will make tipping obsolete (mostly around fair compensation) is the only way we can get rid of it for good.
> The other argument they like to use is that if we actually had to pay these workers a wage the industry would collapse, the system would fail, many jobs would be lost, and prices would skyrocket. But here's the thing: that all has been proven to be completely false by the seven states that have completely eliminated this system. They have higher restaurant sales per capita, higher job growth in the restaurant industry, higher job growth among tipped workers, and even higher rates of tipping than the others.
Oh, hm? I didn't know some states had actually eliminated tipping! Well, I've been keeping my head down and maybe I'm just out of the loop. I'm going to have to look this up.
> Our concern, and why we would never want to legislate that or push for a complete elimination of tipping, is that we don’t think that the employer will do it in the way people like Danny Meyer have done it
Oh, what? But you just spent the rest of the article talking about how bad tipping is? Well there must be some synthesis here.
>> So kind of like how many other industries that have adopted tipping function. Like, say, coffee shops, where baristas are paid a salary at or above the minimum, and also tipped from time to time?
> Thats exactly right.
oof. So uh, despite an entire article talking about what a bad system tipping is, we're not actually talking about eliminating tipping? But instead embracing the dynamic of even more types of businesses nagging each customer for an extra donation instead of directly paying their workers competitively? Which continues enabling most of the poor dynamics the article was just bemoaning?
I get that the two-tiered minimum wage is horrible, and if this article was up front with that framing I wouldn't have felt so cheated. But as it stands, with friends like these...
