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.
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.
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 think this is a fiction we tell ourselves, but it doesn't function like this in reality. The majority of people just tip according to habit and not are not performing some kind of micro performance evaluation at each interaction. In many of the places we are expected to tip, there's not really any performance to evaluate anyway. Filling a cup and handing it over the counter is hard to screw up. Even food trucks expect tips these days.
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.
The first thing you seem to not consider is the percentage. When someone does exceptional service you give them an exceptional tip. I do 20% of the total (so including tax) as baseline. Yes I "overtip" but I decided a long time ago that being generous with service staff was something I want to do. If someone went above and beyond I would add a few dollars/extra percent to the tip.
The question about 7 and 700 dollar bills is illustrative. If I am buying a hotdog or I am buying an exceptionally high end meal - implies a big difference the sophisticated of service and the experience of staff. At the higher price point I expect the waiter to be capable of (whether I need it or not) help the diners navigate the menu and the wine list for example.
That's mainly what I was getting at. By the time you are a waiter in a high end restaurant you are financially good and better than any alternative.
In Asia, exceptional service is the norm and it is a taboo to tip there. The problem is the premise in the United States that exceptional service begs an exceptional tip. And often times, poor service still demands a minimum tip. As much as people here like to say otherwise, it is not culturally acceptable to not tip in the US, unless the service was of a disasterous nature.
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.
The person paying $700 for a bottle of wine at a restaurant (a bottle that would probably be less than half that price at retail) has no problem throwing an extra $100 on the bill for the server.
It doesn't make a lick of difference what a customer can afford but the fact is that the calculation would not take that into account. Neither the server, nor the business, should expect an extra $100 just for serving expensive liquor. The tipper should not feel compelled to throw on that extra because of some non-traditional method of calculation being forced via POS or their pre-printed receipt.
Extravagant tipping can be a real source of contention and trouble with the employer, too. There was a recent case where a "very generous patron" left something like $10,000 for a server, and she was subsequently fired, with litigation pending.
There are, in fact, many POS systems that will inhibit extravagant tipping. Unusual tipping patterns could be indicative of coercion, criminal activity, or money-laundering.
Generous, rich people can believe they're doing a magnanimous favor in throwing stacks of cash at a random, struggling server, but that is not the road to charity.
I've been paying restaurant bills and tipping since the 1980s and never heard of excluding the bar items, unless they were paid separately at the bar. I never bought anything close to a $700 bottle however.
I try to tip in cash, avoids "the system" and avoids the employer keeping part of it.
Tipping a percentage of the bill never made sense. Tip by the number of plates/bowls/glasses/etc served. The server doesn’t do more work for $50 plate vs a $10 plate.
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
Comments
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.
But have you thought about the poor shareholders? /s
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).
Businesses shouldn't accept tips certainly. They go to people.
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.
I think this is a fiction we tell ourselves, but it doesn't function like this in reality. The majority of people just tip according to habit and not are not performing some kind of micro performance evaluation at each interaction. In many of the places we are expected to tip, there's not really any performance to evaluate anyway. Filling a cup and handing it over the counter is hard to screw up. Even food trucks expect tips these days.
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.
Ok.. let's run through the basics.
The first thing you seem to not consider is the percentage. When someone does exceptional service you give them an exceptional tip. I do 20% of the total (so including tax) as baseline. Yes I "overtip" but I decided a long time ago that being generous with service staff was something I want to do. If someone went above and beyond I would add a few dollars/extra percent to the tip.
The question about 7 and 700 dollar bills is illustrative. If I am buying a hotdog or I am buying an exceptionally high end meal - implies a big difference the sophisticated of service and the experience of staff. At the higher price point I expect the waiter to be capable of (whether I need it or not) help the diners navigate the menu and the wine list for example.
That's mainly what I was getting at. By the time you are a waiter in a high end restaurant you are financially good and better than any alternative.
In Asia, exceptional service is the norm and it is a taboo to tip there. The problem is the premise in the United States that exceptional service begs an exceptional tip. And often times, poor service still demands a minimum tip. As much as people here like to say otherwise, it is not culturally acceptable to not tip in the US, unless the service was of a disasterous nature.
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.
The person paying $700 for a bottle of wine at a restaurant (a bottle that would probably be less than half that price at retail) has no problem throwing an extra $100 on the bill for the server.
It doesn't make a lick of difference what a customer can afford but the fact is that the calculation would not take that into account. Neither the server, nor the business, should expect an extra $100 just for serving expensive liquor. The tipper should not feel compelled to throw on that extra because of some non-traditional method of calculation being forced via POS or their pre-printed receipt.
Extravagant tipping can be a real source of contention and trouble with the employer, too. There was a recent case where a "very generous patron" left something like $10,000 for a server, and she was subsequently fired, with litigation pending.
There are, in fact, many POS systems that will inhibit extravagant tipping. Unusual tipping patterns could be indicative of coercion, criminal activity, or money-laundering.
Generous, rich people can believe they're doing a magnanimous favor in throwing stacks of cash at a random, struggling server, but that is not the road to charity.
I've been paying restaurant bills and tipping since the 1980s and never heard of excluding the bar items, unless they were paid separately at the bar. I never bought anything close to a $700 bottle however.
I try to tip in cash, avoids "the system" and avoids the employer keeping part of it.
Tipping a percentage of the bill never made sense. Tip by the number of plates/bowls/glasses/etc served. The server doesn’t do more work for $50 plate vs a $10 plate.
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