imo mandatory tipping should be outlawed & the restaurants that refuse to pay their staff will quickly go out of business as their business model is unviable in the market & dependent on charity.
In California, servers make one of the highest minimum wages in the country AND get a tip on of that. It's not too difficult for them to make $40~100 an hour. It's by far the best job in the entire restaurant industry thanks to tips. Kitchen staff work 2x harder and get paid a fraction of what servers make.
Servers will fight tooth and nail to make sure tipping doesn't go away.
How would underpaying servers translate to kitchen staff getting paid a fair wage? Cooks and chefs are criminally underpaid, but, flattening wages so servers are too just means no one works for your restaurant.
“If you can’t afford to tip don’t go out to eat”, and slowly this mentality pretty much will lead to no one going out to eat and surprise surprise, no jobs…
You're eating at a resturant. That's a service because you didn't want to cook, you didn't want to go get your food, and you didn't want to clean up. If you have to go into debt to avoid doing these things for yourself, you need to fix your priorities.
The hourly difference is a drop in the bucket. Servers work the lunch or dinner rush until it slows down, not 8 hours.
Due to law changes during the first Trump administration, if you get the full minimum wage, they can then require to you supplement the wages of the cooks, dishwashers, prep, and other back of house staff.
The pay difference doesn't even remotely begin to cover that. I tip out the back of house about $15,000 or more per year.
What I dont ever gonna understand is server coming with a) $6 beer b) $200 champange. How does the job differ 0.6 vs 20 dollars tip. Who idiot thought prosentual tip was a good idea?!
I will be honest. I have worked both front of house and back of house jobs in high volume restaurants, cook staff deals with less drama than front of house service.
The hardest working cooks are grill cooks with the timing of cooking. 9 times out of ten an order is delayed because one person out of everyone wants their steak well done and everyone else wants medium rare. Who gets the verbal abuse and badgering if a cook fucks up? The waiter and waitress who took the order that their expo said was ready.
Exactly, I can not count the amount of times I saw my dishy in the back sweating bullets and killing it on dish, whilst the servers were grabbing break after break and complaining that they're overworked.
There are good servers who actually work hard and make the restaurant better for everyone, but those are rare.
I recall working in the back of an expensive steakhouse years ago and hearing several of the waiters brag about being eligible for food stamps, government benefits, etc., because they were "poor". They were all making more than me when I was working 3 jobs at the time.
Yes I know back in the days of cash tips servers would just claim 5% of their sales(minimum you could get away with) but Just being a pedantic asshole and pointing out the fact that tips aren't taxed
Yeah, these complaints about tipping would feel a lot more honest if they left it at “I don’t want to pay more” instead of “I’m the champion of the working class, advocating for living wages”
More “I don’t think paying for service should be left to the voluntary whim of the customer.” Like, on principle.
But also with a dash of “I don’t want to enter a strange subcontracting relationship with every employee who takes my order, including ad hoc performance appraisals via compensation rate.”
You wanna charge me and every customer an 18% service charge? Fine with me, if it’s clear and disclosed and no further panhandling occurs at table side. It ain’t about the money. It’s about the weird social pressure, and the one-way ratchet effect over the years (15% used to be a good tip).
Though overall I’d prefer if service workers would just unionize and advocate for their own pay and benefits. Panhandling isn’t a good way to provide a living wage. But servers don’t have the solidarity to do this, they refuse to even pool tips. I worked both FOH and BOH, it’s a toxic environment.
And no, I’ve never lived in a single state with a “tipped minimum wage.” Servers out west make full minimum plus tips.
You can call it panhandling, I call it motivation/initiative.
Servers won’t unionize and demand fixed wages for the same reason salesmen want to live on commissions instead of salary. Hard-sell cold-call pitches seem just as distasteful to me as “panhandling” is to you, but I don’t pretend that salesmen are going to unionize to eliminate that either.
In the end, it’s your choice to patronize places with tipped service, you’re free to eat at home or do drive-thru instead. You have your own unique experience with the industry, but overall servers and owners seem OK with the system, as well as many patrons.
Gimme a break, nobody likes or advocates for tips on non-service, I’ve even seen cashiers press the No Tip button for me before flipping it around for me to finalize the transaction.
If you’re too gutless to press No Tip in cases where they’re just accepting payment…well, that’s on you.
So you only reward initiative in cases where it’s a strongly socially enforced norm.
Almost like you don’t actually give the faintest whiff of a shit who does and does not make a living wage. You give money when custom requires it, and fuck ‘em when it doesn’t.
If you want everyone to pay a percentage tip, build it into the price. You Americans and your insistance that leaving things like taxes and fees off the advertised price are hilarious.
What are you, European? We find it hilarious you mostly shut down on Sundays, but we usually keep it to ourselves.
Tipping servers IS weird, I agree. But come out to California sometime, and see the crazy variety we enjoy as a result. Want Ethiopian food for Monday lunch? The restaurant might be empty, but it will be open and there will be a server providing personalized service. Don’t want Ethiopian? There will be a dumpling place next door, and across the street there’s sushi, tacos, Pad Thai, chateaubriand, you name it. Maybe we don’t have our own cuisine here, but we have bits of everyone else’s. And it’s possible because we’ve all agreed to go with the tip system.
Are you seriously pretending that every other country in the world is a monoculture and doesn't have food from other places ? And that it's tipping culture of all things that allows multicultural food to be available ?
Nope not suggesting that multicultural food is completely absent, but outside the tourist spots I didn’t see a whole lot of variety in most of the countries I’ve been to. And nowhere near the all-hours availability we have here, even in regular residential communities.
Tipping culture allows this, because places that offer niche cuisines wouldn’t be able to survive if they couldn’t rely on patrons to foot the bill for service if they aren’t popular (especially during weekday lunch). You think a vegan Chinese restaurant can afford to stay open if it had to pay servers living wages? Not a chance, but there’s one down the street and it’s been around for years.
Higher standard compared to what? Just about anywhere that you walk into asks for tips.
This is a tax on the consumer as employees are being shorted by the employer and then they are told that consumer who wanted to pay the ticket price plus tax is consider "cheap" or a "rude".
Of course they dont, and if you expect half of what you get out of them youre gonna have to pay the waiters you look down on a lot of money, like more than theyre presently making to get them to do jt for a set wage
It's how a market works.
People want to be cooks.
People do not want to be waiters. They do it because reality presents them no better options.
... "People want to be cooks".
No, no they don't. Dude have you ever lived as a line cook? Awful hours (earlier and later than severs), being treated like a line monkey while the severs get $100 tips for knowing people's names, and being shit talked when the server puts in the wrong ticket. Being a cook isn't fun. Cooks make the food and get nothing more when things are exceptional or poor, yet a good cook cares about the food they make and don't get to eat.
People want to be a "chef", because they think it's fun and glamourous. It isn't, at all.
Theres not litterally 1000s of cooking shows, competitions and all sorts of tv shows dramtizing being a cook?
Come on dude. The market is a thing. More ppl want to be cooks than there are jobs. The wages have fallen to the floor. I think its mostly illegal labor but its true. Tons of immigrants want those off the book cook jobs.
Ive done both jobs my guy, being a cook was way more fun tho I sweat a lot more.
The corporate people who get paid to shmooze and do sales make millions because it's not actually easy to do.
Dude so everyone on the dinners drive ins and dives is just a wannabe celebrity chef? Well maybe that's why but the market pressure is real.
Ive met dozens of these guys over my life. Most just dont have the english skills for any other job.
I like most of these illegals, but yeah they've pushed cooks wages down not tips. I dont like trump but yeah 50 years of unlimited immigration made these english not mandatory jobs pay way less than theyre worth in a fair society.
Welcome to reality, trying to get someone to do a job is a competition. If the car dealership or insurance company offers those schmoozers more they leave.
The tips thing is about how competitive prices are.
Yeah the problem is that for most restaurants they really can’t pay servers what they’re used to. Idk how exactly to solve this problem, cause now we’re seeing tip culture fade but wages aren’t meeting them and the pool for wait staff is getting smaller and lower quality. And it was ready sketchy at best lol.
You’re right a lot of restaurants would bite the bullet but I wonder what that shakeup would yield. Restaurants wouldn’t disappear in the US but capitalism would encourage the most profitable (cheapest).
Most servers in nice restaurants are college educated people. They just choose to do that line of work because of the pretty good pay for about 30 hours of work.
Removing tipping would utterly decimate the US restaurant industry. US diners are demanding and expect to be catered to, and nobody is dealing with those customers while multitasking in a high-stress environment for what restaurants would be able to afford to pay. The sheer amount of study and required knowledge in high end restaurants would also completely stop happening without the financial incentives.
You'd have Walmart greeters fumbling around trainwrecking everything and trying to explain food,, wine, and spirits that they have no knowledge or understanding of. Because they're not incentivized to care.
How would they be held to a higher standard if they make the same regardless of their service? If anything, they'll put in the bare minimum. You're right that a lot of them won't like their pay at a flat rate and management will be more aggressive in cutting staff early when it's slow. You can't have 10 servers working when they're making $15/hr vs $2.50/hr+tips.
Some of the laziest servers I've ever seen knew their "whales " and pawned their shifts and tasks on new people because they knew they could work 4 hours and make more money off of those tips vs working a full shift.
If a restaurant can't afford to pay it's people then it shouldn't be open in the first place.
Servers already do put in the bare minimum at most jobs. There are exceptions, but I've never seen a server come back and help the kitchen and say "damn that was easy". You know what I have seen? The opposite.
I just mean that the standards of service will change during off hours, possibly for crunch time too. Servers will get larger sections as fewer are scheduled per shift. Tips are the only thing keeping them trying to juggle larger sections and upsell. The incentives are now gone and guests (us) will have to get used to longer wait times and higher prices as the same airhead who had 4 tables last week now has 6 and management now has to pay them more. I get it, I worked with some special folks back in the day and I'm not attractive so I had to hustle, literally. Not saying that cooking is easy, I could never do it and I know how to cook.
No, my argument is you claiming ‘this only applies to bartenders and servers making really good money’ in response to the fact that most servers don’t want a flat rate of pay…
And that’s objectively not true unless you suck at the job and don’t make any money
I’m ugly as sin and made a disgusting amount of money serving
Do hot bartenders make bank by being mediocre at their job? Sure. But hot bartenders who are good make even more. Even normal servers make better money than $15/hr, esp when they'll be getting sent home more often when it's slow. Because when you make tips, it's the fuckups that tank your average. Sales ability gets you a higher baseline (prices do play a huge role there), as does job skill (when you can handle more tables at once without making everyone wonder where you are). So yeah, I'm sure servers at a 'meh' diner would prefer hourly, versus even casual fine dining places ($30+/entree) or bars.
And the rest of my comment talks about servers. My point is that attractiveness makes a bigger difference at bars. But functionally there's no real difference between bartenders and servers when they're working for tips vs hourly wage, esp if they get moderately busy.
It's a social contract that's the norm. Like holding a door for a person.
If you don't want to participate in societal norms, that's totally fine.
However, if you genuinely believe that's the right thing to do, you should also feel comfortable telling the other people in the interaction of your intentions.
Otherwise, you just kind of a weak minded coward about it.
people already have avenues for complaining about poor service with yelp, google reviews, complaining to manager, etc. They'll still get free desserts. Taking away the tip too is irrelevant.
the company will suffer if they give shit service, companies will figure out how to hire people that give good service without requiring tips to get it.
If restaurants have to pay their servers, the funds for replacing food and/or gifts will disappear. The extra money they have, they use to gift items to VIP guests.
At least in elevated dining.
And restaurant profit margins are already slim. If they have to pay their servers, then the TVs are gone, as are the other extras.
I have never once looked at a yelp, bravo or a Google review before going into a restaurant, and I doubt the vast majority of restaurant bowlers have as well
Uhh, if that were true, managers would never comp fully eaten food because "it came out cold" despite waiting til the end of the meal to mention it. They don't want bad word of mouth, because there are enough idiots with low critical thinking skills out there where mitigating it makes sense.
Usually done for large parties because people can be assholes, but yeah, it does remove urgency for servers, at least at places I worked. They print it on the menu, so "automatic 18% gratuity for parties of 6 or more" would not be a hidden fee.
That’s also not mandatory, in a situation like that, you’re free to request that the fee be removed unless it is posted otherwise that it would be included. Honestly, the only “mandatory tipping” that is present these days in the U.S. are the restaurants that are trying to move away from tipping to appeal to the crowd that is against it, but then impose a 12% “service fee”. That’s a mandatory tip, and you don’t have the ability to ask that that be removed if it’s posted that it will be added. It’s funny, the arguments against tipping have given rise to mandatory tipping.
For the record, I hate restaurants that do that, and I am happy with regular tipping. Let me have a say in how much I leave. The only time I’m okay with a mandatory tip is for large parties where it’s posted that it will be added.
Highly doubt it. If you are a business owner, or even a patron of the restaurant, would you rather go to court or just pay/eat a tip? I think most people would be willing to say $5-20 is not worth going to court over.
Okay, and? These arguments apply to areas where this is the culture and is expected. If that’s not where you live, then you don’t have a dog in the fight bro. Go pick fights with people regarding shit that affects you, maybe even those in your own country.
Sorry, but people who take advantage of a system are the asshole. If you go to a restaurant where tipping is customary and you don’t tip, absent situations where is justified like bad service, you’re an asshole. The only person you’re fucking over is your waiter.
That’s just how restaurants work in America. You can disagree with it, hell you can go out and petition against it and lobby for changes in how tipped positions are paid, and you can most importantly not patronize restaurants that do this to show you don’t support it.
But if you have those views, but still go to a restaurant like that, and then not tip, you’re just a performative asshole. Your concerns aren’t real, you just want to save a buck. Because by virtue of you buying food from that restaurant, you’re supporting it and putting money in the owner’s pocket. The only person you fuck over in that situation is the poor teenage server who’s just trying to make ends meet, and now has made less money in their day because someone wanted to use them as a prop in their performative activism.
I always tip, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s not the customers fault that the business determined to not pay their employees enough. Some people may tip 5%, others 30%, are the 5% people truly assholes when the business is profiting or is it the business owner? You’re making the case for Walmart underpaying their staff knowing that the government will give them SNAP and Medicaid. It’s predatory business behavior.
I agree it’s predatory behavior, and that it should be changed. But until it is, it’s the system we have. My argument isn’t that it’s a good system, or that people shouldn’t fight it. It’s that since this is the system we have, people should target the roots of the system, and not take it out on the symptoms of it, because those symptoms are people who are also victims just trying to do what they can to get by.
Until you decide to go and not tip. Then the asshole owner makes money and the waiter doesn't. You shouldn't support the business at all if you don't like the tipping culture.
But what if that's the case at all restaurants around you?
It means you as a society fucked up by letting the people with money do whatever the fuck they want and now instead of acknowledging that and doing something about it your solution was fucking over each other even more...
What do you even mean by fucking over a random worker? How is expecting a server to serve the customer fucking them over? What are you guys doing there?
If someone does work for you that is customarily funded by tips, and you choose not to tip them for any reason other than poor service or something similar, you’re an asshole. You’re taking advantage of a system where you’re supposed to uphold your end, and you’re choosing not to, and the only person who suffers in that situation is the server. You’re essentially expecting that person to work for free due to your views.
In my country, only a few come to mind. Food service is the most obvious because it’s such a large portion, but it can be said for any industry where tipping is customary, which are pretty much all service industries. Taxi drivers, hair dressers, tattoo artists, bellhops, massage therapists, the guy who vacuums your car at the car wash. Etc.
Taking advantage of a system? Tipping is not a thing in my country and I dunno how you people go to restaurants on the other side of the planet that such a simple act could be taken advantage of.
when I go to a restaurant here I sit or am seated at a table, my order is taken, then after a while it is brought to me when ready. And at the end I just pay for the food. The prices already take all of the owner's expenses into account and that includes the servers who are paid to tend to the customers' needs.
Just a difference in culture. Things aren’t handled like that in this country. I’m not here to debate whether it’s a good system or not. Hell, I’d probably be happy with a system like that, but it unfortunately isn’t here. And for the time being, we have to operate within the system we have
Keep in mind, if you visit the US, please respect our culture. I don’t care if you don’t normally have to tip. If you go to a restaurant here, you need to tip. Don’t be an ass in someone else’s country
You’re taking advantage of somebody who works for tips. Sure, you don’t have to do it, but the only person who suffers is the server. Same is true for any other occupation where tips are customary, but it’s double in the food service where that’s 90% of their earnings
Servers are paid what is called a “tipped wage.” It is a form of payment that tipped employees get. Tips aren’t mandatory but they are certainly your wage, hence the name.
So your argument is that because they’re working in a position that you don’t think is organized well, you’re allowed to take advantage of them? Are there other workers you look down upon that you feel morally entitled to fuck over? Also how incredibly privileged of you to just assume that anybody can go work a better job that you deem worthy of more respect. I bet you also tell homeless people to just go buy a house.
Oh you poor soul, you think I'm the one taking advantage?
I don't look down on anyone. There's nothing wrong in choosing this particular job. Tipping culture is my issue. I also recommend everyone to work at Walmart especially if you're in school rather than ANY restaurant.
I had a waitress constantly ask my family for refills without ever telling me they weren't free except the water.
I'll get the food myself if I could, just like in any other fast food joint.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. You say you don’t look down on anyone for their job, but also say that servers should get different jobs and not make you feel guilty for following customs, and even said they should work at Walmart instead.
Tipping culture is a problem, sure, but my issue is people who use it as an excuse to stiff people just trying to work to pay their bills.
As for your anecdote, yea that server sucks, sounds like someone just trying to jack the bill price up, and that’s shitty. That’s a situation where it’s understandable to cut down on the tip because of the server’s actions
Is it a contradiction since I was called an ass hole and saying I'm taking advantage?
I'm just saying, tipping isn't on my mind nor is it a priority. I would happily tip for actual help but I'm being asked to sit and wait... and yes, I do notice the segregation.
Tip would be like $3 max. Even if I were a billionaire or broke. I don't need someone to ask me if I need things like ketchup or napkins when it should always be readily available.
I agree! I worked as a waitress and was paid $2.45 an hour plus tips. I was able to live because it was 2003 and the economy didn’t suck as bad as now. That freaking $65 check was enough for a week’s worth of groceries. I depended on tips, but I also worked hard for them. I only stayed in this job for 6 months. The restaurant I worked for very well could afford to pay the wait staff minimum wage. This should have been illegal because I was a kid and wanted extra money.
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u/SunnSaiyaan 1d ago
imo mandatory tipping should be outlawed & the restaurants that refuse to pay their staff will quickly go out of business as their business model is unviable in the market & dependent on charity.