If you live in a place where food service workers are underpaid and you donāt tip, youāre an asshole. This is not a morally defensible stance unless there is a system to protect those workers already in place.
Youāre right. I should just not go there at all, watch the business collapse, and see them beg for jobs at the next shitty restaurant. Thatās the better option apparently?
While Iām totally for the workers being paid great, itās not really MY job to do so (unless i own the restaurant Iām eating at. And at those the waiters are paid way above average and donāt need tips). Here we tip for excellent service, not the bare minimum to get my food on the table.
If you tip to pay salaries, YOU are the actual asshole that keeps a system alive that is the absolute dogshit in dystopian shitholes with no worker-rights like the US.
If youāre patronizing a restaurant that underpays wait staff and refuse to tip the server, youāre not only fucking them but youāre supporting the system by going to the restaurant in the first place.
If you wouldāve actually read the comment, you wouldāve been in a clear advantage.
Where i live and eat, staff is paid fair and tips are given. But, as everywhere in this country, for especially good service and not because the customer is forced to because the employer doesnāt pay wages because the system is broken.
I also said that at my restaurants, waiting staff is paid way above average, which is probably multiple times of your weird countryās mininum. Do you even have a point?
Stop going to such places. I donāt go there (because we donāt have that silly system). Why tip at all? Do u tip the cashier at the supermarket? Your IT-guy? Your mechanic? Your docs? The cops?
But for the sake of the argument: if noone would tip, noone would work as a waiter anymore and employers would have to pay decent salaries. You know, like everyone civilized would do. Instead you support a disgusting asshole employee by paying the staffs salary AND food. Whatās next? No salary at all and you should double-tip for rent too? It seems to work. Why not.
Customers who donāt tip are. They are punishing a worker for the crimes of a system. The restaurant owner/manager doesnāt suffer if you donāt tip. Only the workers do. So until a change comes to the system where workers get paid minimum wage, not tipping isnāt morally defensible.
You said it yourself, itās the system that needs to change. As long as we keep chasing our tails trying to blame the customer base instead of the real problem, the ones profiting keep laughing.
*edited 1st sentence for better phrasing
Fuck anon.
Edit: and fuck your downvotes. If youāre not willing to make food yourself then tip your servers.
If you believe no tipping will leave waiters to starve with no money, thatās not true. The very reason they are so severely underpaid is that restaurants know theyāll get their income from tips.
The less tips there are, the more your employer will have to pay you - in a form of salary that is way more predictable and reliable than tips.
Customers, on their end, will know price in the menu is final, and they wonāt add crazy extra just so that they wonāt feel like worst people on Earth.
In my country, tips do exist, but you are not expected to leave them by default and itās totally fine and common not to. The result? Waiters get livable wage and can last a month without ever receiving a single tip (which they actually have, too, from time to time).
Pretty sure theyāre only guaranteed minimum wage if they donāt receive tips. So yeah if youāre cool with your waiter making $7 per hour instead of $3, donāt tip.
Iām not aware of how things are on the ground in the US; itās more of a general perspective not tied to any specific country (which is my separate āmehā about strongly America-centric Lemmy, but itās very tangential)
But seeing people actually hit the absolute mandated minimum is indeed depressing. I might expect that waiterās income with tips is normally greater than the federal minimum, so maybe thereās a chance not all waiters will agree to work for that, which should balance it a bit?
Now youāre raising two different issues. The first is a truly abysmal minimum wage. The second is a lack of effort on the part of both the staff and the employer to negotiate an acceptable minimum wage, whether it includes tips or not, enabled by the reliance on tipping to provide an acceptable wage.
Tipping is bullshit. Restaurants should pay their workers properly. But Iām not gonna punish the server for that. She has zero control over that.
If I canāt afford to tip then I just donāt go to the restaurant. People would prefer to make up excuses for why they donāt wanna tip and how that doesnāt make them an asshole while taking huge huffs of their own farts. If you donāt like the tipping culture just go to a fast food restaurant or make your own food. Why is everybody such whiney bitches about everything?
So you hate the tipping culture but also hate people who want it abolished. Thatās just beyond stupid.
Like not tipping is going to abolish anything. You walk in, pay the owner and leave the worker hanging. Why would the owner care?
Itās not like all the waiters can stay home waiting for something to change, people gotta live. Stop going to restaurants if you donāt want to tip
Why do you hate me for not wanting to tip, and not the employer who does not want to pay a living wage to itās worker because the law does not oblige him to.
Why do you blame me and not the government who regulated the law to allow rich people to become more rich by having part of their salary expenses covered by the public?
This is a perfect example of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses
To be fair, thatās not the actual alternative for the waiter. The waiter either accepts their income as it is with some people not providing a tip, or they can opt for other employment like the rest of the workforce that isnāt tipped. They donāt have to sit at home waiting for things to change like helpless puppies.
Iām in California though so we donāt have any of that wage fuckery where they can be paid less than minimum wage if tips make up a significant portion of their income. Itās $17.55 hour minimum plus tips where Iām at.
Iād really rather see tipping outlawed along with all other obscured fees and just pay what you need to pay to have waiters and charge what you need to charge to have a business transparently printed on the menu.
No, I hate the people who say they want it abolished and use that as an excuse to not pay their waiters. I made it plainly clear in my explanation, I honestly donāt know how to dumb it down for you anymore man.
Lol yeah the āI went to the restaurant but didnāt tip to teach everyone a lessonā is the same as āI voted for the third party to teach everyone a lesson.ā
No, you gave the restaurant owner their profit and the employee nothing. You helped no one, you taught no lessons, and if we could harness your mental gymnastics as physical gymnastics we would have infinite renewable energy.
Itās not an attack, you donāt need to get so defensive. It just stood out to me.
Exactly, gender isnāt important. You could have done the convenient thing and they/themed the imaginary waiter. Why did you choose to go to the effort of assigning a gender when gender has nothing to do with your point?
This couldāve been an āoops, youāre right- corrected, thanks.ā But instead you got weird about it
This place is just as toxic as reddit lol, it was a valid question.
Edit: and before people get confused by my username, I havenāt been back to reddit since the day RIF stopped working.
Drag never tips while eating out.
Drag also lives in a country with a livable minimum wage and no tipping culture.
Well yeah, if you live in a country where they make a decent amount so that tipping isnāt necessary for them to be able to eat that day then of course you shouldnāt have to tip. Thatās the way it should be everywhere. But in many countries like the US this isnāt the case, and tipping has been used as a way for restaurants to pay next to nothing to employ people and the servers are at the mercy of kindness from the people serving them. Lots of these people think that they should just be slaves that serve them for free and justify it by blaming the restaurant, which is just shifting responsibility and making weak excuses for being entitled and cheap.
Drag remembers being a pre-teen with little understanding of the world, and going onto internet forums. Drag would sometimes take advice from Americans, who felt very strongly about what they were saying, and then get in trouble because thatās not how we do things here. The Americans didnāt clarify their advice was only for Americans. And drag was just a kid, so drag didnāt know any better. Itās not like drag made an account and commented, drag was just reading what a bunch of supposedly wise adults had to say about life and the world.
Can you just not tip? We live in a tipping society too, but tipping is just goodwill. Like if your waiter is really nice, and the whole thing was 115 dollars, you might give him 120 and he can keep the difference. Sometimes just a roundup, fromm 5.60 to 6 bucks or something. But itās not expected.
Presumably, your country pays its servers a living wage so they donāt have to scrape by on tips. This has been the state of the US labor market in most non-fast food restaurants for decades:
A tipped employee engages in an occupation in which he or she customarily and regularly receives more than $30 per month in tips. An employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 per hour in direct wages if that amount combined with the tips received at least equals the federal minimum wage [$7.25 per hour]. If the employeeās tips combined with the employerās direct wages of at least $2.13 per hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference. Many states, however, require higher direct wage amounts for tipped employees.
Customers are NOT punishing staff by refusing to tip.
Our school teachers all did a great job at getting us to blame other students when when one student did something bad, and the teacher punished all of us for it. My teachers did this gaslighting bullshit many times when I was in school. And now a whole new generation of adults are perpetuating the cycle. But itās wrong.
The restaurant owner is the one to blame for poor wages. The owner will say that the restaurant cannot afford to stay open otherwise. This is probably true. Many ā if not most ā restaurants in america cannot afford to exist unless they effectively steal wages from their workers. We either need legislation to fix this, or we need to let these restaurants die.
He is the one to blame lol, we all agree.
When you go to the restaurant, pay the food (owner) but not the waiter, you are playing right into the owners game (who is to blame).
So congrats on supporting the assholes creating this economic problem (they canāt run a profitable business). Next youre going to tell me human traffickers are the assholes buuut people should just stopped getting trafficked and leave, so that human trafficking stops being a thing. Because power dynamics have nothing to do with this of course.
If you donāt like the tipping culture just go to a fast food restaurant or make your own food.
You know in other countries thereās restaurants that specialize in different dishes. They make stuff that you might not know how to make. They make stuff in bulk thatās hard to make to-order. Thereās a lot of reasons why you might eat out rather than make it yourself.
Tipping isnāt essential to this place. If you specialize in making pigs feet and you open a pig feet restaurant, you can charge people whatever you want them to pay for your pigs feet, and if they want it they pay it. But if you expect to hire waitstaff to do all the customer service, you better pay them a fair portion of what youāre charging customers. Giving them pennies and then telling customers āOh just pay the help whatever you want, itās extraā is just fucking evil. But instead of one shitty business model drying out, it became the norm in only your country.
Yet another case of a stupid american not understanding how the world works outside of americaā¦ no vision of how things could work otherwise. Just arrogance and contempt.
I donāt live in the US bro. But this post is obviously about tipping culture in the US. This is not an issue in other parts of the world where tipping isnāt expected so that the servers arenāt getting starvation wages.
Iām sorry what? You never lived in the US and yet youāre gonna say what you think the solution to tipping culture is? Look I try not to assume that people are American but the alternative to you not being American and making a post like that is you being fucking stupid. Why not just tell people āJust move?ā
Although I guess to be honest when I thought I was responding to an American I thought you were an absolute knob too, so maybe you just have that vibe of āI talk confidently about things I donāt understandā
If you donāt like paying for service donāt go out. This is the way that it is and these are likely the guests that then get on Yelp and complainā¦about service. You can adjust minimum wage all you want but professional waitstaff arenāt going to pander to the wealthy for minimum wage. Minimum wage service sucks as it should, you get what you pay for; minimum wage, minimum effort. If you donāt like the system, change it, donāt victimize your fellow workers. They accepted the job under this current system. Iām in that system and am working to change it but until then if you donāt tip due to your high moral standards YTA. And itās not because USians are stoopid (we are), itās just the ingrained culture. Under capitalism the guest will be paying this money regardless. Much like this fauxmockracy, your choice is an illusionā¦
āIf you donāt tip donāt go outā? Telling people who want to see the tipping culture removed to not go out means that either way, the waiter doesnāt get tipped. Europe has restaurants, so clearly tipping or not tipping doesnāt dictate the existence of restaurants.
If a waiter works an entire shift and receives no tip, they are entitled to actual minimum wage instead of the reduced minimum wage. So there shouldnāt be any moral misgiving to not tipping, itās just social pressure.
When we stop making money weāll quit. And then there wonāt be restaurants since they can barely staff them as it is. Getting āwaited onā by another human being is degrading to them and expensive for you. Tough tits for everyone if they donāt want to cough up. Weāll be getting paid or your service will suck. Thatās how it is. Or cook and clean for yourselves. And no minimum wage in this damned country is a living wage.
Waiter deals with the general public. They deserve it
I mean, they deserve to make a liveable wage regardless of whether someone tips.
Their (livable) wage is supposed to be payed by their employer. The customer is not their employer.
Itās a tax thing. If tips arenāt part of the food price, theyāre not part of revenue and not taxable. If they are, assuming same compensation as tips would generate, taxes would be higher.
I say put that on the food price. Itās a few cents to the dollar difference. Plus, variations in revenue shouldnāt be a thing an employee should worry about. And obviously it would do away with the whole bartering at the checkout.