It’s because everyone except the wait staff gets paid a living wage. The waiter probably gets paid $2.75/hour because the shady restaurant owner wants YOU to pay the rest of their employees wage for them.
The problem is not overly entitled wait staff, it’s tipping culture in general. Any other job would pay at least normal minimum hourly wages.
I keep seeing this repeated in the comments. Apparently no one on Lemmy has actually worked in a restaurant before (because you’re all bots?), otherwise you’d know that a lot of cooks, dishwashers, etc don’t make a living wage either and split tips with the front-of-house staff. It’s not just the wait staff.
In my state and many other places it’s actually illegal to share tips with back of house
My point still stands though that it has nothing to do with overly entitled wait staff as the cartoon would suggest but an issue with tipping culture and the restaurant industries unwillingness to pay anyone a living wage
I’m not trying to single you out, like I said it seems like everyone here has the same misconception. But even if your point could stand on its own, it’s weakened when you support it with an unrealistic example. It hurts your credibility.
I may have overgeneralized because the cartoon was so silly in its implication that the wait staff are somehow cheating fishermen out of tips
Every step of that chain is nickel and dimed. Only the public facing employees get to ask for tips.
The waiter probably gets paid $2.75/hour
In a specific country
Small correction, $2.75 an hour against tips. In a lot of states it’s legal to withhold that $2.75 once they’ve made more than that in tips per hour. They only have to guarantee that you make minimum wage they don’t have to actually pay you it If you’re getting it paid by somebody else.
Correct, except for saying everyone else is getting a living wage. I bet most of them are not. Still higher than the server.
Ok but some people argue for paying tips outside the US too where this isn’t the case.
I have also heard owners ask about making a service charges mandatory instead of optional. They don’t like it when I point out they will now have to pay tax on it and try to ask about any other options in the POS software. No, if must be optional or tax must be paid.
You ask wait staff if they prefer a stable wage or receiving tips. The overwhelming majority of them will want to keep tips.
It would be better if we eliminated tips overall and paid fair wages. But the people who directly benefit will still fight you on it.
I’d much prefer a stable, livable wage over recieving tips.
The problem is that no one is making a livable wage. At least as a server, there’s (on average) a pretty direct correlation between skill & effort and your income, so a decent server is probably making enough to live on. If you’re working retail, you’re barely making enough to survive on even as a low level manager.
That’s what I meant by fair wages.
I completely agree.
Cant speak for the rest of the country but in my state there was a vote on this, and many workers actually supported it, but there was also a huge astroturfing campaign from restaurant owners claiming that tipped workers want to stay tipped when that wasn’t the case. They succeeded.
I’m sure there’s some of that as well.
There’s a restaurant in seattle facing this issue right now. Walrus and the Carpenter. The staff is on strike because they want to keep tips as they feel they don’t make enough on salary. The restaurant just released their books and the owners arent making much more than a bartender at $90k. And that’s across all their restaurants.
It’s a complicated topic, complicated by different areas and laws, and complicated by both sides having good and bad points.
I absolutely believe that astroturfing happens on this topic. But natural opposition does as well.
But the people who directly benefit will still fight you on it.
Is that still true? Even back when I has tipped workers as peers, their attitudes were mixed. If you have any polling data, that would be appreciated – but, I don’t have any data either, just vague memories.
I’m admittedly talking from a personal experience living in a HCOL area that does not have a lower wage for wait staff. Wait staff are paid $17.13 at minimum here and that’s before tips.
So it is area dependent. Probably.
When I had tipped peers, wait staff got $2.15/hr + tips. It certainly changes the calculus.
People also choose individual lines at the cash registers rather than one shared line that splits into the next available opening. It doesn’t matter that it’s better on average, human intuition is really bad at statistics.
Having worked in food service, and having many friends who do, I don’t know a single person who would rather keep tips. The majority have openly talked shit about tipping. Everyone I know hates tipping except the management that benefits from it.
Holy fuck I’ve got a friend that will die on the hill that you (customer) should tip, and generously every time. Given his experience with it, I agree to a point, but only because he willingly chose to dig heels into that job for better or for worse. I do tip because I feel it’s earned in most cases. I just don’t agree with being over the top about it for sure. Part of that is his personality too… And the more I think about it; fuck that guy.
I live in a very HCOL area and that probably has more to do with attitudes on tipping anything. Wait staff in this area can easily earn wages that are much, much higher than minimum wage with tips.
For example, the state in the US I live in does not have a lower base pay for wait staff. They’re making at minimum $17.13 an hour without tips.
And that’s why. For a lot of states they’re making like $2.75 before tips.
Plus, it’s also very relative to what exactly you are doing. A decent bartender can pull like $200+ a night on a weekend in tips.
Yep which complicates the conversation because all wait staff aren’t the same.
So you have bartenders in big cities scoffing at the idea of eliminating tips while there’s waiters in small diners barely surviving on minimum wage.
Plus then there’s the variance of the individual. If you’re naturally good with people, you’re likely to get tipped better. If you’re a pretty young girl, you’ll probably make decent money even if you’re not good with people, etc.
It’s such a complicated situation to talk about.
Which is why I think tipping should be eliminated.
Cool. That restaurant, also being in a HCOL, could afford to pay those people a living wage without tips. You’re advocating for them to not have to do that.
Read more of my comments. I support fair, living wages and eliminating tipping.
I’m not sure if that is the reason. In Ontario there is no separate minimum wage for servers, it’s $18/hour. But servers expect 20-25% tip.
While the waitstaff has particular challenges in U.S. labor law (lower effective federal minimum wage), it is not safe to assume any of the other workers in the chain are still paid a living wage either.
Love that Lemmy is pro worker everywhere except if they get tips. Then it suddenly becomes the workers fault that they have to beg for a living wage while also working full time.
Pro Tip is not Pro Working.
Pro living wage, pro profit sharing, pro median income for CEOs… These are pro-working views.
Tip economy is part of the very class war problem we find ourselves in.
Cool, but until the bigger problem is fixed (broken tax law) you are fucking over the little guy to try and get back at the big guy, with a gesture that’s little more than a bug bite to the big bosses.
That’s not the point. Point is two fold; first, we shouldn’t normalize closing the wage gap that shitty business owners choose to create, their vacation home is built from wage theft. Second, the other laborers in the first photo also get paid shit wages relatively, especially the chefs who do infinitely harder work and don’t get a split of those tips in most situations. And to be frank, wait staff is often traditionally filled with more attractive people than the bridge trolls in back of house, and that’s a big part of why they clear so much in tips. I’ve known many servers who clear more than double the average cooks pay at the end of the year. That’s not equitable.
So the tension is well founded and much more nuanced than you know or want to acknowledge.
All of these things you name are not the servers fault, yet the server is the who gets all the hate and the reduced pay due to the problem people have with tipping. No-one says - wow fishermen get paid terrible but also they don’t deserve money for work. I am going to stop buying fish. Every one gets paid like shit, shit on the system not the worker. Fix the system, don’t punish the worker for working within the system.
I don’t think anyone in their right mind is tipping less or not at all due to beliefs about how dumb tipping is. Also, some servers are strong supporters of tipping so, depending on the person, it kinda is their fault.
IME, servers generally feel pretty firmly entitled to those high wages collectively at the end of the day, they live pretty well outside of work compared to BOH and it’s typically less serious work for them as it’s more likely to be a “stop” rather than a career (which is more likely for a kitchen worker).
Nothing stops them from having a personal policy to split tips out the kitchen 20-50% and/or organizing other servers and petitioning management for a formal process. I’ve seen some that do, but very rare.
It’s a hierarchy like anything else - the owners are doing wage theft at scale and collecting way more profit than they should, the servers are collecting tips as the final mile face representing a lot of people in back literally navigating knives, fire and very heavy lifting. On balance, they get more than they should (when I was in kitchens, the servers routinely cleared 3 - 4x more annually than the cooks - talking mid 30s for kitchen versus over 100k for servers all told). And the cooks are just working, sacrificing their bodies and personal relationships until their knees give out at 35 and the weaker ones are addicts to cope with it all.
We just live in a culture in the US where the predominant voices you hear are the public (customers) and servers themselves. The servers have selfish motivations and the public have an inherent guilt for making others “serve” them and for being half educated on the server’s “perilous plight”. And again, cooks are quieter in the mix by nature and busy working, so you don’t really hear their voice.
So yes , the system is fucked, needs major reform, owner class is the driver, but the servers are in the passenger seat silently enjoying the ride. The cooks are in the trunk, with a speaker playing an audiobook about how difficult things are for the servers.
See this way capitalists get to underpay workers
Nah, all of the people in that strip are underpaid. Tipping waitstaff is a mechanism to tie their ability to feed their families directly to sycophantic ass kissing behavior. It’s essentially a way for the rich to know they can get dancing monkey entertainment anywhere they go.
I mean it literally started so owners wouldn’t have to pay POC waiters, the rest was just added bonus
But yes everyone on a wage is underpaid
Well yes, the owners didn’t want to pay black waitstaff, but also tying it to patron tips meant that they had to perform fealty and fawning and “good humor” under abuse in order to get paid. It’s both a way to underpay and a way to control and break the spirit.
There’s really only two classes: Us and them… And if you’ve got less than 10 million, you’re probably one of us.
Lemmy discovers Commodity Fetishism
Yes, but waiter are underpaid and should have a salary too.
… Apparently. This is too american for me to understand
Visit Canada where wait staff don’t have a separate minimum wage yet still we have American tip culture.
So is the fisherman and the cook.
As wish many things American, it goes back to slavery. Tipped workers were a way for employers to avoid paying (mostly black) workers, effectively providing slavery-lite even after slavery had ended (Happy Juneteenth).
In any case, current U.S. labor law has specific carve-outs for certain tipped jobs that allow the minimal wage to be not the already unlivable $7.25/hr but the unsustainable $2.15/hr. Technically, employers are required to bring a tipped workers pay up to $7.25/hr if they do not report enough tips, but in practice employers encourage reporting incorrect tips and find reasons (if needed) to dismiss employees that do not report enough tips.
Fisherman, Sailor, Teamster, and Chef are not tipped positions. Waitstaff is a tipped position.
True but some states don’t have this distinction and it means servers actually make pretty decent money.
Yes and “tipping” has gone insane. Not just amounts (tho even when I was a child, my parents consider 10% the bare minimum) but also you get prompted to leave a tip for transactions that don’t involve a tipped position.
My experience is from one of the shittier states for workers (Arkansas), right-to-work effectively eliminates all union activity, the state would remove the minimum wage if it could, and there’s even people that want to make it easier for 14-18 year olds to work.
Outside of the US it’s a reward for good work
Inside the US its you directly subsidising the businesses refusal to even pay minimum wage.
So bitching about a higher tip is bitching about fair wages for work. You got an issue paying that, you take it up with the employer who has shoved the burden of paying their waitstaff onto you.
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How many unions you a member of?
Exactly! Don’t like paying tips? Stop eating at those establishments.
Or we could tip while we continue advocating for legal ends to the system of tipping. I won’t stiff someone who isn’t making a fair wage, but I’d really like to switch over to how europe does it
One of the greatest achievements of restaurant owners was to pay waiters sub liveable wage and make them blame customers for it.
And ironically one of the biggest proponents of keeping the tipped minimum wage was Herman Cain (who is black. Or was. He dead now).
please oh please phrase it Herman Cain (who is dead) it tickles so many ex-cultists on here’s funny bones
Tipped workers were a way for employers to avoid paying (mostly black) workers, effectively providing slavery-lite even after slavery had ended
It’s not just about being cheap though. It reinforces the idea that the worker is of a lower social status than the customer. The customer may, at their own discretion, choose whether or not to pay the worker a fair wage for the work they have done. That’s a very clear power imbalance.
my wife hates this but money burns a hole in my pocket. i inherited it from my dad. so while i contribute to the problem, it’s because a larger than average tip really brightens someone’s day. it means i can’t eat out as much, but that’s my problem not theirs.
As someone in the industry, I can’t thank people like you enough. A great tip can make a shitty shift so much better. I wish so many others were as kind. Or at this rate, just kind enough to tip 20%.
I mean let me read a book in a quiet corner for a shift and check in every hour, keep me full of bread and coffee? That’s worth a hell of a lot more than 20 per cent. More like $25.
No, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of Americans are fooled by this sort of anti-worker division propaganda. This is a conservative / right wing comic.
(I get it. It was just for the meme/joke)
Right wing propaganda is still right wing propaganda when packaged in a “joke” or as “irony”. You were correct to question it.
Waiter is the only one who gets their wage subsidized by their bosses customers.
(I get it. It was just for the meme)
Everyone gets their wage subsidized by the customers of the business (both B2B and B2C) they work for.
So, they all can ask for tips?
They can all ask, I’ll still say no.
The money comes from the customer in either scenario, functionally there is no difference it flows from customer to employee regardless.
Yeah, but that’s not what subsidized means at all.
No the definition is technically to be partially financially supported by public funds (I.e. government or other organization)…but that wouldn’t cover tipping from private customers either so…
No, you’re just wrong here and there is no technically.
You’re misunderstanding what public funds are.
No, but we shouldn’t expect to pay less if they stop receiving tips and the employer pays them instead. I think a lot of people make this assumption. In reality it’ll be more like you don’t have to tip but your meal is 20% more expensive.
Are you saying the restaurant should charge more and prevent tipping or if you don’t tip you get hit with an extra charge? Or is it a different method?
I would like the charge to stay the same but the waiter still gets a living wage but it’s absurd to believe that will happen and may be unrealistic to expect that it should. I don’t know what profit margin any given restaurant has but none will give up 20% of profits and a lot may not be able to remain open if they have to. In any scenario the business would have to change beyond recognition. The ones who choose to adapt may just fire the waiters and have you order through a machine and then you don’t have to tip but that business model already exists in most fast food chains.
I would like the charge to stay the same but the waiter still gets a living wage but it’s absurd to believe that will happen and may be unrealistic to expect that it should
which is why it takes a change in law. california did it.
Ideally, the restaurant should pay enough that tipping is not required (which does require them to raise prices). As a customer you would then be free to tip a smaller amount if you thought that the service was exceptional.
That’s how it works in the UK although a lot of businesses are adding a tip onto the bill in advance so that you would need to complain about the service to get it removed (technically you can just ask them to remove the tip without giving a reason if that’s how you want to play it).
And we won’t pay less!
they stop receiving tips we pay the same
employer pays them insteadoops, forgot this part. restaurant owner makes 15% more money!To be fair, they will do the whole boiling frog pot thing. It’ll be easier to do with 7% inflation a year.
we’re currently1 at 4%/mo or 28% a year which is fuuuuun
1last i checked which was i forget but it was less than a year ago and the number makes krasnov look bad so meh.
Yeah, but now everyone’s running out of strategic oil reserves.
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7% more expensive in reality. labor costs are a lot in restaurants, but the big one is rent followed by utilities
there was a study on fast food prices rising in relation to the 15 dollar minimum wage hike. that’s where i’m getting my number from. also my ass because it’s me, but my estimates are usually spot on.
Tip?.. 15%… 20%… custom
it’s a self-checkout machine
High society is for flam goers a d gramma obviously. That why I fuck in the dumpster. That and I like it
Waitstaff fought against raising their minimum wage because they make more with tips
Yep. Anyone fighting against tipping etiquettes is committing warfare against the working class. It’s silly how quickly and frequently we turn on each other. Works for the capitalists though.
The fuck… No.
Most people are class traitors over multiple issues. This is one of yours but no worries, you’re not alone.
I imagine most people think they should get paid well while relying on a wage/salary instead of tips. Even if realistically most would be paid less, it’s not an inconsistent position.
Also, having your payment come more fully from an employer allows workers to bargain and demand things like raises. You don’t really have agency when you are largely dependent on distributed payments from customers.
But I do agree that it distracts from the overall struggle of the working class. A server wanting a tip is not your enemy.
First off, fuck this artist for implying that working in the service industry is not difficult nor requires skill.
Second, I make a very good living as a tipped worker in the service industry. There’s no way in hell that a small business owner could afford to pay a wage even close to what I make in tips.
There is an established system in place in certain industries the US and it works. Otherwise people wouldn’t do those jobs.
That being said, I don’t think we should be adding that system to other jobs. Everyone knows to tip your bartender. Not everyone is going to know that now you have to tip your supermarket cashier just for them make a decent wage.
There’s no way in hell that a small business owner could afford to pay a wage even close to what I make in tips.
Sure they could. All they’d have to do is set the prices to include what would’ve been your tip.
Even if they could there is no bar in the world that is going to pay its staff $50/hr.
Why not? That’s what you’re saying it costs. What’s the difference if it’s listed on the menu instead of hidden behind some obscure social contract?
Yeah, customers are literally already paying that amount.
As someone who lived off of tips for a a couple decades, I agree with all of this despite the down votes. It’s a skill. The people down voting would be flabbergasted by how hard the job is working in a nice, busy place.
None of the down votes are for the opinion that the service industry requires skill. They are because tipping culture is anti-consumer, anti-worker, predatory and just generally terrible, yet the comment is advocating for it because apparently it works for them personally.
Thank you! I think most people commenting here don’t understand how the industry works as a whole.
Everyone else in that supply chain gets a living wage, except maybe the chef who shares tips with the waiter. It fucking pisses me off when people bitch about the fact that they’re asked to tip an underpaid employee instead of getting angry about the fact that the employee doesn’t make as much money as anyone else in the first place.
Where the fuck is the restaurant owner who isn’t paying their worker a fair wage? Where the fuck are the politicians who put a loophole in labor law the allow this situation to happen?
The waiter is even being villainized in the last frame, fuck this comic and fuck you OP for posting it uncritically. I fucking hate this anti-worker spin so fucking much.
Nobody gets a fair wage but at least food service workers in my area get paid the same as everyone else (Seattle $21/h minimum). Tipping is rooted in racist class division and we really should be pushing to end wage exemptions rather than perpetuate a ridiculous sales-commission structure.
Absolutely!
But the people who say “just don’t tip” aren’t fixing anything.
If anything you should boycott the restaraunt.
I remember reading that the only way a restaurant can pay less than minimum wage is if the employees make enough tip to make up for it. In other words if everybody just stopped tipping, it would force restaurants to pay normal wage right?
On paper, yes. That’s how it works. Although let’s not pretend that minimum wage is actually a livable wage.
In practice, most employers have a policy that reads something like “we assume you’ve made enough in tips to hit minimum wage, if you don’t, please inform your manager.” Not only does this put the onus of enforcing the rule on employees, it also makes it easier for the restaraunt to say “you’re the only one having this problem, so you must be bad at your job” (when the reality is that no one else reports it for fear of disciplinary action).
reads something like “we assume you’ve made enough in tips to hit minimum wage, if you don’t, please inform your manager.”
I’m sure they do this, but it sounds illegal as fuck and the DoL should probably be made aware.
They might claim that the onus is on the employee to tell the manager, but that’s absurd. There’s no way that can actually be the case, right?
In the US there are so few that prohibit tipping and pay a fair wage. I don’t think this is a reasonable solution either. Legislation is probably the best answer. Even with that it’s so incredibly engrained in American culture it would be really hard to break. It’s a total shit system though that is only becoming more and more prominent as a way for companies not to have to pay people and playing on a deep sense of guilty charity.
Unionization would probably be the best solution, but not an easy one
Well start with “places that pay a fair wage.” At least there, you can feel better about not tipping, or tipping solely based on service quality. Obviously any restaraunt will still let you tip if you want to, why would they stop you?
Yes, it’ll be hard to stick to only those places. It will limit where you can go and you’ll have to do research before going someplace new. But doesn’t any meaningful action require effort?
There are places like Sugarfish, that actually ban tipping. That’s necessary, because otherwise we still stay in that cycle.
They also are adding a 16% service charge, which is kind of like a mandatory tip, but they have a good reason for it.
The reason is that if they would put actual price on the menu they would be perceived at more expensive (people are dumb) so they impose this service fee to look competitive.
I prefer that approach. Ideally what should be done is as someone suggested is to ban tipping through a legislation.
Understandable to look competitive but I’d prefer it to be part of the actual price with the clear assumption that at a restaurant the service of bringing the thing you ordered out to you is included. I also don’t think percentages make sense. Up charge my beer 2$ or whatever such that if I order 6 of them the server essentially earns more for bringing 6 of them out. But don’t upcharge my bottle of champagne $12 for bringing it out once. There shouldn’t be such a disconnect between service / labor and cost/payment.
This is always so funny… why would you boycot the restaurant? Don’t hate the player, hate the game. So if you want change, change the rules of the game. Get politically involved, campaign for minimum wage, waiters will get a minimum living wage, tipping won’t be required anymore… this idea that you can and will vote with your wallet is absolutely ridiculous. You will never get critical mass that way.
So boycotts never work, huh? Sure about that one?
Changing your economic habits can and does work. It’s just difficult, so people would rather not do it.
But yes, also vote, campaign, protest, etc.
The thing with voting with your wallet is that it is not permanent. It can help for a while if you somehow manage to get critical mass, but I believe that human willpower is not strong enough of a force, it is more or an exception than the norm. If you create a system that incentivizes exploitation and make it legal, someone who participates in the system, say a restaurant owner, can only whitstand the pricing pressure for so long untill the competition, that uses all legal ways to gain an advantage, will take over. I believe that lasting change can only be achieved by rules and enforcement of those rules for everyone. Voting with your wallet makes you feel good about doing your part and it’s better than nothing, but if you want to really have impact, you have to go through the legislative route. I think you call this an collective action problem
Why is it an either/or? Do both.
I live in the US and I’ve worked in the industry since 2008, and I hate the anti worker framing of anti tip culture sentiment so much. I’m a cook but my wage is just as reliant on tips as the servers. The servers and the kitchen staff do equally important parts of the job of giving people a good dining experience. Servers do more than just carry food to the table in a quality restaurant, and there are hours of labor that go into every plate.
Furthermore it’s not always the employer’s fault that the pre tip wages are so low that tips are necessary. The industry involves several players outside of the restaurant itself, including landlords, purveyors, HVAC and sanitation services, and so on. All of them charge as much as they can get away with, which leads to razor thin margins for the restaurant, and labor is always the highest cost. Many corporate entities diffuse this cost in various ways but small scale places like the ones I prefer to work in don’t have as much room to maneuver.
If people had to pay the full cost of a meal that adequately supported the staff, it would likely be just as much or more as the same meal at a lower price with an adequate tip included (15-20%) and restaurants would struggle to stay open even more than they currently do because people would complain about the high prices.
I wish people would address the system as a whole, including the capitalist mode of production, rather than blaming the workers who are victims of this system. I’m opposed to tip culture and I wish livable wages were guaranteed for all forms of labor, but in the current reality we all live in, not tipping doesn’t do any damage to the system, only to its victims.
This doesn’t make sense. If the final check + tips is the cost for the whole service, just include the tip % in the base price and pay proper wages. Margins have nothing to do with this, it’s just exploitation, it’s offloading the risk of enterprise onto the workers.
You all have been brainwashed.
As I explained in my post, restaurants that do this struggle to stay open because people only look at the price and are less likely to want to pay it. Even places that keep prices the same and add a service charge receive many complaints and a drop in business. My source is that it has happened in multiple restaurants I’ve worked at.
I doubt you read my whole post because I also spoke against the system. I’m not brainwashed, I’m living in reality.
Edit: side note, all of capitalism is built on exploitation of labor, it’s the defining characteristic
This could be solved by banning all tipping, then all restaurants would have to display the honest price upfront.
It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista’s jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they’re all getting a living wage, and your tip isn’t a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.
This is definitely one way to approach it, but I currently make minimum wage plus tips in a city where the minimum wage is over $20 and it’s still hard to make ends meet at times. I’m a single adult with no dependents and although I have a reasonable standard of living I’m by no means thriving. The tips are still a very necessary part of my paychecks.
The problem is complex, like I said in my first comment. Lots of sub-industries thrive off of milking restaurants, and simply doing away with tipping is not going to fix it. I just wish people would have some sense of worker solidarity instead of attacking people who live off of tips.
Yeah, I haven’t seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour still isn’t a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, “Fight for Fifteen,” was outdated and needed to be the, “Fight for Twenty,” and we’ve had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.
If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren’t enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.
Most transactions are handled by card, it would be quite easy to enforce. At a minimum, payment processors could be legislated to not have the option for tipping. Banning the tipped minimum wage has already been done in a number of states and so they make minimum wage + tips, with that tip not actually being any more optional.
If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don’t really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you’re right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it’s important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.
All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let’s say you go to your local bakery; you’ve never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they’ll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he’s required to make up the difference anyway. At first it’s great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren’t earning enough tips, ane he’s making up the differences. That’s when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they’re overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.
Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I’d have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.
I’m not trying to be a dick but this is about as short sighted as someone saying they should make crime illegal.
What’s really short sighted is not seeing how tipping develops into a bribery culture. We’ve already seen companies happily turning on the tipping option for the payment processor in situations where people used to never tip. Today you bribe your waiter to not shit in your food and berate you. Eventually you’ll have to bribe government workers to expedite (i.e. bother at all with) your paperwork. Gotta hustle and get that bag above all else, right?
Ignoring that possibility, it’s not like it’s a just practice in any way. Tipping amount is largely detached from level of service and factors such as attractiveness, race, how the person is feeling that day, etc make a greater impact.
You are ignoring my entire argument. At no point did I say tipping culture in the US is good nor have I defended it as a just way to distribute pay. It sucks, and it sucks to live under it in my chosen profession. But it is the reality that I and other restaurant workers live with.
My point is that you should direct your ire at the systems that built this shit show. Removing tipping with no other corrective measures doesn’t fix anything, it just makes life worse for people who are trying to make a living. Service industry jobs should treat tips as an added incentive for good service, but that’s just not the real world. I’ve already detailed a few of the reasons in my other comments but you don’t seem to be reading any of them anyway so I’m not going to waste anymore energy on this conversation.
It works in civilized countries, why not in the USA ?
Because different things are different
Just gonna add a source to back this up:
The no-tipping policy lasted just six months at Chang’s Momofuku Nishi. Claus Meyer, a Noma co-founder, announced in February that he was ending the no-tipping policy at his own New York restaurant, Agern, after two years, citing slow business as a result of the higher menu prices. Gabe Stulman reversed course at his restaurant, Fedora, after four months without tips, telling Eater that guests were ordering less food than they had before.
People are dumb. Even if they should know they’re saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it’s bad.
Thank you for the actual source! I knew there would be evidence aside from my anecdote but didn’t particularly feel like looking it up. I’ve had this argument on lemmy a couple of times so I find it a bit tiresome. Appreciate the support :)
The point is that the menu prices should not need to go up, because tips should never have been a necessary part of their profit margins.
They were literally subsidizing their expenses (including payroll) with tips, and that’s made evident by the fact that the prices had to go up when tips were ended.
If your business cannot afford to survive without paying your employees a living wage, then your business shouldn’t exist.
Ok, well, most restaurants have notoriously small margins (3-5%) with tipping. So, setting aside what you think should and shouldn’t be, what is an actual solution? Eliminate tipping and raise prices? Restructure the agricultural pipeline to lower costs? Cap commercial real estate prices to reduce rental overhead? Because as it stands now, you can’t eliminate tipping without getting the money somewhere, and it’s not in the restaurants profits.
Buy Fairtrade. Cook your own god damn meals. Pay FUCKING EVERYONE a livable wage. The planet is on fire and the like 50 to 100 people responsible are also the reason why nobody’s getting paid enough and why people are getting annoyed at servers asking for tips.
Everyone in this are a worker, the guy we don’t see in this comic (edge fund, financiers and owner) are the real problem and this comic artist seems hell bent to hide this
I have spoke to owners complaining that they want to make service charges (tips) mandatory, then cry that they have to pay tax on it if they do that. “But can we just change the text instead?” - No.
Someones never worked in a restaurant before
*in a country that has legislated tipping as the approved method of underpaying employees
So speaking on somethibg about which they have no experience
All of the people in that comic get paid for their labor. The server doesn’t.
Everywhere in the world the restaurant pays the server for their labor, in the US they make the customer do it and guilt them of they don’t.
So pay the server then!
I agree. Some US states do just that.
Though for this comic I’m just pointing out how the server is being singled out and shamed without the context of how their labor is compensated in comparison to everyone else in the comic.
Damn everywhere in the world the server works for free except in USA they get tips for salary. Why do they even work as servers in the rest of the world without tips for paid labor? Are they retarded?
They’re also required to be paid minimum wage in the US by the restaurant if tips don’t cover it
Minimum wage being below poverty in the US is, of course, a separate issue
It’s required, but ask any servers you know how often that actually happens. Last restaurant my friend worked at would carry over tips from previous days in their books so it’d look like they made exactly 7.25 an hour every time. Only reason they got caught is because they always made it exactly 7.25 an hour on those days.
They got a meager fine and were told to pay the money back. They filled for bankruptcy rather than pay out like $4000 in back pay. If you or I had stolen $4000, we’d be in prison. A business does it and it’s a slap on the wrist and a quick bankruptcy and reopening under a new name
The servers I know all end up with way more than minimum wage, but I completely agree any restaurants getting away with that should have to pay at least 10x the stolen wages, and all court fees, plus a fine that is a percentage of their revenue
In a lot of the US, service workers are exploited similarly to how overtime labor goes without compensation.
Say if someone works 12 hours in a shift, but remains at or under 40 hours for the week, they don’t get any OT. It only kicks in after 40 hours.
The same goes for a server working full time. Without even needing to cook the books, a server could work a few $40 weekday shifts then one busy $300 weekend shift. Rather than being bumped up to minimum for the weekday shifts, the weekend shift is counted against their overall pay and they get nothing. The weekday shifts eat the tips from the weekend shift.
All perfectly legal.
they must be retarded if they’re working for free as slaves when they clearly could be working for tips.
dude, would you use a different word please? i have had a rough past with it. you usually make good points and i like upvoting you
yes, but they all get paid way below the value of their labour.
The Server gets paid exactly the price they agreed to when they took the job
This excuse for worker exploitation has always baffled me. 1. The contract was signed under duress: “Take this shitty job or continue to be unemployed.” Consent made under duress is not consent. 2. It was agreed to under an extreme power asymmetry: If you refuse the job, your family will have to go hungry, but the company will easily find some other desperate soul to fill the position. 3. I haven’t even begun to touch on all the class, racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination that workers face.
There’s nothing even close to meaningful or fair negotiation under such conditions.
The threat of going hungry is in the vast majority of negotiations. And if you’re working all day, and go hungry anyways - does it really matter?
But clearly that isn’t happening.
You’ve have the vast majority front of house who would never do anything else because **it does in fact pay well **. Very well
Ahh, they agreed to it! Perfectly acceptable then
Well if they all said “I’m not working for that shit wage” or they joined a union, did literally anything at all. NMaybe they would get paid more. Instead they do nothing, and bitch
Nevermind that Servers make more money than every single person in the supply chain. I don’t understand why everyone feels so bad for them. Ask any of them if they would rather work back of the house. Forget about logistics, or in agriculture?
Source: I was a server for almost a decade.
Nevermind that Servers make more money than every single person in the supply chain.
FYI, the restaurant owner is in that same supply chain. So no.
Also, I think commercial fishermen make decent money in the US.
Yes let’s also include the CEO of Longhorn Steakhouse in that supply chain. Or better. Let’s compare the server to Mr. Warren Strawman Buffett since he owns shares in Darden Restaurants Inc. “They’re all part of the chain”
Commercial Fishermen make ~ $15/hour.
Any server worth their salt makes more than $15/hour after tips. The mean is $17/hour and that’s assuming the US government knows about all of their tips - they don’t.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes353031.htm
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/fishers-and-related-fishing-workers.htm
The fact is they do make more than the cook in the back, and they often make more than management.
Am I exempt from tipping and the no tipping shame if I walk over to the chef to order and pick up the food myself? Because if the customers are the ones who must pay the servers a living wage via tipping, which is optional, that must mean the service itself is optional and I can do it myself.
Tipping presents a philosophical problem for me, and I just can not do it. Luckily, I live in a nation where its not done and service is not optional and I can not go to the chef to order my own food so the restaurant provides the service of a server (and pays them a wage).You make the exact same arguments that the Sovereign Citizens make.
You’re every bit the asshole that they are.
You’re every bit the asshole that they are.
You don’t even know me, but hey… whatever.
I am judging you solely off what you said, dumbass.
I mean Christ, do you people not have ANY reading comprehension?
We people?!
You’ve become plural, congrats! Big achievement.
Get a little angrier, you’re just not disdainful enough to be right yet. Insult them with the very first word and end the sentence with a nazi closer, maybe.
Sure, you could try to make a point, but why? Insults are all that matters.
p.s. you’re still wrong, throw a tantrum
How to tell everyone that you’ve never worked in food service without actually saying it.
It’s one of the few jobs in which an untrained and not especially strong person can make good money right off the bat without exposing themselves to extremely dangerous conditions.
I worked with a bunch of 40-70 year old women without many qualifications to put on a resume who earned decent money (they were often homeowners who paid for their kids to go to college). I don’t know of many industries where that is the case.
It’s very easy for an employer to exploit tipped workers in places with a difference, but I don’t know if getting rid of the tipping culture would make anything better. Restaurants constantly take advantage of their employees, whether they’re tipped or not, and if menu prices go up, that increase in revenue is not going to just be distributed among the employees. My guess based on how restaurant owners treat their employees is that prices would be raised by 15-20%, servers would be bumped up to minimum wage or just above it, and the rest would be pocketed by the owners.
In that scenario, customers are paying just as much as before, but now it’s mandatory, while servers are poorer (as are kitchen, dish, and bar employees who used to get tipped out [in some restaurants, each server gives 5-20% of their earned tips to various other sectors of the restaurant*]), and restaurant owners are richer. I don’t see how that’s a better situation than the one we have today. It’s definitely less hassle for consumers and it’s fairer in the sense that now nobody makes good money (except of course the owners), but I don’t think it’s an improvement that would stand alone.
If we were to improve the whole system for workers in general, I’d want to get rid of tipping, but not until then.
- I worked somewhere where the servers each tipped 20% to dish and kitchen (total, so if there were eight people in the kitchen, they each got 2.5% from each of the servers), and the employers used that as justification for paying everyone in the back as a tipped employee. The kitchen begged the front of house not to strike, because they were working quasi under the table and didn’t want to lose even a really shitty job. Just a fun anecdote about restaurant exploitation.
we can’t possibly do this, it will make everything worse says only country that does this
From my original comment:
If we were to improve the whole system for workers in general, I’d want to get rid of tipping, but not until then.
I now live in Germany and people with little training, strength, or desire to risk their health are able to support themselves at all types of jobs, plus they’re able to gain qualifications in their chosen field if they want, to further increase their wages. That just requires reworking the whole system.
The US absolutely could do that, but do you think they’re going to?
