> Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed
Here in AU we call that "wages".
Having to do quick maths while under social pressure and the threat of having your service quality degraded to make up for an employer or state being unwilling to pay workers enough to live might be called "coercion", but certainly it is externalising costs onto the customer.
I do wish there was a way to tip the drivers who deliver my Amazon Prime stuff, though.
I don't want to tip someone who presses a few buttons on a screen to take my food order, that they usually mess up and sometimes add on a free side of bad attitude.
I would like an easy way to tip the guy who is trudging through the snow to deliver my 2KG jar of peanut butter at 9:30pm in January. I like this guy...
Wouldn't that just continue to expand a bad practice? If drivers got tips, Amazon would lower their wages, and we'd just have another domain where we have to make extra decisions.
This may be true, but my calculus in this situation was limited to "Guy came through deep snow at 9:30pm to deliver peanut butter...he deserves some money, I have some money, I would like a simple and effective way to transfer it to him."
(Note: I was not home when the delivery was made...)
>(Note: I was not home when the delivery was made...)
If you know when an order is coming, you could copy some of the older folks I doordashed for. They often left money for the drivers in an envelope on the door.
Tipping in Canada is extra absurd. The minimum wage for servers and bartenders is the same as for regular workers (eg. $15.50 per hour in Ontario). But thanks to cultural osmosis from the US, 15-25% tips are also expected on top of that.
US tip workers also get full minimum wage. Tip workers who don't meet the minimum wage threshold on total earnings are compensated for the shortfall. The lower tip worker rate is a subsidy to business owners paid for by guilt tripping their customers.
> US tip workers also get full minimum wage. Tip workers who don't meet the minimum wage threshold on total earnings are compensated for the shortfall.
So they don’t get tips on top of the minimum wage.
Where I live in the US, mandatory minimum wage is $18.69/hr. Tips are on top of that. It has less to do with a living wage and more to do with the fact that the employees make less money with a mandatory 20% service charge than they do via tips.
What's a mandatory service charge even supposed to be? Are restaurant bills cost-plus contracts? Is there also a refrigeration charge, and an ingredients charge?
Yes, service is added as a 20% charge based on the total bill. This is to offset the absence of tipping. If you simply add 20% to menu prices, it has other adverse consequences that reduce employee income in practice.
In southern Europe, automatic 10% tips are often included. But the server will whisper into your ear that he doesn't see any of those 10%, owner takes it all for herself.
Well, unless those areas have worse laws than the US somehow, make sure the server knows that at the very least they should sue the day they quit or get fired.
This compulsion to threaten a lawsuit is such a quintessentially so American. For an American service worker, it also isn't realistic to carry out a lawsuit given that most are working paycheck to paycheck.
Unfortunately, wage theft dwarfs petty theft in the United States due to economic inequality and the inaccessibility of the mostly pay2win American legal system, for the average worker. Millions of workers lose billions in stolen wages every year—nearly as much as all other property theft. [1]
And I didn't say "carry out a lawsuit". You can go to small claims court. Especially since you just lost that job; you can afford the few hours.
I also said "at least", because this is just the plan B if labor enforcement won't do their job and get the money for you. But I assume you don't trust labor enforcement if your plan is to let that 10% get stolen and do nothing.
The US faced a dilemma: Post civil war, many people didn't want to pay freed slaves for their labor.
A combination of tipping and converting jobs that were typically held by blacks to unpaid positions provided a solution. It became popular despite attempts to ban the practice.
Today, tipped workers in the US are paid, but have a lower minimum wage than normal workers.
A sociologist was joking on twitter that “every time I dig a rule that has been on the book for a long time but doesn’t seem to make any sense, it ends up to come from slavery” (paraphrasing)
All states that border the Pacific Ocean have full minimum wage (as in at least $14/hour) no matter what your job. Source: have lived there, have worked in restaurant
> Today, tipped workers in the US are paid, but have a lower minimum wage than normal workers.
No, they have the same minimum wage as all workers. The employer is liable to pay the employee if tips + earnings from tipped min wage are less than earnings from non tipped minimum wage.
That's true on paper, but I worked as a server for like 12 years and never heard of it happening once. In contrast, I've had like 4 bosses who practiced wage theft.
I can see the point of leaving a tip when a server has done a really good job (of course they should be paid a decent wage too). For me the annoying bit is being asked to tip before I have been served - I don't know yet if I would like to leave a big tip or a small one.
At least in the cafes I worked in as an undergrad we split tips between the waitstaff and kitchen, which of course also sort of shifts around the "rewarding good service" aspect, but I think then you feel like you're letting down your coworkers if you piss off customers enough for them to tip badly.
Why does it matter? That isn't some kind of gotcha.
I wouldn't mind if 100% of customer facing jobs were tipped. At worst, is an optional lower price to pay if you are dissatisfied or light on cash. Normally it is just I'm part of the price. I'm not sure why people would be so much happier paying 120% the price instead of 100% and then a 20% tip. It's all the same in the end
Part of the problem is that an expectation of tipping is cropping up in many places where it didn't exist before, and prices certainly haven't dropped 20% to compensate. In these circumstances I would rather just pay 100% of the price and be done.
I think it's partly a crude fix for the problem of some states allowing for waiters and bartenders specifically to be paid below minimum wage[1], as low as $2.13 per hour in some states! Which is of course far worse than most customer-facing jobs.
What is customer facing? Doctor to patient? Employee to employer? Real estate agent to homeowner? Everyone is selling their labor to someone, and everyone has a customer.
Or even worse, be publicly outed by a waiter online because they didn't agree with the tipped amount (retrieving your full name from the CC receipt). Happens.
Foolish move. I’ll bet the restaurant owner loves (fires) the waiters for doing this. It hurts the restaurant and the waiters more than the single customer.
Here in AU we call that "wages".
Having to do quick maths while under social pressure and the threat of having your service quality degraded to make up for an employer or state being unwilling to pay workers enough to live might be called "coercion", but certainly it is externalising costs onto the customer.