While this article brings up some disturbing points that I was completely oblivious to, discussions like "<something> should be illegal" make me cringe.
There will always be some behavior deemed socially undesirable. The real question that should be asked is where is the line between good social protection and an undue infringement upon personal freedom? At the extremes, it's very very clear, but as you get towards the middle, everything blurs and it's in the eye of the beholder.
I can never, and would never attempt to, justify providing inferior service to people based on their origin or appearance (or other identifiable factor), prohibition is a blunt instrument. Education and socialization with diverse communities is another option, although slower and much more difficult.
If not illegal, then why not policy? There's ways of carrot-and-sticking this to the correct course without having to make it outright illegal.
Where I live they tried to cut down on the number of plastic bags used by instituting a $0.05 fee for each one. It's not a tax, it's just a recommendation by the city to retailers that they charge that much for bags, nobody had to do it, but a lot did and for the most part it worked.
If your city went "tip-free", by the same token, with clear advertising and an explanation of the implications made through the media, that would be as good as making it illegal: It'd make it old-fashioned.
I agree, some incentive/penalty would be better than blanket prohibition. Santa Monica I believe actually requires a $0.10 charge per bag. But that is very different from saying "you must bring a re-usable bag."
For tipping, flat-rate minimum tip (like for larger parties, and also described in one of the articles), for instance could level the field. If I want to tip more, I can just leave the cash on the table...
>> "For tipping, flat-rate minimum tip (like for larger parties, and also described in one of the articles), for instance could level the field."
My belief is that that will mean you rarely get tips higher than the minimum. Tips are supposed to be--by definition--voluntary, and in some sense a reward for service. As such, it offends me when a minimum tip is added (note: pre-adding it is different that merely showing off to the side what certain percentages of the bill are as a helpful arithmetic guide.) In keeping with that feeling, I never tip higher than the minimum if it's pre-added, even though in almost all cases the tip I would have given would have been (sometimes significantly) higher.
Perhaps the better question is whether or not it's legitimate for government to attempt to change social mores like that. As a corollary does a "behavior modification" style policy actually change how people feel? Or just how they act? And if it only changes how they act, have we really accomplished the desired end?
I remember travelling to countries where tipping is a no-no, what a breath of fresh air.
Tipping is so arbitrary. The line for who "can be tipped" is different for everyone: waiters, cabbies, hair dressers, hotel maids... you get the idea.
Why does one low skill profession get a tip (wait staff) and others do not (fast food). They both require just as much (little) skill. I don't get it. I mean seriously, the Sonic car hop walks food from the kitchen to your car and the waiter walks food from the kitchen to your table. Is it because the car hop doesn't have the added task of taking your order?
I'd rather no one received a tip just so everyone dealt with the same rules.
Sometimes a worker will ensure the job is well done in order to receive a better tip. For example - a wait staff may be more attentive knowing that they will receive an appropriate tip - however if they disregard their customers they accept that the tip will be little to non-existent.
I got the feeling my server was offended when I didn't order wine or a dessert last friday when I went out to a nice restaurant. F- tipping, it makes both sides of the table into jerks.
I get that often; I'm a vegetarian, which results in me often ordering a cheaper meal, and I usually drink water, unless the tea is decent. I order their tea if it isn't nasty. So the impression for the staff is that I'm cheap, which is far from the truth; I'm an exceptionally generous tipper.
I know the look on the face when they hear my order and decide I'm not worth their time. It pits my interests against theirs, instead of aligning them as tipping is supposed to do.
Tipping makes me their employer willy-nilly. I didn't pick them, I can't fire them (at least not without considerable difficulty). But I have to pay them, although we have no agreement as to details. Its a crazy system.
P. S. I am the "adult white male" as in the article.
I don't drink and nor large groups of friends I have, we're all used to this. As soon as a table demonstrates it's not ordering alcohol, waiters basically disappear for the night or give us attitude. Tipping is stressful for everyone. It's nonsense and broken. Non-tipping systems work just fine everywhere else.
It's stressful because it often results in a lose-lose situation: if I tip poorly, this is not action that will learn them that what they did was somehow bad service, it'll just turn the situation into an antagonistic orientation. So, the next time I come in, I'm not really sure if he's gonna spit in my food. So in the end I always end up reluctantly tipping the same amount, no matter how the service was.
Also, as a brown male, reading the article made it pretty clear why I receive markedly poorer service when I'm with my family (also brown), vs. when I'm eating out with my white friends. Being reminded of racism in this way is, well... pretty stressful.
This essay was also posted on Reddit, and I saw similar responses from African American folks there: even though a lot of them tip pretty generously, they can sense that servers don't look forward to being at their table providing service, as if they're anticipating a bad tip.
Interestingly, and not trying to compare to what you experience but I'm not very tall and when I have to get a drink at a bar it's truly a challenge. And I always think "If I was one of those tall guys I would get better service". (I've not done anything to verify this other than it seems that way).
Likewise sometimes I am in my car and someone looks over at me. I think "wow if I was a girl I would think they are looking at me because of that!" (Because I tend to check out girls!)
My point is although there is no question you are subject to the actions you (and others describe) but it also could be the case that it happens for other reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Make sense?
Lastly, while I am white, I am of a religion that has a percentage of the population that is biased against us. But for some reason I haven't really experienced that bad treatment that I can link to my religion. I think this is because my last name doesn't scream the religion as some others do.
One more thing. I'm married to a physician and I dated a physician. And when we are together people always assume I am the doctor or also a doctor. And they always seem to defer to me rather than my wife (or in the past girlfriend). My wife also has been treated by nurses without respect something they don't do to the male doctors.
> My point is although there is no question you are subject to the actions you (and others describe) but it also could be the case that it happens for other reasons that have nothing to do with skin color.
I think that is a bit of a stretch. There is concrete evidence that explains this happens a lot, and it's clear that racism [1] and sexism [2] are a key part of it.
And -- not as scientific here -- but there's intuition I have gathered that's backed up with 10 years of extensive dining out in various arrangements and settings, and anecdotes from my server friends about the politics in restaurants.
I wasn't questioning that it happens I said "there is no question you are subject to the actions you (and others describe)"
I was saying that there are times that it happens that have nothing to do with skin color and would happen (maybe the waiter is having a bad day who knows) to anyone.
Like the man in the car next to me (assuming he is not gay) if I was a hot girl I would automatically assume it's because I'm a hot girl. Of course this is not the same as saying that men don't look at a girl in the car next to them!
I'm sorry I guess maybe I still don't understand where you're coming from? Of course there would be false positives -- are you perhaps informing me of some possibilities with which I could rationalize why I was the recipient of poor service?
Of course that's a possibility -- servers have bad days, sure, but these isolated incidents don't negate the need to solve the bigger problems of wage disparity in restaurants (cooks being paid half what servers earn -- close to minimum wage in some instances, no matter that they went through culinary school and incurred huge debt), the problems of racism and sexism, etc. I feel non-tipping is the easy and obvious solution here.
Because I get attitude from a person who is supposed to be serving me, as well as inattentive service. I don't think I need to explain why bad service is bad.
Also, the actual act of tipping is uncomfortable. I have to write an amount that I feel adequately compensates the person for their effort and time. I really have no idea what that number should be. 15-20% is completely arbitrary. If I feel the service was bad, I now have to do a passive-aggressive low tip. And you know they are just going to think you tipped low because you're cheap, not because their service was bad.
Any time you are the subject of prejudice, it is a source of stress. While it isn't at the level of a classic civil rights struggle, it still exists.
What prejudice? As the article says, if you look like the profile of a "bad tipper", you get shitty service. If you don't order alcohol/desserts/appetizers, shitty service. Split a large portion to not waste food? Shitty service.
Because sitting with an empty glass of water (or whatever) waiting to get it refilled before you continue eating is stressful - for me at least, I drink a lot when I'm eating. Trying to get the attention of a waitperson who doesn't want to wait on you is stressful.
I used to be a waiter on Mackinac Island Michigan. We always hated getting Canadian or European customers as they rarely tipped anything. We also hated getting a table of old ladies for the same reason. There were very few blacks visiting the island so I can't comment about how they tip as a group. The manager of the restaurant definitely used table assignments to reward some waiters and punish other waiters. The waiters had to share a percentage of their tips with the bartenders but otherwise tips were not shared between waiters. Tipping has many drawbacks but I doubt waiters in the US would want it eliminated given how much money they can make when they get a good tipper who drinks a lot of alcohol. That makes up for a lot of bad tippers.
TL;DR: the tipping system has a negative externality- some customers receive worse service because they "look" like bad tippers, according to the prejudices of the waitstaff (e.g. by being black). This negative externality is so harmful, we'd actually do less harm overall by just getting rid of tipping.
I agree that the first part happens. Not sure I agree with the second.
There's a benefit in incentivizing good service (assuming it leads to better service, which my anecdotal experience at tipping vs service charge restaurants makes me think it does). We tend to marginalize things like this when big societal issues like racism come up, but it's definitely part of the equation.
The most important bit of research he relates has nothing to do with the servers, but with the customers - an individual customer will tip about the same regardless of service. This means that the incentive for waitstaff is not to serve everyone better in hopes of better tips, but to compete for the perceived highest value customers (white business men) and provide them with the best service. I don't have links to studies but this confirms what I've heard from friends in the restaurant industry - the strategy is to serve those with the highest expected tip better.
At this point the disconnect should be obvious. A customer who tips well but doesn't fall into the "expected good tipper" category will not get good service so how is the system "incentivizing good service" in a general sense?
Meh, I anecdotally disagree - I don't think tipping seems to correlate with service at all. Where does that get us? A well-researched article on the negative side and a couple of zero-researched anecdotes canceling each other out on the positive side. Too bad the article didn't include research on the benefits as well as drawbacks.
Don't be hyperbolic, it also incentivizes good service to anyone that the server recognizes... I typically receive mediocre to poor service when I am dining alone until the staff learn that I tip well.
So it incentivizes good service for regulars who tip well and "expected big tippers", but not for tourists or individuals who are having their first dining experience (which is probably the most important one to the employer, BTW).
Seems like the equivalent of a software system that only works on weekday afternoons, except in March where it works every other Sunday too (maybe).
> (which is probably the most important one to the employer, BTW)
Possibly, but I don't think that is generally true. I eat at a (pretty damn touristy) place two or three times a month and the owner behind the counter is always overjoyed to see me and throws in extra stuff for free all the time. Now, in that particular case it isn't tip motivate, but he absolutely appreciates the regular reliable business. I think that regular reliable business is most important to many small restaurants, which is why you see so many of them offering punch/stamp cards to regulars. If you frequent small locations, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the business owners really do love regulars.
If preferring repeat customers was actually bad for business, the business owner would be well within their rights to forbid tipping at their business and instead pay their staff the proper minimum wage. I suspect this isn't ever actually the case; either repeat business makes up a significant chunk of your business and is more valuable for its reliability, or your business is so touristy that the occasional regular getting better service has no significant impact. Maybe there is some sort of middle-ground between those two, but I suspect it is elusive.
To clarify, the first visit is important for attracting the repeat customers. There's nothing wrong with treating repeat business better, but this naturally accrues as servers learn your name, favourite foods, etc. Tipping potentially complicates this process. For example, what if you tip exactly average? Now do you get better services as a repeat customer?
Finally, in the video linked elsewhere in this thread, Bruce McAdams talks about the effects tipping has on turnover among waitstaff (it increases it). This is probably detrimental to serving repeat business better.
Edit: For that matter, what if you're a repeat customer that tips lower than average? Now the interests of the owner and the waitstaff are at odds. The owner wants you to come back and spend more, but the waitstaff will treat you (relatively) poorly.
It is going to take a lot of concurrent repeat customers to appreciably degrade the service that new customers receive, at which point the value of obtaining new customers is diminished. We don't have to talk in hypotheticals with this though, we need to look no further than how business-minded owners treat repeat customers in real life. Repeat business is preferred business.
Server turnover in practice is unlikely to hurt repeat business unless we are talking about unprecedented amounts of turnover on the period of days or weeks. A churn period of several months or more is unlikely to dramatically harm repeat traffic. Certainly I have never stopped visiting a bar because my preferred bartender left.
Furthermore, presumably if a repeat customer repeatedly gets poor service, then that customer does not care about the quality of service. I get fucking awful service from the coffee shop I usually spend my Saturday mornings in (perhaps because I only take my coffee black, or perhaps because I refuse to tip baristas...), but I don't care because I don't need frequent coffee refills and I mostly like them for their decor.
tl;dr: If tipping really is bad for business, then the business owners would be fighting it. They're not stupid, knowing their customers and maintaining a customer base is their livelihood.
Is that based on things said in this one article or did the article point to actual research attesting to that fact? (I didn't read the entire multi part article so I'd like to know if you've identified where that fact came from).
I don't think AlexandrB was stating that tipping offers no benefit, but instead asked what benefit it provides and making the argument that if it doesn't provide any positives, but does provide negatives, then it should be ditched.
The slight against "Canadians" is probably that the customary tip is 12% to 15% in Canada, and for whatever reason Americans tend to prefer 20% to 30% for the same thing.
It's absurd that we have tipping at all. Why is this custom rampant in some countries, and totally unknown in others?
Actually, the article specifically mentions Canadians as poor tippers:
"So now we have a restaurant industry where African-Americans are demeaned as “Canadians”, in reference to another group which is considered by US servers to be low tippers."
I expect that most people in the industry are probably unaware of how actual Canadians tip. Frequently encountering Canadians is probably a pretty geographically dependent thing.
Can confirm from the south here. No idea about real Canadians but "Canadians" pretty much never tip in my area. I was shocked when I first heard this, but I have friends who have been in the industry for years and it seems to be nearly universal. I asked a couple black friends about it once and they pretty much said it was just a cultural thing and they were not taught to do it as kids.
It's referring to both. It says in the article that Canadians are also thought of as leaving low tips, and it's presumably easier to get away with calling black people Canadian than the other way around.
The point was that both groups do not tip as well as other groups. 'Canadian' is substituted for black just to avoid having to say what they really think. IOW, the server would say the same thing if it was a table of Canadians.
"So now we have a restaurant industry where African-Americans are demeaned as “Canadians”, in reference to another group which is considered by US servers to be low tippers."
I assumed that they were saying that Canadians didn't tip well and waitstaff used that as a euphemism for anyone they don't expect to tip well. That's just the way I read it, I could be wrong.
That's what the article said, but I don't think it's true. I've heard this substitution many times and not always in restaurants. I don't think anybody is actually thinking of Canadians when they say it. I think they're just substituting a code-word they can safely use in public to communicate racist sentiments. I know what I mean, you know what I mean, and we have plausible deniability if an unsympathetic party overhears us.
The reason is that servers get paid still up here, so there is no reason for tips. We tip anyways because we do everything that they do in the US, regardless of whether or not it is appropriate. It is becoming an issue now where servers up here are expecting higher and higher tips because they hear about tips servers in the US get. When you are getting paid a normal wage and bitching about getting a 22% tip on top of that, something is wrong.
Bullshit, all around. If you want to pay your employees more then fine, integrate that into your pricing structure. But do not try and play political correctness games with your customers, because you'll lose.
Me, I tip based on services rendered. Do a perfunctory job and get around 7%. Be reasonably attentive and get 10%. Treat me like you want me to come back and get 15%. Screw things up and take too long to even bring me the check and get nothing.
I could honestly not care at all what persuasion the waitstaff happens to be. I'm looking for food service and that transcends pretty much all the rest of the nonsense. Do that right and profit from it. Don't and, well, torment someone else in your next line of work.
I think the service charge is a bridge idea. In the long run it'd be simpler to pay servers reasonable wages and roll the price into the cost of the meal, but that's a big step; in the short run it would be much easier to switch from "optional, customer-calculated tip" to "mandatory, restaurant-calculated service charge".
It annoys me that I feel I have to tip. If I'm not ordering alcohol it's pretty much certain I'm gonna get bad service, but I still have to tip. And even if I decide to tip less because the bad service, I'm just furthering the idea that people who aren't drinking will tip less. And it annoys me that no matter how bad the service is there's still social pressure to tip the usual or I'm a cheapskate.
OT: Wtf "black customers" Kind of discriminating... (I get it's not about black people but still keeps the mindset going where non-caucasian are thought of as lesser persons)
Is that how american people phrase things? (On the bright side I now know that my native language isn't alone having very deep rooted problems when you try to be equally friendly -- its a lot easier to equally offend everyone...)
Having worked a little in the industry, tips should be abolished. Generally people tip the same unless the service was terrible (not necessarily slowness, but demeanor). For the most part, the amount of the tip is outside the server's (or pizza delivery person's) control.
Pooling seems like a decent compromise, though as the author states, letting the employer control the tip jar...
Like so many things in an ideal world he's right. However you can't get there from here. Far too many employers in tipping services discount the employees pay to where the tips make the take home approach a living wage. Getting those employers to increase the cost of their services to cover lost tips with extra wages is not the least bit realistic.
How can service members see the upside of any sales without tips? Bar has a big night and does $20K? Sorry, here is your $20/hr instead of your $500 in tips. Can any bartenders comment?
Because on a slow night, they will still get $20/hr...
I live in Europe and I always thought the tipping system in the USA is a bit backward. Mind you - we DO tip over-here, there's just no unwritten X% rule, and tipping is not mandatory. Service is always included and people are able to live from what they are paid by their employer. I do tip depending on the service (which sometimes means no tipping at all). Also in a lot of places, all tips are collected centrally and then evenly split at the end of a night without intervention from the employer (I worked in pubs as a student).
There's no reason why the customer should bear that burden rather than the owner. The owner can figure out how to implement a profit sharing/incentivization scheme just like every other business! If I work at an Apple store and we sell 5,000 iPhones in a day and still make the same hourly wage, should I be mad at the customers for not tipping?
I think a "profit sharing" system for a restaurant would be pretty complicated. Plus tipping to me is somewhat like a price discrimination system. Cheap skates don't tip or pay the minimum, people that can afford tip more, drunks tip the most. So the same service is being provided at different prices. If you throw that out the window, you might never get those dollars back.
We are often surprised to see the corruption in other countries, and yet to them paying a government official "To Insure Promptness" is completely normal.
Same thing here: it seems normal to pay someone -who is employed by someone else- to do some various tasks.
Are you serious? A bribe goes to a public official and is designed to encourage the official to put your interests above the public's interests (or more cynically, "realize" your interests happen to be aligned with the public interest ;) ). Wheras; a tip is a reward for someone doing well at serving you in regards to something they are already supposed to do for you- and they are usually a private party.
Public officials are frequent recipients of bribes, but there are many classic examples of bribes that went to other parties. For instance the Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal of 2010 involved athletes taking bribes from bookmakers to underperform.
In the case of tipping, it has been pointed out that a demonstrated willingness to tip results in the server putting your interests above those of the other customers in the restaurant. How is this any different than bribing in effect?
>Public officials are frequent recipients of bribes, but there are many classic examples of bribes that went to other parties. For instance the Pakistan cricket spot-fixing scandal of 2010 involved athletes taking bribes from bookmakers to underperform.
Yes this is the case, in majority of cases the word bribe only applies to officials of public trust, which most of the time means government.
>In the case of tipping, it has been pointed out that a demonstrated willingness to tip results in the server putting your interests above those of the other customers in the restaurant. How is this any different than bribing in effect?
What you are describing is a tip as opposed to a bribe above and is normal as opposed to being a crime. The biggest distinguishers are:
1. The is person already getting paid to do what you are paying them to
2. They are non-govermentment / public trust
Qualify what you mean by poorer service. Just because the service is different doesn't mean that it's worse. I'd take a waitress that was curt and left after I'd placed my order over one that asks me if I need anything every 10 minutes.
I tip well at the bars I frequent because stopping by every 10 minutes means I always have another beer sitting in front of me right before I finish the one I already have.
I don't enjoy fighting for the bartenders attention with the attractive person on the other end of the bar; tipping is how I level that playing field.
No, they don't really offer poor service, but their tolerance for jackassery is a lot lower.
If you're rude to the owner, you're toast. "The customer is always right" does not apply. Maybe you're wrong, and they'll tell you to your face. "White wine? With your steak, sir?" can be absolutely dripping with disdain.
I think it's better that way. They can be more honest and not have to pretend they actually like you. The way they treat customers they don't know might border on hostile, but they will go to great lengths to accommodate their regulars.
Totally cultural. Visitors from other countries might find the US waitstaff to be overbearing while US visitors to other countries may find the waitstaff to be inattentive.
Way to attempt to get the obvious crux of the article while completely missing the point that it is way more complex than people think. Seriously, read the 6 parts and get your head around the depth of the topic.
In a tipout system, what started as one enterprise (a restaurant selling its food & hospitality to its guests), has now spawned two completely new, concurrent businesses: the business of the server selling the perception of extra attention to the guest for tips; and the business of the kitchen workers selling favors to the servers for tipout. These additional, parasitic businesses are not focused on improving the quality of the original enterprise. Instead, these secondary businesses are focused on maximizing income using short term, and proven effective, means. ...
Over the last couple years, another alternative has started to emerge — the lawful tip pool. In this model, the business is permitted by the law of the land to distribute its tips among every member of its team, including kitchen workers. In the Ninth District (the western US), one court decision (Cumbie v. Woody Woo) has paved the way for this, but the US Department of Labor has attempted to nullify that decision by issuing new regulations. It’s not clear that the Labor department is actually allowed to trump the court, and the matter is not yet clearly resolved.
Back in 2006, however, it was still definitely illegal for a tip pool to include back-of-house workers. The only legal way that tip revenue could be distributed among the whole team was for it to not be tip revenue. Instead, it had to be an amount charged by the business for its service. In other words, a service charge.
My argument for tipping:
Make somebody who is working feel special if they are making you feel special.
Disclosures:
I worked in the service industry for years while also holding an engineering internship and getting a EE degree. There were many people who were not my regulars that made me feel special on days where there wasn't much else to.
There will always be some behavior deemed socially undesirable. The real question that should be asked is where is the line between good social protection and an undue infringement upon personal freedom? At the extremes, it's very very clear, but as you get towards the middle, everything blurs and it's in the eye of the beholder.
I can never, and would never attempt to, justify providing inferior service to people based on their origin or appearance (or other identifiable factor), prohibition is a blunt instrument. Education and socialization with diverse communities is another option, although slower and much more difficult.