Please! For the love of God! Get rid of tipping!
I hate tipping! As the consumer I should not be responsible for proving a living wage for someone else’s employees!
as a European I have to say both the Tipping culture and the not showing the full price in stores with VAT included is just mindblowing.
It’s literally a culture of hiding true costs, weird af.
Hotels too. The advertised price is never accurate because their stupid resort fees.
What now? First I’m hearing of this. How much extra?
Again, it’s prevalent in the US market, not sure about others. They advertise say $199 / night, but when you go to check out, there’s something like a ~$35- $50 /night resort fee to “pay for amenities like WiFi/ gym /pool”. You can’t reject paying the fee, so your hotel room is actually like 25% higher than advertised.
Yeah, that’d be quite illegal down here. I spent basically half a year living in hotels straight due to work all across the UK and primarily London then continued for a few years after. So we’re likely talking +300 nights. I have never seen an additional charge.
It’s a culture of trying to get away with whatever makes the most profits. We also have that, but there are some reasonable laws working against that. One of my favourites is the duty to display per kg or per litre price. Before that, shops made the package sizes deliberately confusing.
We actually do have that in the US as well, but it’s typically in very fine print and a lot of people don’t even know about it.
It’s really not that weird at all. It’s a simple consequence of the EU having better consumer protection laws. Unfortunately the far right in the US is a lot stronger than in most of Europe and has been since the post-war era.
We also, in the US, have an old and antiquated system that was deliberately designed to be difficult to change because the founders had to convince the slave-owning class that abolition couldn’t be forced on them if they agreed to join the newly-formed union. How did they do that? You guessed it! By making the Constitution almost impossible to change, which is one reason why it required the bloodiest war in our history to end slavery.
Again, there’s nothing especially “weird” about it. As is true of a lot of contemporary reality, it’s largely a consequence of history.
Interestingly, tipping culture is also at least tangentially a product of slavery as well, but that’s a bit more complicated so I’ll save it for another comment.
And if you’re starting to suspect that a ton of what ails the US can be traced directly back to slavery, here’s a hint; you may be on to something!
That said, it was the European colonial powers who brought slavery to North America in the first place, which kind of brings us full circle.
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Have lived in both eu and us.
Agree, but the challenge on tax is that it’s not harmonized across municipalities. This means that stores that are across the street from each other may have identical prices/profit margin and a different net price to the consumer. This would lead to consumer preferences biased by physical location and have lots of other weird side effects. You can see this in areas that border state lines when the tax is appreciably different.
Step one is a harmonized tax rate, but that’s easier said than done.
The true cost is different no matter how it’s advertised, no? Harmonized tax is great and all, but lying about price is still bad, irrelevant of the actual price.
I was going to say this but fear of mass downvotes kept me quiet. Glad I’m not the only one. I’ve worked for tips but I’d rather just work for a reasonable wage instead, remove the guesswork and chances for abuse.
One way or another, you’re paying those employees wage. One of them doesn’t get taxed or advertised is all.
Yes and no. All tips are supposed to be reported to the IRS. Whether they are or not is not really relevant. What really matters is that the customers aren’t forced to do an owners job. If an owner needs their customers to prop up their employees then the owners shouldn’t be in business.
I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.
I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.
I think that should be the point, employees should not be taking on the risk of a business doing poorly. That’s the business owner’s responsibility and risk, to be mitigated by them. Not screwing over a waiter because it was a slow night. Or because they were unlucky to work a tuesday night over a busy Saturday night.
You dont have to tip bro its okay
It’s not okay. I can hear some of my customers’ anxiety when they struggle to tip me. Some people lord it over me like I should revere them for their blessing. There is an unnecessary layer of stress to the customer service routine for everyone involved except the owner who benefits from this system. Not to mention some businesses pool their tips and share it with everyone, sometimes redirecting these funds into unscrupulous items like snacks without consent. >:(
Tips don’t motivate me to provide great customer service to my customers. Tips serve to maintain cheap labor, but more important to me is how they erect social barriers. I can’t blame someone for wanting or being motivated by tips when they’re stuck near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. I’m there too so I understand, but there’s just no reason for tips when we can get/provide great service without adding layers of paranoia; When we can provide a satisfying quality of life for everyone in the process with a
not-so-simple wage increase (and God forbid, better budgeting and management from business owners).They also in general make my job harder, especially when an old person who’s basically blind can’t find any of the buttons or follow simple directions (PRESS 3 FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MARIANNE)
I’d like to supplement that I’ve had access to my various employer’s records multiple times… because why lock the admin computer.
With my current employer, my entire wages for the month are paid for with net profits in a single day thanks to the skeleton crew we operate. I get to work knowing every other day is going straight to my boss’s luxurious life-style because it’s certainly not coming back here.
Don’t be surprised when you hear of another staff walk-out~
Fuck tips, support good living standards for everyone!
It’s not socially acceptable to not tip servers in a full service restaurant in the USA. It’s becoming a required social norm to tip fast casual.
The pandemic really changed the tipping norms in the USA.
As a german the whole tip system in the US is both redicilous and hilarious to me.
We have tipping here, too (we literally call it “drinking money”). With the difference, that it’s pretty much voluntary and if you don’t have much money (e.g. as a student) noone will expect you to tip.
Having tips be part of the actual wage totally defeats the point of them…Are you a true American if you don’t shaft your employees for every penny that you can though?
Are you a true American if you don’t shaft your employees for every penny that you can though?
No, but a true Capitalist, yes.
(Sad of me to write that, as there used to be a time where companies made good products and accepted reasonable profit margins, going for the win-win scenarios. Today’s Capitalism seems all about the win-lose scenarios.)
I was so confused the first time I went to Germany. I asked someone there about tipping and they said, “you can, but you don’t have to.”
That didn’t really clarify it enough for me so I just tipped like I do in the US. Didn’t want anyone thinking I was a jerk.
As an American and former tipped employee, living in a country without tips is so much better. However, there are some groups trying to make tips happen here in Japan. If you get good service, tell the manager or corporate. If you’re a regular, give them an actual small gift (this happens anyway because people exchange gifts when they go on vacation and such). If it’s a bar employee, buy them a drink. I like this much better.
So that should cover everyone in this day and age since everyone asks for a tip now /s
Great. I’m never tipping again.
Paying your employee’s is not my responsibility.
I live in a state that pays minimum wage to tipped workers. The annoying thing is they still expect you to tip. They’ll even add 5% for worker healthcare and an 18% gratuity then give you a receipt with a tip line.
We need to do away with the whole concept of tipping. The employer should pay their workers end of story. The problem with tipping is it is never enough. If employees complain about low wages, the employer will just go to the customer for more. It used to be that a 10% tip was enough, then 15, then 18, then 20, now I see 25 and 30.
If they’re taking extra are you workers actually getting the health insurance and coverage you deserve or are they straight up lying? I’d believe you, the worker, before I believe anything a corporate entity has to say.
Since you used the possessive, I think you forgot a word.
Employee’s salary?
That’s… not how it works. The key word here is “minimum” wage which we all know is woefully inadequate. Going from making $2.13 to $7.25 isn’t going to pay anyone’s rent without help
Do you tip everyone who works minimum wage, though?
This is why I’ve been saying we should be focusing on raising minimum wage before worrying about tipping. I’m telling you right now almost nobody is going to put up with the ass tier job of being a server for minimum wage. It’s short sighted to be worrying about tips just because they annoy you now when that’s nothing compared to just letting everyone make a living wage.
Everyone? No. Most places can’t hire if they’re paying minimum, so not a lot of people working non tipped positions are paid the absolute minimum.
Food workers, yes.
Regardless, this is a bad faith strawman argument
There is nothing bad faith or strawmanning about my question. I’m just going to take that accusation as a sign that you know you don’t actually have a valid argument and don’t want to continue.
Minimum wage is sad, yes. I wish it were higher. But fast food workers and many others make it work without the tips. There is no logical basis for tipping servers if they are being paid the same minimum wage as many other people doing equal (or sometimes harder) work in other contexts.
Fast food workers A) make more than minimum and B) so accept tips depending which establishment it is
Also, they don’t “make it work” because you can’t live on that without assistance. If your sole job is McDonald’s or Walmart, most of those people are also on food stamps
Not to mention, by using the service which “forces you to tip to compensate the worker” at all, if you don’t participate in the tipping, you’re simply exploiting the worker with the business owner who got his money and doesn’t give a fuck about the worker thus the $2.13/hr. The only ethical option to “not tip” is “not order,” opting instead to heat up your own nuggies, or pop in a Freschetta, or find a business that does pay fairly and support them, or start one. By ordering, paying in full, and not tipping the delivery or wait staff, you’ve affected no change beyond exploiting that worker and making it harder to afford rent, even if they quit they will be just replaced and the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
I understand where you are coming from but the purpose of the free market doctrine is to allow both consumers and workers to choose where they buy from and where they work at.
No one is forced, gun to head, to work at (X) location or buy at (X) location. If you believe you are worth more, you need to work somewhere that is willing to pay you what you’re worth.
I used to work the service industry and ended up getting my red seal as a chef and around the same time I got my red seal I abandoned the industry. I saw where it was going, I trained to make 5 star meals and then once working at a five star restaurant got paid minimum wage and treated like shit by both employer and customers alike.
I took out loans and went to university and because I did this I will die in debt, but I will at least die having access to somewhat reasonable accommodations and food.
My advice to anyone stuck in a similar situation as I was is to avoid college/university and get online accreditation and certification for network security or similar. You can practice the materials for free and when ready pay for the certification tests then leap from whatever unfavourable job to one that pays, in some cases, obscenely more than necessary.
Greedy employers leverage tipping to pay their employees the least amount possible. It’s fucking disgusting.
And too many people who receive tips don’t realize that it’s their employer fucking them over rather.
It’s worse than that, most of the time, employers are skimming from the tips. Don’t tip for things that were previously non-tipped and give the person cash if you can.
The scummiest thing I’ve seen is restaurants adding a percent service fee before asking for an extra tip on top. Not a delivery service or 3rd party, the restaurant itself. Basically it makes customers tip less because they see the service fee so it’s just flat out stealing the tip from workers.
most of the time
Citation needed. When I worked for tips, my tips never got skimmed.
Not them, but every tipped job I’ve had has been skimmed.
Whether to pay the cooks, dishwasher, or just straight pocketed by the owner, I only ever got 50-75% of the tip.
I’ve had my manager take our tip pool for snacks. The justification being that the snacks are for everyone even though half of us didn’t eat the snacks. >:( I don’t want chips, especially when it’s my customer’s good will directed towards me.
Surely you’ve got a source on this highly illegal activity. Or is it more likely you’re making stuff up?
That’s great, but minimum wage needs a huge overhaul.
20 bucks minimum wage
IT’S ABOUT TIME.
While I abhor the whole concept of tipping, the thing that really grinds my gears is that we are expected to pay a percentage of the bill for service. If I order a basic cheese pizza or a 16 ounce tomahawk steak with a big chunk of foie gras and all the trimmings the server does not have to do much extra work for the latter. But if I have to tip $5 on a $20 pizza, why the fuck do I have to tip $100 for almost the same amount of service for the steak? Sure it weighs more and you might need to make an extra trip to serve the trimmings, but WTF, the server is not providing any more value by serving an expensive dish.
If I order an expensive bottle of wine it takes no extra effort to serve, why should I pay a shit ton more service charge?
USA, get your shit together, this is so not right. Land of the free? My arse.
Because restaurants decided to enforce tipping by percentage after world war 2 in order to keep payroll down. They lobbied for laws around it and ran advertisements to the public. Corporate governance is a huge problem in the US and tipping is just one facet.
Thanks for the background.
While I do tip. It does suck that eating out pretty much requires a donation because we all agree that food workers don’t make enough to live on. And I live in a State where they get full minimum. Just give the workers food and boarding and we can call it a deal, oh wait… Let’s not.
Non-american here. While I tipped last time I visited, I don’t think I will do it next time I visit. It will just legitimize a system, that has to go away. Due to the way tipping and minimum wage work together, I essentially just tip the owner of the restaurant (at least to a large degree). As a customer, I have no reason to pay more than the price that is asked for
You’re going to get banned from a bunch of restaurants then. Anywhere worth eating enforces tipping. Some of them have it already included in the bill.
I understand your frustration but that’s going to add far more stress to your trip, will result in servers being underpaid, and could result in the police being called if you refuse to pay a tip that’s already included on the bill.
I’d like to see that in court.
The state of Texas is committed to ending slavery in the coming decade. As a first step they are proposing that minimum wage should cover an entire cardboard box living quarters. And we’re not talking shoebox size Amazon hand me downs that still have the return address tag! They will remove the tag and provide enough duct tape to seal that portion of the box. Under article 17 of the 2024 end of slavery pact, they propose that men and women under the age of 27 shall not be responsible for sealing and or weather proofing their cardboard boxes. Older people are not covered yet, but may be covered as soon as two or three more migrant babies are sold back to their respective Mexican families. Indeed, Texas is making strides to accommodate the world’s demands for fair treatment of human rights and the people who should have them.
It’s also bullshit that tipped workers rarely pay taxes on the vast majority of their earnings. We’re subsiding their wages, access to infrastructure, and social services.
Lmao this has got to be the most misplaced anger ever. You’re mad at people that don’t even make minimum wage aren’t paying taxes on the maybe $35k a year? How about the billionaires that basically don’t pay taxes? Maybe we should deal with that first.
It’s been a long time since ither of you’ve been a server, huh? They’re doing better than that unless they are part-time.
Your point stands, that taxing billionairs is good, but a full-time server is probably doing 50k+ in all but the lowest cost of living areas. Because a tipped employee earns a % of goods sold, they are hurt less by inflation. The rising prices people pay result in higher tips. But since most places aren’t cash, only the vast majority of their tips are via card and thus recorded and reported.
TLDR, they aren’t as bad off as people think, and they are mostly taxed correctly.
50k ain’t shit these days
Servers aren’t getting a constant influx of people every day that they work, it varies from day to day except for the most popular places, even then tips aren’t consistent amongst different groups of guests at popular places.
It’s not their fault that their income comes from untaxed tips because their boss isn’t paying them a taxable wage.
All business is like this, which is why we average our earnings in these discussions.
When I managed a grocery store where tips were super rare and never % based, the slow days were about $36k earnings, and the busy days were about $92k. Unfortunately, a server still has to be present on slow days, which may be low earning days, but often that’s balanced with another preferred shift.
For reference, Musk paid 8.3 billion in federal taxes in 2021, after all the evasion tricks. So even if the servers are being taxed correctly, who cares, it doesn’t actually impact the economy.
It does. That’s how taxes work. Musk’s taxes don’t benefit everyone equally. The server’s taxes will be split, and the portion that goes to their state may be one that a billionaire doesn’t pay into.
But it doesn’t matter since you’ve created a straw man argument. I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said about taxing the rich. You just take exception to me stating that servers also pay taxes for some baffling reason.
How much is that expressed as percentage of his total wealth?
A quick search revealed $185b, which is probably his net worth and not his total wealth, but we’ll go with it:
8.3 / 185 * 100 = ~4.49%
For reference, I paid over 20% of my total wealth last year.
So I actually paid more than 4x as much tax as Musk did, relative to the amount of wealth we have.
If he paid 37 billion dollars in taxes, you would be satisfied? I find “wealth tax” to be completely separate from income tax discussions.
I’ll be satisfied when the quality of life for average citizens starts going up again.
I feel like this was true when cash was more widely used, however, anytime recently I’ve been out it’s always a tip on the card (which they can’t “hide” from the govt).
They don’t really avoid taxes now. Anything tip charged to a card gets taxed. Cash tips might not be claimed but that’s very little for most tipped workers. Additionally tipped workers paid below minimum wage make the employer responsible for making up the difference if they don’t have enough tips reported to avg min wage. That means the employers are very motivated to ensure their employee tips are reported.
Also, even years ago when cash tips were a significant % of tips, being predominantly low wage workers those employees would get virtually all their taxes back after filing a return as well. They wouldn’t get SS taxes back but otherwise for most not reporting tips didn’t amount to a lot of missed taxes. There were some exceptions where people made decent money - maybe high end restaurants and salons - but today with little cash use there aren’t many taxes missed.
They have to report their cash earnings for taxes… Maybe some don’t but most businesses will at least require it.
I never worked at a place that made the servers produce all of their cash tips for accounting purposes. I only knew one server who was claiming everything all the time and it was because she was trying to get a home loan and minimum wage wasn’t going to cut it (most people seemed to claim enough to make just over minimum wage so that they didn’t have to have their paycheck adjusted later).
Well, that’s illegal so 🤷♀️
Defeat the #fuckingcapitalists
I wish NC was one of them
- Restaurants lobby US government to pay their staff less than minimum wage
- Restaurants tell customers if they want better service, they should tip their server
- Customers begrudgingly begin tipping their servers
- Sexually attractive female servers in their early 20s absolutely destroy, making people think there’s a scam at work (seriously, I’ve seen girls I’ve worked with go on back to back WEEKEND vacations to Cancun on their tips, and I live in Canada, but it’s not a scam, it’s just horny dudes simping for their server)
- People start to complain about tipping culture, seemingly blaming the server for just working a job and not the restaurant owner for paying their staff starvation wages (we are here right now)
- States mandate minimum wage for service industry staff
- Restaurant prices go up to pay for wages but tip culture begins to go away
- Servers are making less money so they go get easier jobs that pay the same (working in a restaurant can be fucking BRUTAL)
- Restaurants hire more and more Indian immigrants, while hard working, are indicative of an even larger societal problem
- Restaurant owners continue to make out like bandits, while customers and staff get shafted.
Would fucking love it if we just got rid of tipping all together. Employers -not customers- should be responsible for providing employees good pay.
Factor the difference into up front price of the food/service and be done with it.
Couriers (DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc.) are not employees. They are contractors.
There is no minimum wage for contractors. The base pay for these services don’t quite cover the $0.655 per mile that the IRS allows drivers to claim in travel expenses. The only money these drivers actually take home is customer tips.
If you, as a customer, do not believe in tipping couriers directly, that’s perfectly fine, so long as you DO NOT use these services. As these drivers operate almost exclusively on tips, using these services without tipping is socially equivalent to begging in the streets.
As these drivers operate almost exclusively on tips, using these services without tipping is socially equivalent to begging in the streets.
Imagine a system so broken you say shit like this lol.
Tipping was never the problem, subsidizing owner profits out of worker pay was.
Tipping is freedom of expression for the customer. Wage is the obligation of the employer.
If it isn’t a living wage the company shouldn’t exist. Full stop.
But it should be a hard opt-in, no “decline tip” bullshit, social engineering is still at issue
If Businesses don’t get a share of tips Square’s model dies and SE with it.
That said their model dies if you grow a pair to hit zero tip and backcharge on poisoned delivery.
Social engineering only works in this situation if you are a bitch.
If Businesses don’t get a share of tips Square’s model dies and SE with it.
Not my problem to figure out their business model.
