I regularly suggest restaurants pay people more. I will not be shocked or upset when the prices go up. Hopefully way up so we can retire the silly process of having to tip while we're at it, and the restaurant can, in fact, actually pay people. (Note that with pickup orders, the tip line on the receipt is incredibly stressful for me: I shouldn't tip because there isn't table service, but I should tip because the restaurant staff are still getting underpaid...)
And yeah, it's probably going to cause some people to reevaluate going to restaurants. They might cook more at home, and better appreciate the higher cost when they do eat out, and in turn, the world moves forward.
I think there is a 3rd possibility in how tipping ends: people get sick of tipping and stop doing it. It seems like every single transaction asks for a tip these days. I tip heavily, but even I am getting weary of tipping so often. Most of the time, it feels like the tip shouldn't be necessary; the employers should be covering the cost of the employee. If people get used to declining tip prompts, it's possible that we see this change in behavior make its way into the restaurant industry.
At least for me, personally, I'm nearly at the point where I want to stop tipping entirely. It just seems so unnecessary and just another way that the capital class deflects blame for inadequate employee pay.
I agree. I understand the reason why tipping exists in the restaurant industry and that there are special laws surrounding tipping and minimum wage there, but in my opinion the future should be moving towards eliminating the need for tipping. Businesses adding tipping to their existing business model is, in my opinion, moving in the wrong direction. It's hard for tip-based businesses to move in a tipless direction, but the best way to begin phasing that out is to not start requiring tips in the first place. Once they start allowing tips, they're really never going to get away from employees demanding tips and customers seeking lower prices even if adding in a tip makes the prices the same.
If you need to pay your employees more, they should get paid more. Tips is a bad way of handling employee compensation. Tips should be reserved for extraordinary service rendered, not the main way of paying your employees.
I don’t understand the “pay people more” sentiment. It _seems_ like the correct and obvious solution, but it seems like it just moves the goal line.
Margins are razor thin in restaurants specifically. If you pay people more, you’ll need to raise your prices and that will offset the pay raise if it happens across the board.
This doesn’t necessarily refute your point about restaurants being fucked, but with tipping, aren’t customers paying the same either way? If I tip $5 on a $20 steak or pay $25 for a steak at a place where tipping isn’t allowed and waiters are paid directly doesn’t that equal out at the end of the day?
I get that the catch is that many people tip poorly, and so for many people prices would in fact functionally increase leading to different decision-making around how much “restaurant” they consume. But that doesn’t feel like enough to say it would be impossible. Plenty of non-American countries have vibrant restaurant culture without tipping.
Killing it in places with a strong tipping culture seems thorny, though. A restaurant that charges high enough prices to pay its servers well without tips is presumably going to have trouble attracting customers. Even if they say there's no need to tip, that's factored into the price, the psychological heuristics that people use around economic decisions like this are well-known to be irrational and generally crap.
And if servers' actual pay is increased enough to make up for not making tips, I'm guessing that back-of-the-house staff will start demanding higher pay, too, because the unfairness of the pay disparity would be a lot more apparent if servers and bartenders got better overall pay and known, stable, transparent pay.
And I'm guessing there are other problems that come into play that I don't even know about, since I haven't worked in a restaurant since I was a kid. But I'm guessing it all boils down to something akin to how car dealerships that price transparently can't make it, even though basically every consumer ostensibly wishes that car dealerships would price transparently, because it's too difficult to get your customer base to actually grok how this works when presented with it as a real option.
I don't get why raising the wages implies that food will go up more than the average amount of tipping (~10-20%). Currently, if it's legal for their wages to be lower granted that they are supplemented by tips, if we raised the price of food at establishments with waitstaff by the average tip amount, the amount of money that the customer pays for food would be exactly the same (on average) as it currently is. Now if that money was diverted directly the the waitstaff (as it currently is) then we would have higher wages being paid to the waitstaff.
I recognize that some restaurants might raise prices by more than the average tip amount in order to increase profits, but that seems to be a separate concept from the one that I proposed. My proposition in no way requires that any restaurant raise the current cost that the customer pays (net money outflow from an average customer).
As for high wages not implying good service, I agree, and it's also a core axiom of why I believe tipping is inefficient, outdated, and cumbersome. But if we operate on the assumption that a good server gives good service in order to earn higher wages through tipping, I think we can also assume that a good server will give good service in order to continue to make his wage and not be fired as a result of treating customers poorly out of laziness.
Yeah, personally I think the tipping culture is wrong and I don’t like people to feel they have to grovel for my pittance. It feels gross to wield that power over people. If they give bad service they should simply be fired, rather than having to earn that on each and every exchange. Some restaurants have started including tips without optionality. This feels right - it scales with the business volume. By making the business more successful, cross selling upselling and creating loyal customers, the wait staff wins. Probably the way to change things is to seek these restaurants out and make their business model successful rather than screwing over folks who are just trying to get by.
Tipping is important to many people who already make a solid living wage, it is what puts them in the middle class. I know people that earn $60-70k, some significant fraction of which is tips. It isn't just important to low-wage workers.
An under-appreciated aspect of tipping is that it is a form of wage elasticity in industries with small margins and highly variable revenue. Hedging revenue risk is going to come out of employee paychecks, and tipping allows the employee to take on some of that risk for higher average take-home pay. Eliminating tipping has been tried in bars and restaurants many times in the US with poor results, such that they revert; employees hate it because they would rather have the income variability and higher average income, and it also impacts the quality of their hours.
There are some complex economics going on with tipping that it would be foolish to ignore.
Even for establishments that do pay more... so many fast food/takeout places have tipping on their checkout process now. Starbucks in my city, as an example, pays a baseline well above most similar positions in the area, but they still expect tips above and beyond.
I don't blame someone for wanting and accepting more... It just feels weird to tip when the service is baseline, vs say a waitress where they take your order, bring drinks, refills, corrections, additions, etc. and generally with a pleasant personality.
Higher prices and friction in the experience will just drive people to eat out less.
So you may have higher tip %'s, but if people on average eat out only half as often, the service staff still receives less tips in aggregate.
Frankly, the best way to address this is overall improvement of the safety net in the US, starting with single payer health care. Tips are a small shim-fix at best, and realistically a wedge between the service staff and their customers.
Isn't the real problem that the industry has driven itself into a corner by charging unrealistically low prices and giving consumers a distorted view of how much restaurant experiences should cost? A well managed restaurant should be able to pay its staff a decent wage and turn a profit based on the prices it charges for its dishes, end of story. If a 20% tip is basically mandatory in the USA why don't all restaurants unilaterally up their prices 20%. And then that would allow the odd generous guests to tip/overpay in the somewhat rare scenarios where the establishment has genuinely excelled. Sounds like you got yourselves into a right old mess.
Then they should demand higher wages.
And if that's too high a cost for the restaurant - they should raise their prices or close their business.
Tipping does not make sense, and makes even less sense for takeout.
Tipping is the brilliance of the restaurant industry. Keeps overhead low and allows them to churn through "employees" with promises of tips.
Some say restaurants can't survive with more costs. Baloney. If you can't pay a decent wage you don't deserve to exist.
The only people that care about prices going up are the no tippers because the tippers are subsidizing salaries. The tippers wouldn't notice prices going up much if any.
Mentioned this in another comment but one thing to consider is patronage at a restaurant is very spiky. Busy shifts and slow shifts. Paying all servers say 50-100/hr and raising menu prices to match would be prohibitive as the quiet shifts would kill them.
Not requiring tipping but any model that allows pay to scale to volume would account for this.
We see something similar where I live, restaurants are adding a %age based fee to go direct to kitchen staff. In my state tips can’t be split with BOH staff. This allows the owner to pay the BOH stadf more but scale it to actual volume
Full time employees will now cost much more to the employer: taxes, health care, benefits, a higher wage (the wage of a waiter is usually much lower than the standard minimum wage).
All these costs add up and the result will be a much higher end cost for your meals. Restaurants usually have razor thin margins as it is...if they even make it past their first couple of years in business.
Again, I feel like most people complain about the wages, but will then complain about the meal costs when they go up because they misunderstand the costs in running a business.
I know many waiters and waitresses and most make way more in tips than they would ever get if they were paid an average wage.
I think if you talked to most waiters/waitresses, they would want to keep the tipping system.
Most places in the world do not have tipping. The US has tipping because for some reason, the law allows restaurants to pay below minimum wage. I think that tipping should be outlawed and waiters should be paid a wage supported by the market, at least whatever minimum wage is (in California, that's $15.50/hr).
Think about it: if we weren't tipping our wait staff, service would be awful, yet, if we paid our wait staff a livable wage, the prices at restaurants would increase ten-fold.
And yeah, it's probably going to cause some people to reevaluate going to restaurants. They might cook more at home, and better appreciate the higher cost when they do eat out, and in turn, the world moves forward.
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