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The problem is that removal of tipping, pretty much just hurts the employees. Customers will probably pay less. Employers will be a bigger cut of the customers

The problem is that removal of tipping, pretty much just hurts the employees. Customers will probably pay less. Employers will be a bigger cut of the customers actual spending. Very few restaurants would pay an hourly wage that is equivalent to what waiters are getting tipped now. So the waiter will just get less. Just look at what non-tipped restaurant workers get paid, not well.

chillacy 7y ago
There are restaurants that just tack on a 20% surcharge, do staff get paid less at those establishments?
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  Apparently, yes, they take home less money, counterintuitively. The no-tipping 20% surcharge model was tried at many Seattle restaurants a few years ago and now it is all but gone. I've asked employees about it and they all tell me they hated it because they made less money, hence why most restaurants got rid of the 20% surcharge policy and went back to tipping. One bartender I talked to made the (astute) observation that people feel more generosity toward individuals than to restaurants -- it de-personalized the transaction from the customer perspective, which turned the service charge into a food tax.
  - FireBeyond 7y ago
    > The no-tipping 20% surcharge model was tried at many Seattle restaurants a few years ago and now it is all but gone. I've asked employees about it and they all tell me they hated it because they made less money In other words, someone's being dishonest. In most cases, still, the model I seem to see (and I live in the PNW) was a 15/18/20 tip model, and for personal services (nails, hair, etc.) 25. Food servers would have us believe that poor tipping and other practices have them one shift away from being homeless, or "I have to pay the IRS to serve you, because they assume I'm getting tips I'm not"... ... and yet, when a 20% "tip"/surcharge (which would be on the high end, I feel, most of the time) is added on to every order... "This sucks, we're making less money".
ilikehurdles 7y ago
The rest of the world's solution is fewer, higher paid, and better trained waiters. Restaurants in the US are run like a factory assembly line, with every person manning a portion of the line being incentivized to get the table out of the door as fast as possible in order to maximize the amount of scraps they get out of tips. In a fixed system, you might sometimes have to flag down a waiter rather than have your glass endlessly refilled even when you're done drinking, and folks might stop walking by asking (if you're lucky) to take your plates away before you're ready. If you're a person who travels, count the amount of visible staff at an average German restaurant, and compare that to what you see in the US. It's drastic. Orders of magnitude drastic.
- asark 7y ago
  There's an awful lot of "we can't do it, and if we did it'd definitely be bad" in American political discourse that can be pretty conclusively proven false by just looking at a few other OECD states.
- markn951 7y ago
  What are you talking about? Tipping makes servers actually care about doing a good job. Servers in Europe in my experience almost never care about you or the service they're providing you, because it doesn't matter how good a job they do. I've been flatly refused service at a restaurant because they were "too busy" - the three people working were overwhelmed with waiting on 10 tables and didn't even have a wait list because that was too much to manage. If that's what you mean by "fewer and better trained" then, well, I'd rather eat at the restaurant I choose than get turned away because they can't afford enough employees to run it.
  - iguy 7y ago
    Crap restaurants certainly exist everywhere. But it's hard to argue that service is overall dramatically worse in Europe. There is generally less fawning & begging, which some people prefer.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    If anything, I've noticed services in many of the larger European countries do a better job than in the US. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I'm not aware of any widespread stereotype of American waiters to be better than non tipped waiters.

chillacy 7y ago

There are restaurants that just tack on a 20% surcharge, do staff get paid less at those establishments?

jandrewrogers 7y ago
Apparently, yes, they take home less money, counterintuitively. The no-tipping 20% surcharge model was tried at many Seattle restaurants a few years ago and now it is all but gone. I've asked employees about it and they all tell me they hated it because they made less money, hence why most restaurants got rid of the 20% surcharge policy and went back to tipping. One bartender I talked to made the (astute) observation that people feel more generosity toward individuals than to restaurants -- it de-personalized the transaction from the customer perspective, which turned the service charge into a food tax.
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  > The no-tipping 20% surcharge model was tried at many Seattle restaurants a few years ago and now it is all but gone. I've asked employees about it and they all tell me they hated it because they made less money In other words, someone's being dishonest. In most cases, still, the model I seem to see (and I live in the PNW) was a 15/18/20 tip model, and for personal services (nails, hair, etc.) 25. Food servers would have us believe that poor tipping and other practices have them one shift away from being homeless, or "I have to pay the IRS to serve you, because they assume I'm getting tips I'm not"... ... and yet, when a 20% "tip"/surcharge (which would be on the high end, I feel, most of the time) is added on to every order... "This sucks, we're making less money".

ilikehurdles 7y ago

The rest of the world's solution is fewer, higher paid, and better trained waiters. Restaurants in the US are run like a factory assembly line, with every person manning a portion of the line being incentivized to get the table out of the door as fast as possible in order to maximize the amount of scraps they get out of tips. In a fixed system, you might sometimes have to flag down a waiter rather than have your glass endlessly refilled even when you're done drinking, and folks might stop walking by asking (if you're lucky) to take your plates away before you're ready. If you're a person who travels, count the amount of visible staff at an average German restaurant, and compare that to what you see in the US. It's drastic. Orders of magnitude drastic.

asark 7y ago
There's an awful lot of "we can't do it, and if we did it'd definitely be bad" in American political discourse that can be pretty conclusively proven false by just looking at a few other OECD states.
markn951 7y ago
What are you talking about? Tipping makes servers actually care about doing a good job. Servers in Europe in my experience almost never care about you or the service they're providing you, because it doesn't matter how good a job they do. I've been flatly refused service at a restaurant because they were "too busy" - the three people working were overwhelmed with waiting on 10 tables and didn't even have a wait list because that was too much to manage. If that's what you mean by "fewer and better trained" then, well, I'd rather eat at the restaurant I choose than get turned away because they can't afford enough employees to run it.
- iguy 7y ago
  Crap restaurants certainly exist everywhere. But it's hard to argue that service is overall dramatically worse in Europe. There is generally less fawning & begging, which some people prefer.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  If anything, I've noticed services in many of the larger European countries do a better job than in the US. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but I'm not aware of any widespread stereotype of American waiters to be better than non tipped waiters.