8 ms·

Two more restaurants in Toronto just got rid of tipping

36 points by colinprince 6y ago

smnrchrds 6y ago
No, they did not. It is more accurate to say two restaurants in Toronto just mandated 18% tipping: >Tips will still be split between front and back but Ten will now be "adding a flat untaxed 18 per cent service charge onto each bill no matter the size of the group," The more sensible thing would have been to increase menu prices by 18%. But they are not being sensible. They just increased their prices while pretending they have not done so. I hate it when you have to treat a menu like a legal document and be looking for the fine print.
- jszymborski 6y ago
  and while we're at it, include the taxes!
  - tonyztan 6y ago
    I think separately listing taxes has the benefit of transparency - you know how much the government is taking and can make more informed electoral decisions.
    - EffToyz 6y ago
      I wish they made it in LCBO reciepts, so we could see that sweet almost 100% tax on alcohol.
    - Smoosh 6y ago
      With a single Federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) as in Australia, you know it is 10%. All prices include the GST and are the price you will pay. There are no other sales taxes. Everyone knows what the government's cut is. Everyone knows how much they are actually paying. I can't see why anyone would want a more complicated system. Clarification: Many "essential" goods like simple foods are GST exempt. They will be marked as such on the receipt. Again, the price on the shelf or box is what you will actually pay. There are no hidden surprises. Though there are still some special cases where they sneak in extra taxes - stamp duty on houses and import duties on cars for example.
      - wenc 6y ago
        Is it 10% in all states? In Canada, the provincial sales tax differs in each province. The federal rate is 5%. Alberta has no sales tax, whereas Ontario charges 8% (post-harmonization it's a HST of 13%). In the US, the sales tax differs not only by state, but by county and city. The tax situation in Chicago is particularly bizarre. The sales tax in Cook County, where the city of Chicago located, is 10.25%. The sales tax one county over (say Dupage County, 15-20 miles outside the city and still part of the greater Chicago metropolitan area) is 8%. Restaurants in the City of Chicago (but not other parts of Cook County) charge 10.75% because there's a city-specific restaurant tax. The different tax rates create strange arbitrage opportunities. If I buy an iPhone from an Apple Store a few miles outside Chicago, I get an automatic 2.25% discount.
        petre 6y ago
        I wonder why does harmonization always infer a higher tax than the previous one. If we'd had harmonized VAT in Europe I guess it would be like over 20% and those with 19% or lower would end up paying more.
        wenc 6y ago
        The harmonization in Ontario is more like combining the 5% federal rate and the 8% provincial rate into a single combined rate of 13%, so there’s no change in this case.
        itsjloh 6y ago
        The 10% tax is at the federal layer in Australia and is the same across all states and territories.
      - jszymborski 6y ago
        FWIW, Canadian taxes are similarly quite uniform within a province. Canadians also have a Federal GST, and provinces add their own tax, which gets added together into one Harmonized Services Tax (HST) in all provinces but Quebec and British Columbia, which have their own rules (QC collects an additional Provincial Sales Tax (PST)) Of course, there are fun additional taxes as well like the Environmental Handling Fee (EHF) on electronics.
    - apple4ever 6y ago
      Not sure why this got downvoted. Absolutely you should know what you are paying so you can make informed electoral decisions. You can't assume "everybody" knows.
- bronson 6y ago
  Covered in the article: "To me it really doesn't seem like too radical of a change, my hope is that after people get comfortable with this, we will be able to scrap a service charge completely and just increase our menu prices by 18 per cent and then pass that 18 per cent into higher salaries for all of our staff." I hope it catches on.
  - jbob2000 6y ago
    Urbanite restaurant-goers aren’t so price sensitive that they can’t handle a price increase from $20 to $22. I think they’re doing it this way so that if it doesn’t work out, they already have the previous infrastructure in place to return to tipping if need be.
- petre 6y ago
  18% price increase during a pandemic? Wow. They have it in Hungary too, but it's 8% as far as I can remember, not 18%. But we didn't mind as in Budapest the service and the food was almost always excellent, even in a bar that served mainly cocktails but had some easy dishes so that the customer doesn't leave the place if they're hungry. I don't like service tax. If you don't like the service you have no other option but to pay it. With tips you would just not tip and walk away.
  - fireattack 6y ago
    It's not 18% price increase though. People normally already pay tips just not a fixed 18%.
    - moltar 6y ago
      People normally pay tips for a good service. Making tips mandatory provides no incentive to provide a quality service. If the service quality drops - customers will go elsewhere.
      - playeren 6y ago
        >If the service quality drops - customers will go elsewhere. Wouldn't that be incentive to provide good service? I ask because some of the best restaurants in the world do not expect you to tip - ie. Danish restaurants Noma and Alchemist.
        moltar 6y ago
        I was talking about the North American model where staff are paid basically nothing and they live off of tips. Europe is another story. Tipping there is not expected. And staff are probably decently paid.
        petre 6y ago
        It really depends which part of Europe you are talking about. In Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe one is expected to tip and tips are typically 10-15% of the bill. In Greece you might also get rewarded if you visit the same joint more than a couple of times and tip. In Nothern Europe and Western Europe it's a different story, but meals are also considerably more expensive. In Central Europe and Southern Europe the staff doesn't expect tips but they will be quite grateful if you do tip them. Some places have a fixed service tax as it's the case with Hungary some have a sit down charge as in Italy (< 3 euros) but it's nowhere near 18%. Some enable you to tip a variable amount using the POS such as it's the case in the Czech Republic.
- untog 6y ago
  > The more sensible thing would have been to increase menu prices by 18%. That would not be sensible because when people are comparing restaurants they will appear 18% more expensive than an identically priced competition when they aren’t. > I hate it when you have to treat a menu like a legal document I don’t know why you’d need to. I’ve travelled in Europe plenty, where restaurants charge a service charge. It’s right there in the receipt. I don’t know why this would be any different.
  - petre 6y ago
    > It’s right there in the receipt That's the main issue with it. It should be on the menu, on every page that contains prices. Once it's (only) on the receipt it's too late to pick another restaurant. In Europe they're required by law to list it.
- moltar 6y ago
  That restaurant would def go on to a mental ban list. I hate when they do that. It’s like an extra sales tax. I want the total number, after all of the fees. A true place I know that banned tipping is Crew Collective Cafe in Montreal. It’s the same group that started crew.co and Unsplash.
lostgame 6y ago
Good riddance. Tipping is racist/sexist, and is more often than not an excuse for the restaurants to use it for exploitation. I live in Toronto and everyone I know working in the food industry is happy to hear this.
- tptacek 6y ago
  It isn't hard to find servers who do support tipping; especially in high-end and fine dining, it's relatively lucrative.
- skj 6y ago
  Racist/sexist in that it allows racists and sexists to express their biases via poor tips? Or something else.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Are tips universally distributed? I would suspect that unconscious bias can impact tipping norms and result in certain classes of people getting smaller or larger tips. I don't have data to back up my hypothesis, however. Additionally, tips tend to go to front of house staff, where certain groups are more/less represented.
    - skj 6y ago
      That's fair. To be clear, I wasn't denying the claim, just asking for your thoughts around it. I tip 20% rounded up to the nearest dollar every time, unless I'm really disappointed with the service which is quite rare.
- tsherr 6y ago
  Tipping isn't racist or sexist any more than language is, but you can have sexist or racist tippers. I won't eat at a restaurant that decides I must pay X% tip. I occasionally get tips at work when I do outstanding service, and it's awesome but not required. I pay tips on the same way.
vecinu 6y ago
I'm so happy to hear this. I cannot stand tipping and genuinely get anxiety when I'm out with friends and the wife and she sometimes pays without knowing what the right "tip amount" is. It happens to me too, where I have to pay attention to what the waiter/waitress is doing that is exceptional or bad so I can adjust my tip accordingly. It's bad for the customer and the employee, the employer is the only one winning by exploiting its own workers. I wish we would just pay our servers a living wage with health benefits and stop hiding those as "Extra surchages" as San Francisco is doing. While we're at it, show me the final price with taxes included please.
- tptacek 6y ago
  You do not in fact have to pay attention to how well the server performs. You can just take the final price, divide by 10, multiply by 2, and round whichever direction you want. You should look at tipping as a cost sharing measure, not an incentive system.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    Fascinating. Are we now at 20-23% (exclusive of taxes, as I think they're usually calculated, so the variance here is entirely how much meals tax you have on your meal) tip rates as the new normal?
    - tptacek 6y ago
      15-20% has been the norm for my whole adult life, and the upper range (1) doesn't often materially change the price of a meal and (2) simplifies the math. Use whatever system you want, though; the point is: you are not actually on the hook to evaluate the server's performance. Think of it as tipping the institution of table service.
      - dwohnitmok 6y ago
        Oh interesting! My impression was that it was 10-15% about two decades ago and has now risen to 15-20% with most people I know tending closer to the 20% edge. Maybe it's simply that my social circles have become more generous tippers.
rascul 6y ago
Give me the price up front, including cost for the staff to get whatever is determined to be a decent wage. At the same time, pay staff a decent wage.
sudeepj 6y ago
As someone from India, I never understood the the tipping culture when I went abroad. It is not that tips are non-existent in India. It is not mandatory in India. However in UK, any tip < 10-15% is judged and hence the reputation of Indians as poor tippers. This leads to lot of mis-understanding. I was surprised even getting a simple haircut had to be tipped in UK. I do not mind if the appropriate tip amount is factored in the price itself. The guilty-feeling and ambiguity whether I am being miserly or not made me avoid such places whenever possible. Note: I learnt later that waiters in an restaurant are not that well paid and they have to "earn" it via tips.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  I’m British. I’m sorry you feel this way. It’s the thing I hate the most about visiting the US. I’m going say this once and really big for you: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TIP IN THE UK. You can if you want but, having worked in the service sector, it is not expected, service staff won’t think worse of you and please don’t feel guilty. Unlike the US we have a vaguely liveable minimum wage that is nearly £10 per hour now and tipping is absolutely not required. I only tip when the service was excellent or the person actually went above and beyond.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    £10/hr sounds significantly lower than what a US server would make in a $$ restaurant (based on industry norms for diner/day/server), let alone a $$$ or a $$$$. If they're relying on that little cash, I'm definitely tipping next time I'm in the UK.
    - simonbarker87 6y ago
      A good salary in the UK is any over £40,000 and not all service workers are paid the minimum. Minimum wage in the UK works out At £15k-20k per year so yeah, not a good salary but a lot better than the $3 an hour I’ve heard US restaurant workers get per hour. If you have to rely on the enforced generosity of customers so your staff can afford to live you don’t have a viable business in my opinion, and that seems to be the model in the US. If memory serves tipping used to be heavily frowned upon in the US until the Great Depression.
wenc 6y ago
I hate the idea of tipping. I tip generously. Both of these statements are simultaneously true. The vast majority of the countries in the world (that I've visited) do not believe in percentage based tipping as we do in North America [1]. A tip either involves rounding up to the nearest unit of currency, or takes the form of a small service fee added to the bill. In North America, we've arrived at a situation where waitstaff actually prefer a tipped environment (due to high upside potential, especially where alcohol is served) and are also beholden to the tip (due to huge downside potential i.e. laws that mandate a lowered minimum wage for tipped workers). Getting rid of tipping by instituting a living wage can sometimes result in lower upside, so many workers end up being against a fixed livable wage. The calculation is that stochastic/high upsides (at bars, large groups) is preferable to stable but middling upside (i.e. living wage). On the other hand, the laws of supply and demand still apply. Without high food prices and corresponding demand at those prices, a restaurant can't sustain an untipped staff. So getting rid of tipping is a gamble and not many restaurants, especially low end ones, are able to swing it. Restaurants that are looking to get rid of tips are banking on the fact that the demand will remain the same at higher sticker prices (which in theory, should be true since the effective prices have not changed -- culturally a 15-20% tip is almost mandatory) but psychologically this often isn't the case -- unless you have a sign at the door that says (no tips required). It's a little bit like Uber/Lyft. The economics doesn't actually work out, but there's something propping it up. In the restaurant world, it's tipping. Getting rid of it is like getting rid of VC money for gig companies. There's a tightrope you have to walk to balance the books. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity
- untog 6y ago
  > I hate the idea of tipping. I tip generously. Both of these statements are simultaneously true. I strongly agree with this. Particularly in the US, where tipped workers are allowed to be paid less than minimum wage on the assumption they will be tipped. So yeah, I’ll tip. But what a damn stupid system.
- swimfar 6y ago
  In addition, the amount a waiter is tipped is also often influenced by their race, sex, and physical appearance.
scott31 6y ago
Ugh, I generally pay 0% tip and these kinds of restaurants just add friction where I have to send the bill back for them to remove it.
Pfhreak 6y ago
Several restaurants have gotten rid of tipping in Seattle, either through just eliminating it or through the "we charge a fixed additional fee that goes to staff". Either way, I'm a fan (though I prefer the former) if the business provides a living wage, benefits, etc.

36 points by colinprince 6y ago

No, they did not. It is more accurate to say two restaurants in Toronto just mandated 18% tipping: >Tips will still be split between front and back but Ten will now be "adding a flat untaxed 18 per cent service charge onto each bill no matter the size of the group," The more sensible thing would have been to increase menu prices by 18%. But they are not being sensible. They just increased their prices while pretending they have not done so. I hate it when you have to treat a menu like a legal document and be looking for the fine print.

jszymborski 6y ago
and while we're at it, include the taxes!
- tonyztan 6y ago
  I think separately listing taxes has the benefit of transparency - you know how much the government is taking and can make more informed electoral decisions.
  - EffToyz 6y ago
    I wish they made it in LCBO reciepts, so we could see that sweet almost 100% tax on alcohol.
  - Smoosh 6y ago
    With a single Federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) as in Australia, you know it is 10%. All prices include the GST and are the price you will pay. There are no other sales taxes. Everyone knows what the government's cut is. Everyone knows how much they are actually paying. I can't see why anyone would want a more complicated system. Clarification: Many "essential" goods like simple foods are GST exempt. They will be marked as such on the receipt. Again, the price on the shelf or box is what you will actually pay. There are no hidden surprises. Though there are still some special cases where they sneak in extra taxes - stamp duty on houses and import duties on cars for example.
    - wenc 6y ago
      Is it 10% in all states? In Canada, the provincial sales tax differs in each province. The federal rate is 5%. Alberta has no sales tax, whereas Ontario charges 8% (post-harmonization it's a HST of 13%). In the US, the sales tax differs not only by state, but by county and city. The tax situation in Chicago is particularly bizarre. The sales tax in Cook County, where the city of Chicago located, is 10.25%. The sales tax one county over (say Dupage County, 15-20 miles outside the city and still part of the greater Chicago metropolitan area) is 8%. Restaurants in the City of Chicago (but not other parts of Cook County) charge 10.75% because there's a city-specific restaurant tax. The different tax rates create strange arbitrage opportunities. If I buy an iPhone from an Apple Store a few miles outside Chicago, I get an automatic 2.25% discount.
      - petre 6y ago
        I wonder why does harmonization always infer a higher tax than the previous one. If we'd had harmonized VAT in Europe I guess it would be like over 20% and those with 19% or lower would end up paying more.
        wenc 6y ago
        The harmonization in Ontario is more like combining the 5% federal rate and the 8% provincial rate into a single combined rate of 13%, so there’s no change in this case.
      - itsjloh 6y ago
        The 10% tax is at the federal layer in Australia and is the same across all states and territories.
    - jszymborski 6y ago
      FWIW, Canadian taxes are similarly quite uniform within a province. Canadians also have a Federal GST, and provinces add their own tax, which gets added together into one Harmonized Services Tax (HST) in all provinces but Quebec and British Columbia, which have their own rules (QC collects an additional Provincial Sales Tax (PST)) Of course, there are fun additional taxes as well like the Environmental Handling Fee (EHF) on electronics.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    Not sure why this got downvoted. Absolutely you should know what you are paying so you can make informed electoral decisions. You can't assume "everybody" knows.
bronson 6y ago
Covered in the article: "To me it really doesn't seem like too radical of a change, my hope is that after people get comfortable with this, we will be able to scrap a service charge completely and just increase our menu prices by 18 per cent and then pass that 18 per cent into higher salaries for all of our staff." I hope it catches on.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  Urbanite restaurant-goers aren’t so price sensitive that they can’t handle a price increase from $20 to $22. I think they’re doing it this way so that if it doesn’t work out, they already have the previous infrastructure in place to return to tipping if need be.
petre 6y ago
18% price increase during a pandemic? Wow. They have it in Hungary too, but it's 8% as far as I can remember, not 18%. But we didn't mind as in Budapest the service and the food was almost always excellent, even in a bar that served mainly cocktails but had some easy dishes so that the customer doesn't leave the place if they're hungry. I don't like service tax. If you don't like the service you have no other option but to pay it. With tips you would just not tip and walk away.
- fireattack 6y ago
  It's not 18% price increase though. People normally already pay tips just not a fixed 18%.
  - moltar 6y ago
    People normally pay tips for a good service. Making tips mandatory provides no incentive to provide a quality service. If the service quality drops - customers will go elsewhere.
    - playeren 6y ago
      >If the service quality drops - customers will go elsewhere. Wouldn't that be incentive to provide good service? I ask because some of the best restaurants in the world do not expect you to tip - ie. Danish restaurants Noma and Alchemist.
      - moltar 6y ago
        I was talking about the North American model where staff are paid basically nothing and they live off of tips. Europe is another story. Tipping there is not expected. And staff are probably decently paid.
        petre 6y ago
        It really depends which part of Europe you are talking about. In Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe one is expected to tip and tips are typically 10-15% of the bill. In Greece you might also get rewarded if you visit the same joint more than a couple of times and tip. In Nothern Europe and Western Europe it's a different story, but meals are also considerably more expensive. In Central Europe and Southern Europe the staff doesn't expect tips but they will be quite grateful if you do tip them. Some places have a fixed service tax as it's the case with Hungary some have a sit down charge as in Italy (< 3 euros) but it's nowhere near 18%. Some enable you to tip a variable amount using the POS such as it's the case in the Czech Republic.
untog 6y ago
> The more sensible thing would have been to increase menu prices by 18%. That would not be sensible because when people are comparing restaurants they will appear 18% more expensive than an identically priced competition when they aren’t. > I hate it when you have to treat a menu like a legal document I don’t know why you’d need to. I’ve travelled in Europe plenty, where restaurants charge a service charge. It’s right there in the receipt. I don’t know why this would be any different.
- petre 6y ago
  > It’s right there in the receipt That's the main issue with it. It should be on the menu, on every page that contains prices. Once it's (only) on the receipt it's too late to pick another restaurant. In Europe they're required by law to list it.
moltar 6y ago
That restaurant would def go on to a mental ban list. I hate when they do that. It’s like an extra sales tax. I want the total number, after all of the fees. A true place I know that banned tipping is Crew Collective Cafe in Montreal. It’s the same group that started crew.co and Unsplash.

lostgame 6y ago

Good riddance. Tipping is racist/sexist, and is more often than not an excuse for the restaurants to use it for exploitation. I live in Toronto and everyone I know working in the food industry is happy to hear this.

tptacek 6y ago
It isn't hard to find servers who do support tipping; especially in high-end and fine dining, it's relatively lucrative.
skj 6y ago
Racist/sexist in that it allows racists and sexists to express their biases via poor tips? Or something else.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Are tips universally distributed? I would suspect that unconscious bias can impact tipping norms and result in certain classes of people getting smaller or larger tips. I don't have data to back up my hypothesis, however. Additionally, tips tend to go to front of house staff, where certain groups are more/less represented.
  - skj 6y ago
    That's fair. To be clear, I wasn't denying the claim, just asking for your thoughts around it. I tip 20% rounded up to the nearest dollar every time, unless I'm really disappointed with the service which is quite rare.
tsherr 6y ago
Tipping isn't racist or sexist any more than language is, but you can have sexist or racist tippers. I won't eat at a restaurant that decides I must pay X% tip. I occasionally get tips at work when I do outstanding service, and it's awesome but not required. I pay tips on the same way.

vecinu 6y ago

I'm so happy to hear this. I cannot stand tipping and genuinely get anxiety when I'm out with friends and the wife and she sometimes pays without knowing what the right "tip amount" is. It happens to me too, where I have to pay attention to what the waiter/waitress is doing that is exceptional or bad so I can adjust my tip accordingly. It's bad for the customer and the employee, the employer is the only one winning by exploiting its own workers. I wish we would just pay our servers a living wage with health benefits and stop hiding those as "Extra surchages" as San Francisco is doing. While we're at it, show me the final price with taxes included please.

tptacek 6y ago
You do not in fact have to pay attention to how well the server performs. You can just take the final price, divide by 10, multiply by 2, and round whichever direction you want. You should look at tipping as a cost sharing measure, not an incentive system.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  Fascinating. Are we now at 20-23% (exclusive of taxes, as I think they're usually calculated, so the variance here is entirely how much meals tax you have on your meal) tip rates as the new normal?
  - tptacek 6y ago
    15-20% has been the norm for my whole adult life, and the upper range (1) doesn't often materially change the price of a meal and (2) simplifies the math. Use whatever system you want, though; the point is: you are not actually on the hook to evaluate the server's performance. Think of it as tipping the institution of table service.
    - dwohnitmok 6y ago
      Oh interesting! My impression was that it was 10-15% about two decades ago and has now risen to 15-20% with most people I know tending closer to the 20% edge. Maybe it's simply that my social circles have become more generous tippers.

rascul 6y ago

Give me the price up front, including cost for the staff to get whatever is determined to be a decent wage. At the same time, pay staff a decent wage.

sudeepj 6y ago

As someone from India, I never understood the the tipping culture when I went abroad. It is not that tips are non-existent in India. It is not mandatory in India. However in UK, any tip < 10-15% is judged and hence the reputation of Indians as poor tippers. This leads to lot of mis-understanding. I was surprised even getting a simple haircut had to be tipped in UK. I do not mind if the appropriate tip amount is factored in the price itself. The guilty-feeling and ambiguity whether I am being miserly or not made me avoid such places whenever possible. Note: I learnt later that waiters in an restaurant are not that well paid and they have to "earn" it via tips.

simonbarker87 6y ago
I’m British. I’m sorry you feel this way. It’s the thing I hate the most about visiting the US. I’m going say this once and really big for you: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TIP IN THE UK. You can if you want but, having worked in the service sector, it is not expected, service staff won’t think worse of you and please don’t feel guilty. Unlike the US we have a vaguely liveable minimum wage that is nearly £10 per hour now and tipping is absolutely not required. I only tip when the service was excellent or the person actually went above and beyond.
- tptacek 6y ago
  £10/hr sounds significantly lower than what a US server would make in a $$ restaurant (based on industry norms for diner/day/server), let alone a $$$ or a $$$$. If they're relying on that little cash, I'm definitely tipping next time I'm in the UK.
  - simonbarker87 6y ago
    A good salary in the UK is any over £40,000 and not all service workers are paid the minimum. Minimum wage in the UK works out At £15k-20k per year so yeah, not a good salary but a lot better than the $3 an hour I’ve heard US restaurant workers get per hour. If you have to rely on the enforced generosity of customers so your staff can afford to live you don’t have a viable business in my opinion, and that seems to be the model in the US. If memory serves tipping used to be heavily frowned upon in the US until the Great Depression.

wenc 6y ago

I hate the idea of tipping. I tip generously. Both of these statements are simultaneously true. The vast majority of the countries in the world (that I've visited) do not believe in percentage based tipping as we do in North America [1]. A tip either involves rounding up to the nearest unit of currency, or takes the form of a small service fee added to the bill. In North America, we've arrived at a situation where waitstaff actually prefer a tipped environment (due to high upside potential, especially where alcohol is served) and are also beholden to the tip (due to huge downside potential i.e. laws that mandate a lowered minimum wage for tipped workers). Getting rid of tipping by instituting a living wage can sometimes result in lower upside, so many workers end up being against a fixed livable wage. The calculation is that stochastic/high upsides (at bars, large groups) is preferable to stable but middling upside (i.e. living wage). On the other hand, the laws of supply and demand still apply. Without high food prices and corresponding demand at those prices, a restaurant can't sustain an untipped staff. So getting rid of tipping is a gamble and not many restaurants, especially low end ones, are able to swing it. Restaurants that are looking to get rid of tips are banking on the fact that the demand will remain the same at higher sticker prices (which in theory, should be true since the effective prices have not changed -- culturally a 15-20% tip is almost mandatory) but psychologically this often isn't the case -- unless you have a sign at the door that says (no tips required). It's a little bit like Uber/Lyft. The economics doesn't actually work out, but there's something propping it up. In the restaurant world, it's tipping. Getting rid of it is like getting rid of VC money for gig companies. There's a tightrope you have to walk to balance the books. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity

untog 6y ago
> I hate the idea of tipping. I tip generously. Both of these statements are simultaneously true. I strongly agree with this. Particularly in the US, where tipped workers are allowed to be paid less than minimum wage on the assumption they will be tipped. So yeah, I’ll tip. But what a damn stupid system.
swimfar 6y ago
In addition, the amount a waiter is tipped is also often influenced by their race, sex, and physical appearance.

scott31 6y ago

Ugh, I generally pay 0% tip and these kinds of restaurants just add friction where I have to send the bill back for them to remove it.

Pfhreak 6y ago

Several restaurants have gotten rid of tipping in Seattle, either through just eliminating it or through the "we charge a fixed additional fee that goes to staff". Either way, I'm a fan (though I prefer the former) if the business provides a living wage, benefits, etc.