4 ms·

> You can just take the final price, divide by 10, multiply by 2, and round whichever direction you want. a) this sounds horrendous, and b) so there's zero pr

by Jedd 6y ago

> You can just take the final price, divide by 10, multiply by 2, and round whichever direction you want. a) this sounds horrendous, and b) so there's zero pretence that tipping is somehow related to quality of experience? (I ask as a fairly well-travelled Australian, but who rarely sojourned into North America.)

dwohnitmok 6y ago
There's still some correlation to quality. Personally, and I think my friends all do this as well, I have a default rate in mind that I then adjust up or down depending on service. Usually criteria for adjusting up is whether the server has a noteworthy level of service or whether I'm being an unusually needy customer. Adjusting down usually requires something fairly egregious.
skj 6y ago
That's correct.
tptacek 6y ago
Why is that horrendous? (I get "annoying"). It's the restaurant sharing the cost of labor with the diner, which you're doing one way or the other, but tips have less price stickiness than list prices. There's certainly a "pretense" of tipping as an incentive, and you can treat it that way if you want to (to a point; you can't reasonably tip much below 15%). But you should ignore the pretense; it's not worth the psychic energy.
- Jedd 6y ago
  > Why is that horrendous? Hmm. Imagine that you never had to consider any kind of unstated, fuzzy mathematical wrangling at restaurants, hairdressers, hotels, in taxis, at stores, etc - your entire life every financial transaction was straightforward. If you came from that environment, this arrangement would seem horrendous (and annoying). I understand that there's some cultural exceptionalism involved - there always is - but for most of the (rest of the) world this kind of intentional, onerous, relentless, and needlessly complex obligation is some combination of bewildering, disrespectful, and anathema.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Calculating 10% ain't that hard killer -- just move the decimal point over. 36.22 becomes 3.6. Multiply that by 2, round up/down as you feel is warranted, and go with it. Plenty of the card readers even offer pre-calculated options when paying with debit/credit (usually 15%, 18%, and 20%). If that's too difficult, horrendous, and annoying to do then chances are you shouldn't be eating out in the first place.
    - Jedd 6y ago
      Thanks, but as a metric-loving Australian, you don't need to espouse the benefits of base-10 to me. My point remains that forcing everyone to consider a tip of varying amounts in a wide range of social / fiscal interactions, is a needless cognitive burden. Approximately 95% of the planet gets by somewhere between 'just fine' and 'much better' without it.
      - boring_twenties 6y ago
        I've never been to Australia, but my experience traveling in Germany, France and the Netherlands is that service ranges from "adequate" at best to "abysmal," with the average case being much closer to the latter. In the US, I'd say service is "excellent" more than 95% of the time, and I don't think I can recall a single instance of worse than "adequate" in my life. I have no idea if tipping sufficiently explains this, but it sure seems at least plausible...
        Jedd 6y ago
        FWIW, my anecdata is different. I've travelled - both short work stints and holidays - in ~30 countries over the space of a few decades. I don't know if I could confidently pick the worst service experience across that time, but a sit-down dining comedy club in Manhattan (NY, USA) would probably be towards the top of the list. I tend to be non-demanding, accommodating, and convivial etc, so that may have skewed most of my experiences across Asia and Europe towards the positive end of the spectrum.

by Jedd 6y ago

dwohnitmok 6y ago

There's still some correlation to quality. Personally, and I think my friends all do this as well, I have a default rate in mind that I then adjust up or down depending on service. Usually criteria for adjusting up is whether the server has a noteworthy level of service or whether I'm being an unusually needy customer. Adjusting down usually requires something fairly egregious.

skj 6y ago

That's correct.

tptacek 6y ago

Why is that horrendous? (I get "annoying"). It's the restaurant sharing the cost of labor with the diner, which you're doing one way or the other, but tips have less price stickiness than list prices. There's certainly a "pretense" of tipping as an incentive, and you can treat it that way if you want to (to a point; you can't reasonably tip much below 15%). But you should ignore the pretense; it's not worth the psychic energy.

Jedd 6y ago
> Why is that horrendous? Hmm. Imagine that you never had to consider any kind of unstated, fuzzy mathematical wrangling at restaurants, hairdressers, hotels, in taxis, at stores, etc - your entire life every financial transaction was straightforward. If you came from that environment, this arrangement would seem horrendous (and annoying). I understand that there's some cultural exceptionalism involved - there always is - but for most of the (rest of the) world this kind of intentional, onerous, relentless, and needlessly complex obligation is some combination of bewildering, disrespectful, and anathema.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Calculating 10% ain't that hard killer -- just move the decimal point over. 36.22 becomes 3.6. Multiply that by 2, round up/down as you feel is warranted, and go with it. Plenty of the card readers even offer pre-calculated options when paying with debit/credit (usually 15%, 18%, and 20%). If that's too difficult, horrendous, and annoying to do then chances are you shouldn't be eating out in the first place.
  - Jedd 6y ago
    Thanks, but as a metric-loving Australian, you don't need to espouse the benefits of base-10 to me. My point remains that forcing everyone to consider a tip of varying amounts in a wide range of social / fiscal interactions, is a needless cognitive burden. Approximately 95% of the planet gets by somewhere between 'just fine' and 'much better' without it.
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      I've never been to Australia, but my experience traveling in Germany, France and the Netherlands is that service ranges from "adequate" at best to "abysmal," with the average case being much closer to the latter. In the US, I'd say service is "excellent" more than 95% of the time, and I don't think I can recall a single instance of worse than "adequate" in my life. I have no idea if tipping sufficiently explains this, but it sure seems at least plausible...
      - Jedd 6y ago
        FWIW, my anecdata is different. I've travelled - both short work stints and holidays - in ~30 countries over the space of a few decades. I don't know if I could confidently pick the worst service experience across that time, but a sit-down dining comedy club in Manhattan (NY, USA) would probably be towards the top of the list. I tend to be non-demanding, accommodating, and convivial etc, so that may have skewed most of my experiences across Asia and Europe towards the positive end of the spectrum.