Have you ever worked a job that depends on tips? Try serving a table of 20 and working your butt off and then getting no tip from the table because they "don't

Have you ever worked a job that depends on tips? Try serving a table of 20 and working your butt off and then getting no tip from the table because they "don't believe in tipping." The correlation between "great service" and getting a good tip is nowhere near a 1:1. It sucks to go to work and not know whether you're going to come home with enough money to pay your bills this week, because you might get lucky or you might get a stream of tightwads. I'd be OK with tipping if people made a baseline living wage and the tips were for service above and beyond the usual. I'm not OK with the current standard. If you can't be persuaded that it's unfair to the workers, realize it's also unfair to you as a customer. Because people can't be reliably counted upon to tip their fair share, you need to over-tip if you care about people making a fair wage. And the perception of a "fair" tip has gone up noticeably in my lifetime -- 10-15% used to be a reasonable tip when I was in my teens and early 20s. Now it's crept up to 15-20% and spread to a lot of jobs that you didn't think of for tips (e.g., somebody handing you a coffee) because wages suck.