5 ms·

There isn't any tip in New Zealand and Australia. Everybody get proper salary. The service is always exceptional. How is that possible?

luxuryballs 4y ago
culture/demographic
- wyclif 4y ago
  It's difficult to explain the cause. You can't really account for it by a simple tipping/no tipping divide. In other countries that don't do tipping, you'll end up wishing they did because the service is so abysmal. You can't get decent service or expect a good waiter or waitress, because nobody is motivated to do the job well.
  - lovemenot 4y ago
    You must have not been to Japan.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      He's never been outside the US.
      - wyclif 4y ago
        Ah, that's bullshit. I've been all over the world and I'm guessing by your comment I'm more travelled than you. Currently, I'm in the Philippines, where there's no tipping. Go ahead, come down here on a trip and see what happens. No tipping. And the service is abysmal because nobody has any incentive to be an excellent waiter or waitress. What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing in order to reward good service and provide a decent income to service workers. It's not perfect, but it's there for a reason.
        midoridensha 4y ago
        Obviously, you've never been to Japan or Europe if you think no tipping = bad service. What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing because racist Americans didn't want to pay newly-freed black people properly.
        wyclif 4y ago
        I just finished saying that I've been all over Japan. And you missed where I said that Japanese culture is in many ways exceptional and not like other cultures. It's not like the rest of SE Asia, for instance, where there's no tipping and you have to wait for a half hour to get your cheque.
    - wyclif 4y ago
      I've been to Japan many times. Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya. Japanese culture is exceptional in many ways—you can't pretend that their culture is normative when applied to the west. My point still stands. You can't pay service staff minimum wage or slave wages and expect good service. This is why the tipping system developed.
tsmarsh 4y ago
Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.
- seanhandley 4y ago
  No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness. It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode. If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some change in a tip jar if we only ordered drinks. Traveling to the US as a Brit is an affront when you first experience "service culture". You become desensitised to it after a while (and can even have some fun with it) but initially it's a genuinely uncomfortable experience and it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
  - foldr 4y ago
    Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).
  - kelnos 4y ago
    > it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture. Is that really true, though? The US is such a mix of cultures at this point (and even the more dominant cultures have diverged so much), that I'm not sure it's accurate to say that Brits and Americans generally share all that much culture. History is there, yes, but it's been over 200 years, and history fades.
parallel 4y ago
People do tip in Australia, it's just not expected. Tipping a genuine act of generosity to reciprocate exceptional service. The correlation between service quality and tipping is an interesting one, why does anyone do a good job in any role without some kind of incremental reward for effort. Do office workers always revert to 'just enough to not get fired' or are they playing a longer game for promotions and bonuses?
- Yizahi 4y ago
  What is this "exceptional service" people are talking about? Take the order without forgetting stuff and then bring dishes from the kitchen? Isn't that just a normal baseline for this profession? Or does it mean not spitting in the food (I'm joking)? I sometimes leave tips, but not once have I understood why, because there is no such thing as "exceptional" in the waiting service imho. I only do it due to the social pressure, like a monkey in the story about water hose and a ladder.
  - aareet 4y ago
    I absolutely think that exceptional service is possible - for example, when I visit a restaurant with my elderly grandparents who have some extremely particular dietary restrictions, and the wait staff patiently discuss our options, help them create a meal that satisfies their preferences and remains interesting, I find that exceptional. I've had wait staff give us genuine recommendations on the menu, with honesty, indicating the dishes they don't like (much more rare) as well as those they do resulting in a good meal - I enjoy that candor and am happy to tip for the recommendation. I've also had staff stay late and keep a restaurant open because we were on the last train into a station with nowhere else to go and eat and didn't speak the local language - I found that exceptional as well.
alwaysanon 4y ago
I am an American who has been living in Sydney for years and who stopped tipping here after getting used to it not being expected - but it has gotten a little weird/muddied of late. First it was Uber and the food delivery apps - and I did tip there because the app asked and I knew that in the gig economy the workers were not paid well (unlike others in Australia). Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in). I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?". So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?
- Symbiote 4y ago
  In Denmark, half the time the waiters are embarrassed that their boss set up the machine to prompt for tips, and press 0 for you. It's not Square doing this, it's the restaurant owner.
- hnick 4y ago
  You're correct, it's creeping in mostly due to cookie cutter POS machines setup for US market (I assume), and Doordash/Uber/etc apps and websites baking it in. I'd guess the payment machines can be setup to hide it, but management figures we have a "choice" (under light duress) to not tip so that's good enough. There are also a lot of international people working in hospitality so I guess they wouldn't be as against it as a lot of locals and just assume it's normal. There are pretty much weekly hate threads on r/australia and similar places on Reddit about this as you'd expect. One other thing I did notice - when travelling the US and reading reviews, a lot of people talk about the service. It's rarely mentioned in reviews over here in comparison unless it's an outlier. I personally found the fawning attention quite cloying in the US, but it's a different culture I guess. Wondering if that'll change if tips gain a foothold.
grecy 4y ago
I'm Australian, living in Canada for 10 years, just went back to Australia for 18 months, now back in Canada. I have some experience here. I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada. In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum. In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious. So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.
- peteforde 4y ago
  I had to read this a few times to make sure that, yes, you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great. I've lived here all of my life, but traveled very extensively. I would give the typical Canadian service interaction a neutral pass; they aren't openly rude, nor are they offering to wash my car. Where are you going to eat that someone taking your order, bringing it to you and checking in to make sure that it doesn't taste like burnt plastic could be described as "bare minimum"? That sounds an awful lot like "pretty standard" to me. Even in fancier places, there is a real art to achieving the perfect balance between attentive and annoying in service. Having someone notice that I need more water leaves me feeling cared for; having someone stop by on a 7 minute schedule to ask if we're "still okay" leaves me feeling violent.
  - grecy 4y ago
    > you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great. I was saying that service in Canada is noticeably "better" than service in Australia. So what I'm actually implying, is that service in Australia is quite "lacking". By lacking I mean nobody "waits" on you. You often order at the bar, pickup your own food and cutlery, re-fil your own water and walk to the bar to buy yourself a drink. Even a "sit down" restaurant will really only take your order and bring your food, nothing more. Fancier is different, but then you're paying more for the food. As I said, I'm perfectly happy with that level of "service" because it means no tipping. Of course, minimum wage in Australia is $21.38 with benefits, leave, healthcare, etc. etc. For everyone.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
The service is not always exceptional - what are you talking about? It's sometimes good, sometimes bad, the same as anywhere else on earth.
golemiprague 4y ago
[dead]

luxuryballs 4y ago

culture/demographic

wyclif 4y ago
It's difficult to explain the cause. You can't really account for it by a simple tipping/no tipping divide. In other countries that don't do tipping, you'll end up wishing they did because the service is so abysmal. You can't get decent service or expect a good waiter or waitress, because nobody is motivated to do the job well.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  You must have not been to Japan.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    He's never been outside the US.
    - wyclif 4y ago
      Ah, that's bullshit. I've been all over the world and I'm guessing by your comment I'm more travelled than you. Currently, I'm in the Philippines, where there's no tipping. Go ahead, come down here on a trip and see what happens. No tipping. And the service is abysmal because nobody has any incentive to be an excellent waiter or waitress. What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing in order to reward good service and provide a decent income to service workers. It's not perfect, but it's there for a reason.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        Obviously, you've never been to Japan or Europe if you think no tipping = bad service. What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing because racist Americans didn't want to pay newly-freed black people properly.
        wyclif 4y ago
        I just finished saying that I've been all over Japan. And you missed where I said that Japanese culture is in many ways exceptional and not like other cultures. It's not like the rest of SE Asia, for instance, where there's no tipping and you have to wait for a half hour to get your cheque.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    I've been to Japan many times. Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya. Japanese culture is exceptional in many ways—you can't pretend that their culture is normative when applied to the west. My point still stands. You can't pay service staff minimum wage or slave wages and expect good service. This is why the tipping system developed.

tsmarsh 4y ago

Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.

seanhandley 4y ago
No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness. It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode. If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some change in a tip jar if we only ordered drinks. Traveling to the US as a Brit is an affront when you first experience "service culture". You become desensitised to it after a while (and can even have some fun with it) but initially it's a genuinely uncomfortable experience and it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
- foldr 4y ago
  Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).
- kelnos 4y ago
  > it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture. Is that really true, though? The US is such a mix of cultures at this point (and even the more dominant cultures have diverged so much), that I'm not sure it's accurate to say that Brits and Americans generally share all that much culture. History is there, yes, but it's been over 200 years, and history fades.

parallel 4y ago

People do tip in Australia, it's just not expected. Tipping a genuine act of generosity to reciprocate exceptional service. The correlation between service quality and tipping is an interesting one, why does anyone do a good job in any role without some kind of incremental reward for effort. Do office workers always revert to 'just enough to not get fired' or are they playing a longer game for promotions and bonuses?

Yizahi 4y ago
What is this "exceptional service" people are talking about? Take the order without forgetting stuff and then bring dishes from the kitchen? Isn't that just a normal baseline for this profession? Or does it mean not spitting in the food (I'm joking)? I sometimes leave tips, but not once have I understood why, because there is no such thing as "exceptional" in the waiting service imho. I only do it due to the social pressure, like a monkey in the story about water hose and a ladder.
- aareet 4y ago
  I absolutely think that exceptional service is possible - for example, when I visit a restaurant with my elderly grandparents who have some extremely particular dietary restrictions, and the wait staff patiently discuss our options, help them create a meal that satisfies their preferences and remains interesting, I find that exceptional. I've had wait staff give us genuine recommendations on the menu, with honesty, indicating the dishes they don't like (much more rare) as well as those they do resulting in a good meal - I enjoy that candor and am happy to tip for the recommendation. I've also had staff stay late and keep a restaurant open because we were on the last train into a station with nowhere else to go and eat and didn't speak the local language - I found that exceptional as well.

alwaysanon 4y ago

I am an American who has been living in Sydney for years and who stopped tipping here after getting used to it not being expected - but it has gotten a little weird/muddied of late. First it was Uber and the food delivery apps - and I did tip there because the app asked and I knew that in the gig economy the workers were not paid well (unlike others in Australia). Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in). I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?". So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?

Symbiote 4y ago
In Denmark, half the time the waiters are embarrassed that their boss set up the machine to prompt for tips, and press 0 for you. It's not Square doing this, it's the restaurant owner.
hnick 4y ago
You're correct, it's creeping in mostly due to cookie cutter POS machines setup for US market (I assume), and Doordash/Uber/etc apps and websites baking it in. I'd guess the payment machines can be setup to hide it, but management figures we have a "choice" (under light duress) to not tip so that's good enough. There are also a lot of international people working in hospitality so I guess they wouldn't be as against it as a lot of locals and just assume it's normal. There are pretty much weekly hate threads on r/australia and similar places on Reddit about this as you'd expect. One other thing I did notice - when travelling the US and reading reviews, a lot of people talk about the service. It's rarely mentioned in reviews over here in comparison unless it's an outlier. I personally found the fawning attention quite cloying in the US, but it's a different culture I guess. Wondering if that'll change if tips gain a foothold.

grecy 4y ago

I'm Australian, living in Canada for 10 years, just went back to Australia for 18 months, now back in Canada. I have some experience here. I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada. In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum. In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious. So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.

peteforde 4y ago
I had to read this a few times to make sure that, yes, you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great. I've lived here all of my life, but traveled very extensively. I would give the typical Canadian service interaction a neutral pass; they aren't openly rude, nor are they offering to wash my car. Where are you going to eat that someone taking your order, bringing it to you and checking in to make sure that it doesn't taste like burnt plastic could be described as "bare minimum"? That sounds an awful lot like "pretty standard" to me. Even in fancier places, there is a real art to achieving the perfect balance between attentive and annoying in service. Having someone notice that I need more water leaves me feeling cared for; having someone stop by on a 7 minute schedule to ask if we're "still okay" leaves me feeling violent.
- grecy 4y ago
  > you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great. I was saying that service in Canada is noticeably "better" than service in Australia. So what I'm actually implying, is that service in Australia is quite "lacking". By lacking I mean nobody "waits" on you. You often order at the bar, pickup your own food and cutlery, re-fil your own water and walk to the bar to buy yourself a drink. Even a "sit down" restaurant will really only take your order and bring your food, nothing more. Fancier is different, but then you're paying more for the food. As I said, I'm perfectly happy with that level of "service" because it means no tipping. Of course, minimum wage in Australia is $21.38 with benefits, leave, healthcare, etc. etc. For everyone.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

The service is not always exceptional - what are you talking about? It's sometimes good, sometimes bad, the same as anywhere else on earth.

golemiprague 4y ago

[dead]