6 ms·
My summer as a dishwasher made it clear tipping, already deeply stupid, is wildly unfair even to service workers. A lot of people helped you get your meal, but
by CalRobert 2y ago
My summer as a dishwasher made it clear tipping, already deeply stupid, is wildly unfair even to service workers.
A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoI thought that tipping is mainly to enable the restaurant owner to avoid paying their workers properly.
- Gormo 2y agoNo, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you, even in the context of an organization managing the transaction. You tip people who are personally responding to your requests -- that's why the dishwasher and other people you're not directly interacting with don't usually get tipped.
- Larrikin 2y agoSo like the accountant filing your taxes, the person who fixes your bug in the bug report, the electrician adding power to a new room, the plumber fixing a leak?
- Gormo 2y agoNo. Most of those people are self-employed, so you are usually already paying 100% of the compensation directly to them in the first place. Tipping is for when someone is doing work directly for you, but as an employee of another party.
- johannes1234321 2y agoWhy is there a difference between somebody carrying a plate from the kitchen to my table and somebody preparing that plate just for me?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wiradikusuma 2y agoDo people in the US tip flight attendants who serve them meal?
- School-Cotton 2y agoTipping flight attendants happens often enough that it wouldn't be considered bizarre, especially in business/first class. But it's not the norm, no.
- rangerelf 2y agoThis comment made me gag. "Tipping culture" has definitely gone too far. What about the pilot and other members at front? Do the tipped flight attendants kick some bucks over to them? It definitely feels like an abdication of responsibility (and obligations) of the company that those people work for.
- adolph 2y agoDoes one leave a flight attendant tip in the seat or in that envelope in the seat pocket? (Handing a tip to someone directly feels so gauche, like I'm pretending to be some fancy person.)
- Closi 2y agoOr the checkout workers at Walmart?
- DowagerDave 2y agoDo people choose to dine on airplanes? Do airlines even still serve meals?
- drpgq 2y agoI don't think I've ever had the electrician who showed up to my house or business be the owner. I guess it is possible, I've just never seen it.
- rqtwteye 2y agoI guess I will start tipping my dentist and dental hygienist. Also will tip at the DMV
- djtango 2y agoDo you tip your nurses and your bus drivers?
- DowagerDave 2y agoWhat exactly does a bus driver do directly for just you? Everyone tips private drivers though. Nurses don't get tips but it's very common for them to get thank-you gifts and treats.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thruway516 2y agoIn my city, it is common courtesy and sometimes expected that you say 'thank you' to the bus driver when getting off at your stop. It's not too much of a stretch to the scenario where bus drivers are tipped, except that most bus riders (at least in the US) tend to be poor. Maybe we'll have bus drivers tipping well behaved passengers instead lol.
- wolpoli 2y agoDo you tip the mortgage specialist at the bank that prepared the mortgage for you?
- Gormo 2y agoNo -- it's also not customary to tip people who get a commission from your purchase.
- jdgoesmarching 2y agoMost of those people are self-employed? Citation heavily needed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoThat doesn't change the fact that it's near-universally used as an excuse to underpay workers.
- bastawhiz 2y agoIf that was actually true, minimum wage for tipped employees would be equal to the standard minimum wage.
- Gormo 2y agoWhy? I'm not sure I see how that follows.
- bastawhiz 2y agoBecause the employee tips are effectively taken by the restaurant up to the point where they make "normal" minimum wage. If tipped employee compensation was actually about compensating those folks for their effort, they should received the tips they earn. (Tipped minimum wage gets increased to standard minimum wage if you earn fewer than the difference in tips—which is functionally identical to having $5 and a bit of your tips withheld every hour) As it stands today, if you're tipped and you work a shift where there are fewer customers, you implicitly get paid less (and have more of your tips soaked up by your employer) for exactly the same amount of effort. If you work a graveyard shift for eight hours and see $40 in tips from eight customers, you effectively worked minimum wage with $0 in tips, not minimum wage plus $40. For the people working those jobs, that's multiple meals or tank of gas. There's no practical reason for having a lower minimum wage for tipped employees, it's literally just an excuse for employers to pay their tipped employees less. If we as a society actually believed that some professions should be compensated based on effort, there would be a different minimum wage for people compensated by commission. But that doesn't exist. So to answer your question, you're not necessarily "directly compensating" the employee, because a non-trivial percentage of your tip goes towards subsidizing their employer.
- CalRobert 2y agoThis varies by state, though.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoYou don't seem to see a lot of things. If anyone ever tried to tip me when I was on-site I don't know what I'd do. Whatever your job is or was, are you not a professional who already gets paid well for your work? You're at my office as a consultant already getting paid a good salary by your company, and I try to flip you a 50, you just take it? Oh right, that's why you laughed at all my jokes. Well good boy. I like that. Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute. The only people who are ok with that are people who like the feeling of being on the top side of that power dynamic.
- liotier 2y ago> No, tipping is a way of directly compensating people who are directly doing work for you From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?
- vundercind 2y agoThere’s a history in the US (in, like… the 1930s) of attempting to dismantle tipping culture on the grounds that it sets up a degrading servant/master relationship (you choose whether to tip, and how much) that’s inappropriate for a free people. They were entirely right but didn’t win, for whatever reason. [edit] I mean, I don’t know why, but if I had to guess, based on the timeframe, I’d guess the reason was racism.
- thruway516 2y agoEvery couple of years someone attempts to tackle this but it usually goes nowhere. Just a few years ago it was Danny Meyer (one of the most well known restauranteurs in the country) trying to revive the no-tipping movement by eliminating tips at his restaurants. There was a big todo about it at the time but it seems to have fizzled out as I havent heard anything about it recently. Seems the tipping lobby (aka Big Tipping ie the workers receiving the tips) is too powerful on this one lol.
- dingnuts 2y agoif you ask professional wait staff in the US you'll find that tips are more popular than set wages. They wind up making more from tips than they would via salary. Occasionally you'll read about a restaurant trying to eliminate tips and they lose good servers to their competition. Was just reading about this somewhere else.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoSeems like the problem here would be that employers tried to pay too little.
- Dylan16807 2y agoWhy should I be favoring the specific workers that get within 5 feet of me? And why should they be getting less indirect pay?
- colechristensen 2y agoMost of the people working in a restaurant don't actually get your tips.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoAlso a nice little tax dodge, at least back of the day when tipping was predominantly done in cash that I'm sure was never declared on the waiters taxes.
- ThunderSizzle 2y ago[flagged]
- dhosek 2y agoThe thing with the no tax on tips thing pandered by both major condidates is that most waiters don’t make enough to be paying income tax in the first place. On the other hand, more regressive taxes on income (OASDI/Medicare/IL state income tax) would apply, but none of these would be covered.
- DowagerDave 2y agoprofessional wait staff sure make enough to pay income tax; it's a skilled trade. In Canada the tax authority would audit service industry people who don't declare other income, where tips get captured.
- vondur 2y agoThat's not generally true. My friend worked at a waiter in the 90's and was making $200-$300 a night on tips on the weekend. Definitely not reported income either.
- ThunderSizzle 2y agoIt's a combination of things, but it's similar to why online stores advertise a price, and then add charges at checkout (like shipping, or credit card charge, processing fee, etc). You entice the customer with the lower price, and once they have committed, you can hit them with another charge or fee without as much ramification. Restaurant customers can be price sensitive, so tipping is a way to advertise a lower price that isn't actually real. Also, it's pretty ubiquitous, so unless you heavily advertise a no-tipping policy like Kroger delivery, most people will assume tipping is required, and factor that into your now higher price.
- wichert 2y agoLet me change that a bit: "it's pretty ubiquitous in the US". It's not common everywhere. My personal observation (in NL) is that with the transition from cash to contactless payment it seems to be becoming less common over time. Payment terminals here are not setup to ask for a tip (with very rare exceptions) - you just pay the amount on the receipt directly.
- dhosek 2y agoIn Paris, the menu prices include tip and tax and—somewhat miraculously. it felt—the prices are generally less than a comparable meal in the U.S.
- harry_ord 2y agoI feel tipping is still very common in Austria as well. Wife gives me a hard time when I don't tip a lot or at all but they're still very cash only here.
- nmd 2y agoAs someone also living in NL (Amsterdam though, may be different in other parts of NL), I have to partially disagree with you. It's not at the US level yet, but, my experience is that many if not most cafes/restaurants I go to now display a "Choose your tip %" screen on the payment terminal before paying, and anecdotally it feels like this is becoming more common over time with the newer payment terminals.
- tiphawk 2y agoThe point of tipping is to incentivize good service. You're supposed to vary your tip according to the quality of the service. It stopped working when people got too nice. Now people still tip well even when the service sucks. It's just a holdover from a better time at this point.
- School-Cotton 2y agoCulture is a complex thing and probably shouldn't be anthropomorphized like this. I see no reason to believe someone came up with this cultural norm for an identifiable purpose, as opposed to it having just evolved randomly in response to various factors. Tipping seems terrible for restaurant owners since it lets waiters capture an unusually large share of the value of the product.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoThe actual origin would be hard to say but it took of in America for some very specific reasons https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurants-civil-war/ https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...
- pessimizer 2y agoBut you're just making that up. It evolved almost instantly after the US Civil War as a way to employ newly released slaves without paying them. It was described as a "new idea that had just come from Europe." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fact-check-tipping-kept-wages-low-formerly-enslaved-black-workers/3896620001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fac... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage-cbsn-originals-documentary/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/minimum-wage-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/minimum-wage-raci...
- rangerelf 2y agoI bet that if this bit of history was more widely exposed, "tipping culture" would be exposed as the degrading practice that it actually is.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoIt's a cultural norm that would persist (and does) regardless of whether or not there is a genuine purpose to it. That some restaurant owners use it to avoid paying workers doesn't mean that's "its" purpose. Others use it to supplement revenue (like when Starbucks and Uber and those places just keep the tips for corporate). If it has any purpose at all, it's a social signaling protocol to say "I am a good person" that servers use guilt to amplify as much as possible.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoOnly in red states. Blue states don’t garnish a minimum wage for tips.
- GuB-42 2y agoFrom https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-do-we-tip https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-do-we-tip > I think that there are five basic motives for tipping. Some people tip to show off. Some people tip to help the server, to supplement their income and make them happy. Some people tip to get future service. And then other people tip to avoid disapproval: You don’t want the server to think badly of you. And some people tip out of a sense of duty. So, it is complicated. The part about the owner to avoid paying their workers properly is a consequence of the tipping culture, not a cause.
- astrange 2y agoThat's a popular myth because people don't want to tip, but tipping definitely gets workers like bartenders and waiters paid much more than otherwise. It also wouldn't really work in several states (like all West Coast states) because there's no tipped minimum wage.
- JTbane 2y agoAren't there some places that "tip-out" back of the house staff from the waitstaff tip pool?
- bombcar 2y agoI worked a restaurant with pooled tips, and the bussers got to split 15% of the total tips, and the dishwashers got some too (iirc, 5% but there was usually only one). I don't recall if the chef/cooks got any but I also believe they were salaried.
- louky 2y agoI worked in a place where the waitresses tipped out to the kitchen, and everyone got some of the money - including the dishdogs. It was a union (UFCW) restaurant. Cheap health insurance and 2 weeks paid vacation after 2 years, 4 weeks paid after 7 years. Not bad benefits for restaurant work. This was a while back though.
- helios_invictus 2y agoA better restaurants the tips are pooled. In my experience front of house, and cleaners/dishwashers splits. Kitchen staff where in a separate pay bracket.
- dfxm12 2y agoI bussed at a place where the dishwashers made more than me. They had an hourly wage that was higher than what I got hourly + tips. Every place is different. Some do tip out the back of the house. At the end of the day, I want to get paid an honest amount. I don't know if I care where the money comes from.
- throwway120385 2y agoYour dishwasher might be tipped depending on the restaurant. My wife served at several restaurants where expo, dishwashers, and kitchen staff got a portion of tips from the service.
- throw0101d 2y ago> A lot of people helped you get your meal, but your dishwasher is definitely not tipped. AIUI, front-end servers are supposed to kick some money into a pool for back-end staff. > Tip out is the restaurant practice where servers or bartenders share a portion of their collected tips with other staff members who contribute to the dining experience. This can include bussers, food runners, and sometimes even kitchen staff, depending on local regulations. * https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-tipping-out-guide/ https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-tipping-out-guide/ This could be legally regulated, or it could be social convention.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoIn my very brief foray into food service, it was my understanding that the front of the house shares 40% of tips with the back of the house...
- subpixel 2y agoIt wasn't recently but I was tipped out by the waitstaff when I was a dishwasher. So on top of my $7/hr I'd take home a hundred bucks or so. What they paid me was totally up to them.
- ensignavenger 2y agoAnd both major party presidential candidates have expressed a desire to enshrine tipping into the tax code as the holy grail tax avoidance.
- viccis 2y ago>your dishwasher is definitely not tipped I posted this elsewhere in here, but this is not true. They are often tipped out of a tip pool, especially in pricey ($100+ a head) restaurants with a lot of tip money to go around. People I know have made $40/hr this way, and I even know a guy who dish washed at age 17 at a counter service place and still made $20-35 an hour this way just off the tips that the little payment machine asked for when you picked up your food yourself. It is a complicated topic though, as it is actually illegal to include BOH people in tip pools in some states. This is because it is often a sneaky way for owners to steal tips by underpaying BOH compared to how they would have to pay them without a tip pool. So you might live in such a state.
- dghughes 2y agoProfessional kitchens are crazy so much drama and tips is like gasoline. I've always found it amazing a cook makes a meal, a waiter carries it to the table. It can be a $10 hamburger or a $100 steak. The waiter gets a 10% or 20% tip of the total value of the meal. All just for carrying a plate with different food on it food which they never made. The cooks and dishwasher get squat of that. Granted cooks are paid more than dish washers.
- CalRobert 2y agoToo late to edit but what I've learned is that apparently my restaurant was crap and dishwashers in other restaurants do get tipped out. Oh well.
- sitkack 2y agoI was a dishwasher as a kid, it is how I bought my first computer. The front end staff had to put a percentage of their tips into a pool that we were all tipped out from.