It is going to take a lot of concurrent repeat customers to appreciably degrade the service that new customers receive, at which point the value of obtaining ne

It is going to take a lot of concurrent repeat customers to appreciably degrade the service that new customers receive, at which point the value of obtaining new customers is diminished. We don't have to talk in hypotheticals with this though, we need to look no further than how business-minded owners treat repeat customers in real life. Repeat business is preferred business. Server turnover in practice is unlikely to hurt repeat business unless we are talking about unprecedented amounts of turnover on the period of days or weeks. A churn period of several months or more is unlikely to dramatically harm repeat traffic. Certainly I have never stopped visiting a bar because my preferred bartender left. Furthermore, presumably if a repeat customer repeatedly gets poor service, then that customer does not care about the quality of service. I get fucking awful service from the coffee shop I usually spend my Saturday mornings in (perhaps because I only take my coffee black, or perhaps because I refuse to tip baristas...), but I don't care because I don't need frequent coffee refills and I mostly like them for their decor. tl;dr: If tipping really is bad for business, then the business owners would be fighting it. They're not stupid, knowing their customers and maintaining a customer base is their livelihood.