Some (many?) countries have demonstrated that no-tipping can work just fine.
> makes them less competitive to any nearby coffeeshops that haven't raised prices
Maybe I'm an outlier but for me I'm sick of the mental game of "Am I good member of society for the % I selected, and how much will my date judge me if I choose what used to be the norm -- 10%-15%... and am I the sucker if I choose a high amount while other people groups select low amounts?". Some of you may be too young to realize but there has been tip % inflation that is when combined with price inflation the tip amount has grown geometrically.
To me a good customer service is I order my drink, I pay the stated price -- no more or less than the next person. Tipping makes me feel both guilty/ashamed and like a sucker knowing that certain groups of tip less. (and nothing to do with means)
Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?
It seems different in the US, where everyone is expected to tip as part of the overall price, like the article describes, and there is tipping Europe where the tip is not needed to boost the wage to an acceptable level but is simply to reward people who have gone above and beyond.
In many restaurants in the UK, a "tip" is automatically included for large parties to reward the extra work required but can be removed on request if they didn't think your service was good.
> In many restaurants in the UK, a "tip" is automatically included for large parties to reward the extra work required but can be removed on request if they didn't think your service was good.
This is often the case in the US where it's default 18-20% for parties of more than 6-8 in my extremely unscientific recall. What's funny is that now 20% is already the default so they just made it a bit easier on the diner is all.
>there is tipping Europe where the tip is not needed to boost the wage to an acceptable level
The internet gets the cause and effect on this backwards. Waitresses get paid 2 dollars an hour in much of the USA because they get tips. They don't get tips because they get 2 dollars an hour.
You could pay waiters 60 dollars an hour and Americans would keep tipping.
A default service charge is pretty common in the UK for sit-down food service at this point in my experience.
In the US, it's a very path dependent thing. High-end restaurants have tried experiments to eliminate it but front-of-house staff in particular didn't like it because in many cases they made less money.
What extra work required? It seems to me that the attention paid per individual is always less for large parties than, say, a party of two. It's much less personal.
Nearly every restaurant in London automatically adds ~12% even for 2 people. I don't know about the rest of the UK but it can't be drastically different.
> Some of you may be too young to realize but there has been tip % inflation that is when combined with price inflation the tip amount has grown geometrically
This is the most annoying part of many point-of-sale systems at counter-service restaurants today. You tap your card/phone/watch, and are then presented with big buttons for say, 35%, 30%, and 28% (I'm exaggerating, but not by much). The "custom amount" button is somewhere different for each POS vendor (Square, Toast, etc.) so you have to search for a moment if you want to tip a more traditional amount (or an amount that you might consider more commensurate with having to dispense your own water and bus your own table, for that matter).
> so you have to search for a moment if you want to tip a more traditional amount
And kind of like cracking security where certain operations take more or less time, you have the embarrassing experience of the waiter immediately knowing you're not tipping the requested amounts.
What bugs me is with some of the POS systems is that if you make a mistake with the custom tip amount, you have to restart the transaction (i.e. hand it back over to the cashier). It's aggravating.
> Some (many?) countries have demonstrated that no-tipping can work just fine.
Yes, but the reason it's difficult to implement when there was previously a tipping system is the fact that increasing prices to cover labour means a no-tipping place has a higher menu price than a place that encourages tipping.
Customers also have less perceived "power" over their dining experience.
France for example, (mostly) abolished their tipping culture through several pieces of legislation and to this day there's a 15% service charge on your bill in France. Even then they still tip, a little.
> Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?
We do and that's tipped wages. A career waiter in a major American city can make over 100k, which is several times more than what they would make in Europe. Even if you adjust for cost of living and median incomes, it's still going to be much higher. On the low end of the spectrum, tipped wages and untipped wages would be both at minimum wage.
> A career waiter in a major American city can make over 100k,
Yeah, but this is counter service we are talking about. The person making your latte is not making $100k/year. When I worked at a coffee place ~20 years ago, tips were about $1/hour per employee and that was like 10% of my income. Certainly wages and presumably tips are higher now, but these jobs still dont pay much over minimum wage.
According to Google: As of Nov 2, 2022, the average annual pay for a Waiter in New York City is $35,180 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $16.91 an hour. This is the equivalent of $676/week or $2,931/month.
It's not just waiters though, in fact the article specifically uses coffee shop employees as an example. I would be quite surprised if they're clearing 100k, even in a major city.
You aren't, I genuinely try to tip well, knowing how stacked things are, and I'm lucky to be in a higher income bracket, but it sucks, and I wish we could end tipping via an outright ban (as to not cause weirdness in the marketplace). I'd rather the prices adjust accordingly, and everyone gets a fair wage.
Its so much more transparent. and I think thats really what it is, its a way to obfuscate pricing transparency to the broader market.
The folks who don't tip at all are the ones who win, I suppose, as its genuinely cheaper if you don't, but I suspect if you frequent a place alot, people will figure this out and it will actively work against you.
I have, in leaner times, not tipped at establishments I knew I wasn't going to frequent again or so little there was no way for them to really identify me, if the service was bad / subpar or just for pickup.
I'm not going to go into a full definition here, but I guess I consider it undignified to have your material needs dependent on the good will of others who choose to follow a social convention to pay more than strictly required to.
We can, and should give employees dignity and a fair wage. We can each start right now by directly transferring a tiny portion of our wealth to the individuals that we interact with who could benefit from it (at least in this specific context, not exclusive of others who could also benefit).
I figure, I have it, they could use it, and I don't need to change everything about our economy and society to do it. I can just give someone some money. Simple and elegant.
I agree with your sentiment on tipping - I feel the same way. However I think the article did a pretty good job at answering your question of Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?. It's for economic reasons.
To make it work you'd have to collude on pricing with all the other coffee shops (which I think would be illegal but IANAL), or you'd have to use government force to ban tipping (which would without a doubt hurt many people in different areas). It's a hard problem, though I do hope we can figure it out because the status quo of expecting 20+% tip on an already expensive product is not good.
>the status quo of expecting 20+% tip on an already expensive product is not good.
Eliminate the expectation of a 20% tip and prices will basically go up 20% to cover an increase in base pay for the staff. So consumers probably won't actually save money if tipping were eliminated.
The argument the article makes is indeed a bit blunt.
The idea here is that tipping enables better price discrimination, which in turn allows a higher "quantity" of coffee to be produced. With coffee shops that "quantity" will translate to things like 1) higher density or 2) more attractive placement of coffee shops, both of which increase coffee consumption by making it easier to pick one up, or 3) higher quality (think small batch) coffee being produced, which increases the quantity of labor being sold in a cup.
I still don't enjoy this tipping culture, but the argument being made makes sense when you fill in the details.
Is there any empirical backing for this narrative? Some of this reads as pretty counter to intuition.
Most suspicious in my mind is the core presupposition (not a contention, a presupposition--the article doesn't even argue for it!) that rich people will step up to the opportunity to fulfill their noble obligation to give more to the less wealthy. Having known some pretty stingy wealthy people (and some very generous blue-collar people), it's not obvious to me that this is true.
Having owned a bar in the past I can tell you right now the most wealthy people either didn't tip at all or very little. Fellow service industry people tipped the best.
I would argue it's more likely that most wealthy people that are the type to let you know they're wealthy either didn't tip at all or very little. There's plenty of wealthy people that tip very well, but many of them don't flaunt it in any way.
This leaves me wondering what percentage of a typical service industry worker's salary is usually spent on tipping, and whether it couldn't be the case that if they stopped giving and taking tips entirely they would be better off in aggregate. I guess it depends on what fraction of their income is spent on "tippable" expenses.
I know that in my own case there was a period in grad school where it was only slightly below 50%, implying that almost 10% of my wages were spent on tips... what exactly are the "best" tip percentages that service industry people leave like?
This is exactly how I think about tipping. I, and many friends and family, worked retail and food service jobs when we were young. Now I’m professionally successful and will not miss a couple extra bucks on a cup of coffee. So I’m happy to help boost the person serving it to me. I know it means way more to them than it does to me.
This also explains why people (including me) get SO MAD if they find out that tips don’t actually go fully and directly to staff. See: DoorDash.
The way you describe it sounds like a micro trickle-down wealth redistribution rather than making sure someone has a fair wage.
Personally I find this really frustrating. You're not paid fairly for your labor. You only achieve a living wage through the generosity of those "happy to help boost" me. In my mind that reinforces a power dynamic between the "professionally successful" and those in the service industry. If I get a tip that raises my wage to something I can live off, now I must be profusely thankful to the person that donated their money to me.
I may be isolated in that opinion. I understand many service industry workers prefer tipping. For my personality though it's distressing.
Employees like tipping because it gives them greater control over their earnings. If they handle customers efficiently, if they sell hard, they can make more money. And they can take it home that day if they are receiving tips in cash.
And business owners like tipping because it aligns the employees' interests with their own: bringing in as much revenue as possible.
There are U.S. food service jobs without tipping, for example fast food chains or school cafeteria workers. Do these folks have higher pay as a result? Generally no.
I used to work shipping & receiving, where I got minimum wage, and didn't get a tip for anything. That's why I'm happy to let people working retail & food service jobs just do the work for their wage.
People working in restaurants in the US have a lower minimum wage than the rest of the country. So letting them do their work for like $3/hr doesnt really cut it
I'm a firm believer in better salaries rather than pushing the burden of sustaining an employee directly onto the customer by keeping an air of shame if you don't follow the "accepted tipping guidelines".
Whenever I've been to the USA I feel I'm being scammed every time I'm required to tip. I know it's your culture but it feels like an emotional extortion, if I don't tip I have to bear the weight of an underpaid employee not making ends meet because I don't think it was fair to see a price and then have to mentally add "20%" just because someone served me.
Worse, for me this culture makes me very uncomfortable by the level of service, I can tell when a waiter is miserable and just fake smiling to get me to tip more. When a waitress is over-the-top charming and nice while being berated by the kitchen staff for a misplaced order, etc.
It just makes every service I get feel fake and forced, to the point where I've avoided going to eat somewhere on days I'm exhausted because I don't want to deal with that weight on top.
I'd much rather just pay 20% over the price and know that the staff is well paid.
Tipping culture just opens a can of worm of abuses...
Another issue with DoorDash and GrubHub is that I am supposed to tip BEFORE delivery. I do that but most of the time my orders get delivered to a wrong building because drivers don't seem to read my delivery instructions.
I wish I could tip them directly after the delivery, but I am concerned that no one would pick up my order if I set the tip to $0 in the app.
This is why I always try to tip in cash, even when paying with a credit card. Higher chance of the tip actually going to the worker(s) and not their managers.
Not defending what DD was doing there but whether it directly goes to the driver/server/cashier or not, you're still implicitly giving that money to the store owner/delivery company/restaurant by allowing them to get away with poor pay.
> If a coffeeshop wants to pay their employees more they will have to raise prices
This does not follow purely from the facts presented. Consider: "If a coffee shop wanted to pay their employees more, the coffee shop itself might take a smaller cut and keep prices the same."
I also hate tipping everywhere, but coffee shops might also like to adjust their prices slightly for customers that don’t mind paying a bit more for well paid staff and for those customers to whom price is a major concern when choosing where to purchase their coffee.
Dynamic pricing makes some sense in the concept of trying to capture maximum demand, it just feels horrible as a customer.
I'll reiterate: the resolution is an answer to a question of whether it is true that "if a coffeeshop wants to pay their employees more they will have to raise prices".
If you have a defense (or a response where the phrase "in practice" appears anywhere, really), then that's a separate matter, but it does not follow strictly from the matters presented that the coffee shop "will have to raise prices" in order to pay their employees more. That's, in fact, a stronger claim than the factorable defense that the author (and others who make the same argument) is depending on.
In other words, both "have to" and "can't" are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I can see that for restaurants, the price of a good portion of meat at home isn't all that cheaper, but for coffee shops? That $6 lattee probably cost them thirty cents of milk sugar and beans and less than a dollar in labor to put in front of you.
I think the expansion of tipping, to the point where every point-of-sale machine is asking for it, is a dark pattern. I highly doubt that those tips go directly to employees, like restaurant tips would, but almost certainly directly to the shop.
I'm cynical but I see these new places where tipping has showed up as a way shopowners backhandedly raise prices and depress employee wages. And given that there is basically no human interaction, not even eye contact involved in the transaction, I'm not doing it.
Being slightly more cynical now, I'm wondering if this push is merely the payment processor realizing they could increase their cut by shaming the customer into paying more.
And I don't believe we can measure this purely financially, as simply not tipping in a coffeeshop with a tablet now comes with a bigger sentiment of shame, which is especially levied on the ones for which that extra 20% actually matters.
I always assumed that was it. The tip for paying at a counter started when clover and other touch tablet point of sale systems came around.
Some genius figured out that asking people to write down a tip on a receipt and signing it was too much friction and off putting, but on a touch screen, where a tap takes a fraction of a second and zero effort, at least some people would not mind hitting the tip button.
Also there is the psychological factor of the staff member watching the ipad screen the entire time, and looking at it again immediately after you are done. Like are you going to put zero and have them think "Fuck you cheap asshole" or are you going to be guilt tripped into throwing $3 away that the staff member might not even see? It taps into the same moral dilemma as a beggar accosting you on the street.
Arguing that new (or newly-conspicuous) PoS tipping is just a way to get price-insensitive spenders to pay more ignores the social dynamic which will cause many price-conscious customers to tip when they can’t really afford to or else to not tip and feel uncomfortable.
In either case, these price-conscious customers are less likely to come back. But since this PoS tipping trend seems strongest in hip, gentrified shops, maybe they aren’t interested in having less well-off customers in the first place.
Increasingly, in the US, people don't carry cash/coins with them. I might have a "just in case" $20 or two but I mostly don't have currency to cash tip which is probably one reason you see it appearing more on PoS devices.
I feel like its just a feature thats on with default settings than a careful analysis of cash on hand of the average american by the restaurant owner. Anecdotally, you are more likely to have cash on hand if you frequent street food or weed dispensaries so it probably varies by local culture quite a lot.
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> makes them less competitive to any nearby coffeeshops that haven't raised prices
Maybe I'm an outlier but for me I'm sick of the mental game of "Am I good member of society for the % I selected, and how much will my date judge me if I choose what used to be the norm -- 10%-15%... and am I the sucker if I choose a high amount while other people groups select low amounts?". Some of you may be too young to realize but there has been tip % inflation that is when combined with price inflation the tip amount has grown geometrically.
To me a good customer service is I order my drink, I pay the stated price -- no more or less than the next person. Tipping makes me feel both guilty/ashamed and like a sucker knowing that certain groups of tip less. (and nothing to do with means)
Why cant we just give employees dignity and a fair wage?
In many restaurants in the UK, a "tip" is automatically included for large parties to reward the extra work required but can be removed on request if they didn't think your service was good.
Just multiply all the menu items by 1.15, 1.18, 1.20, or whatever you need to ensure your wait staff is happy, and re-print the menu.
Don't make ME have to bust out a calculator and do math after my meal, and then have to decide which of the above numbers I should use.
This is often the case in the US where it's default 18-20% for parties of more than 6-8 in my extremely unscientific recall. What's funny is that now 20% is already the default so they just made it a bit easier on the diner is all.
The internet gets the cause and effect on this backwards. Waitresses get paid 2 dollars an hour in much of the USA because they get tips. They don't get tips because they get 2 dollars an hour.
You could pay waiters 60 dollars an hour and Americans would keep tipping.
In the US, it's a very path dependent thing. High-end restaurants have tried experiments to eliminate it but front-of-house staff in particular didn't like it because in many cases they made less money.
This is the most annoying part of many point-of-sale systems at counter-service restaurants today. You tap your card/phone/watch, and are then presented with big buttons for say, 35%, 30%, and 28% (I'm exaggerating, but not by much). The "custom amount" button is somewhere different for each POS vendor (Square, Toast, etc.) so you have to search for a moment if you want to tip a more traditional amount (or an amount that you might consider more commensurate with having to dispense your own water and bus your own table, for that matter).
And kind of like cracking security where certain operations take more or less time, you have the embarrassing experience of the waiter immediately knowing you're not tipping the requested amounts.
Yes, but the reason it's difficult to implement when there was previously a tipping system is the fact that increasing prices to cover labour means a no-tipping place has a higher menu price than a place that encourages tipping.
Customers also have less perceived "power" over their dining experience.
France for example, (mostly) abolished their tipping culture through several pieces of legislation and to this day there's a 15% service charge on your bill in France. Even then they still tip, a little.
I can't think of any place that bills service separately. They just say the menu is €20, and you pay €20.
We do and that's tipped wages. A career waiter in a major American city can make over 100k, which is several times more than what they would make in Europe. Even if you adjust for cost of living and median incomes, it's still going to be much higher. On the low end of the spectrum, tipped wages and untipped wages would be both at minimum wage.
Yeah, but this is counter service we are talking about. The person making your latte is not making $100k/year. When I worked at a coffee place ~20 years ago, tips were about $1/hour per employee and that was like 10% of my income. Certainly wages and presumably tips are higher now, but these jobs still dont pay much over minimum wage.
Its so much more transparent. and I think thats really what it is, its a way to obfuscate pricing transparency to the broader market.
The folks who don't tip at all are the ones who win, I suppose, as its genuinely cheaper if you don't, but I suspect if you frequent a place alot, people will figure this out and it will actively work against you.
I have, in leaner times, not tipped at establishments I knew I wasn't going to frequent again or so little there was no way for them to really identify me, if the service was bad / subpar or just for pickup.
I always tip for sit down service though.
sorry, it's clear. I am not what?
Define dignity first, maybe? A slave in chains can still have dignity, and the most wealthy and powerful of men can be utterly undignified.
I figure, I have it, they could use it, and I don't need to change everything about our economy and society to do it. I can just give someone some money. Simple and elegant.
To make it work you'd have to collude on pricing with all the other coffee shops (which I think would be illegal but IANAL), or you'd have to use government force to ban tipping (which would without a doubt hurt many people in different areas). It's a hard problem, though I do hope we can figure it out because the status quo of expecting 20+% tip on an already expensive product is not good.
Eliminate the expectation of a 20% tip and prices will basically go up 20% to cover an increase in base pay for the staff. So consumers probably won't actually save money if tipping were eliminated.
Apropos of nothing, I’ll just mention that the Fed is currently trying to decrease employment [1] and eliminate people’s savings [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/08/27/fed-chair-...
[2] https://twitter.com/schwarz/status/1587873284997218304
> Tom is willing to pay $6 for coffee and the shop only charges him $4, the deadweight loss is $2.
That is a consumer surplus, not deadweight loss.
The idea here is that tipping enables better price discrimination, which in turn allows a higher "quantity" of coffee to be produced. With coffee shops that "quantity" will translate to things like 1) higher density or 2) more attractive placement of coffee shops, both of which increase coffee consumption by making it easier to pick one up, or 3) higher quality (think small batch) coffee being produced, which increases the quantity of labor being sold in a cup.
I still don't enjoy this tipping culture, but the argument being made makes sense when you fill in the details.
Most suspicious in my mind is the core presupposition (not a contention, a presupposition--the article doesn't even argue for it!) that rich people will step up to the opportunity to fulfill their noble obligation to give more to the less wealthy. Having known some pretty stingy wealthy people (and some very generous blue-collar people), it's not obvious to me that this is true.
I know that in my own case there was a period in grad school where it was only slightly below 50%, implying that almost 10% of my wages were spent on tips... what exactly are the "best" tip percentages that service industry people leave like?
Dead Comment
This also explains why people (including me) get SO MAD if they find out that tips don’t actually go fully and directly to staff. See: DoorDash.
Personally I find this really frustrating. You're not paid fairly for your labor. You only achieve a living wage through the generosity of those "happy to help boost" me. In my mind that reinforces a power dynamic between the "professionally successful" and those in the service industry. If I get a tip that raises my wage to something I can live off, now I must be profusely thankful to the person that donated their money to me.
I may be isolated in that opinion. I understand many service industry workers prefer tipping. For my personality though it's distressing.
And business owners like tipping because it aligns the employees' interests with their own: bringing in as much revenue as possible.
There are U.S. food service jobs without tipping, for example fast food chains or school cafeteria workers. Do these folks have higher pay as a result? Generally no.
See how that works?
Whenever I've been to the USA I feel I'm being scammed every time I'm required to tip. I know it's your culture but it feels like an emotional extortion, if I don't tip I have to bear the weight of an underpaid employee not making ends meet because I don't think it was fair to see a price and then have to mentally add "20%" just because someone served me.
Worse, for me this culture makes me very uncomfortable by the level of service, I can tell when a waiter is miserable and just fake smiling to get me to tip more. When a waitress is over-the-top charming and nice while being berated by the kitchen staff for a misplaced order, etc.
It just makes every service I get feel fake and forced, to the point where I've avoided going to eat somewhere on days I'm exhausted because I don't want to deal with that weight on top.
I'd much rather just pay 20% over the price and know that the staff is well paid.
Tipping culture just opens a can of worm of abuses...
I wish I could tip them directly after the delivery, but I am concerned that no one would pick up my order if I set the tip to $0 in the app.
Dead Comment
This does not follow purely from the facts presented. Consider: "If a coffee shop wanted to pay their employees more, the coffee shop itself might take a smaller cut and keep prices the same."
Dynamic pricing makes some sense in the concept of trying to capture maximum demand, it just feels horrible as a customer.
If you have a defense (or a response where the phrase "in practice" appears anywhere, really), then that's a separate matter, but it does not follow strictly from the matters presented that the coffee shop "will have to raise prices" in order to pay their employees more. That's, in fact, a stronger claim than the factorable defense that the author (and others who make the same argument) is depending on.
In other words, both "have to" and "can't" are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Deleted Comment
I'm cynical but I see these new places where tipping has showed up as a way shopowners backhandedly raise prices and depress employee wages. And given that there is basically no human interaction, not even eye contact involved in the transaction, I'm not doing it.
And I don't believe we can measure this purely financially, as simply not tipping in a coffeeshop with a tablet now comes with a bigger sentiment of shame, which is especially levied on the ones for which that extra 20% actually matters.
Some genius figured out that asking people to write down a tip on a receipt and signing it was too much friction and off putting, but on a touch screen, where a tap takes a fraction of a second and zero effort, at least some people would not mind hitting the tip button.
And it worked beautifully.
In either case, these price-conscious customers are less likely to come back. But since this PoS tipping trend seems strongest in hip, gentrified shops, maybe they aren’t interested in having less well-off customers in the first place.
Increasingly, in the US, people don't carry cash/coins with them. I might have a "just in case" $20 or two but I mostly don't have currency to cash tip which is probably one reason you see it appearing more on PoS devices.