There are other “restaurants” where the food and service are crap (like Denni’s), and yet we are expected to tip there.
Why is McDonald’s cheaper than the tip-required crappy restaurants?
Didja see my full list of reasons, which don’t apply to Denny’s?
Note also that the cost of serving you the food is minimal at McDonald’s: a single employee can handle far more McDonald’s customers than Denny’s customers. So the service charge is higher at Denny’s.
And if you don’t want to be bothered figuring out the tip, I’m sure you can ask the wait staff to add an 18% gratuity, and they’ll gladly do it.
Daniel
Because fast food is not the same as a sit-down place.
Actually, it might be cool if restaurants had two types of menus.
One, like the current ones, where tax and tip are not included.
And another, where the sales tax and, say, 18% tip are included in the price of all foods.
This way, everyone gets the menu they want.
Of course, I’d always pick the second menu type.
Because that’s the goal of the McDonald’s corporation: the cheapest possible food at the quickest possible pace. That’s why you order at a counter, and not from a waiter. If McDonalds switched to a traditional restaurant model, its prices would increase significantly, regardless of wether or not you were supposed to tip the servers. Fast food restaurants are geared for one thing, and one thing only: speed. “Real” restaurants are trying to provide an enjoyable dining experience, and that costs more. You’re comparing two entirely different business models, here. You’re not going to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.
If McDonald’s decided to start having waiters, and also decided against tips, it would cost more than it currently does, but it would still be cheaper, or at least as cheap as low-end restaurants like Denny’s and IHOP.
And your point is?
Here is my opinion on tips from the employer perspective:
I am doing something totaly unrelated to restaurants, but I employ people to provide a certain service to my customers. About half of the customers do not tip at all, which is OK since tipping is not mandatory in Greece for any service. Most of those who tip will give about 10-15%, 20% tops.
But there are a handful of customers who will tip from 50% to 100% or even more. My employees feel obliged to provide better service to those customers and on busy days when there is not enough time, that means that non-tipping customers will receive sub-par service.
As a business owner i want all my customers (tipping and non-tipping) to receive service of the same quality.
While the theory behind tipping is solid (rewarding good servers with a big tip - punishing bad servers with small/no tip), in practice it doesn’t always work that way. That’s why many businesses in Europe have signs on their premises saying “No tips allowed”.
Do you need help in understanding it?
Yes, prices will certainly go up, but why abolishing tips would result in receiving worse service?
Again, your point is…? These waiters would demand a tip as part of their compensation, or, they wouldn’t wait tables. People sitting down at the wait-staffed McDonald’s would expect to tip their waiters. We all agree that prices would still be lower because McDonald’s has economies of scale, among other reasons already cited.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was suddenly implemented. That was a typo on my part, but IMHO, it was pretty obvious what I meant.
Then why are there swaths of the domestic population who don’t know about it? Plenty of people here think of tipping as an extra reward given for exceptional service that merely amounts to padding the server’s pocket change rather than an expected payment of service that makes up the bulk of the server’s income. Did you read elmwood’s cites? He posts them all the time, and from memory I recall that in them non-tipping native Americans who were ignorant about the importance of tipping changed their habits once they were told by a third party why they should tip. So this isn’t just about stubborn cheapskates.
How about a shortcut pathway?
Having served before, I know that $5 is usually the minimum that any server would find acceptable to get from one check. Never as low as a dollar for a sit-down meal.
You’re bringing in hypotheticals that have no bearing on what’s going on in the here and now. IOW, “if ‘if’ were a skiff, we’d all go sailing”.
So I don’t know … how does this play out in your daily life? Do you philosophically refuse to tip, tip but hate it, or something else?
I’m not hopping on that bandwagon.
How do (generic) you go about changing the American psyche to abolish tips? Do you think a mandate from the top is going to change the ingrained habits of hundreds of millions of people? If Bush signed an Executive Order saying “No More Tipping - As of July 1, 2006, employers must now abide by minimum wage laws and the IRS must no longer expect tip income”* that suddenly everyone would stop tipping or expecting tips? What is the upside to forcing such a change?
*Yes, I know that it wouldn’t be that easy and that it would have to go through the legislative process
“Swaths of the domestic population”? It’s true that there are Americans who don’t about tipping … but among all restaurant goers, their numbers are insignificant. Indeed, to be unaware of the tipping culture, you pretty much have to have been shielded from it (e.g. grew up eating out rarely, if ever, like I did).
Let’s not take folks on the extremes, and treat them as part of the average.
In my humble 40 years’ life experience, the vast, and I’m talking vast majority of people who claim ignorance about tipping are very much like the people who claim ignorance each and every time you remind them to put the toilet seat back down. They’ve heard it fifty times already. They just refuse to acknowledge they heard, or “grasped” the concept.
No, I was only asking because I’m trying to pump up my post count. :rolleyes:
Because having raises controlled by one manager who is incapable of directly over-seeing every transaction is waitstaff engages in is not as accurate a way of rewarding hard work. When you get right down to it, in any industry, people ultimatly get raises by getting the person in charge of the raises to like them. Obviously, an employee who’s lazy and incompetent is not going to be liked by their manager. But if you have two employees who have equal output, the employee who’s funny or interesting or likable is going to get the bigger raise. The way things work in restaurants now, the person in charge of giving out that “raise” is the customer. If the waiter is not only good at his job, but pleasant and witty and what-have-you, he gets the bigger tip than the waiter who doesn’t do anything more than make sure the order is accurate and prompt. If you switched to a strictly hourly basis, the waiter no longer has an incentive to be all of that to the customers. He just has to be all of that to his manager. The result: dining in general becomes a less pleasant experience for the diner. Not to the point where the waiter is openly rude or contemptuous of the customer, but the transaction is likely to become much more businesslike and impersonal, because there’s no real incentive for the waiter to go that extra mile to make the customer happy. He just has to make the customer happy enough not to complain to the manager.
You’re being extreme. Just about every American is a restaurant goer. You’re talking about regular restaurant goers - they’re the one’s who are insignificant. Ask any server about weekends - Friday and Saturday night is when the average American decides to eat out. Restaurants are packed; yet those are the skimpiest nights of the week in terms of tips. Those enthusiatic enough about food and wealthy enough to spend good money on it are the type who eat out on Wensdays, and they more than pay their share, but they aren’t average. BTW, did you even read those cites?
I was merely responding to Miller’s ‘if’ from way back:
“When in Rome, …”
Sounds like every restaurant I’ve ever eaten at in Europe, with very few exceptions. Those exceptions being when I was pretty sure the waiter & I were flirting.