In restaurants that I’ve been to in the US that are “no-tipping”, they pay their staff a higher wage. There is no space on the credit card receipt to leave a tip, and there is no service fee added to the bill. The prices of their menu items are priced up to cover what would have been a tip.
They have signs up and on the menu and on the bill, that stipulates that there is no tipping.
If you’re arguing that the form of the disclosure might be inadequate, that’s a different matter. I’m assuming that you as the customer have received disclosure adequate enough to give you actual knowledge of the policy.
Yeah, I agree. Most of Europe gets enough tourists from enough cultures to just accept tip or no tips, whatever.
Anecdote. I was once chased down the street from a restaurant in Paris for NOT tipping (long story, bad service). That was in 1999, so the idea that you never tip in France sure isn’t true for everywhere.
I take it this means “no tipping required”, not “no tipping permitted”. I eat at a “no tipping” restaurant but leave a tip, what happens?
And in the US, the restaurant would have to pay at least minimum wage, and probably a lot more than minimum wage to attract and retain good servers, if they had a no-tipping policy.
It’s not “wage theft” if I leave money on the counter for the butcher at the supermarket, and he doesn’t get to keep that money. Hell, in my job, if a customer tries to give me extra money it’s called bribery, and it’s illegal for me to accept it, and I’d be fired for taking it.
I imagine it depends on the place.
I ate at a restaurant in Austria with no tipping required. Not understanding that, I tried to leave a small tip. The waiter told me that if I paid more with my credit card, it would just go to the restaurant, and if I actually wanted to tip him, it had to be cash.
Indeed, when a bunch of big New York restaurants instituted no tipping policies a few years ago they did raise hourly wages. And one of their concerns is that tipping meant that front of the house employees made a lot more money than back of the house employees. But wage laws prevented them from making servers share their tips with cooks.
One of my friends caught a snarky comment in Australia after not leaving a tip. They heard her (American) accent, and evidently thought it was worth trying it on.
Perhaps the French restaurant thought I was American (I’m not).
Ahh, hadn’t thought of that, as I (almost) always tip cash.
Tipped employees worldwide often want to get tips in cash so they can cheat on their income taxes with less risk of getting caught. Or it could also be a sharing issue, in cases where they are allowed to share tips with other employees but would rather keep more than their agreed share. Or it could be a restaurant management that says it will pass tips paid via CC along in full, but the employees doesn’t trust them. Or it could be what the person told you, simply a policy thing. I’d take a statement like that with a grain of salt though, myself.
Although I would not actually refuse to leave a tip or give a smaller one just because I was asked (nicely) to give it in cash. It doesn’t generally leave a good impression with me though, in part because I think the first explanation is by far the most common across all restaurants in all places.
Besides that specific wrinkle, I’d note that a tiny % of NY restaurants started doing that ca 5 yrs ago and media articles since have mentioned ones reversing course.
Re the recent related thread about why don’t ‘we’ end tipping: the only meaningful ‘we’ in such a scenario is the govt, and since it’s highly unlikely there would ever be laws against tipping* it’s really hard to overcome entrenched customs with basically individual choice (a few restaurants in NY getting together is still basically individual, there are something like 27,000).
Not to say ‘no tip’ can’t be a marketing niche, like all other kinds of niche restaurants.
*people generally against further collectivization of life under the control of the govt would object on the usual grounds; people generally in favor of more collectivization will probably have higher priorities of things to further collectivize, overcoming the opposition of the first group each time, for a long time to come.
You are correct.
There was a struggling seafood restaurant near me that switched over to a no tip policy. They claimed they would pay their waitstaff more than the minimum wage. I am also assuming they thought it would increase business. The first thing I noticed during my first visit with the new policy was a substantial increase in prices. The place went out of business shortly after the change.
Well, yes, that’s the tradeoff. If you eliminate tipping, the cost of service still has to be paid for, whether through a mandatory service charge, or incorporated into the menu prices.
I think that sums up the two basic reasons ‘no-tip’ is going no-where generally:
There are other patterns like this in micro economics. Seems strange restaurants ‘can’t’ just function like the great majority of other jobs (non-min wage, non-union) where the market sets a wage firm owners and employees can both live with, without tips or an external party telling them what the wage must be (though not necessarily happily, employees always want more pay, owners always want more profit, as a rule everybody wants more). But the issue here isn’t steady state function, it’s shifting from one custom to another. That can easily be stalled indefinitely when it makes people stop to think about things such as 1 and 2 which they don’t have to think about in status quo.