See the post further upthread from Machine Elf. In a restaurant without tipping (where all wages were included in the food prices), some customers got angry because they felt that the absence of tipping reduced their say in the waiters’ income.
I’m guessing the OP might be another of those people who derives some sort of pleasure (or self-aggrandizement, or whatever it is) from being able to make imperious decisions about how much money his server will receive. Remove tipping, and you remove his chance to lord it over a minimum-wage worker, and that’s just wrong.
I’ve lived for extended periods in countries with and without tipping. I’ve worked as a bartender and waiter for extended periods in countries with and without tipping. I worked just as hard when i worked for wages alone as when i worked for tips. And, at least in my experience, service is not really any better or any worse, overall, in one environment or the other.
I don’t think that the first paragraph necessarily follows, though. If minimum wage laws do need improving, that’s still no reason to carve out a special category of worker that, for arbitrary reasons, has his or her wages directly subsidized by the paying customer rather than paid by the employer.
You say that most restaurant owners would, if they simply raised prices and abolished tipping, simply pocket the extra money. Assuming this is true, why does this worry you more than, say, Whole Foods pocketing the money you pay for your overpriced organic produce, or Safeway taking the profit from your milk and cereal purchases? If your local garage or car dealer raises the hourly rate for your annual tune-up, do you grill him about how much of that money is paid to the actual mechanics? Do you assume that increases in your cable bill go into the pockets of Comcast service techs or phone representatives, or into the profit margins? For that matter, why provide direct compensation to the person who carries your food from the kitchen to the table, but not to the person who actually cooks the food for you, or the one who washes up the pots and pans and your dirty dishes in the kitchen?
I think that all employees should be paid a decent wage. I’m just not sure that the way to encourage fairer compensation is to create arbitrary categories of people whom we reward with extra money for simply doing the job for which we supposedly pay their employer.
Also, tipping encourages tax evasion. Whether you like taxes or not, we should all pay what we owe. Yes, the IRS and the FTB come after some of the wages earned by tipped employees, but i know from personal experience, and from people in the industry, that it’s very easy for a waiter to pay less income tax than he or she is supposed to. Why should the waiter who earns a pre-tax income of, say, 30 or 40 or 50 grand a year pay substantially less tax than the delivery driver or the clerical worker or the school teacher on the same pre-tax income?
I’ve always been inclined to suspect evil from every employer who I’ve ever had, but I think this problem will self correct.
I think it’s entirely possible that in a small town or depressed area a restaurant could increase prices, institute no tipping, then not provide a fair wage increase. However, it seems like the no tipping experiments are happening in areas that have a very strong restaurant culture.
If the waitstaff at a no tipping restaurant in San Francisco are not making competitive wages, then that restaurant will very soon have the worst waiters in San Francisco. I’ve waited tables for years, waitstaff are not disinclined to walk away from one restaurant for a job at a better one. All the best waitstaff from the evil restaurant that you describe would leave and get a job at a restaurant that still uses the tipping model or a no tipping restaurant that pays a competitive wage.
Even if the evil were industry-wide, all the really good waitstaff would change professions and all the new waitstaff would suck.
Sure, but from my understanding of the situation, if the enforcement mechanisms fail in these cases it’s not so much that complaints get ignored or badly investigated; it’s more that many waiters, especially in low-end jobs in states with few protections, don’t know what their actual rights are and therefore don’t file complaints. That, or they are threatened with firing by their bosses if they bring up the issue of non-compliance.
Barbara Ehrenreich talked about this in Nickel and Dimed. It’s been a while since i read it, and i can’t seem to find my copy in the junk of my office right now, but she talked about how the waitstaff she worked with (in Florida, IIRC, but it doesn’t really matter where) had no idea that their employer was supposed to make up any shortfall in their wages if tips did not bring them up to the federal minimum. They were also, in many cases, poor and poorly educated folks who wouldn’t have known where to start in filing a complaint.
Yes, I’m not saying the mechanisms are necessarily flawed. I’m saying the number of employees willing to risk their jobs to report these violations are tiny (even among the pool who know the law is being violated.)
I’m pretty sure there are standardized labor law posters employers have to post somewhere public; everywhere I’ve worked, except for a few strictly white collar places have had that stuff prominently posted in the breakrooms and/or near the time clocks.
There’s usually numbers and websites for the State agencies that investigate that kind of thing listed on the poster.
I don’t have much sympathy for someone who doesn’t read the sign.
That sounds great to me. The price I see is the price I pay? I’d like that.
I’ve had good waiters and I’ve had less good waiters, but on the other hand I’ve had good experiences in the checkout lane at the grocery store and poorer experiences. In my experience, whether a job is tipped or not does not correlate well with how the service is.
But the second paragraph doesn’t follow from the first either.
As for them being “separate thoughts,” they are still ostensibly addressing the same issue: how we determine compensation for different types of work.
If it makes you feel better, i can phrase it thus: I agree with your second thought. Your first thought demonstrates inconsistency and arbitrariness rather than thoughtfulness and logic. Happy now?
You are right, the second paragraph is directed at percentage tipping. The first paragraph is not.
I will clarify my position: it is irrational to have a few classes of workers (mostly waiters) whose wages are largely dependent on the whims of the customer. In the rest of the labor force, compensation is worked out between the employer and employee. I do not see any reason to involve random customers in it, aside from “we’ve always done it that way”.
Hey Ulf, I saw it itemized out on a tab I received from a high end restaurant back in 2010. I remember that because the restaurant would ship in fresh prawns daily from The Gulf. (They were so Yummy. Gimme gimme gimme…). The next day was the BP oil spill.
I never went back and they appear to be outta business.
