That is very true there just as it is in Japan. You don’t have to check out Yelp to see if you are going to get edible food over there. In the US, sadly you do.
Aside from the occasional Curb Your Enthusiasm episode or Tarantino flick.
I think it was @LSLGuy who called the US primarily an “economic culture” (in another thread). The tipping situation here exemplifies this. While other cultures might optimize their foodscapes for, say, tastiness or health or tradition or agrarian heritage or whatever, we just treat ours like one big, industrialized factory, with cooks, servers, and customers all mere cogs in a great big trickle-up of wealth. The food is functional, the service is performative, and the whole ritual of it is just learned helplessness.
Who actually profits from this entrenched enshittification? It’s not like small business restaurant owners are Wall Street fat cats. The margins are razor thin and they’re some of the hardest businesses to run, frequently going under. Who’s keeping all the profits… Sysco? Monsanto? Annheiser? How come we haven’t seen this industry reshaped into something better, while so much else in the country has changed? Or WAS that the change, away from small family farms and distributors into giant agricultural conglomerates?
IMHO, it’s largely because America’s viewpoint on economics is a zero-sum one of mutual hostility between everyone involved. The customers are the enemy. The employees are the enemy. The management is the enemy. Your co-workers are the enemy. The suppliers are the enemy.
So nobody wants to make things better because that means letting the “enemy” win. Everyone wants to make things worse, because that hurts the “enemy”.
That applies to about half of Americans in all aspects of their lives, not just the economy. But a very good point, if a bit of an overgeneralization.
Amongst me and my circle of friends, we’ve given up on going out for the most part. The pandemic had us all buying restaurant grade cooking accoutrements: Smokers, grills, flat-tops, woks, etc. Through the power of Youtube, we learned we can cook outstanding food (we already knew my wife could do this). And we all do now. We have dinner parties and the food is a huge notch above what we overpay at restaurants. I can mix cocktails above what you pay outrageous sums for at craft bars. For the most part, we don’t go out because the food is not good enough. Why pay $100+ for a dinner out with an OK burger when we can do a smash burger on our Blackstone, along with outstanding fries, and mix up an amazing Old Fashioned to go with it, all for a third or less the price?
I don’t get that… why not keep the jar, and just spread the tip love around the servers? Seems like the best of both worlds- the servers are fairly compensated, and the people who want to give them a little extra for exceptional service can do so.
That way, you get back to the original intent behind tips- to reward for good service, not be part of their actual compensation. And I’m all for that, while I think paying a sub-minimum wage for tipped employees is tantamount to piracy.
But that said, I do get annoyed when people manage to imply, intentionally or otherwise, that MY tip directly impacts their ability to live a good life, and I’m obligated/honor-bound to tip this person far in excess of the customary 15-20%.
That’s what I’m getting at! It’s not only that the price has gone up, but the expectation is that we are going to pay our servers more as well… for something. Certainly they’re not giving me 5 or 10% better service than say… 10 years ago.
I don’t know; I can’t speak for those establishments or their staff…
If I had to guess, maybe they’re just as sick of the tipping culture as many of us here are? Or maybe they don’t want customers to feel obligated to tip (as many currently do) — which would make it just another expectation on top of already-higher prices.
I don’t know that tipping really motivates good service to any meaningful degree… if it ever did, well, it certainly doesn’t seem to these days, since it’s more just an obligation than a reward now. Maybe it’s one variable among many, but there seems to be much larger variances in quality of service when you compare between individuals, establishments, locales, and (IMHO most importantly) cultures/countries.
Good service should just be the default expectation if your job role is customer-facing. That’s already the norm for anybody who earns enough to live without tips… mechanics, plumbers, electricians, dentists, teachers (well, they really should be paid more), booksellers, etc. It IS the norm in many other countries, including places where average quality of service is both better or worse than in the US.
And even just within the US, the best service I tend to get is from small family-owned restaurants or food trucks whose food is relatively inexpensive to begin with. They also have to juggle many orders, substitutions, dietary restrictions, etc., all in a tiny space with poor ventilation. A 20% tip there might get them $2-3 vs a 10% tip for a server at luxury steakhouse getting $20-$30. I don’t think the server at the fancy steakhouse is necessarily working any harder than the food truck workers… even discounting all the cultural differences, tipping as a reward for good service just doesn’t mathematically work out when it’s a percentage of a dollar amount that has nothing to do with their service or sweat to begin with. It’s a crazy, stupid system. It’s even more detached from individual performance when (as in many establishments) tips are split and shared anyway.
The baseline should be “good enough” service for livable wages — both of which vary depending on region. And if someone does an exceptional job, their reward should be a heartfelt thank you and maybe a mention to the manager. Let the business itself retain, promote, and otherwise reward that employee. They’re professionals; let’s just pay and treat them as such to begin with instead of throwing treats at them like pets…
I guess re: Doordash, I’ve seen too many reports about non-deliveries when their tip is not enough to try them; is it true that with DD the tip is shown on the order slip? with other delivery services I’ve used, tip is offered/given AFTER delivery
but remember the DD driver is doing nothing more than a pickup, not cooking; granted, it also involves travel to and from restaurant site and then to you, plus waiting in line time (+gas costs), so that’s a factor
I did DD/GH part time like 2017-2020 when I was in school so my knowledge is out of date, how it would work then is that you’d get an offer that would give you a map. Pick up from this restaurant, deliver to this house, offer is $7.83. You didn’t know specifically what the tip or was, but TYPICALLY those services paid like $2 plus maybe 30 cents a mile or something, so you could guess that it was probably ~$4 from DD/GH and a ~$4 tip. You needed to know the total to make an informed decision about whether to take the offer or not. Because if someone didn’t tip, you might get an offer to take something from a restaurant in a really busy part of town to a high traffic area and take 40 minutes delivering a $3 order.
I never worked for ubereats. My understanding is that they’re actually the worst of the bunch and they don’t even tell you where you’re picking up or dropping off, so you can’t make any informed decision at all. Uber the taxi service also works the same way from what I hear. Ridiculous.
I know doordash started manipulating that information in 2018 or so, they would tell you the offer is worth at least $5 and you’d have no idea if it was worth $5 or $15. This was both manipulative to drivers and a disservice to customers because if the customer was generous and gave a good tip (which generally should prompt quicker acceptance and better service) we wouldn’t know who tipped well until after the delivery was completed. GH remained honest about what the offer paid through the time I was still working, but there was suspicion they were manipulating the offers sent to you based on your acceptance rate.
These companies were in a constant race to manipulate the drivers. Since the services themselves didn’t pay very much at all (basically enough to offset your driving expenses), the gig drivers work for tips. So how do you get someone to deliver offers with no tips and basically work for free or even lose money on a delivery? The whole system is stupid, of course - like everything else, they should just price it in and pay the drivers fairly, but of course they won’t because that’s too fair and not exploiting enough.
Those jobs (along with uber) were pretty good flexible part time work for the first few years of their existence when they were burning venture capital to keep everyone happy. Once they started having to show a profit, it became all about manipulating and deceiving the gig workers as much as possible and they turned to complete shit. Given how fast they got worse from when I was doing them, I have to imagine they’re absolutely awful now.
I always figured they had really high turnover, and as they screwed/manipulated people, lots of people would try the job for a few weeks and quit and they just assumed they had an infinite supply of new gig workers. But I have to imagine now that everyone who was willing to work those jobs already did and rejected them for being shitty, so it makes me wonder where they get their gig workers now, and if maybe they turned it around and started making it fairer and more transparent to drivers.
Random trivia: GH customers tipped much better for whatever reason. And it wasn’t necessarily because they were richer, you’d usually deliver to the same sort of neighborhoods. But they sucked as a logistics company because they made no effort to match your arrival with when the food was ready, they just sent out orders as soon as they came in. So if you got an order for a pizza place across the street, it might be 20 minutes until the order was actually ready to pick up, so you’d just sit there for 20 minutes doing nothing. They didn’t give a shit about driver efficiency.
Doordash was much better at the logistics side of thing where they’d at least try to get you to places as the order became ready, but they were far more manipulative at hiding vital information from you, and a MUCH scummier company with restaurants.
GH would only work with partner restaurants that signed up to work with GH. Doordash would just involuntarily put restaurants on their service. They’d use old outdated or wrong menus all the time (whatever they could find on the web), and there would be all kinds of problems because someone (either from a call center or a driver) would come in and make the order and get it all wrong because DD had the wrong information, and then the customer would blame the restaurant for the fuckup even though they had nothing to do with it. Some were actively hostile and hated that doordash was abusing them like this. It’s shocking it was legal. Doordash also worked with partner restaurants, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were basically extorted into working with doordash just so they’d stop getting flak from customers for DD’s fuckups.
It is supposedly becoming pretty common for the tip calculations on those machines to be wildly higher than what they claim. I cannot figure out they can claim that 15% of a $20 purchase is $6.00.
Also, watch the sales tax figures. I know of one restaurant that charges 50% more in sales taxes than the maximum.
I typically go out to eat once or twice a month. My own cooking is better than our local restaurants.
On the Monday before Thanksgiving, one local restaurant had a special Thanksgiving special at lunch. I had pretty much abandoned that restaurant but gave them one more chance.
The menu was a salad, ham and turkey, green beans, a roll, and a drink.
The salad was okay, but that’s hard to mess up unless you get the lettuce out of the dumpster.
The ham was the toughest ham I have ever tried to eat. I wasn’t even able to cut much of it.
The turkey was cut by someone who didn’t understand how to slice meats.
The only thing worth eating was the roll.
I haven’t had a good meal at that restaurant in years.
The restaurant next to my office is also pathetic. The last time I got the chicken fried steak there, it was so tough that it made my teeth hurt. One odd thing about that restaurant is that the owner had never even been in a restaurant, much less eaten in one, prior to buying that restaurant. It shows.