Never did that. Never even thought of doing that.
I have been to many restaurants in Europe and Japan. I don’t think I’ve been to a chain, but I’ve been to local pubs, things like diners, local mid-price restaurants, and maybe one or two more expensive places. Mostly not upscale, mostly I’m looking for affordable local food. I guess I’ve been to takeaway chains in the UK (pret a manger)
But i have no idea how the public treats the staff, because I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what’s going on at other tables. And… I don’t speak the language, so it’s hard to tell, anyway. I can say that the staff have always treated me well, except at one Indian place in London (where people do tip, so maybe it doesn’t even count) Service is maybe slower at a lot of European places than at most comparable US places. But it’s pleasant and they bring the right food and … I mean, really, what do you expect from a server at a place you’ve never been? Service in Japan is excellent and fairly quick in cheap places. And they were very patient with my total lack of Japanese and clumsy pointing at words in tourist-translation-books. (I never did manage to pronounce the word for “cold water to drink” in a way anyone could understand. But if I pointed to the right word, they were always happy to bring it to me.)
Nor I. The local PTO usually raised funds to give the teacher for extra classroom stuff, and of course I chipped in, but the only time I gave any of the teachers a gift was when my son’s 2nd grade teacher administered the Heimlich maneuver and saved his life. I gave her colorful roses. I mean, there’s obviously nothing that’s adequate to say “thank you for saving my child’s life”, so I went with a conventional gift.
Here’s an article on teacher gifts from the globe and mail talking about the variety of gifts teachers receive and suggesting a $20 max for gift cards. It certainly doesn’t seem uncommon. My mom was a teacher and she brought a box to school the last week to help her pack all of the presents home, she vastly preferred gift cards or cash.
My senior year of high school we gave our German teacher a block of beeswax and a square of cheesecloth for his bare scalp, along with a bottle of whiskey, but that was on his birthday and was a one-time deal. (This was third-year German, and most of us in the class had had him all three years.)
My understanding is that most people in the world take a much more relaxed pace when eating meals; Americans seem to value speed almost more than quality when dining out. (ETA: in the eyes of many foreigners)
I tip because I’ve been a waiter. It informs my expectations. I live in east Asia and have seen those memes about how Asians resent big-tipping Americans. That may be true in Japan, but not in China or Korea. In Korea it depends on the service and the location, sometimes a tip is inappropriate, but when they see my American face, it’s usually appropriate. In China, I actually had cab drivers remind me to tip, in case I was worried about insulting the Revolution and the Worker’s Paradise. In both countries, cabbies are really open to going off the meter and getting paid a flat fee up front (especially if we’re going from one city to another).
In France, I think part of the resistance to tipping is that after the liberation of Paris, overpaid American big shots and their overpaying ways drove the prices of food and clothing up for everybody, not just themselves. The same thing happened in Italy, but they were actually kind of okay with it.
I don’t think you can look at the current shortage of waitstaff and determine it’s because it’s “so hard.” Seems much more likely it’s because people don’t want to have to interact in close contact with strangers who by definition will be unmasked. That has nothing to do with how hard being a server was or wasn’t before COVID.
Variant of #3, 4 and 5: they believe overall quality of service improves if servers have skin in the game. That’s my position. After the revolution, I’d push for wage increases and tips set at 10%.
Based upon my travels in Europe during the 1980s, I think tipping in the US promotes less lackadaisical, less surly service (which I like) as well as more fawning service (which as an introvert, I could do without). I interpret Japan as a special case, as they have a pretty strong service culture across the board (or at least they believe they do, based upon my reading of manga/anime/light novels).
Until then, I adapt to tip inflation. No, my standard tip has never been 10%, but I understand that was the practice during the 1930s. It sounds about right to me.
PS: Ok, now let’s start a thread about whether the penny should be abolished. Who is with me? 
Now that’s just crazy talk. 
I guess @Oredigger77 is ‘everyone else’, since he’s the only person to offer a correction. And I concede I may have misunderstood what you’re saying, and perhaps I still do. But you seem to be responding to something perhaps you’ve heard from others out in real-life or in a different thread. I don’t believe anyone here is advocating for anything other than converting tips to wage. In other words, no one is advocating for cutting the overall pay of waitstaff.
I get it’s a hard job. There are a lot of things that suck about it. It’ll probably always e.arn more than minimum wage. And it’ll probably always have high turnover.
To give credit @doreen also offered a correction as well:
Though to @ZipperJJ, not to me.
I am a genius.
I think this sheds some light on one reason why most restaurants in the US that have tried to switch to a non-tipping model have failed. Servers expect to make as much as they do now under a non-tipping model, and that basically means that restaurants have to increase their prices by 15-20% and give all of that money directly to the servers. However, that rise in sticker prices probably scares away more business than is gained by attracting people who prefer a non-tipped environment. For one, many cheapskates who tip less than 15-20% may no longer visit the restaurant, and for another, people who used to tip over 20% probably now aren’t tipping, so that leads to an overall reduction in revenue for the business/servers. The only thing that leads to increased revenue is the people who used to tip less than 15-20%, but still go to this restaurant at the same frequency.
The other thing is that many owners use the non-tipping model to try to compensate their back-of-house staff better, eg. giving raises to cooks, dishwashers, etc. However, the reality is that servers as a whole care more about maintaining their own wages than improving equity between front-of-house and back-of-house compensation.
Ultimately, I see tipping as a way for restaurants to achieve some level of price discrimination that allows them to increase the size of their market. For a fixed-price restaurant, they may charge $30 for a dish, and will attract people who are willing to pay $30 or more for the dish. However, even if they were willing to pay more than $30, they’ll only end up paying the $30. For a tipped restaurant, they can charge $25, and will attract people willing to pay anywhere between $25 and $35 (or possibly even more for those overly generous tippers), and everyone who was willing to pay more than $30 actually does pay what they feel is reasonable. As well, the servers take on all the risk/benefit of the price discrimination while the owners make the same money on every dish sold. The economics are inherently tilted towards tipped restaurants over non-tipped restaurants. There’s a good article in the Eater that describes the challenges that “hospitality included” restaurants consistently face in the US.
I can understand why some individuals like to tip, @puzzlegal your post #113 captures that well. But how many people who like to tip actually think the system is better than a non-tipped system? (I know several people in this thread have already said they don’t like the system but like to tip as an individual, but it seems like quite a few people are also defending the system).
There just seems to be all sorts of unfairness baked into the tipped-service system:
- Customers can legally stiff a server
- There can be massive disparities in front-of-house vs. back-of-house compensation, especially jurisdictions where servers still get full minimum wage but still enjoy major tips
- It can be used to justify low minimum wages for tipped workers
- It amplifies racial inequality
- It fosters a sense of entitlement in customers since they are paying directly for service
- It encourages people to flaunt their sexuality/act ingenuinely to get more tips
The benefits seem to mainly be:
- Enables price discrimination, which is good for the business
- Can make some customers feel good for various reasons, as per @puzzlegal’s list
- Incentivizes servers to give better service to get more tips
If you ask me, the negatives outweigh the positives.
Moderating:
This is a thread shit. It serves no useful purpose in the thread except to excite disharmony among posters. Please refrain from doing this again.
Not a formal warning.
No matter how you want to fancy it up, if you’re asking to end tipping, you’re asking servers and restaurateurs to take a pay cut. A big pay cut. And that is unconscionable. Would you do it to any other small businesses? Any other public facing workers? Then why do you feel it’s your place to do here?
Servers don’t want tipping to end, every single suggestion in this thread involves severely cutting their current take home income. Restaurant owners don’t want it to end, it keeps their staff motivated, and self selects out shitty servers. Their servers have ‘keeping the customers happy’, as their main objective. Any of the suggestions, here provided, would do exactly the reverse.
So you think you’ve got a better approach. Great. But don’t pretend your concern is some sort of equity for people working exceeding hard, at doing a job you wouldn’t, with crazy shifts and hours, facing John Q Public on the daily, and keeping a smiling face. Because if that was the case you wouldn’t be advocating a giant pay decrease for them.
The same goes doubly for owners. Any idea how risky a restaurant is to run? How changing and challenging it can be? How tight the margins are in most places? If so, how can you dress up your suggestion they take an income cut as wanting ‘better’ for them?
Front of house kickback to compensate back of house staff (still heinous, what other industry would stand still for such a thing?) is a living breathing example of why none of this nonsense you’re proposing would work.
It used to be that FOH staff, when inclined, and unforced, often shot a few bucks to the kitchen staff. Why? Because they helped them make that ‘good night‘. When someone spilled a drink on their dinner and the server needed another double quick, when a late comer regular slipped in and really wants a bite, though you just shut down service, what can you whip up? Or any one of a thousand other things that just come up. And most commonly the kitchen staff were cooperative knowing they’d get looked after by the server. Everybody pulling together makes for better service.
Then the owners decided they should siphon off server tips, on the pretext of increasing wages for BOH staff. But what really happens is the owner pockets most of that money. The servers resent it and are in no way tipping out to to the kitchen on top of that. And now you have disincentivized cooperation between them. Kitchen staff don’t care about the customer who came in two minutes too late. They don’t have to help you fix mistakes, correct accidents or meet special requests, they get the same money if they do or don’t!
It’s not good for anyone, causes conflict and definitely costs the restaurant customers. The old way worked much better, there were fewer Restaurant Nightmares like you see in reality shows.
It’s okay to not understand why servers and restaurant owners find this a system that works well for them. It’s NOT okay to pretend you’re concerned about them, while advocating slashing their income.
That still has a different feel than a tip. To me, a tip would be if your son came home and showed special knowledge of the Battle of Gettysburg so you went to school the next day and slipped the teacher a five dollar bill with a wink and a “good job.”
Or conversely, if your son had a year of history class and didn’t know what a battle was, then the teacher got no gift card or a smaller one, then that seems more like a tip.
Again, no one in this thread is advocating such a thing, regardless of what you feel like asserting here.
Not at all. I expect to pay the same, or a bit more to make up for those who don’t buy as much plus extra taxes. Why would either servers or restauranteurs lose, on average? I really don’t follow this logic at all.
No, I don’t try to cheat businesses. I want them to be prosperous enough to stay in business, and I want their staff to be paid well enough to stick around and master the job. But I don’t tip the guy at the hardware store, even when he’s very helpful in figuring out what I need. I don’t tip the butcher who tells me the Icelandic lamb will be in next week. Why shouldn’t the cost of the waiter, like the cost of those public-facing workers, be built into the price of the product?
People leave it on the table because they want it to go to the server.
If it goes through the till it will never reach the server in full. It removes the ‘extra‘ pay servers make when they go the extra mile for your aging father, screaming baby, spilled soup, etc. And skimming tips is a major cash flow for the owner.
All of this has been repeated in this thread. I’m sorry but it feels quite obvious, and easy to understand.