While good servers do get stiffed sometimes, on the whole, they make adequate money.
I wouldn’t call whiny servers venting evidence sufficient to call the system broken.
Even if employer paid wages were increased, servers would still pit people who didn’t tip them enough, or at all.
Right now more and more professions are getting less benefits, or none at all, when they used to. A lot of them make less money than waiters do, too, and I am not talking about base wages.
That’s fine, let your system win. If the cost of going out to eat increases by 25% or more, I will do it no more than once per month at best. This will result in a loss of revenue to the restaurants. It’s not a threat, it is reality. Your idea may be grand and idealistic, but I doubt it will work out as intended. With a rise in costs, there will be a decrease in demand. That much is certain. With a decrease in demand, there is a need for fewer employees than before. I have not heard complaints that the current system was broken, so all this outrage is news to me. Go for it. Convince a restaurant that this is a better way to go and see how it turns out before trying to get a Congress critter to make it a pet project though, ok?
Well, it seems to work just fine in other countries. I don’t think it’s affected the restaurant industry there.
“Fix it so that tipping is still in existence as a bonus for good service, but so that workers can’t get screwed by tightwads.”
If you raise their base salary, people will tip less, on average. You can’t do a “static analysis” in economics. Actions have consequences.
BTW, I’m wondering what the proposal is for the mechanism of instituting the proposed changes. A federal law? Think of how many restaurants there are and how many owners/servers would have to agree.
Was there a change over from a system like what exists in the US currently?
What are the comparative wages earned by furrin servers, (tips and all)? Do they make more, less or about the same as their American counterparts?
I don’t want to paint with an overbroad brush here, and there are certainly any number of examples of poor service in the U.S. . . . but it is my considered opinion that service in American restaurants is superior to countries where a service charge is included in the bill.
And yes, I have spent a considerable portion of my life living and traveling outside the U.S.
I’ve got a couple of questions:
Why should servers in cheap restaurants get lower tips than those in expensive ones when they work just as hard?
Why do certain service workers get tipped but not others? Why tip a hairdresser but not a mechanic? Why does a bartender get a tip for handing you a bottle of beer but not a drugstore clerk for handing you a pack of cigarettes? I worked as a carpet cleaner and never once received a tip. You can bet that’s harder work than delivering pizzas.
Why do certain service-only transactions (OTOH) require tips? There’s a certain soft logic behind tipping a server or a hotel bellhop–the price is for the food or the room and the tip is for the service. But a haircut or a cab ride is nothing but service, which I’m paying for, so what’s the tip for?
Well, that’s when management needs to step in and get rid of bad employees just like they would in any other industry.
When I was in Australia last year, I really got great service everywhere I went. Maybe I was just lucky, but I certainly didn’t notice service any worse than places here in the States ~ in a lot of cases it was much better!
Maybe we should. Especially at the DMV.
Lets say that you wait on 4 tables over the course of an hour and they average about $40 per table. Lets say they each tip 17.5% (split the diff. between 15% and 20%), that’s $7 a table x 4 = $28, which is a lot more than minimum wage. There will be times where things are slow and you’ll be paid less, but you’ll also be working less and from what I’ve seen it averages out.
I have yet to meet a waiter/bartender who said that they’d prefer that they were paid by the hour. Unless it was waaaay over minimum wage.
I’ve actually done some work on this issue, and aside from current tax treatment and perhaps cultural hangups, my best guess is that it really doesn’t matter that much. This is a perfect example of the indifference principle in economics. You can’t really make the average waiter better off by tipping, because if you make waiting tables more lucrative, more people enter the job, and the wages go down. You might think that the resturants in general benefit: but nope… the tips are essentially returned to diners in the form of lower menu prices.
The ugly truth is that, however nice tipping might seem, the practice historically seems to have a lot more to do with class issues than anything else. It essentially builds in a means of direct control over poor wage workers: so that any one of them can become your personal servant for a time when you please. This is not something you’re likely to find in higher class levels, because in those professions, labor markets are less elastic, more skilled, and employees are given the respect of their clients using much less direct methods to reward and compensate them rather than the customer docking their pay directly and, often, publically. Poorer workers tend to h have much more wildly uncertain incomes because unlike the stable paychecks of better professions, they can’t be certain what each new day will bring.
This, however, is a distinctly ridiculous attitude. We’ve already agreed that the menu prices are low because most of the server’s wages come through tips. That means that you are ALREADY being compensated a great deal in the menu price no matter what sort of service you get. And yet, you’d STILL like to hang the majority of one’s income over the wait staff, instead of over management (by complaining about the service in general or simply not going to the resturant if you don’t like it)
After working as a waiter, I know all too well what this attitude is: some snooty customer, who has not the slightest idea what a waiter’s life is like, what sorts of things cause delays (many of which are completely out of the waiter’s hands), whimsically doling out compensation to servers usually on utterlly fanciful ideas about the service being good or not that often have more to do with how big of an asshole the client is than any difference in service.
The whole country? Wouldn’t that just make everybody fall into the ocean?
This really hinges on how you define work and hard.
Low end restaurants don’t ask as much from their servers as high-end restaurants. At an upscale restaurant your server has a working knowledge of multiple wines, liquers, aperitifs, salad greens, etiquette, cuts of meat, sauces and on and on and on… My server at ihop may well carry the same amount weight over the same distance in the same amount of time as my server @ Chez Le Snobbe but his job definitely isn’t as demanding.
It’s similar to asking why a financial adviser makes more money than an accounts receiving clerk. they each write things down and enter data into computers that have to do with money. Expertise in the service industries is a good deal of the “commodity” you’re paying for.
As to these other questions, i assume that there are historical reasons for whycertain professions are compensated wholly or partially through tips and others are not.
Well, I think I’ve stiffed servers three times in my life.
Once, she never came back. I mean, she took our orders and brought them, but didn’t bring drinks and never stopped by the table again. When we left, she was sitting in a booth (well, lounging in it) with someone, gabbing.
A second time, she never came back. Different person. Same result.
And the third time? I can’t remember, really. I just seem to recall there was a third time.
Now, I suppose there could have been extenuating circumstances, but on the other hand, I sincerely doubt it.
Julie
My take on this differs a bit from SimonX’s. I view it as just paying your dues. It’s more difficult to get a job at Chez Snooti then it is at IHOP. Customers at nice restaurants have significantly higher expectations. If I’m paying $30/plate for my dinner, I damn well expect great service. But when I go to IHOP, I know the service is a crap shoot. If I get Dorko the Incompetent as my server, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not entirely unexpected. As such, there’s a greater tolerance for crappy servers at IHOP than at Chez Snooti. But this means the owner of Chez Snooti needs to make damn sure that his servers are top notch. How? By hiring people who have ample experience. IHOP is an entry level job; Chez Snooti is upper-tier. And the pay (by way of tips) reflects this.
This is by no means unique to the industry. In my company, the artists with the most seniority get paid higher salaries. It’s not because they really do more work, it’s because they do better work, and have proven their ability to do so. They’re more valuable, so they get more.
In most, but not all, cases, there’s a certain expectation of heightened service in some fields. You expect a waiter to provide you with good service, so you tip. You don’t expect the same from a McDonalds clerk, so you don’t. Tipping jobs tend to have a more substantial benefit to the customer from a job well done. Of course, there’s a lot of arbitrariness to tipping. I stil don’t get why I’m supposed to tip the guy who carries my luggage in a hotel. Hell, I’d carry it myself, if he’d just let me. And the service provided by the guy at the counter matters a lot more to me than that of the luggage boy. Short of throwing my bags down the stair well, how can he really screw up?
I look at service-only fields as more of a variable-cost deal. If a haircut costs $15, then I view it as a cost of $15-20, depending on my satisfaction. In a more concrete sense, though, a lot of the cost of, say, a haircut just goes to maintaining the hair salon. Out of that cost comes rent on the place, pay for non-haircutters, cost of equipment upkeep, utilities, and profit for the owner. Then take out another couple bucks for salary for the guy who actually cut your hair. So instead of paying the haircutter $15-20, think of it more as paying them $2-7.
Jeff
Ahh, jjimm, that is what the Pit is for. Seriously.
American-style tipping is an example of non-familial altruism. Psychologists and advocates of behavioral evolution theory have long wondered why we act altruistically in non-familial situations. The answer turns out to be relatively simple - if you don’t act altruistically as you are expected to, you suffer oppobrium and ostracism.
As (IMO) has been established in this thread, the American tipping system is a social good. Customers get better service and save money, waiters get more money and (I don’t thnk anyone has mentioned this) get immediate access to their funds, rather than having to wait until payday, and the owners save money as well.
But the problem is the “freeloader” - the person who takes advantage of the social good for personal benefit, in this case the non-tipper who eats more cheaply than anyone else. What to do?
To cause them to fall in line, the rest of us punish the freeloaders. In studies, people will act in a manner detrimental to their own interests if, by doing so, they are able to punish a freeloader. It appears to be built into our sense of right and wrong.
Americans punish the non-tippers by berating them, ostracizing them, or starting Pit threads about them. 
Usually, you won’t get a second date if you don’t tip appropriately on the first date.
And it works. As you may note from the posts from waiters on this thread, non-tipping is not a huge problem. It happens, but not often enough to cause waiters to quit, etc.
Sua
Of course. For instance, here in France, where a 15% service is included in the bill (and actually in the prices posted/printed on the menu), and where waiters are paid at least the minimum wages and sometimes way more than that, it’s well known that there isn’t a single restaurant still in existence, since they all went out of business due to the high wages 
As I think has been pointed out, there’s nothing particularly altruistic about tipping. Most of the supposed good effects are either entirely illusory (like the idea that someone somehwere gets or spends more money) or, like your money in the pocket insight, could easily be replaced by a differing pay treatment by owners that would be no more radical than the institution of tipping itself. Even non-tippers don’t change the situation much: all they do is slightly lower the average wage that servers can earn, which lowers the attractiveness of the job, which means less people are wont to go into it as compared to other jobs, which means that the real wage has to increase slightly to get full employment, which means that average waiter is ultimately not necessarily any better or worse off than before.
If tipping has any real benefit, it’s that it forces Americans to do a little math once and awhile, which can’t hurt. 
But how is this different from any other type of business you’d care to mention?
And what’s all this about “great service” at a restaurant? Either your server screws up or she doesn’t, and 9 times out of 10 they don’t. How “great” can it possibly be?
Nobody’s mentioned another effet that tipping has- it ties the financial success of the waitstaff with the restaurant. If the restaurant is busy, the server will most likely make a lot of money. If it’s slow, then the owner isn’t paying a premium amount for someone to do very little.
Well, to large extent, there’s a correlation between how much you interact with the server and whether or not you tip. In addition, the degree to which the server’s performance can affect the experience plays a role. McDonalds? Little interaction, and either you get the food or you don’t - no tipping. Waiter? About an hour of off-and-on interaction, and the quality of service can impact the experience heavily - tipping. Hair stylist? Constant interaction for some amount of time, and the quality of service is extremely important - tipping. Of course, as I also mentioned, there is some arbitrariness, and many exception. But it’s not entirely random.
Surely you must see more to a waiter’s performance than whether or not he screws up (by which I assume you mean brings the right food). There’s the waiter’s attitude and demeanor - is he friendly and courteous? There’s the degree to which he maintains his attention on your table. Does he refill your drinks the second they’re empty, or do you have to wait 10 minutes with an empty glass, and hunt him down? Is he too pushy? Does he know the menu? Can he answer questions accurately? Proper waiting is practically an artform. At the least, it’s a highly demanding skill. Of course, this holds more true the higher the quality of the restaurant.
On a different note, from what I’ve heard from a few people, this who thread may be rather moot. It seems that more and more restaurants are simply pooling tips, and splitting everything between all waiters at the end of the night, along with cuts for busboys and the like. In these places, whether you’re brilliant or inept, you get the same amount. If you’re caught keeping cash tips for yourself, it can mean trouble. Is this a growing phenomenon? Is it common? Do I just happen to know the people working at the crappier joints?
Jeff