“Altruistic” in that you make a voluntary action that is, at least immediately, detrimental to your interests.
I disagree. I read your analysis, and you ignore taxation benefits for all three parties. A service charge included in the tab would be taxable, an increase in base salary mandates increased tax payments by the owners,* and of course, waiters can underreport earnings (not that they would. :D)
Sua
*admittedly, much of this increased taxation is social security taxes, which benefits the waiter. But since we all know Social Security won’t be around by the time we retire, I feel safe in ignoring this.
When tipping first started out, it could have been described as such: but today, as a standard part of dinning, I don’t see how this definition applies. Exceptional differences might be altruistic: for instance, tipping more than the standard rate. But the more regular it becomes, the more it simply gets reflected in prices.
I challenge your claim that you read my analysis. I explicitly pointed out the exception of differential tax treatment.
Of course the cool thing about American tipping practices, is that many US tourists don’t realise the difference outside the US, and tip huge amounts of ca$h to service staff around the world who aren’t expecting nearly as much.
An altruistic act is an act you do not have to commit that is, at least immediately, detrimental to your interests. Since, even today, you do not have to leave a tip (a laBlacknight), it remains altruistic.
As for your assertion that I did not read your analysis, your entire discussion of tax effects was “aside from current tax treatment…”
As you later concluded that the only real benefit of tipping was forcing Americans to do math every once in a while, it is apparent that, despite the fact that you mentioned them in passing, you do not believe that the tax effects are a real benefit.
That doesn’t excuse you acting as if I had never noted it at all.
And the reason one normally doesn’t count tax benefits is because taxes aren’t benefits OR losses. The fact that one avoids taxes is a net gain to them… and a net loss to other people who have to pay larger share of taxes to compensate for whatever level of revenue the government is trying to aim for. So one generally doesn’t count the impact of taxes as anything other than an efficiency loss, when we’re talking about specific cost/benefit calculation (in which case people seeking to avoid taxes via tipping would be a LOSS to society, not a gain, because people would be expending economically wasteful efforts to avoid paying a tax).
But when one is talking ultimately about a practice itself in a larger context, it makes even less sense to count the effect of tax treatment, because tax treatment can be changed any day of the week. It’s not relevant to the actual practice under consideration (tipping). That’s why I didn’t and dont count it as relevant to the practice itself. If the government wanted to start more zealously taxing tips, it could. Or it could stop taxing resturant transactions altogether. From the perspective of the practice of tipping, these changes are arbitrary, and the ability for tipping to avoid taxation is not by any means a benefit of the practice.
I don’t have a problem with tipping in restaurants. But if we could get rid of most of the other tipping situations, so that there were, say, less than 10 all told, that would be a tremendous social good. You could put all the standard tipping rules on a wallet-sized card, and end the eternal confusion about whether/when/how much to tip.
