So last election, we had a ballot initiative in Maine to increase the minimum wage to $9 per hour (and raise it by $1 per year until it gets to $12, and thenceforth indexed to inflation).
It also eliminated the tip credit, so restaurateurs are no longer allowed to subtract tip income; they must pay the full minimum wage regardless of any tips earned by their staff.
So based on that information, how much, if anything at all, should I tip when going out to eat?
Zero. Tipping is a stupid necessity when restaurants are allowed to underpay staff. Why would you tip them when they get paid the same as everyone else? Sure, waiting tables is hard work but not harder than a lot of work that is traditionally paid minimum wage and never tipped.
If you enjoyed yourself, tip what you’d like to be paid for serving someone and making them happy. Minimum wage is minimum, after all.
The service ought to be of the same value now as it was prior. Does how much you get paid for your services hinge on how much you’re making? Or the service itself? Should people pay less for you to do, whatever you do, whenever you get a raise?
That said, if you don’t want to tip. Don’t tip. Just do everybody around you a favour and resist telling all and sundry, the why and how, of your reasons. Especially if you finish up with, “I’m NOT cheap!”
(People WILL think you’re cheap, there’s no way around it. That’s just part of not tipping, deal with it!)
Forgive me, but that sounds like you are talking in circles. If servers are making more in wages and performing the same tasks, why should diners still tip the same amount? It seems to me that restaurants will have to increase menu prices to pay the higher wages. So, if the cost of a certain meal goes up from $10.00 to $11.00, you think the consumer should absorb this cost and still pay the server the same (or even higher if you pay a percentage) tip? Or should diners figure that the extra dollar is going to the server and reduce their tip by the same dollar, keeping their total the same? I suspect that the actual result will be somewhere in the middle.
Minimum wage laws are inflationary, and also make employers look to non-worker alternatives like ordering kiosks, payment gizmos at the table, etc.
There probably aren’t any such establishments in Maine now, but there are actually places in the USA where wait staff actually pays management for the right to serve customers and get exposure to tip potential, which is far above the minimum wage.
How does Maine law account for that?
If I were a restaurant owner, I would post a notice to the effect that “This restaurant pays a fair wage to all employees, which is reflected in the menu prices, but an optional tip is always appreciated.” I think a great majority of diners would continue to tip according to service.
IMHO your moral obligation to tip becomes significantly less if you know the servers are being paid at least minimum wage without tips.
Rules about tipping are mainly a matter of agreed-upon social convention. I would want to find out what the common understanding is (or becomes) in an area like that, and let myself be guided by it.
If tipping were completely optional, to where I wouldn’t be doing anything unusual or violating any social norms either by tipping or by not tipping, my inclination would be to not tip for minimal adequate service but give some kind of a tip for anything that went above and beyond that.
At any decent type of restaurant, making a few buck an hour more isn’t going to be a huge change in the take-home pay of the waitstaff. What am I going to do-- withhold a dollar off the tip so it’s $14 instead of $15? If it’s a cheap-o diner, then the waitstaff isn’t making much in tips, either. This would not affect my tipping at all. Most of the places I go to I’m a regular at, so I like to tip well and get that extra bit of service that makes the experience all that much better. I can afford to be generous, and so if I’m making someone else’s life a bit better in the process, then win-win.
To an extent, I agree with this. Customers don’t need to know how or how much employees are paid.
But a law like this severely alters the old canon - servers rely on tips because they are getting paid $2-something an hour. If it is well-publicized by the media and/or restaurant owners, people will become aware of the changing landscape. I can only imagine that it will be tremendously burdensome on restaurants. If server payroll more than doubles (which is easy to imagine if hourly pay goes from under $4.00 an hour to $9.00 an hour), a restaurant will have no choice but to raise prices, which can be expected to reduce demand and the number of meals served.
Time will tell if this works to the advantage of servers - if they get higher base pay and still get similar tips - or if it backfires when restaurants cut shifts and fire employees… and raise prices… and go out of business.
Yeah, this will hurt the smaller, non-chain restaurants. The Mom and Pop places we here so much about as being the bedrock of the communities. Pretty soon, everyone will be eating at the food court in Walmart. 
Interesting article from Maine that touches on all of the bases without coming to a conclusion… which is probably all one can know until the law is in effect for awhile.
If a customer is used to paying $10 for a meal and $1.50 for a tip, the restaurant shouldn’t be reducing demand if they raise the price of the meal to $11.50 without a tip. If the business isn’t doing terribly to begin with, the servers will each be waiting on multiple tables an hour, so it’s not as though each single meal’s price needs to be raised so much to cover the full additional pay for a server.
There is no tip credit in California, and everyone here still tips the standard amounts: around 15% for decent service.
Yesterday, the server at the luncheonette made $3/hr + $6/hr in tips & my lunch cost $12 + $2.50 tip. Today, the new law is in effect, the proprietor raised prices so that same lunch costs me $15, but w/o a tip. The waitress still makes $9/hr for the same work as yesterday. Why should I tip today?
There’s no strip clubs in Maine? 
Seriously, I understand they use this model but there’s reputable establishments that do as well?
But as elfkin477 notes, if the overall cost to the customer doesn’t really change very much (or at all), why would the overall number of diners go down? Why would restaurants need to cut shifts and fire employees?
There are countries that manage to pay servers a decent wage, and that do not require them to rely on tips to make a living. I’ve lived in such countries, and they manage to provide a surprising number of restaurants for the consumer to choose from. The lack of tipping, and the higher wage levels, have not resulted in a wasteland devoid of options for eating out, and from what i’ve read on the subject, restaurants in such places do not fail at a greater rate than restaurants in places like the United States.
What we basically have, in the United States, is a legal and economic system that allows one sub-group of employers to stiff their employees, on the assumption that the general public can be guilted into making up the difference.
I don’t disagree with anything you said there. But you are assuming that customers will quickly and universally change their tipping habits and no longer tip, keeping their total cost the same. I think that will happen to a degree. But you will also have people who will still feel compelled to tip, and their total cost will go up. Some will then eat out less or order less.
I think it will be interesting to see what happens, and how it all works out. I think tipping is a strange custom, but is quite ingrained in US culture.
Are you are assuming that restaurants will post signs saying “no tipping allowed due to new law”? I actually think that may happen in some places, but not all. And many servers will not like the consequences of this law, if their tips decrease due to customers thinking/believing they don’t need to tip anymore.
Not all of the United States. As I said, In California it is already the law that tipped employees must be paid at least minimum wage before tips, and I’m sure it’s not the only state. As far as I can tell it has not affected tipping culture here at all.
I don’t see why raising prices across the board by 15% wouldn’t sufficiently offset the higher cost of labor. Those customers who generally tip more than 15% can still opt to tip nominally and not realize any greater cost while feeling like they’re buying better service, for 15% tippers it’s a wash. Tightwads who tipped less than 15% were a burden on labor costs anyway since the restaurant would have to make up the difference between what the servers earned and the minimal tips earned from cheapskates. The loss of their business due to higher meal costs should be easily absorbed by the 15% tippers who no longer have to do math at the end of a meal.
As for service, I don’t see how it changes. I work in retail and nobody tips us. Regardless, there are staff that really go the extra mile for no added reward and other staff who couldn’t care less about customer service and are simply there for a paycheck. Even factoring better raises for performance, financial incentives for working harder or providing better service are negligible in retail and not a factor for anyone I know.
I hope this is a trend that spreads because reliance on tipping is abused by employers, employees and customers alike and it should stop. Employees should not be financially held hostage by capricious customers, nor should it be so easy for employees to cheat on taxes by under-reporting tip income, nor should tipping pools or non-tipping labor counted as tipping labor allow employers to shirk their responsibility to pay their employees the wages to which they are entitled.
Right. I was talking about the system entrenched at the national level.
As you suggest, there are a number of states that have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum, and that do not allow reductions for tipped employees. I live in California, and am very happy that our labor laws require full minimum wage, even for employees who get tips.
And you’re right that, in considerable measure, this has not had a great impact on tipping culture. I still tip, even though i know that my server is getting at least ten bucks an hour (or, actually, 10.50 since January 1). Then again, i mainly eat out in cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and i have some sense of how hard it would be to make ends meet on minimum wage in those cities. It’s a bit different than, say, Fresno or Bakersfield.
Cultural practices like tipping tend to change slowly, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t change. There are restaurants in some cities, including San Francisco, that are already encouraging their customers not to tip, and are paying higher wages to compensate.
As for service, i tend to agree with Brown Eyed Girl. When i was younger, i worked as a bartender and waiter on three continents, in countries that tip and countries that don’t. I’ve also lived and been a restaurant customer in a variety of countries. Based on my experience on both sides of the table, service is generally no better and no worse in either type of place. There are hard workers and shitty workers everywhere, and the presence or absence of tipping doesn’t really seem to change that very much at all.