I was originally thinking about delivery (isn’t it basically the same effort to deliver 1 or 2 pizzas?). Shouldn’t delivery tipping be based on distance/effort rather than cost of food?
The same goes for restaurants, of course. If I go with a friend and we have the same meal but I have three glasses of wine, and she has three cokes, I am expected to tip more, but the server’s effort is the same for each of us.
Was it always like this or did it change with time?
Note: I’m only trying to understand this aspect of Us tipping culture. I know that tipping isn’t the norm everywhere.
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Where I live, servers tip out 6% based on their sales.
If your bill is 100$, then I owe the house 6$.
If your bill is 1000$, then I owe the house 60$.
I tip out almost double what they pay me hourly.
It is similar to commissioned sales, only I work for the customer and the food and drink is the product I sell. Would I prefer the restaurant pay my commission instead of me paying them? Absolutely.
How many variations of people complaining about US tipping culture can we get?
Restaurants like it because they can then pay employees $2.13 an hour
Good servers and bartenders like it because they can make more than their place of business would pay them by an hourly rate.
The rest of the country hates it too.
Some delivery tipping *is* based on distance and effort: UberEats and other gig economy apps.
It makes sense to tip a waiter based on the bill because the bill is pretty consistently based on how much food is ordered and therefore how much effort it took to serve the table.
It makes slightly less sense when splitting a table between multiple bills because then you get uneven distribution of tip costs for relatively the same effort.
It makes even less sense for things like pizza delivery, because the only thing that gets harder with more pizzas is carrying them from the car to the customer. But established pizza companies often use a purely percent-based system just as a holdover from restaurant tipping.
But for UberEats, tips are promised in advance and are the main source of income for workers, who can choose whether to accept them or not. So customers can tip whatever they want, but workers only have to take the jobs with tips that they think are worth the effort.
Business works on markups. Why do you pay more for the tip when your bill is higher? Because the assumption is that if you can afford more for your food and beverages, you can also afford more for the service.
Tipping has always been based around the idea that the price you see on the menu is for the item on the menu. Service is extra. How else do you justify having the same price for takeout vs dine-in? There’s no service with takeout, so if you’re paying for the service as part of the food price, why don’t you get a discount when there’s no service?
Because the service is extra. It’s not part of the food price. So then we get into the question of how much your server deserves to earn for their labor? Should they be poverty workers? Is that cool of us to complain endlessly that we don’t earn enough and then turn around and gladly make excuses to pay the people who work for us trash wages? No. We’d like to see them earn a wage that justifies showing up to work, and that’s expensive. It’s actually more than most people can really afford.
So it ends up that the question isn’t so much why you have to pay more for the tip on 3 glasses of wine v 3 glasses of soda. It’s why people who get 3 glasses of soda get away with paying so little for the service.
Tipping culture in America mainly emerged during the great depression. It’s a long and complicated story but the basic gist is that it started out as a quid pro quo arrangement between club/restaurant owners and wealthy patrons. The wealthy patrons could pretty much get exclusive service and do whatever the fuck they wanted and in exchange the business owners could get away with not really paying their staff. Of course at the time this was limited and still optional. But over time, and despite coming out of the depression, business owners liked the idea of not having to pay their staff a livable wage, and establishing a tipping system based on a percentage ensured that the staff would get a certain amount of money rather than relying solely on people’s good will and whims. At this point it’s more or less codified in the US to the point where even if you’re not legally obligated to tip, it’s frowned upon if you don’t.
Funnily enough that’s just a US thing. In other countries it’s very different, with the main tipping system that you’ll encounter being based on the quality of service and not adhering to a specific percentage. It’s more about whether you’ll tip or not rather than how much you’ll tip. There’s also countries where tipping is seen as disrespectful.
Typically you do both. At a restaurant you’ll tip 15% and then more at your discretion if the service was abnormally good.
Tipping culture is stupid, folks will say you need to tip on cost or effort depending on which gets them more money. Deliver McD’s tip for distance, but deliver steak and lobster and suddenly it should be percentage. I like how they are doing at the reopened Casa Bonita, pay the servers well and eliminate tips.
Tipping based on price does seem a bit unreflective of the actual reason for the tip – thanking someone for their hard work.
However, if you go the opposite route, you run into some awkward areas too. Let’s say, tipping culture decides that absolutely perfect service from a waiter is valued at $25. Now, you go out to a meal and it only costs $15, but your waiter still gives you perfect service. You’d be expected, culturally, to pay $25 extra and now your bill is $40. That’s likely to discourage a lot of people from ever eating out as it really increases the bill.
And, let’s say a big party goes to a restaurant and generates a $500 bill. Their server is perfect, potentially a little above perfect given the huge order they’ve catered for. The party feels like the service was worth just a bit above the usual $25, call it $35. Culturally, the party are going above the expected rate, but the server has still worked really hard, but earnt barely more than they would on an easier table. Less than they would on a 10% or 20% system too. That’s not very rewarding for the server.
The thing about a percentage based tip, whether your tipping culture is 10%, 20% or w/e, is that the server gets a ‘fair’ rate no matter the size of the bill, and it doesn’t unfairly inflate the bill for lower-budget customers. You also aren’t obliged to give the standard, and you can give a higher percentage if you really want to thank someone for their work.
Overall, percentage based is fairer on everyone. Although what would be truly best is fair living wages for waiters and other workers who rely on tips, but that’s another argument altogether.
I waited tables for about 8 years. There’s a few reasons.
The first is that it’s a carve out for restaurant owners. Restaurants are a high overhead business with a relatively low chance of turning a serious profit. Most restaurants and bars close within a year of opening. They require a lot of staff to function at capacity. Having to pay all of those employees a living wage would be fairly untenable for a lot of restaurants. So most states allow for servers to be paid well below the minimum wage (just over 2 dollars an hour usually) with the assumption that tips will make up the difference. It is also depressingly common for kitchen staff to be made up of undocumented immigrants who can also be paid less, or ex cons who will settle for any kind of income that allows them to fulfill their parole conditions. Tipping 20% helps ensure that everybody is getting enough income that they won’t starve, and back of house staff are usually paid out at the end of the night based on a percentage of each server’s total tips. In the event that tips do not make up the difference between the ~2$ an hour and minimum wage, restaurants are legally obligated to pay the difference in a paycheck. However, these labor laws are seldom enforced and a lot of restaurants don’t bother.
The second is to incentivize upselling. Servers are salespeople, although good servers are subtle about it. A good server can get you to buy an appetizer, drinks, entrees, and dessert without you even thinking about it. From your perspective as a customer, a server’s “effort” might mean going the extra mile to provide a welcoming and attentive experience. But from the perspective of their employer, “effort” means getting big bills and selling every person who comes in as much food as possible. Tying tips to cost makes every server’s income dependent on this kind of effort. When a restaurant is extremely busy and a server is managing multiple tables, their ability to put in the other kind of effort drops quite a bit. So a server giving mediocre rushed service to ten tables is theoretically able to make the same money as they would giving their full attention to two.
The last is to even things out over time. There were nights I would work 8 hours and go home with 20 bucks in tips. There were (much rarer) nights when I would work 5 and go home with 300. Restaurant traffic is extremely fickle. Bad weather can cause a restaurant to be completely dead. Most restaurants remain open all throughout the week despite the fact that 90% of their money is made on Friday and Saturday nights, which means that the new staff working mostly on weekday afternoons are likely getting screwed. Many customers are not tipping 20% to begin with. At least a few times a week I would get a table that left no tip at all. My service could be no different from how I treated high tippers, but a lot of it is based on luck. Lots of people have never been educated about tipping culture at all, and some are just vindictive or rude. Tying tips to cost helps smooth over a lot of the unevenness, and makes sure that when the restaurant is doing well, so are its employees. Managers usually plan shifts so that every server gets a couple busy shifts each week and a couple of slower ones. But there’s never any guarantees either way.
Is it a good system? Probably not. But if servers were paid a guaranteed wage like they are in other countries, there would be far fewer restaurants in the US. There are other more labor-friendly ways that governments could subsidize restaurants, but the system works just well enough that there’s little real effort to change it. Restaurant work is considered temporary and noncommittal by most people who engage in it. Its scheduling flexibility and low barrier of entry make it a great “side gig” or “in-between job” for people making more income elsewhere or pursuing education. Because its looseness is part of the appeal, it’s difficult to organize servers to negotiate for better pay.
I was told that TIP is an acronym for… To Insure Promptness.
Was I told wrong?
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