restaurants will be gone when we all start popping meal pills. The tech is probably 3-4 years out by conservative estimates.
2000 calories -- that's a lot of pills.
The first implementation is known as "M&Ms".
No tipping means better business
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Re: No tipping means better business
#12restaurants will be gone when we all start popping meal pills. The tech is probably 3-4 years out by conservative estimates.
I mostly go to restaurants with people to enjoy a cup of coffee over conversation. The belly-filling is incidental.
(for the sake of beautiful symmetry, I don't go to restaurants by myself..)
Re: No tipping means better business
#13This idea was suggested long time ago - it doesn't work.
What do you mean by "it doesn't work" exactly? No tipping in restaurants does work in many countries where people are paid a living wage from the outset, from Norway to Czech Republic.
And it works fine in many other industries in the U.S. where there's no tipping.
Re: No tipping means better business
#14[deleted]
Re: No tipping means better business
#15Went to a revolving sushi bar tonight. Everything was automated. They even had a touchpad where you can put in orders (like miso ramen soup), which get delivered by a belt. The only thing the servers did was sit us and bring us water. We asked them to replace a leaking soy sauce container and they never did.
We tipped 0$ -- there was essentially no service. I kinda felt bad, but talking it over with my wife, I couldn't really find a reason to tip.
Re: No tipping means better business
#16I've traveled the world and have come to the conclusion that diners are better off in a tipping environment. Realize this is purely anecdotal but time and time again we have come to the realization that incentives matter and incentivizing good service makes sense to me (and I shouldn't have to order a bottle of wine at lunch to get it). If all someone is going to do is play telephone from one side of the room to the other, no thanks, I'd rather save the 20% and order off an iPad.
Re: No tipping means better business
#17Unless everyone decides to kill tips all at once, this will never work out. No server will work for a fixed 20% increment when they have the potential to get a lot more than that, especially on Saturday nights. There have been plenty of examples of this not working out [1].
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/15/478096516/why...
Re: No tipping means better business
#18You might argue that this is stupid, because it's a catch 22; unless everyone does it, you lose as a business if you do it; nothing motivates people more than raw dollar value and you'll either lose your staff or have to put prices up to pay them more.
...but, you look at Uber, and there's no tipping there; and it's great for the consumer, and (astonishingly) drivers seem fine with it, despite objectively being exploited blatantly and paid less than taxi drivers.
So, maybe there is something to be said for an all digital disruption to the food scene, somehow...
Honestly, I can't see how it would work though; you have to actually demonstrate that your new 'no tip' solution works somehow, not just armchair philosophize about some way to 'magically make tipping disappear?'
Re: No tipping means better business
#19editorialized title. Tsk. the tipping situation sucks, but the larger economic problem is effectively due to rent extraction by the landlord. when a restaurant can't afford the rent that, say, a bank can, they are effectively priced out of the market. All excess returns and up going to the land owner. This effectively becomes a variant of baumol's cost disease. Once again, return on capital trumps return on labor. I…
This is why I support the land-value tax. Landlords would only be taxed on the value of their land and not the property they're building. They're heavily incentivized to develop as much as possible to pay tax, since land-value tax doesn't care about the cost of any improvement you make.
This wouldn't change landlord's incentives and therefore unlikely to change the outcome.
Re: No tipping means better business
#20Went to a revolving sushi bar tonight. Everything was automated. They even had a touchpad where you can put in orders (like miso ramen soup), which get delivered by a belt. The only thing the servers did was sit us and bring us water. We asked them to replace a leaking soy sauce container and they never did. We tipped 0$ -- there was essentially no service. I kinda felt bad, but talking it over with my wife, I couldn…
Were you actually requested to tip? If so, it seems strange. When I've gone to many kaiten-zushi places it is usually stated that you shouldn't tip at all (in Japan you don't). There used to be one like that downtown Berkeley off Durant that closed a few years back.