Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

Tips are fundamentally broken. If you didn't know about tips, and someone offered you a job and said, "I'll pay you crap wages, but you can ask the customers for more money. Don't worry, they'll pay or their friends won't like them," you'd think it was a scam because it's such an obviously terrible deal.

Tips are an awful way to incentivize good service.

I'm neither qualified to judge my server's performance, and I've got very limited and potentially misleading information about what a reasonable expectation is. I've got no idea what small crises my server had to deal with, or how other customers are treating him.

And because tips are everywhere now, nobody knows the going rate for most tips. Obviously tourists have no idea how much to tip.

If I reduce the tip, the waiter is only finding out that I was unsatisfied after it's too late to fix anything. But tipping up front makes the exercise entirely pointless.

And the moralizing of tips is stupid.

Many moral arguments paint people in the service industry as paupers or victims, but a basic level of respsect has to assume they're competent professionals who chose this line of work.

A tip is not an act of generosity, either, you're paying a fee for a service rendered. And that's why, as a system, the morality of tipping is entirely backwards: it rewards people who rip off their servers.

The thing that really bothers me are the awful motivations behind tipping: being control freaks, conspicuous consumption and all the slimy business incentives to push their payroll onto their customers.

I don't think it fixes i would say, but more likely people wouldn't waitress for very long then, just like they don't stay at stores or other service positions for every long. Part of the reason tips work is that those restaurants wouldn't pay close to what the servers make otherwise. They'd end up giving them $10 an hour with a 25 cent or 35 cent raise every year.

It's really low. I've worked in a place where people will literally throw away money equalling an hours worth of the wages of a service person into a pool of water for good luck.

> The people who steal the difference between a living wage and a tip-subsidized wage?

The people who could "steal the difference" are usually the owners, right? Not sure why GP put the owners and kitchen staff in the same bucket.

From my experience as a client in bars (without actual kitchens) in Paris, France, where tipping "isn't expected but kinda is" [0], most of the time tips are split between wait staff. So I kind of get the issue that if some waiter is going above and beyond and is nice / helpful / quick to serve / etc, whereas a colleague will do the bare minimum, when someone tips, this is diluted.

As a client, I'm tipping X for the service, but this particular waiter will only get a fraction of that, the same as his low-effort colleague. I'm not really OK with that.

Most places I usually go are rather small and the waiters seem comparable, so I guess it's not usually an issue I have in practice.

However, there are other, usually larger places where quality of service varies much more, and I'm usually much less inclined to tip in those places. I've also heard from bar staff having worked in such places that there indeed is more tension between staff, along the lines of "so and so just waits around / doesn't do anything". Wouldn't be surprised that the complainer wouldn't be all too happy to split their tips in such a case.

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[0] Technically, in France, prices are "all-inclusive", that means service is already included in the price, so you don't have to tip. However, at least in bars around Paris, I've noticed that it's somewhat expected to get a tip, especially when clients are considered "difficult" (though I'm unable to exactly quantify that).

Not true.

Australia does not have tipping in it's culture. We pay our wait staff fair and reasonable rates (legally mandated btw).

I don't really think our food costs are too much higher than the USA. And people eat out ALOT here.

Food tastes good, service is good. People want to come back.

Please expand your horizons.

The biggest part of the story to me is that Amazon is not paying a single cent in fines. They are only paying the amount owed to the drivers. It's a shame a company can get away with this without facing a penalty.