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Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

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Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#121

Post by wyre »

gtvwill wrote: post #118

Lol imagine having a labor market where the base wage is so low you have to rely on tips for people to survive. Ontop of that, imagine having a labor market where humans were such a neglected resource your boss thinks it's ok to hire an individual for an entire day but not pay them enough to survive or price his sales enough to be able to do so. It's absurd. Truly an astounding way to to setup your economy. Couple it…

>how long it took you to get healthcare for all

Still no healthcare for all.

>It's almost like your country hates its own people

Not even almost, it is. It’s a page out of the republican party’s playbook to disseminate blame or criminality towards anyone who is different.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#122

Post by autoexec »

astura wrote: post #40
LarryMullins wrote: post #12

Make no mistake, tipping continues in America because most Americans like the system. If you don't like to tip, there are plenty of restaurants where tipping isn't expected; specifically those where you carry the food yourself from the counter to your table. If enough people hated tipping, restaurants that don't have tipping would eventually out-compete those that do. They may yet do so, but presently most of the pub…

>If you don't like to tip, there are plenty of restaurants where tipping isn't expected; specifically those where you carry the food yourself from the counter to your table These places still ask for a tip. Even to-go only places practically demand tips. I was recently told by a friend that it was just as socially expected to tip for counter service as it is to tip at a sit down restaurant.

Your friend is crazy, or rather it seems they fell victim to the scam. Businesses want you to tip for counter service because you're helping to pay for their labor expenses and they get to pocket the difference. The person behind the counter hopes that you'll tip because they were told when they were hired that tipping would help make up for their low wages.

They want to push the perception that society thinks you should tip for counter service, but it's not real (at least not yet). I don't tip for carry out or for retail transactions. Tips are reserved for people who perform a service (waiting on my table, cutting my hair, etc) and not for every employee I interact with who handles food.

There was an exception made at the height of the pandemic for restaurants that had few if any indoor diners. We tipped them for carry out because it's money they would have been getting if it were safe to eat inside like we wanted to. Now that most people are back to their old habits (safe or not) I think it's fine to stop tipping for carry out orders.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#123

Post by Overtonwindow »

I don't think it's impossible to get rid of tipping. If you make the wage high enough people will stop tipping, but some will continue. If the credit card companies stop allowing a gratuities line on receipts, or a way to add a gratuite, then tips may go to cash; or run another transaction.

The issue I have with tipping is that it's everywhere. From the person who takes your order at a coffee shop, dining, ridesharing, and it's become ridiculous. Ban the solicitation of gratuities in drink and eating establishments; conversely you could make no-tipping a contingent for a restaurant license.

If people want to tip, fine, but enough with the asking.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#124

Post by dopidopHN »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #120
dopidopHN wrote: post #58

For context : restaurant and bars in many ( most ? ) countries function without tips. Function=do not go belly up too much. More context : the state take over some employers responsibilities by providing healthcare, unemployment, and retirement insurances. ( none of that is free, it’s been pay by both employers and employees ) More context : prices are fair, in the sense that middle class folks in those place can aff…

It's not that it's unreal to remove tipping. It's that there is no big incentive to do so. If anything, there is pretty big incentive to keep it. Restaurants like it as it allows them to appear cheaper by offloading the visible cost into the tip. Many servers like it as cash tips are frequently used as untaxed income.

Lack of incentives. I would take it.

It seems like a common theme here.

In regards to worker liking the untaxed incomes: I live in a US city that rely on tourism and thus the service industry.

I had countless conversation with industry worker about this and it seems like a chicken and egg problem.

They need it because the base pay is shit, but they also hate the irregularity of it. ( triple pay in season, not worth to work outside of it )

They also would take more stability in order to raise family.

Most stop to find « a real job » when they reach their 40 or so.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#125

Post by Overtonwindow »

rcme wrote: post #8

I think there is a 3rd possibility in how tipping ends: people get sick of tipping and stop doing it. It seems like every single transaction asks for a tip these days. I tip heavily, but even I am getting weary of tipping so often. Most of the time, it feels like the tip shouldn't be necessary; the employers should be covering the cost of the employee. If people get used to declining tip prompts, it's possible that w…

The only reason I continue to tip is out of fear for being called out, or something done to my food. So much of tipping has been about constantly badgering them then guilting and shaming people who don't do it.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#126

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

nebula8804 wrote: post #107
rcme wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(To me) it's abundantly clear that a certain percentage of the population is no better than feral beasts trained to live in society. For instance, some people report having no inner monologue. If such people are not introspectively evaluating their thoughts, then what are they doing? Most likely mindlessly going through the motions of their life as a simple stimulus/response machine.

Isn't that chalked up to the normal distribution? Can you really blame people who fall under the left side of the curve? Look at page 9 of this PDF. [1]: https://www.westga.edu/academics/research/vrc/assets/docs/th...

I have no inner monologue, unless I'm specifically thinking about what to say or write. Language is non-essential for thought. It's a way to map thoughts into a communicable form, but it's not thought. The concepts language describes exist independent of the language.

Interestingly for me this translation of thought into language is much slower for writing than it is for speaking (with typing intermediate but closer to writing). I was diagnosed with Dysgraphia[1], as part of that evaluation I was given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Third Edition (WAIS-III) when I was 16 years old, it gave me a verbal IQ of 147, a performance IQ of 125, and a full-scale IQ of 143. So I think I'd serve as a counterexample (sample size 1, though I know there are others) to the "left side of the curve" correlating with a lack of inner monologue (at least for this particular measurement, there are many others). Perhaps it goes the other way around, and the people who have to slow their thoughts down to translate everything into language are the left side of the curve, but more likely they're uncorrelated aspects of cognition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#127

Post by Kranar »

lesuorac wrote: post #115
Kranar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was A&W and it's almost certainly BS. The only source for this was a single restaurant that hired a marketing firm to identify the reason for the failure. The marketing firm conducted a single focus study, whose methodology remains unknown but reported that one participant in the study asked why they should pay more money for a smaller product. Let me tell you something about marketing firms, many of don't exactly…

> The firm eventually conducted a focus group to discover the truth: participants were concerned about the price of the burger. "Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?" they asked. > It turns out the majority of participants incorrectly believed one-third of a pound was actually smaller than a quarter of a pound. [1] Sure maybe only a single person asked…

My position is to remain highly skeptical of this story. The single source of this entire anecdote comes from a book written by A&W's owner at the time (Alfred Taubman) that is left almost intentionally vague and has a clear conflict on interest.

The book makes a lot of unsourced and unverified claims about how A&W's burger tasted better than McDonald's in blind tests, and a bunch of other claims about how A&W should have outperformed McDonalds, but all because Americans are too stupid to know that 1/3 is larger than 1/4, A&W failed to capture market share and that's why they had a major decline in the 80s.

There is no other source for this story whatsoever other than the literal owner of A&W. The marketing firm (Yankelovich, Skelly and White) never released any details, no one else at the company ever wrote about it, and there's no way to independently verify any of these details to really understand what actually happened.

As an FYI, McDonald's had a third pounder burger on their menu for 6 or so years and never seemed to have any issue with customers reporting feeling ripped off because of it. They removed it along with all of their premium menu items as part of an effort to simplify their offerings.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#128

Post by tzs »

rcme wrote: post #98
RajT88 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more dire than this. Anna Gunn played the emasculating wife of Walter White in "Breaking Bad". She was not a popular character (and wasn't supposed to be, at least at first). She received a myriad of death threats on social media for that portrayal. https://www.vulture.com/2013/08/breaking-bads-anna-gunn-conf... I cannot express how bananas that is that people can't separate fiction from real life in this w…

(To me) it's abundantly clear that a certain percentage of the population is no better than feral beasts trained to live in society. For instance, some people report having no inner monologue. If such people are not introspectively evaluating their thoughts, then what are they doing? Most likely mindlessly going through the motions of their life as a simple stimulus/response machine.

> For instance, some people report having no inner monologue

And some people have more than one voice in their head.

It would be interesting to compare the total number of voices in the collective heads of humanity with the total population to see what the average number of voices is in a head.

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#129

Post by jrockway »

bradizbad wrote: post #81
jrockway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it peak capitalism to find the market price for food delivery by bidding? Too low of a bid, the limited resource goes to someone else. My biggest complaint are services that don't show the driver the tip until after they deliver. I want them to know!

Bidding is fine and will drop process and balance out long term, but seeing the tip before delivery creates the bad incentives described in other comments i.e. canceling an accepted order for another with a higher tip or not following instructions. I know I've been peeved after waiting 30 minutes only to find out my food isn't coming.

That makes sense. The problem sounds like that some vendors let the delivery be cancelled mid-way through the delivery process, rather than making people commit to making a delivery that they have accepted. I'd think if we were serious about bidding to discover the price, there would be a queue of open orders, and then someone would accept, and they would absolutely have to do the delivery or be banned or whatever. For the customer, your order would either sit in the queue forever, or be accepted and you'd be guaranteed to receive your order. (This is challenging in practice because there are two concurrent processes going on; preparing your food, and then delivering it. You want to get the delivery driver en route to the restaurant so they show up right when the food is first ready; waiting on either end is lost money. The food delivery provider is walking a fine line where they'll have to pay for food that's prepared and thrown away if no driver is willing to transport it. And, I'm sure restaurants will want in on this price discovery mechanism, making it too complicated and unreliable for any consumer to actually use.)

Re: Why Tipping Is Impossible to Get Rid of in America

#130

Post by froggertoaster »

> ...I thought that was much more fair than front-of-the-house staff being paid more than the kitchen folks due to some antiquated racist bullshit.

Was this necessary to get your point across? Honestly, invalidated much of the article for me. I find that assumptions like this betray the poisoned viewpoints of the author.

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