Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Don’t Leave a Tip
Tipping in restaurants has always been a complicated issue. I usually leave around 20 percent, which is more than the 15 percent expected, but my feeling is, in Obama’s America everyone needs a little more help.
And there are tip jars in almost every coffee shop and take-out place, and what I usually do is just dump the change into it. But it’s a complicated and awkward business no matter how you slice it.
Word now comes from Danny Meyer, one of the most successful (deservedly so) and celebrated restauranteurs in America, that he’s going to eliminate the practice in his restaurants, beginning with the high-end Modern in the Museum of Modern Art. From Eater NY:
Starting in late November, sharp-eyed guests sitting down for dinner will notice four new things over the course of their meal. First, many prices on the menu will be markedly higher than they previously had been. Second, menus will carry a note informing diners of the new policy. Third, the only supplemental charge on the itemized bill will be for sales tax. And fourth, there will be no space on the guest check for leaving a tip — just a line for the diner’s signature.
His reasoning is pretty compelling:
The American system of tipping is awkward for all parties involved: restaurant patrons are expected to have the expertise to motivate and properly remunerate service professionals; servers are expected to please up to 1,000 different employers (for most of us, one boss is enough!); and restaurateurs surrender their use of compensation as an appropriate tool to reward merit and promote excellence … Imagine, if to prompt better service from your shoe salesman, you had to tip on the cost of your shoes, factoring in your perception of his shoe knowledge and the number of trips he took to the stockroom in search of your size. As a customer, isn’t it less complicated that the service he performs is included in the price of your shoes?
What I like the most about this policy is that there will be no little space on the bill for something extra. It’s a No Tipping Period policy. No guilt. No disingenuous little empty space.
Not everyone agrees. From France (of course) comes another way to look at tipping. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry isn’t thrilled with the French policy of service compris. He likes the Tipping Culture:
I come from France. Worse, I come from Paris. Here, waiters are almost universally dour, unkind, frequently forget or mess up your orders, and generally scowly. No, tourists, it’s not just you. I mean, they probably turn it up to 11 for the tourists, but it’s already a 10 for the rest of us. Smiling doesn’t help. Being nice doesn’t help.
Service, for Parisians, is one of the small inconveniences of life. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it will wear you down.
And so when I first had a meal at an American restaurant, where the waitress was friendly and peppy, quick with the order, and inquisitive about how everything was, I felt like I had landed on a different planet. And it wasn’t a fluke! It happened over, and over, and over again.
I went back to my home country, and it was like telling them that in America, whiskey comes out of the tap.
It does, at my house. But back to the subject at hand:
… when I see Americans — predominantly, let’s face it, elite, liberal Americans — who want to destroy one of the nicest things about their country, and one of the nicest things in my life, I get positively angry. I am talking, of course, about the movement against tipping, seen here recently in The Economist (The Economist! Not Pravda! The Economist!), and also in Vox (of course).
I’m no fool. I realize my waitress (or waiter) is not smiling at me out of the overflowing goodness of her heart. There’s something in it for her. But in France, tipping is basically illegal. The waiter doesn’t have any reason to be nice.
I guess I’ll be happy to see tipping disappear — it’s a nuisance — but I also see Gobry’s point. How about this for a compromise? We don’t tip waiters and waitresses, but we do tip IRS agents and congressmen? After all, they’re the ones currently delivering lousy service, right?
Published in Culture, Economics, Humor
Way past due to eliminate tipping, but I’m not making the first move. I’ll let the restaurant do that. I don’t want my food spat in the next time I dine there.
Vincent ‘Vinnie’ Antonelli: It’s not tipping I believe in. It’s overtipping.
I’m too lazy to read the link: Does Danny Meyer provide performance bonuses for his waitstaff, or does he pay them all equally regardless of performance?
If he does provide bonuses, it means that he didn’t really eliminate tipping. He merely took the responsibility of judging the quality of the service away from the customer and gave it to the employer (himself).
If he doesn’t provide bonuses, then what incentive is there for an individual waitperson to put in any extra effort?
No, We just simply patronize another…. oh, wait…
So, when’s the party at Rob’s house?
On tipping, I am with Gobry and Antonelli.
One things for sure, no tip for you for not doing a podcast again this week.
How about pay them a decent hourly regardless of whether or not they get tips? I don’t mind tipping for good service (not on a percentage, but a flat $/person served), but the employer should have no expectation of me paying his staff directly for the staff’s duty to the employer.
There are certain situations where if you sling a little cash, they’ll treat you like Sinatra and it can get you out of some real jams. I was moving out of a high-rise apartment building, and the loaders never showed. For about $100 more than I would have paid the loaders, I had 4 guys loading within 10 minutes.
So, like, a government-enforced $15 minimum wage?
After all, if it’s not government-enforced, then restaurant owners right now can rightly argue that they already do pay a “decent” hourly wage (since, after all, who is to say what is “decent” and what isn’t), and that tipping is entirely voluntary.
Totally agree.
Even more awkward at coffee shops, where I end up paying 3 bucks for a cup of drip coffee, simply because the tip line is included on the signature slip. In my cases, it loses them business, because I avoid those shops unless I’m carrying cash.
I find the argument that “without tipping, waitstaff have no incentive to provide good service” to be ludicrous. Of course there can be an incentive – if customers don’t like the service at a particular restaurant, they’ll go elsewhere. That financial pressure will quckly trickle down from the mmanagement to the waitstaff.
The reason service in Europe is so poor isn’t (just) due to their lack of tipping; it’s due to the fact that Europeans are so accustomed to bad service that they simply accept it instead of taking their business elsewhere.
Here’s the problem. Tips were never meant to be something that servers, porters, cab drivers, bellboys, etc., relied on for their income. But when it became clear to the government that these people in these jobs (who were getting paid an agreed upon rate to work the job) were bringing in a lot of unaccounted for cash, Uncle Sam determined that wasn’t fair, began calling tips income and requiring all of it to be reported. Over time, this opened up a whole can of worms in allowing these businesses to hire people and rely on their customers to subsidize wages they normally would have been on the hook for in any other type of industry. In some states, servers are actually paid around 2 or 3 dollars an hour because of the tips they rely on! A restaurant should be paying servers a competitive wage regardless of tips. If I, or you, want to tip them on top of that, that should be between me and the waiter and no one else. But of course that is too reasonable a world for us to live in.
The fact that the government-mandated minimum wage is different for waitstaff than for other classes of workers is only a “problem” if you agree with the idea of a government-mandated minimum wage in the first place.
If there was no government-mandated minimum wage for any class of worker, it’s entirely possible that a “tipping culture” would arise for many other areas of the economy as well.
Wow, you sure extrapolated that out to a steaming pile of what the hell are you talking about?
I don’t know about the great white north, but down here restaurants can pay less than the mandated minimum wage and consider tips to be part of the server’s compensation. I’m saying that restaurants shouldn’t expect me to directly pay the wages of their employees any more than any other business expects me to.
Shoe salesmen and many salespeople in this country are tipped- by commissions. This is a cost best left to the business owner to absorb because it forces them to negotiate better deals with vendors and landlords.
If there was service compris in this country, I would never be able to enjoy a meal in a restaurant. I tip 25% because I always ask for something different- no sauce, grilled instead of fried, steamed instead of sauteed.
I admittedly ask to reinvent the menu much of the time in the U.S. but I am always accommodated because I’m willing to pay for the angst with which the waitstaff must deal when negotiating with temperamental chefs. :)
It’s not the level of compensation we’re complaining about. It’s the direct payment that is the problem.
Again, that’s a “problem” caused by the institution of the government-mandated minimum wage in the first place, not by the restaurant industry.
There’s no law saying that restaurants aren’t allowed to pay more than the minimum wage, nor is there any law saying you have to tip.
It’s not the law that makes tipping “expected”. The idea of tipping predated the idea of the minimum wage.
If there was no minimum wage, would there be no tipping?
In short: Business owners should be free to pay their staff what the labour market will bear, and customers should be free to tip or not tip. Whether or not tipping is “expected” should be a question of culture, not of law.
Instead of saying “I don’t tip person a, so why should I have to tip person b“, one should instead ask “why don’t I tip person a, and why do I feel that I have to tip person b?”
It could be that the answers to those questions are entirely rational.
I don’t think it is so ludicrous. Money is much more motivating than anything else. But pressure from management is important too.
So I’d be for some kind of sharing between employer and customer. Say like, the employer pays some sort of basic wage and then the customer chips in something like 20% of his bill.
At some bars and restaurants, the management is apparently quite concerned about income inequality, so all the tips collected each night get put into a common pot and split among the waiters and waitresses equally. So that kind of destroys the idea that someone can make extra money if they really hustle. I’m sure it’s popular with the less motivated wait staff, though.
Here’s my question, though: Rob Long can afford to eat at restaurants where customers tip? I was under the impression that Ricochet was losing so much money for it’s founders that they were getting by on generic macaroni and cheese. I upgraded to the Thatcher level just so Rob & Peter could afford some Kraft Mac & Cheese from time to time. Maybe even a can of Hormel Chili for special occasions.
Another factor at present is the laws in the US. The IRS automatically figures that servers will at least average a certain percentage of tip on everything served in their sections. If you aren’t currently tipping, they are being taxed on it anyway.
When I was traveling to Europe quite a lot on business I was appalled at the level of service. And not just some places, most everywhere. I even had servers react negatively to my desire to tip because they had to go back and redo the bill.
I agree that tipping is a bit of a nuisance, but I prefer our system because I get much better service.
(That said, I do need to get better at tipping less when the service is poor. I tend to feel that the only message I’m sending is that I’m a tight wad…the server probably thinks they did just fine and won’t get the intended message.)
Doh…I think I just argued with myself.
Isn’t that due to an inability to fire an employee?
Of course, an employer should be free to institute that sort of system if they think it’s the best system for their establishment. One could hypothesize that talented waitstaff will be more likely to choose a different employer.
The assumption seems to be made that waitstaff are somehow less “autonomous” than workers in other industries, and therefore they need special protection from predatory employers. I simply don’t buy it.
Instead, I see a wide variety of dining establishments, each instituting their own wage structure and their own policy towards tipping, according to their own particular market circumstances. More talented workers will work where they get a better deal. Less talented workers will work where they can convince an employer to hire them.
A mentor once told me that if I made it a practice to be a regular, be friendly and tip well it would pay off in spades. He was right.
Wait, so, the IRS charges tax on income the worker may never have actually received?!
The wait staff is taxed on their tips. The government automatically takes 8 percent or something by calculating the cost of the meals the waiter served.
I’m wondering how that figures in to the restaurant owners’ new payment method.
Edit: Sorry. I didn’t see Arahant’s similar point above. :)
Yes. Unbelievable, isn’t it?
What rankles is when a restaurant’s policy is to share tips equally between the wait staff. Talk about socialism. Result: the go-getters eventually decide it’s not worth it to work as hard and as courteously as they used to.
Yup. Tipping is built into the tax code.