No topping is good in theory but it won't stick. Restaurants have tried it and no one is happy with it. Customers get higher prices. Many employees feel they can make more money with tips and employers have to pay higher salaries.
What's becoming a problem is that many businesses that weren't tip-related are suddenly requesting tips for service. Those are the ones that people should not tip. There's no need to expand the number of services that need to be tipped.
> What's becoming a problem is that many businesses that weren't tip-related are suddenly requesting tips for service.
Who gets to decide?
I think the only absurd thing is making it a percentage of the cost. Why do I tip someone more for doing the same job because my meal/service is more expensive?
It's often not the same job behind the scenes. Your more expensive meal typically requires more effort to prepare. The other function of cost is drinks and if you order more drinks then you require more service.
Neither of which matter as the labor for production of said meal and drinks does not benefit from the tip, it is instead the person who takes your order and carries it to the table.
Tips get pooled. Only in very expensive restaurants does the chef fully prepare your plate. Arranging that your table gets all it's meals at once is not as simple as you might think it is.
If you've not seen how the back of house functions you may have some misconceptions about the sources of labor involved in your meal.
This is a generalization that isn’t universally true. I’ve known so many restaurants where the servers keep their tips. The whole point of this thread was that the means of application are inconsistent and arbitrary.
I don’t care about tip amount? Howevery, I think you’re being pretty stingy with a 10% tip. I always tip 20% or more at sitdown places. The pain of potential social reproach is far greater to me than 20% the cost of my meal which I already knew would be part of the cost of going. Mechanically it is easy, move decimal left, multiply by 2.
I want to know how it works! You’ve told me I’m ignorant and that’s fine, I’m too invested in my current career to get a job in a kitchen right now, and you seem to know, so go ahead and educate.
Who gets my tip and how is it divided? I’ve always assumed it goes entirely to the waitstaff (pooled or not). It seems like maybe it should be distributed to other people who make the service happen. Does the dishwasher get a cut? What about the line cooks?
For example, when I go to a restaurant serving steaks, the job isn't significantly different from one steak to another, but the cost can be significantly different.
Preparing a ribeye vs. a t-bone vs. a sirloin isn't all that different, but you can expect the prices on each to vary wildly, mostly due to the cost of materials. Rationally, neither the wait staff nor the chef really deserve more of a tip for one vs. the other, but the convention demands it.
This is why it has to be legislation that simultaneously forces the entire market to stop it at once. That may not ever happen, but these terminals at fast casual takeout places are definitely starting to build consensus against tipping.
> What's becoming a problem is that many businesses that weren't tip-related are suddenly requesting tips for service. Those are the ones that people should not tip.
The problem is that the line between where tipping is required is incredibly difficult for people to understand. It used to be that if they asked you to enter a tip that meant that the employee wasn't getting a living wage unless you gave something. Now you can't use that, and all the "simple" ways that people say you can know are just confusing to most people. The result is that people have to either make a random decision or consistently tip everywhere or nowhere, and everywhere isn't financially possible.
By following this analogy, what would stop us (in IT) from requesting tips when we are not happy with our salary?
This tipping madness should stop and is IMHO US specific - I don't see that the rest of the world sees tipping as something "by default", and in many countries tipping is even disrespectful.
What's becoming a problem is that many businesses that weren't tip-related are suddenly requesting tips for service. Those are the ones that people should not tip. There's no need to expand the number of services that need to be tipped.