/townhall/ - Townhall

...oh, in my experience on all 3 continents mentioned, culture is more important than tips for service. But that depending on culture, tips are important.

In East Asia, service is always better than in Europe or America's, even without tip. In Europe, some no tip places are better than typical, with-tip American service, others are not. Denmark has service as good as American service without tip. Scotland has better service. France has worse service.

I have my doubts that anyone provides better service in the hopes of a better tip, if people can even agree on what better service would look like.  Tipping is a broken system leveraged only to everyone's detriment.  A very very narrow band of workers in the US are even allowed to accept tips, some portion of what's left have to redistribute it to the workers as a pool, and most of the time people tip as a flat percentage, with some businesses now even enforcing it as part of the bill.

But the biggest argument against it is just the first one.  The majority of jobs, even when they interact directly with the customer, do not get tips.  The most obvious gap is between fast food and something like a diner.  Both create and then serve you food, but the pay structure for one is completely different?  Does the average wait staff provide any better service than a McDonald's crew?  No, not even a little.

And in fact, I think we'd be better off in most cases if we just cut out the wait staff entirely.  There's no reason I shouldn't be able to go to Red Lobster, order what I want from a menu attached to the wall, fill my drink on my own and go sit down at my table.  Hell, these days we could even order digitally from the table, no extra person required.  Think of all the labor we could save as a society.  These people could do literally anything else with their lives and it would be more productive and helpful than what they are doing right now.

>>11445
It's probably a personality flaw at some level, but I feel uncomfortable at places where you would tip, not because of the tip, but because it feels like a role play of a medieval servant/master relationship.

Granted, I go to Five Guys sometimes because it's one of the few places that's open when I go to work and they ask for a tip, but it's when you make your order which can't be expected to reflect the quality of food that's yet to be cooked.

Tipping culture is a means to lower the wages of workers via emotional manipulation of the consumer.

It should be abolished.

>>11445
>But is this actually true?
Yes. I would know I've worked the industry for that tip.

>Do you know if the service in say an average American bar is way better than in an average European or Asian bar?
No. But then, you'd be assuming that it's purely the difference of tipping culture, and not the plethora of other items, were it to be true besides.

>Also, feel free to share your thoughts on tipping culture in general.
Tips are a gift, and so the state taxing it is immoral.

>>11449
This. All it does it shift responsibility for proper wages away from the employer and towards the customer.

So the concept of "quiet quitting" has been coming up lately, and I'm thinking of it together with the idea of "better tips better service". I'm going to consider "refusing to do your job well without a little something on the side from the end client" a more toxic but less cringeworthy version of "quiet quitting". And my question is this:

Don't these people have managers or supervisors? Isn't there somebody whose job it is to make sure the required work gets done to a satisfactory quality?

I'm not faulting the workers here but rather a rash of passive management that I've noticed has become more prevalent. Of course workers aren't going to go above and beyond if you just shove them in a box half trained with a rough idea of what they're supposed to do and then go home. If you don't give a crap then why should they? You're the one here who is actually invested in this operation going well, they're just punching a clock. Instead everybody is laser focused on some spreadsheet that came from on high with some arbitrary metrics that are ambiguations of how somebody else did something else so we must meet these same metrics too.

Walk the floor. See how the staff treat the customers, and if there is a problem either fix them or fire them. Stop expecting your customers and your employees to do your job for you.

>>11476
I feel the problem with quiet quitting is just that companies are just constantly downsizing and squeezing every penny out of their workforce while work schedules and demands are getting more and more eggregious.

I feel every worker should have the drive to perform their work properly, but it's necessary the workers can work in a proper environment, no expenses are spared to give people the tools to do their job and there is plenty enough organisation that people can find time to close off the work for the day.

But companies are downsizing, taking up new obligations, but refusing to expand the workforce or provide the proper tools. And there are working spaces where there is no more room for respect and kindness.
And then people are surprised when the workers refuse to take on all that extra workload for free?

Quiet quitting to me doesn't sound like unsupervised workers loafing around and not doing their work. It sounds like the bosses want their workers to work 18 hours per day and do it with a smile, while their pay gets cut in half again.

My work promotes the notion of tipping to workers, yet few people actually tip.  Those who do tip generally tip so little as to be a negligible supplement to income.  Those few people who tip well are so few and far between as to be an anomaly yet drive up the averages from ~2% tip rate to ~5% tip rate.  I make zero additional effort for tips because I know that my effort has almost no bearing on tip rates.  Also, people who outright say they will tip generally don't, and are in fact just looking for additional unpaid effort or special favors out of the worker.  After their service ends, they will simply "forget" to tip, and the extra effort/favors will be for nothing.  Tipping is simply used as a hypothetical benefit to equivalent employment and as a substitute for real income paid by the employer.  As such, I accept tips, but I do not "work for tips."