Richard Cohen on Tipping: To Ensure Proper Servitude

In California, the common pattern is that all of the kitchen staff is uniformly Hispanic and the waiters are uniformly personable white people. It makes tipping super weird.

I’m not sure: given that the openly-stated goal of abolishing tipping is to pay waitstaff less relative to kitchen staff, I tend not to be in favor.

And I’m definitely one of the “I like the fact that a tip makes a difference”; I think anyone who worked in a tipped job remembers how much better one big tip can make your day–and the difference between a big tip and a small tip is often less than the difference between having a drink or not, so I actually can afford it. How often do you get the chance to make an identifiable person’s day better for $5?

I favor a Soviet-style Flat Tip: 20-percent.
Regardless.

As a former waiter for many years, and based on my acquaintance and friendship with many waitstaff and bartenders, I actually think that Cohen’s experience (and his interpretation of that experience) as a waiter (in the U.S.) is fairly universal. Most feel a connection to (most of) their customers, and enjoy getting a good tip for good service. Most that I know take pride in their work, and do not feel that it degrades or diminishes them to perform it, Sartre’s comments notwithstanding.

Perhaps they are wrong. But to suggest that Cohen’s experience is somehow unrepresentative seems inaccurate.

Whether eliminating tipping works out well for waiters or others in a restaurant is, as they say, an empirical question. No tipping decreases the power of the customer, but it increases the power of the employer. How it works out in practice is an open question. Here is San Francisco, one restaurant that experimented with no tipping has reverted to the old arrangement because of the complaints of the waiters, who were losing income and apparently had more pull than the back staff, who liked the change.

One historical point. In the 17th Century and before, servants expected tips from the nobles they served. The cheeky footman who wouldn’t fetch your hat unless you threw him a coin is a feature of old novels. What we think of as the ancient aristocratic system, the state of affairs you see in Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey, was pretty much a 19th Century phenomenon. When the lords decided they wouldn’t go on tipping the butler, it wasn’t necessarily a progressive moment in the development of the class system.

This is where I could post the famous scene from Reservoir Dogs.

But I would prefer not to.

How often do you get the chance to make an identifiable person’s day better for $5?

I think the point being made is that Oliver Twist should not be starved just so that he feels gratitude when the well-fed Mr. Bumble deigns to give the child more gruel.

It should be noted that, historically, a large percentage of the tipped service industry have not been college educated. When people are told that without a college degree, they will be working as a waiter, or at McDonald’s, and then find themselves later doing exactly that after being out of work for 14 months with thousands in debt, an economy in recession, and a workforce that somehow considers “three years experience” an entry level requirementand and refuses to put effort training employees because that’s what college education and summer (unpaid) internships are for, will resent the people who told them bother in the first place.

A friend’s grandfather was absolutely flummoxed as to why, when his grandson exited college, they weren’t in some sort of managerial position.

I could ask as to why we feel that someones livelihood should depend on the mood of whatever random person comes in the door.

I could just as well ask why a customer’s dining should depend on the mood of whatever random French waiter they get, whose job performance is not tied to their compensation via tips.

It’s ultimately a problem of competing interests—customers want good service, but the greedy ones won’t even tip for it; waiters want good pay, but the lazy ones won’t even be polite to the customer for it. Clearly we need to eliminate this dependence of one human on another, and serve everybody with robots in butler uniforms.

Get dramatically higher wages first, go after tipping later.

If you do it in the other order lots of currently tipped people are going to get hurt.

@BenK

I completely agree with you that gratitude does not depend on destitution or desperation, only that (judging from the OP’s tone) that this specific defense of gratitude in this specific circumstance was to put it mildly, problematic, considering that failing generosity on the part of the customer, many waiters and waitresses would indeed be destitute.

The situation of strangers paying for each other’s meals is I think different (and completely laudable), unless that is the primary method of obtaining the money the need for food.

For myself, I’m actually ambivalent on the issue. I think there’s some confusion between people being paid for what they earned (Cohen suggests the gratitude of the tip must be earned) and people “just brightening others day” which, if the pleasures and virtues of generosity, and gratitude, common living and humanity, are the primary concerns, I’m not quite sure what that has to do with the performance of your waiter. Presumabley a waiter distracted by something (maybe even financial concerns) and delivers a “lesser” service will be just as grateful for that undeserved tip as anybody else, and presumably a waiter who felt they “earned” the 20% tip, isn’t going to be grateful, because as Hobbes puts it, gratitude follows a free-gift not one’s just desserts.

If one had a blank sheet of paper to design a restaurant compensation system, they wouldn’t use tipping as a way of doing it. The restauranteur has an interest in the wait staff providing prompt and generous customer service since, as noted in the OP, he is the primary link between the cook and the customer. Whether the smile is forced upon or real hardly matters. There are any number of jobs from CEO on down to the janitor where the correct response to a service matter is to say “yes sir, let me make it right.”

I don’t however think it should be inherently a system of reward and punishment – there should be a higher base compensation that is contemplated within the restaurant prices and accordingly a higher firm (and hopefully fair) salary built into the pricing structure – a 15% or 20% tip changes the equation signicantly compared to giving the customer the opportunity to add a relatively smaller percentage to reward good service. If the wait-staff isn’t good the difference between getting stiffed or 15% doesn’t matter – they’ll shortly be out of a job.

I’ll admit to having spent a few years behind a bar and I enjoyed a fat tip and bemoaned a cheapskate as much as anyone. That said, it was always a stupid system. My job was to open bottles, pour liquids and not screw-up. Doing these always guaranteed a minimal tip when it was really a fairly expected task. Few of my actual tips were all that deserved since I was doing what I was there to do. On the other hand, what I should have gotten paid for was all the times I talked a guy into the $10 call brand of whiskey rather than the $7 house brand…I’d get maybe an extra $0.50 in my tip, but the house got an extra $3….that salesmanship might have merited reward.

Not sure I see all the democratic ideals imbedded in the OP…its a compensation choice among many.

“but I am a healthy tipper”

I believe this about as much as his claim to be a “funny guy” He really is one of the most self-involved people on earth.

Richard Cohen seems pretty invested in his relationships with waiters:

That’s why Sean Connery was my kind of Bond. He was 53 when he made his last Bond film, Never Say Never Again. Women loved him because he was sophisticated and he could handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin.

“Attempts to destroy both generosity and gratitude through third party coercion are in every sense a blow against humanity”

I could say that the argument that requiring a higher minimum wage for waiters is a “blow against humanity” is something that a comic book villain would cackle right before getting his just desserts.

But I would prefer not to.

Okay, an exception to my rule of never commenting on Prof. Robyn’s posts.

“the tip, as Cohen and others like to say, stands for “to ensure promptitude”).”

Jesus Fucking Christ on the Cross.

No, tip does not stand for to insure promptitude. Cop is not constable on patrol. Posh is not port out, starboard home. Wog is not wily oriental gentleman. Wop is not without papers. Fuck is not for unlawful carnal knowledge.

Tip is an ordinary word. To tip once meant to touch with the tip of something, like your finger.

So if a person put a coin into the hand of a servant, he was touching, or tipping, him. There are examples in print from the early 1700’s. (Interestingly, there’s an almost opposite meaning of touch meaning to borrow money.)

It’s a pretty good rule that if an English word pre-dates WWII it’s not an acronym. So snafu really is situation normal, all fucked up. But tip is just an ordinary word.

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln, und mit fünfzig Kanonen, wird liegen am Kai….

What Sebastian @17 said.

Or we could do what they do in Chapter 14 of Looking Backward. (Since that would presuppose a wholesale egalitarian reconstruction of the society, I can’t explain in short compass.)

One of Cohen’s argument has one implicit empirical step: that Cohen, and tipper more generally, reliably detects a “job well done” and that tips in line with that. Is there empirical evidence that supports that premise?

@Wm Timberman:
“Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln, und mit fünfzig Kanonen, wird liegen am Kai….”

Je regrette de vous informer que je peux lire le français mais pas l’allemagne. C’est à cause d’une éducation mal.

@LFC:

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln, und mit fünfzig Kanonen, wird liegen am Kai….

Just get to the head-chopping part and it all falls into place.

I think its instructive that the more agency someone has, the more empowered they are, the less they rely on tipping, and more on contracts and binding agreements.

Richard Cohen, for example would probably not want to have his salary vary depending on how his editor felt about his column on any given day.

For that matter, I doubt that a restaurant owner would prefer to have customers pay according to how tasty they felt the meal was.

Does anyone here want to be paid the way we pay waitstaff, regardless of the amount? Dependent on your client’s whim and pleasure?

That we support the idea of tipping reserved only for people who are relatively powerless is pretty revealing.

@42, Philippe;
I appreciate your full-throated defense of your stance on bad behavior. Your unique perspective may not have many fans (see 36), but you wave the banner high.

With all due respect to LFC, to the French language, and to Nina Simone, I prefer the original — Lotte Lenya as originally conceived, you might say….

https://youtu.be/Ec0clERjQ5A

One of the most disgusting columns I’ve ever read and I occasionally read Will or Marc Theissen or at the WaPo. I hated being a waiter and asked to be moved to busboy when I last worked at a restaurant. That someone gets to treat you like a servant and you have to pretend to like it felt demeaning and was infuriating.

@43 got it completely right. If tipping is so good for the tipper and tippee then why don’t we have more people paid using tips as their main source of income? It’s like conservatives constant lionization of work. If work is so great then why does the GOP support policies that make it easier for the wealthy and their descendents to not have to work?

Follow-on to my earlier comment about tipping and sexism/sexual harassment. What should also have been obvious to me is the opening for racist behavior that tipping creates, again on the part of the customer (who is, of course, always right).

Tipping? feh!

There’s good reason for its disappearance in revolutionary Catalonia.

“which causes no trouble to anyone”

Well except to the waiter who eats poorly because his last table stiffed him on the tip. Or the waitress who puts up with a customer copping a feel because her rent is over due and she needs the tip. I could say you lack empathy but I would prefer not to.

“Does anyone here want to be paid the way we pay waitstaff, regardless of the amount? Dependent on your client’s whim and pleasure?

That we support the idea of tipping reserved only for people who are relatively powerless is pretty revealing.”

A lot of that depends on the culture of tipping doesn’t it? I wouldn’t mind being paid a fee plus tip *if there was a strong culture of tipping*. I would take that risk because clients seem very happy with me. But since there isn’t a strong culture of tipping for most work, of course I wouldn’t want to take it. However, see bonuses.

It seems to me that current concerns about tipping are highly misplaced. Are waiters expected to be less servile at these new tip free restaurants? Will patrons fail to complain to owners because tipping isn’t involved? I’d be rather surprised.

So the issue will come down mostly to pay. If waiters are really going to be getting equal pay at these new restaurants, great. But if they aren’t, attacking tipping before improving their pay isn’t doing them any favors. All you have done is left them with less pay while still in a position of serving others.

A million years ago, we (waiters) pooled our tips to be divvied up among all the workers (waiters, bussers, dish washers, cooks) at the end of the shift.

Now that I’m on the other end, I like to tip well. Waiting tables is a tough gig. 5 tables of 4 diners per table is a really hectic couple of hours.

My favorite tip story happened in Oxford. We were visiting our son and went to a pizza joint which (unusual for England**) served good pizza. More than satisfied all around, we left an American-size tip. The waitress followed us out into the street, angrily, to hand us our tip back. I can’t remember what happened next. Did we jolly her into accepting the tip? Did she kill us with a convenient pike? I like to think she shamed us about our superior attitude while she accepted the tip as her due for educating us.

I like restaurants as a rule. At least, owner-operated restaurants. When a good one closes, it’s like losing an old friend.***

**sample size: 3
***spends too much at restaurants

Tips are a bit of a nuisance to compute and, for most people, really are basically the equivalent of a fixed surcharge on the bill. I’m just as happy in practice having them folded into the bill. It does affect the quality of service, to some degree, e.g. compare France to the US; but there is of course a wide variance anywhere – you get perfectly good efficient restaurant service in Scandanavia or Germany without any expectation of a big tip.

Having said that, they have a huge upside for a lot of people: you can make a good deal more money in tips than you would in wage for a lot of positions. You can do it tax-free in some cases, as you’re getting cash. Individuals may stiff you, but the average person doesn’t; when I tended bar I got a consistent average yield and seriously doubt that I would have been paid 30 or so dollars an hour instead. So this is the sort of reform that would have the effect, in practice, of reducing wages if it was instituted outright. And that could matter a lot for people who don’t get much absolute income, even if they can get decent hourly wages.

It’s also worth noting that it isn’t the rich who care about tipping so much as it is people who are working or middle class. They get very few times when they feel as if they’re in the position to be waited on, and they tend to be the bulk of the people who complain when restaurants drop tips because they perceive that they’re losing some sort of leverage.

I’ve had a couple weeks’ worth of restaurant meals in France and I have to say I don’t understand how they got a reputation for poor service. The service isn’t fawning, but I’ve found it ranging from competent to professional.

Getting some telling pushback in the comments here:

As usual, I look at this from the opposite end, bottom-up rather than top-down, and ask why and how the power structures or service roles or qualitative competitions are internalized by labor as comfortable or pleasurable in the expansion of the affect economy.

An acquaintance asked me once if we had brownstones in the UK. I said I didn’t know – we might have them, but if we did we didn’t call them ‘brownstones’. He looked puzzled and said, “what do you call them?” I said the limits of my language were the limits of my world, and I’d just reached them. (Not really.)

At least with tipping we share the word, but the practice both is and isn’t the same thing as tipping in the US. We’ve got a minimum hourly wage – currently about $8 US for 18-year-olds and $10 for 21+ (I see these rates are on the high side by US standards). People get minimum wage for the usual kind of relatively unskilled and absolutely vital service jobs, including waiting tables. Some restaurants add a service charge to the bill, or give you the discretion to do so yourself; where the money goes in that case, or whether the waiting staff see any of it, is anyone’s guess. In other places you just leave money on the table. But whatever system they use, it’s unusual to tip either more or less than 10% – unless you’re seriously dissatisfied with service, in which case you’ll (or at any rate I’ll) leave without tipping at all. The idea of calibrating the tip to send a message to the waiter – either good or bad – strikes me as positively creepy. Mind you, so does the idea of the waiter as the diner’s wingman – as far as I’m concerned, once I’ve got my order ‘my’ waiter can forget about me and get on with his life.

There’s an odd custom in pubs around here – I’ve no idea how widespread it is – of adding ‘and your own’ when ordering a drink or drinks. It’s not something you’d do every time, by any means; I do it when I’m ordering something complicated, when I’m breaking a big note or just when I’m feeling flush. The odd part is that the bar staff never actually keep back enough money to pay for a drink; they just take 20p, which goes in a glass by the till & presumably gets divvied up at the end of the evening. It’s a tiny amount, absolutely and in proportion – even on a one-drink order that’s well under 10%.

Other than that, and a couple of cab drivers, I don’t think I’ve ever tipped anyone (hotel staff, servers in McDonald’s, barbers, garage mechanics…). Mr Pink’s spiel about waiters probably had even more resonance here than it did in the US; waiters in restaurants are practically the only people to get tips here. Even tipping cab drivers is optional – I rarely do.

For me, there are different tipping environments, but I will always treat the tip as owed by me to the staff. So 20% minimum at restaurants and bars regardless of my subjective experience of the “quality” of the service. I may not agree with the compensation system, but it is the way things are done.

Owners get the benefit of lower fixed labor costs, so that when business is slow they’re not bleeding as much cash, and get to display a lower “list price” on menus than would be the case if they were paying all of the wages. My experience has been that the better servers and bartenders get the busier shifts, so there would have to be a differential wage structure. There would be a lot of ingrained psychology to overcome, it’s hard to see a wholesale change being beneficial to the service workers making good money.

And then there’s strip clubs. . .

@69: This. And “punishing” the waiter who seems slow or not friendly enough is wage theft.

@69: I’d wager that the net effect of banning tips will be that servers will end up earning less money. That matters to me when thinking about this.

Well, let’s not forget Australia, where tipping is optional. Because restaurant work is paid at a reasonable minimum wage (something the current government is trying to alter) . I have never noticed that the service is worse than in the the US.

Sorry crossposted with yatreblansky and Peter T. (Refresh, js., refresh!)

In Australia tips are not as important since waitstaff are covered by minimum wages. Tips can still add to your wages, especially if you are working in a restaurant where good tips are common, and they are often split between all staff. But someone I worked with had worked in America and she said the wages were very very bad but the tips made up for it since everyone tipped , she had a funny anecdote about almost running over Oprah Winfrey once in her car at a ski resort. So in Australia tips are just like a pleasant extra, but in America they are a necessity.

I don’t know if Corey Robin has ever worked as a waiter? It really is important to work for the customer because you are an interface worker between the chefs and the customers, and you want the customers to enjoy their time in your restaurant. Chefs are under a lot of pressure in the kitchen, which is why kitchens are run with people talking in French and things. So you need to be able to advocate for the customer if they have special dietary needs or want changes, without upsetting the chefs and things like that. And let the chefs know how the service is going. And even if the writer didn’t mention it it is important to work as a team with your co-workers to to keep everything running well in the whole room, as you can’t have one waiters tables happy and another waiters tables not happy, not only for the customers but because it would spoil the atmosphere in the room.

We are actually having a debate n Australia at the moment about weekend penalty rates, which are maybe something like time and a half. The federal government is considering abolishing weekend penalty rates, as some people say we are a 7 day a week economy now. But penalty rates contribute quite a proportion to some peoples weekly wages, and also encourage people to work weekends when most people have their days off.

Also I think you should always be mindful of the influence of Foucault’s personality on his theorising, even when he had some insights. The alternative to the Victorian sorts of disciplining that starts Discipline and Punish is someone being drawn and quartered , not a pleasant utopia without punishment.

magari @79
It’s truly an aberration that we have a job remaining in the US that requires no education and pays over the minimum wage, and in many cases significantly over that wage.

A truly weird statement. First, waiters have to be literate, they have to read and write, at least at a basic level, so to say it requires *no* education is wrong, unless you think humans pop out of the womb reading and writing. Second, being a waiter I don’t think is a much less skilled job than being a cashier, say, at a supermarket, and if the latter workers are covered by union contracts, which many of them are at least where I live, you can be sure they’re making more than minimum wage.

Tip-defenders: you are agreeing with Richard Cohen about something. Thus, you are wrong, QED. But seriously, tipping is a uniquely American and awful thing. Moving to Asia has taught me that. People in Bali are incredibly kind and thoughtful waiters without being tipped. That’s just because Balinese people are ludicrously nice all the time. Taxi drivers in Singapore are, on the whole, good despite the tipless standard–if you owe less than 75 cents or so above the nearest dollar of the fare, the driver will say, “never mind the fifty cents,” and likewise you don’t demand the small change when paying a bill of $9.80 or whatever, so it balances out for everyone during the day. (They are uniformly poor drivers who have one foot on the gas and the other on the brakes the whole time, but tipping ain’t going to fix that nauseating problem.) To the extent that European waiters are not fake-friendly I think it’s just a question of cultural mores and their being reserved rather than the tips that make the difference. Comparing it to customer service in communist era Eastern Bloc states is unfair, because everything sucked then.

Like apparently everyone in the thread I have waited tables. People commenting about sexual harassment are on the money; someone would have to be rising to the level of sexual assault for your manager to give a shit IME. Even then you’d probably be told to shake it off. Also there is the weirdness alluded to above–the wait staff in the restaurant I worked in in Savannah was 100% white and the kitchen 100% black. Pooling tips becomes a racial issue. But maybe the worst thing is, tons of things can go wrong with a customer’s meal that you, as a waiter, have no responsibility for! Long wait times, wrong orders and bad food can be coming out of the back of the house, and then you as the waitress are getting shafted. Nor is there any prospective relationship–beyond the barest logical connection applying to extremes–between your attitude to the customers and their tips. You can be sweet as sugar to people coming to eat after church, and they will tip you $5 on a $60 tab. I think it is a space in which less affluent Americans can exercise dominion over people the way the rich do, plain and simple.

Seconding Ebenezer Scrooge on Japan. Service here is great and tipping an absolute no no. Many restaurants – locally owned and chain – pay their staff not just a guaranteed hourly wage, but as seishain, full-time corporate workers with promotion rights, bonuses and higher quality social insurance. But whether they’re part time students or full-time salarymen, people working in restaurants here take their jobs seriously and show you respect.

I think Richard Cohen has carefully elaborated the true reasons for tipping in his article. Get rid of it!

Sorry that last post got messed up. My eyes are going.

Some people, including the caricature of Richard Cohen drawn here by Corey Robin, cherish every opportunity to exercise discretionary power. Among those, people with few such opportunities outside of their immediate family might be the happiest to dangle a carrot in front of a waiter to make her do their bidding. The abolition of tipping would close, and the introduction of a fixed wage would narrow, this avenue for sadistic behavior.

However, decent people tip for reasons entirely different from those above. Tipping is not a uniquely American practice: what is unique is the extent to which waiters have to rely on tips for their livelihood. Belle Waring cites $5 on a $60 bill as miserly, but by European standards, it would not be outrageously so: 8% instead of the average 10% (the average US tip being 15-20% of the check IIRC). Banning tips entirely (rather than making them supplement a fixed wage) would make the payoff from pleasing the boss (the wage-setter) higher than the (near-zero) payoff from keeping the customer happy. That’s how bureaucratic organizations work, not necessarily state-owned, by the way.

The core question I always have for people who are fundamentally in favour of tipping is this: what makes waiting tables different from (almost) any other job, especially those with a lot of interaction with customers? Why is it a good thing to tip in a restaurant (even assuming the staff is paid a decent wage regardless of tips) but is it not necessary to do the same in a hospital, when hiring a plumber of buying groceries?

“The core question I always have for people who are fundamentally in favour of tipping is this: what makes waiting tables different from (almost) any other job, especially those with a lot of interaction with customers? Why is it a good thing to tip in a restaurant (even assuming the staff is paid a decent wage regardless of tips) but is it not necessary to do the same in a hospital, when hiring a plumber of buying groceries?”

Plumbers are well paid in Australia. Nurses are quite well paid. Waitressing is about minimum wage here, which is better than in America where you have a very strange system of making up for extremely low wages with tips that I don’t quite know how developed.

If you are making minimum wage it is quite nice to have additional money from tips. I suppose this is sort of unfair to other minimum wage workers as you mention. I think there are two main differences from waiting and retail: one is the time spent with customers as while you are not with the customers consistently say two or three courses plus coffee or a dessert wine or something is a lot longer than you spend with customers in retail (unless perhaps you work in some sort of high end retail job? I’m not sure); the other is that it is hospitality so people are going for a pleasant lunch or dinner, it might be a special occasion, or you might have a solo diner to take care of etc — Corey Robin complains about the “affect” and says it should be a transaction but that is not how people enjoy going out to lunch or dinner. I am afraid Corey Robin would not make a good restauranteur any better than Sartre would have. Also it is more pleasant if you are waiting on a table to have a nice bit of conversation and so on, or else you feel like a drone which is what Corey Robin’s preferred approach for waitstaff would be, I am quite sure he does not take this approach with his students that him providing education is a transaction and there should not be any “affect” in his professorial relationship with students.

(Sorry, offended waitress rant over)

The affective economy, liberalism, neo-liberalism, democracy, Gramsci’s hegemony essentially works by letting the working class participate in and enforce bourgeois morality, as in making moral and fair laws, judging the Kardashians decadent or trivial, judging Cohen as haughty or callous, homogenizing the commodified labor markets.

ccc @36:

One of Cohen’s argument has one implicit empirical step: that Cohen, and tipper more generally, reliably detects a “job well done” and that tips in line with that. Is there empirical evidence that supports that premise?

The Economist points to a study finding that people rarely vary their tips based on quality of service. That’s certainly my experience: I leave 20%, rounded to the nearest $.50–I don’t own or manage a restaurant and don’t consider it my job to do performance evaluations or make payroll decisions there.

Super analysis from CR. My, uh, two cents: there are restaurants and restaurants. Meyer’s are, I imagine, the sort where the dining “experience” is part of the package, the commodity. Other joints are perhaps less about the dramatic arc of fine dining, in which tipping is a stock piece to be performed, and more about simple pleasures. As news, this story is thus for Cohen simply another characteristic of trendy food-ism. Meanwhile, here in Oakland and Berkeley, more humble ventures have taken the same step. I frequent a pizza restaurant that went tipless at all of its locations in April. The wait staff was anxious and, so far, does not appear all that happy with the trade-off of tips for marginally higher wages, although they are unquestionably pleased that their less well-paid co-workers are making more. They respect the move toward equity. But the joint has reduced its hours and whittled away at its menu. The customer-server relationship feels a little uncomfortable. At no point during the public conversation about this change has the income of the owners of or investors in the restaurant ever been fair game.

Name any domain of human experience and there’s an academic who specializes in it. Meet Wm. Michael Lynn, Burton M. Sack Professor in Food & Beverage Management at the Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, “Tipping Expert.”

http://www.tippingresearch.com/

P.s. That R. Cohen is kind of a self-centered jerk is clear, but really separate from the broader issue of whether tipping should be kept or replaced, ISTM. Or if the two issues are connected, it’s partly a question of weighing psychic indignities vs. material benefits, an issue which those directly affected are prob. best placed to decide.

@98: The only Meyer restaurant I’ve ever eaten in was in the Shake Shack chain, where tipping is not customary (and which no longer belongs to his company), though there have been several times when I almost went to the Union Square Cafe, so I can’t speak to the “experience commodity” issue, but in regard to the other really salient point–

At no point during the public conversation about this change has the income of the owners of or investors in the restaurant ever been fair game.

–Meyer’s company has in fact raised this, one of the reasons I think it’s so interesting:

USHG will emphasize transparency when it comes to explaining the revenue share portion of any given paycheck: employees will receive daily updates on the restaurant’s overall financial performance, as well as training on understanding what he describes as “the financial aspects of the business, which is now directly tied to their compensation.”

Obviously waiters with good jobs would be worried because the chance to get serious amounts of cash in a single night would be reduced. But no one is talking about a) failing to raise waitstaff’s pay to minimum-wage and then b) never tipping anyone ever. Because right now waiters are paid scandalously sub minimum wage, taxed on hypothetical tips, and often forced to work doing prep work or cleanup in off-the-books BS. I was forced into non-table-waiting scut-work while being paid less than minimum wage. This was in part because the restaurant owner was a skeezy cokehead who inherited the business; however, the numbers of non-skeezy-cokehead resterateurs is so small as to be negligible, and can be dispensed with for the discussion.

Marc @ 99:

I’m completely OK with increasing the minimum wage for tipped employees.

Good on you; me too.

However, we’re being asked to endorse a “no tipping” regime,

Yes, that’s precisely the plan of action that Professor Robin and many of us in this comment thread are endorsing: Everyone needs to stop tipping immediately, push through legislation banning the practice just in case, and hope that wage increases follow. Good grief. Alternatively, we might be decrying the practice because the way it’s practiced in the US is tied up with such things as waitstaff being exempt from normal minimum wage requirements, relying upon tax evasion to boost their incomes, etc. If we were doing it just to get out of tipping, there are already alternatives such as fake currency, condescending notes, and religious tracts.

I’m shocked that it took 70-something comments for anyone to point out that there are whole cultures in which tipping is not practiced. Pitiful.

@108: The sanctimonious lectures in this thread are coming from people who don’t like tipping, and people who do it are being called wanna-be lords trying to treat others like servants and various other insults.

@112
If the server’s anticipated pay is wrapped up in their base salary, then they will become much more of a risk to the establishment, which will hire fewer of them. Right now, there is a balance between their idle time and their busy times that is tipped more towards keeping extras on hand than it would be. Also, there would be more pressure to substitute capital for labor.

So, perhaps you mean that the people who are giving the lectures are people who don’t like waitstaff and wish that there were fewer jobs available in that line of work…

js. et al: Tipped employees are not exempt from the minimum wage laws. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers can credit a certain amount of tips toward the minimum wage, but if the tips fall short, the employer has to make up the difference. In California, tips are by statutory definition the property of the people who receive them, so the employer can’t use them as a credit toward the minimum wage.

What Bartleby said would prefer not to say.

@117 and 118
I can’t speak for all employers and certainly won’t represent that wage theft never happens, but I can say that in any restaurant where the vast majority of transactions are run on credit cards….there is definitely a direct and accurate accounting and most restaurant management point of sales systems (which you’d see in basically 100% of any franchised type restaurant from Applebee’s to Ruth Chris) credit the tips directly to the employee in question and there is full accounting.

@ js. It’s one thing to say there is widespread wage theft (although I note you haven’t offered any actual factual support for that, and that what Trader Joe says at 120 seems to weigh against it) and it’s quite another to say, as you said, and as others such as ZM went along with, that servers in the US are exempt from minimum wage laws. They are not.

Does anyone here want to be paid the way we pay waitstaff, regardless of the amount? Dependent on your client’s whim and pleasure?

The ones here who have expressed the desire to be paid the way we pay waitstaff seem to be mostly people who have worked as waitstaff and reported they found that working for hourly wage plus tips was preferable to working the same job without tips.

That’s pretty consistent in all the discussions of tipping that I’ve seen; people who are actually working as waiters more often comment in favor of tipping. I don’t have a personal preference either way, and I support tipping because the people involved generally seem to like it that way.

IIRC, the first time I was in the US, when young and callow, I tipped the tipjar at a diner 4 times the amount of my meal, but the cook returned it and said 15% would suffice. Not really a tip, but another time I gave the plumber my cat (more accurately he took it, and it was a stray rather than my own. But I implied he could have it, so didnt really mind)

Trader Joe — I have no doubt you have a sterling personality, and I certainly agree that bussers should be paid fair wages, but none of this is to the point. As the Dissent article mentions, several of the pooling schemes are straight up illegal; and tips are properly owed to the tipped employee, whether their personality is sterling or whether they’re the second coming of the Grouch.

etv13 — I’ll grant you that when I said that tipped employees are exempt from minimum wage laws, I should have said that they’re exempt from normal minimum wage requirements. Which is true: they’re treated as a special class. But this:

if the restaurateurs don’t care about paying minimum wage, why bother lobbying against minimum wage increases, as the article also describes?

I’ll leave you to figure out by yourself.

Etv13 having worked as a waiter I can tell you that owners DO NOT pay you minimum wage when you fail to make that in tips on a slow night or when they ask you do to none serving functions like folding napkins or sweeping. Well I could tell you if I didn’t prefer not to.

p.s. I didn’t check the time difference where you are.

faustus notes,

“ZM I’m sorry but you’ll get all that and more in Japan without ever even paying 1c in tips. It would be considered actually offensive to leave even that 1 cent, and people would chase you to give it back.
I have only been to America once and only for 3 weeks but I soon got very sick of tipping. ”

I have never been to America. I was just talking about here in Australia.

Waiting is covered by award wages here so it is not like in America. You don’t need tips. Waitstaff are usually nice whether you tip or not. It is more common here to tip at higher end restaurants than at cafes or less costly restaurants, probably because you are spending a lot more but the award wages are not that much different (there are about three classes of award wages for hospitality here I have an idea depending on experience). But as a waitress it is still nice to have extra money from tips, as your wages are not very high.

Bartleby, as a woman who makes substantially less than her less experienced male counterpart, I am perfectly well aware that employers don’t always do what they are legally required to, and that there are major barriers (perhaps merely psychological, in my case) to suing them, or complaining to the EEOC or the DOL. Nonetheless, it is the law throughout the US that employers are supposed to pay everyone, including servers, at least the federal minimum wage. We shouldn’t get that wrong when we are talking about whether abolishing tipping would be a good thing or not. And if there is genuinely widespread lawlessness among employers, we should take that into account, too.

Just to be clear, I do know how to spell “afterwards”.

Waitstaff aren’t paid sub-minimum wage because their employers are supposed to make up the difference? Hollow laugh.

Okay, so Belle, what do you propose? Get rid of tipping, and put the whole control of servers’ compensation squarely in the employer’s hands? Institute a 20 percent service fee customers pay directly to the server? Or maybe, since apparently you don’t trust either employers or diners to act like decent, responsible, law abiding people, we should just abolish restaurants and eat frozen food at home. Oh wait, frozen food is made by employees too.

In other countries waiting on tables is a respectable profession. The conviction that there should be bad jobs paid less than a living wage and without benefits is not common in developed economies outside the United States, but it’s obviously received wisdom among Americans.

Nobody should comment on this without reading all the articles by Porter linked by Afeman and Fuzzy Dunlop. Tips don’t work the way tippers like Cohen think they do.

I eat most of my meals out. Half the places I frequent I don’t even need to order; they already know what I want. I always tip 20%. Even so, the service and the food is of variable quality. Sometimes it’s busy and I have to wait; some of the cooks are better than others; food is an agricultural product, a little bit more variable than industrial commodities.

However, in some of the nicest places I eat in town, the staff turns over so quickly that there is no institutional memory. Maybe the busboy remembers me, but to the hostess or waitress I’m a random stranger and all my prior signalling is for naught.

I really, really don’t know why Americans like etv13 get bent out of shape over this. Here in Australia waiting is mostly temporary work for the young, not really well paid. But it’s paid award rates, enough to live on without tips. So tips are optional. Sure there are occasional employer scams – we have a government body to deal with that. What’s so hard about paying people enough to live on? You don’t have to abolish tips – just raise the minimum wage and enforce it.

This is one like health care. The rest of the world figured it out 50 or more years ago, but there are still Americans insisting that it just can’t be done ,and any attempt will end the world.

I’m not sure what js is on about, but I’d imagine 100% of the people on this board think waiters’ base hourly wage should be at least the minimum wage (as it is, for example, in California). To that, I happen to think tips should be preserved since they add to that base wage, in some cases substantially.

On sexual harassment: tipping may be a way through which waiters put up with horrible people, but the solution to that is not to do away with the workers’ extra wages, it’s to do away with horrible behavior. If we can limit bad behavior to general boorishness, I think that’s a tradeoff most waiters would be willing to take (in return for the extra money tips bring in).

The problem of skeezy restaurateurs: yes 100x’s, which is a great reason to think that going no-tips is a bad idea.

@144: A lot of us have long and direct memories of what it is actually like to be a waiter, bartender, etc. Perhaps instead of lecturing us it may be useful to listen to our actual experiences.

“Notice who is pushing for this – it’s not the people in these jobs; it’s basically their customers.”

I could point out this is false but I would prefer not to.

Here’s the question you all really need to ask yourselves: How often is Belle Waring wrong?

My mind has been changed. Tipping is great. They should bring it in in hospitals too, because I’m sure a lot of grateful patients would want to give their nurses and doctors a bit of extra pocket money for services rendered. Pupils could always give their teacher more than just an apple in return for good grades, the bus driver surely deserves a bit of cash in return for getting me to my destination on time, and so on, and so on….

@156
You’ve just hit on the truth in much of the world, where informal exchanges matter as much as the highly regulated, highly taxed, formal fee. Yes, in health care, yes, in education, yes, certainly with transportation, and even with lawyers.

But some special few, who have at heart the best interests of everyone, work tirelessly to create justice, which can only be done when all money and power flows through their fingers – from each according to his capability – before being doled out – to each, according to his need – less a certain small management fee…

@152: I could point out that you make assertions without bothering to provide even a shred of evidence, and I will.

I’d imagine 100% of the people on this board think waiters’ base hourly wage should be at least the minimum wage

Well, you’ve got Marc arguing in the comment directly below yours (@149) that a rise in the hourly wage would hurt waitstaff. So I don’t think this is quite right. But I retract lumping your position with Marc’s.

@ js.: well, maybe I’m misinterpreting her, but Belle seems to be saying, on the one hand, you can’t trust restaurateurs to comply with the minimum wage laws, and on the other, that we should end tipping and give those same untrustworthy restaurateurs even more complete control over their employees’ compensation. I think that’s pretty good evidence of Belle’s being wrong.

I live in California, and we have a pretty lively restaurant scene despite our system of not allowing employers to credit tips against our relatively (for the US) high minimum wage. It makes sense to me that such a system would be less susceptible to gaming by unscrupulous employers than one where the employer is allowed to credit tips against some portion of the minimum wage. I don’t know what percentage of employers actually are unscrupulous, so and accordingly am agnostic on the question of whether tips are preferable to service charges. And I have to admit that it has been nearly forty years since I worked in the food service business, and when I did, it was not in a place so high-Clayton (fucking auto-correct will not allow me type the word I want, damn it) as to have tips.

@ adam.smith: I read Belle as saying let’s do away with tips, not minimum wage plus tips.

” I read Belle as saying let’s do away with tips, not minimum wage plus tips.”

I could say you are reading her incorrectly but I would prefer not to.

@ Adam.Smith: (sorry, auto correct capitalized your name) I disagree with you about what Belle was saying at 140. Her comment at 82 could be read your way, but I think is better read my way; she expressly says “tip defenders . . . You are wrong.” (Auto-correct capitalizing again.) But I am starting to feel a little uncomfortable arguing about what Belle said (or meant) with people who aren’t Belle, and anyway I have to go to work, so I am going to leave this for now.

If it helps, I’m 44, and I don’t remember 10%. When I started tipping as a teenager, in the eighties, the rule I knew was 15%, and anything higher was lavish. Through my twenties and thirties, it drifted upwards through people saying “I always tip 20% because I used to wait tables” and the like, explaining why they were particularly high tippers. And then gradually 20% became a solid norm. (That’s all NYC area, it may differ regionally as well.)

I just moved to a no-tip country. Feels so good. Try it once if you don’t believe it.

@162: That’s multiple times that you’ve utterly misunderstood what I wrote. Grow up.

If hourly wages rise, restaurants will accelerate what they already do – schedule people for even more unpredictable shifts and send them home early or call them in late when business is slow.

That’s just me quoting you. And you can cut out the insults, thanks very much.

@172 and 173
I’d agree with these 15% was normal and now its closer to 20%.
I frankly think it has evolved towards 20% since many people are too math-illiterate to calculate 15%, but can do 10% and double it.

Sebastain has said it several times, but it bears repeating. Tipping vs. no-tipping isn’t really the right way to frame the choice. If the worker can be fairly compensated without tipping (as is quite clearly the case in many countries) by all means do away with the tip jar. But the mimimum wage needs to brought to a better level before that conversation even gets undertaken (surely to +$10 or +$15 depending on location).

However if the choice is being paid the currently inadequate minimum wage of $7.65 or getting paid $2.13 + tips….I guarantee 9 out 10 restaurant employees would rather take their chances on kind strangers doing math and judging them. In more cases than not the latter arrangement is gonna come closer to adequate compensation.

By the way, I noticed a couple of years ago when one of the chain restaurants started calculating for you what various tip levels were on your receipt, they did the calculation on the pre-tax total. I’ve always tipped on the post-tax amount. Anyone have any insight on that?

etv13 @182 — years ago I had dinner with some people I was at a workshop with. A couple of them had waited tables at some point in their lives, they weren’t earning much at the time I met them, and they insisted on calculating the tip on the pre-tax amount. They said it was standard practice, but I had never heard of such a thing, and it felt like penny-pinching to me. But then, I was earning a more comfortable living than they were at the time when this was happening. It’s also a different attitude from that of a lot of people in this thread who say they tip generously precisely because they remember waiting on tables themselves.

For the record, I never worked in that kind of job. All my low-paying grunt jobs were in offices; no tips.

I’m 65; I too remember the time before 20% was a sort of standard, but I don’t remember when that change occurred. I moved around so much when I was younger that I might have imputed it to geography rather than the custom changing over time.

In general I would much rather tip a little generously than calculate to the penny (like, seriously, how much difference does including the tax in the calculation make? I guess I can consider myself lucky that I don’t have to worry about it). It makes for interesting group lunches when some people want to do precision calculations and others are content to just round the amount upward and get out of there.

This is one like health care

Or gun control. Or campaign advertising. Or …

Calibrating for age: I’m 71, so I remember 10% from the 1950s & 1960s, maybe creeping up (but by no means standard) to 15% in the 1970s – then I was away most of the 1980s and 1990s, and when I came back in the 2000s it was 20%. So what I’m hearing out there is compatible with my experience, but from most of you a shorter timespan. (Whippersnappers.)

I’m still not sure what drove the rate/expectation up, however. Whatever it was was not universal, since there doesn’t seem to have been “tip inflation” in other countries, at least not to the same extent.

The thing I particularly hate is leaving dollar bills on the bar when you a buy a beer. When I first stayed in NY I didn’t do it (didn’t have dollar bills, didn’t know it was mandatory) and the barman came running after me and yelled at me. Lesson learned.

“Just say bonjour” could be a new public awareness campaign.
My understanding of France’s (apparent) lack of customer service was just that people extrapolated from their experience with small local restaurants (same idea with Italy) where (like with local pubs) it generally takes more effort to ingratiate yourself. This has nothing to do with the French , per se, so much as the behaviours and mannerisms such a business model develops. (Relatedly, I once lived, as in shared a house, with a French girl training in london in hospitality, and her claim was that British customer service was a joke, and they could learn from the French. Takes all types , i guess)

Another Australian chiming in – I read the list of wages at #111 and found it very hard to understand, except that all the minimum wages were very low. Surely that’s the main problem? Here in Aus the minimum wage is $17 per hour (which converts to about $US12 at present) however waiters woukd also get a casual loading and weekend rates so I guess they earn more than that usually. Anyway fixing the U.S. minimum wage seems to be the first order priority.

Just for interest, in spite of being Australian, I nearly always tip in restaurants, and sometimes in taxis (here in Aus). However I do find it deeply confusing being in countries where people make much of their living from tips and where tipping is essentially obligatory. Who do you have to tip, how much do you have to give them – it all gets very awkward. Interestingly the U.S. was most like India in that respect – comparison to chew on.

@195 engles
I meant my comment in jest. There is no possible way you could have known….I’ve been equally caught out many times in my foreign travels where I could tell by looks and expressions I hadn’t done the right thing, but didn’t really know where I might have erred. While always momentarialy embarassing, learning by doing is one of the joys of travel.

P.S. if you were ever in my joint, however improbable, I thank you for your custom.

Thanks Joe. I don’t think I’ve been in your bar but have shopped in your supermarkets quite a few times.

After hours of lengthy analysis
I would like to advance a hypothesis
Though initially chuffed
I’ve now had enough
Of Bartleby’s ceaseless apophasis.

Fuzzy @ 201

The key difference (legally, in the US) between a service charge and a tip is that a tip belongs to the waiter; a service charge belongs to the restaurant. Unless the 10% service charge went, legally, to the waiter and no one else, a service charge would not have the same distributional impact as tips do.

175: “I’ve always considered the restaurant biz as one of those “only in capitalism” kinds of crazy. It’s super-low margin, high risk, very low chance of success.”

Why do you think so? Many restaurants have been successful and have been providing a stable income to many employees for decades. Is this another American idea that restaurants are thought of as short term adventures?

@mdc I’ve spent some time trying to find out what the union officials say, but I’m not getting anything. They seem to focus on raising the tipped minimum, which is essential in any case:

According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED), tipped workers are more than twice as likely as workers in other fields to fall under the federal poverty line

The median pay of waiters and waitresses in the US (excludes fast food counter staff and other non-tipped occupations) in 2012, including tips, was $8.92/hour or $18,540. And they’re not all college students, either: 86% are over 25, 53% over 40; 80% work full time, 34% have children.

@ 204 – I’m just going off the textbook economic truth about the restaurant business. I don’t know the numbers, but a huge amount of them fail pretty quickly, although I’d be curious how it tracks with the general failure rate for businesses in general, which is already high.

Yes, some of them stick around, but they are outliers. There are three kinds, as far as I can tell: those that cater to the rich (and which are still very risky, for reasons of fashion, the whims of taste), and those who cater to a stable, reasonably affluent population, like Mom’s Diner in Anytown USA. The high-end, Manhattanite restauranteur can always open a new place to keep up with the changing tastes of the urban elite. Mom of Mom’s Diner is fine until they close the local steel plant, and then its over for her. The third and by far most successful is the franchise model, which involves ruthless cost cutting, elimination of competition, and gov’t regulation to grow and succeed: thus, the true capitalist model.

@209 I don’t think Robin is so much interested in demonizing tipping as in exposing the grotesque thought processes of Richard Cohen.

Sam Chevre @202 I see I misunderstood the terms–what I had in mind was something like a service charge, but that is legally required to go to the waiter (and maybe split with other workers).

Incidentally, this just came up on Daily Kos, it seems to me like a no-brainer that having a higher minimum wage for waiters would make them better off, since diners will tip the same 15-20% either way, and the whole cost of the higher wage would seem to go to the restaurant.

Really good industry data on restaurants is hard to come by, but this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sageworks/2014/06/22/us-restaurants-margins/ comports with what I see in Seattle, including plenty of long-established high-end places. It’s an industry with relatively low barriers to entry so you expect a certain amount of churn. U.S. restaurant failure rates turn out to be in line with failure rates of businesses of all kinds.

@213: I certainly *do* tip on the pre-tax amount, and I always have, except when I tip on a basis only related to the bill by order of magnitude. (Thirty dollar bill gets a fifteen dollar tip, because I’m friends with the server.) Here, then, is a big problem with tipping. It’s a social convention. People tend not to get social conventions in a precise way. We all know we’re supposed to cover our mouths when we sneeze, but how, exactly? And driving. Nobody gets driving.

Again, there are tiers of restaurants. Some are highfalutin’ and well worth the pricey price-price, assuming one could even contemplate shelling it out. I’m thinking Daniel and Patina, at least back in the day. But most restaurants are, one hopes, merely good, sometimes better. The former entails tipping the sommelier et al., even if their contributions aren’t reflected in the pre-tax total. (If the sommelier gives you special attention you might end up spending *less* than you would have had you thrown a dart.) The latter usually involve ordinary levels of “service” (smiles, attentiveness, knowledge). Thomas Keller, presumably of the top stratum (he is by my lights fatally overrated) decided bundling the cost of service in with the price as a viable model. He seems to be correct in terms of running a business. But for a friggin’ neighborhood pizza parlor? I’m not so sure.

It all seems backwards to me. Keller’s restaurants, if they were worth the premium, would virtually automatically generate generous tips by social convention. But the corner pizza & beer joint is always at the mercy of the local yokel. Service there should be built in. Yet that move is made only when the owners determine that *they* are at risk because local government requires higher wages for their employees.

Kinda reminds me of students groveling for a higher grade. Gotta jump through the right hoops and regurgitate the correct bs to get tipped with an A. Or so I’ve heard.

{delurking}

I’ve read this piece about five times, all the while trying to figure out why I don’t object to it. At last I’ve come up with the solution, which is: this guy wants to be able to act entitled, but he’s willing to pay the freight. (Most of the time, anyway, according to his own testimony, which I don’t disbelieve.) And that’s okay with me — at least he’s willing to lay his money down. So many characters of the same ilk also want to act entitled, but they don’t want to pay, in money or in any other coin. They want to get their servitude for free. They want their fellow-creatures to grovel for no reason. That’s what I don’t like about them. If you want a seat at the table — a restaurant table or any other kind — then put some money in the pot. (Money-equivalents like time, effort, talent, and life-energy also make the cut.) But for gosh sakes don’t just sit down and start to condescend and expect your friendly waitperson to dote on you for free. It doesn’t work that way, a fact of which this author seems to be well apprised.

{delurking}

MP @219 Eric @209

This is an old problem and is faced by many industries that have to decide between salary and commission models to solve the principal-agent problem. There are commission and fee-based models in real estate (commission vs buyer’s brokers), personal finance (commission stock brokers vs fixed-fee financial advisers), and car dealerships (commission vs salaried) just to name a few. There are shared-tip models where the service is monitored by the other servers rather than the owner given the incentive structure. (And some of these arrangements actually change the principal e.g. buyer’s vs seller’s broker in real estate and similarly in finance.)

I agree with the commentator that suggested the whole pay structure would have to be changed at once for the servers not to get screwed. In today’s environment it is almost certain that any changes to the compensation structure would benefit the owners at the expense of the servers. And that’s why almost all the commentators that actually work in this industry for a living are pro-tip despite the fact it really bothers Corey’s and jeff’s sensibilities.

And a special thanks to Eric for explaining certain institutional features of the restaurant industry. It makes sense to actually know how compensation works across all workers before suggesting structural changes to a multi-billion dollar industry.

@222 Once again, the occasion for Cohen’s column isn’t some kind of proposal for the nation to do away with tipping without otherwise revising the pay structure, it is about one restaurateur’s plan to totally overhaul the pay structure in a way that will eliminate tipping in his company’s restaurants, as an experiment that other restaurateurs may or may not choose to emulate (or that may or may not transform the business, as his decision years ago to ban smoking in the company’s restaurants, to protect waitstaff’s health, eventually did). The overhauling is obviously an intrinsic part of the process.

What Cohen is protesting against is the potential loss of his own power as customer to make or destroy the waiter’s happiness for the day.

T:

This [the principal-agent problem] is an old problem and is faced by many industries that have to decide between salary and commission models to solve the principal-agent problem. There are commission and fee-based models in real estate (commission vs buyer’s brokers), personal finance (commission stock brokers vs fixed-fee financial advisers), and car dealerships (commission vs salaried) just to name a few.

All the solutions mentioned in the 2nd sentence above are used to align the agent’s interests more closely with the principals. In a restaurant, presumably the principal is the owner. It is not clear that tips align the interests of the server with those of the owner, anymore than bribes align the interests of politicians and civil servants* with those of the electorate. Clearly Jay Porterthought that tipping interfered with achieving his ideal of a restaurant, and thought that a salaried or waged staff was more motivated to do things as he wanted them done.

*A similar argument can be made for corporate office workers, especially those with some sort of discretion or decision-making authority that places them in a position much like that of government employees.

@226
Not exactly. The switch, for example, from a commission broker to a buyer’s broker in real estate or a commission broker to a fee-based broker in fiance actually changes the principal from the seller to the buyer. The pooled tip model is an interesting case where the servers are incentivized to monitor each other. A partnership has similar incentives. As do steelworkers depending on the company. .

@227
Thanks for going through many of the posts. While I haven’t reread each of the 200+ posts, I was struck by the dichotomy between the actual servers and the not actual servers. They actual servers were often pro-tip in part because they understood the business — Eric @209 — or because they felt renegotiating the current power dynamic between the owners and servers in the current environment would worsen their circumstances.

@217 Yes, jeff. The people that don’ agree with you enjoy grovelling. And they are probably stupid, too. And you are a much better and stronger person than they are. Glad we got that out of the way.

“A dichotomy that does not actually exist, neither on this thread nor outside of it.”

Yeah, I could say how strange it is that people keep claiming this is the case when I simple read through of this thread shows it is not but I would prefer not to.

@229

the dichotomy between the actual servers and the not actual servers.

Perhaps that commenter was thinking in some language other than English, as “zwischen den aktuellen und den nicht aktuellen Dienern” or more correctly “between the currently active servers on the one hand and the former and merely potential servers on the other”, in which case the statement is not nonsensical but merely false. (I was non-tipped, as mentioned above, in my own restaurant career, rising over five or six years from dishwasher to grillman and then back down, when the owner’s skeezy cokehead son took over that place, to prep in a series of new places, rolling meatballs and opening clams.)

Honestly I feel as if the big dichotomy in the thread were between those with some aspirationally Gramscian notion that waiters should feel obliged to try to live on $2.13 an hour and whatever the customer feels like doling out on a given night in order not to be implicated in collaboration with the forces of hegemony, and those who feel they shouldn’t (whether that involves a higher minimum wage plus tips or a share in a 19% service surcharge, or a minimum wage of $25, or an experiment like Danny Meyer’s, or whatever it takes), because feeding your family is more important than living in theory. Obviously that’s a straw man I just made up, but I can’t figure out what else the party so deeply opposed to any experimentation with the tipping system we have is trying to say.

@232/3
The BLS survey is of employers (not employees) who are supposed to report tips as part of hourly compensation. My guess is that if the tips do not go through the employer’s system, some may go unreported. But the point remains that servers are paid about the industry median or more.

I have zero objection to experimenting with different compensation schemes. In fact, I think that would be great. However, unlike some others on this thread, I don’t know the outcome before the experiments take place. And in states that have a large employer bias, I’m not very optimist that the ex post wage would be higher. You have to assume that the current system is the worst of all possible systems to say that any change would necessarily be an improvement. I have faith that owners in a pro-employer states could figure something out to screw labor even more.

It seems that some people on the thread are objecting to the low wage and others to how the compensation is delivered (tips v hourly). It’s unclear that they are related since hourly workers in the industry have about the same wage.