[Klathmon]

But part of the problem is that the tipping-culture already VERY quickly corrects that problem.

Restaurants generally over-staff, and tend to get really cutthroat about who stays and who gos when it's needed. A place I worked when I was younger would regularly take the lowest performer off of saturday nights every saturday night.

The ones who aren't making a huge amount of money on the busy nights are already removed from it before they can even think to complain about it.

And it was a very "open secret" that if the restaurant needed to "supplement" your wage for ANY reason, you were going to be gone the next week. I saw it happen many times. So it was somewhat common for the wait staff to "pad" their own wages with tips if they had a bad week.

So now you get the situation that everyone involved wants to keep tipping.

* Well-performing waiters want to keep tipping as they make a lot of money, not tips means a huge pay-cut.

* Under-performing waiters want to keep tipping because they know the second the restaurant needs to pay their wage, they will be the first to go. So it's either keep their low-paying job, or have no job.

[csydas]

I disagree with the conclusion since the premise (tipped wages make for unstable work) is exactly what the restaurant owners are complaining about, and many servers do as well. As others replied, the high payout often overshadows the rainy days for those servers lucky enough to get a killer night of tips. They remember that because it's an actual event as opposed to the night the spent not earning money while looking at their phone. In the long term it's unsustainable and it is more of a problem for restaurant owners than most want to admit.

There will be holdouts no doubt but overall the rest of the world has no lack of people willing to wait tables. They just get a steady pay check out of it instead of hoping for hours.

[greedo]

Yup. Once we had to start pooling our tips, you better be getting a minimum of 10%, or you'd get crappy shifts. 15% was expected, and to be a star waiter, 20%+ was the goal. This was partly to weed out the underperformers, but also to limit underreporting of tips by waiters. No one liked pooling, so they'd surreptitiously pocket a few tips.