[speedplane]

I'm always amazed when others are astonished of the "ridiculousness" of restaurant tipping in the U.S. It's a well understood social convention that everyone follows, creates an incentive for waiters to treat guests well, and creates a more direct connection between a patron and server.

There have been many cases of restaurants that have removed tipping, only to go back at the behest of their staff because waiters made more money from tips than from a higher hourly salary. This makes sense too, if a waiter is incentivized for tips, they will quickly learn how to nudge customers into getting more.

So waiters make more tipping, and U.S. customers accept it as a social norm. What's the problem?

The problem is that it opens restaurant employees up to abuse and discrimination. In most companies, if a client starts abusing an employee, managers can offer some level of protection and insulation, either by inserting themselves or in extreme cases, dropping the client. A restaurant offers far less insulation to waiters/waitresses, which makes it harder to combat entrenched discrimination. This abdication of responsibility arguably reinforces such discrimination, which can have wider effects than just in a restaurant.

This is a problem that needs fixing, but given that waiters/waitresses are often towards the bottom of the economic totem pole, and plenty of other of areas need fixing too, forcing unwanted change on them for some greater moral good before others seems wrong in itself.

[cannonedhamster]

Good service should be the norm. They don't get the same minimum wage and service levels are arbitrary. You don't actually seem to understand some things about waiting.

Higher wages only occur in places with higher food prices. Diners and the like often don't make much over minimum wage. Try making a decent wage at a place like a Waffle House. Great greasy diner food a a low cost, which means the waitstaff make nil in tips unless they make it up in volume. Some places also force waiters to pay for dine and dashers. The legality of this is questionable but it definitely happens.

The solution is to remove the tipping minimum wage. If customers then want to provide a tip above and beyond that wage level for exceptional service, fine, but removing the tipping minimum wage would allow for more stable wages, would improve the bottom end of the wages, help with lower hours, etc. This way it removes the arbitrary lower wages that might come from discrimination, foreign eaters, management issues, etc. Prices would go up everywhere, normalizing the costs.