I'm Australian, living in Canada for 10 years, just went back to Australia for 18 months, now back in Canada. I have some experience here.
I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada.
In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum.
In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious.
So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.
I had to read this a few times to make sure that, yes, you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great.
I've lived here all of my life, but traveled very extensively. I would give the typical Canadian service interaction a neutral pass; they aren't openly rude, nor are they offering to wash my car.
Where are you going to eat that someone taking your order, bringing it to you and checking in to make sure that it doesn't taste like burnt plastic could be described as "bare minimum"? That sounds an awful lot like "pretty standard" to me.
Even in fancier places, there is a real art to achieving the perfect balance between attentive and annoying in service. Having someone notice that I need more water leaves me feeling cared for; having someone stop by on a 7 minute schedule to ask if we're "still okay" leaves me feeling violent.
> you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great.
I was saying that service in Canada is noticeably "better" than service in Australia.
So what I'm actually implying, is that service in Australia is quite "lacking". By lacking I mean nobody "waits" on you. You often order at the bar, pickup your own food and cutlery, re-fil your own water and walk to the bar to buy yourself a drink.
Even a "sit down" restaurant will really only take your order and bring your food, nothing more. Fancier is different, but then you're paying more for the food.
As I said, I'm perfectly happy with that level of "service" because it means no tipping.
Of course, minimum wage in Australia is $21.38 with benefits, leave, healthcare, etc. etc. For everyone.
I waited tables for years in the Southern U.S., now I live in Canada.
I find that service is highly regional even in the U.S., but as a whole, better than service in Canada.
I also think that Canadians making at least minimum wage with tips on top plays into that. In the U.S. you'd have to provide great service or you risked not making any money (technically I know your employers are supposed to top you up to minimum wage, but they do it for the pay period rather than an individual shift)
I am an American who has been living in Sydney for years and who stopped tipping here after getting used to it not being expected - but it has gotten a little weird/muddied of late. First it was Uber and the food delivery apps - and I did tip there because the app asked and I knew that in the gig economy the workers were not paid well (unlike others in Australia).
Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in).
I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?".
So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?
You're correct, it's creeping in mostly due to cookie cutter POS machines setup for US market (I assume), and Doordash/Uber/etc apps and websites baking it in. I'd guess the payment machines can be setup to hide it, but management figures we have a "choice" (under light duress) to not tip so that's good enough. There are also a lot of international people working in hospitality so I guess they wouldn't be as against it as a lot of locals and just assume it's normal.
There are pretty much weekly hate threads on r/australia and similar places on Reddit about this as you'd expect.
One other thing I did notice - when travelling the US and reading reviews, a lot of people talk about the service. It's rarely mentioned in reviews over here in comparison unless it's an outlier. I personally found the fawning attention quite cloying in the US, but it's a different culture I guess. Wondering if that'll change if tips gain a foothold.
If there's a presumptive pre-filled tip amount that I have to zero out that would annoy me a lot.
In most cases there is a tip button that I just don't press or I answer 'No' to the question on it. Sometimes the staff do it when handing it over. That doesn't annoy me as much and I don't usually feel much pressure since I've got a whole life behind me not tipping I guess. I do feel a bit awkward sometimes so I'd rather they not put me in the situation but I get over it.
People do tip in Australia, it's just not expected. Tipping a genuine act of generosity to reciprocate exceptional service.
The correlation between service quality and tipping is an interesting one, why does anyone do a good job in any role without some kind of incremental reward for effort. Do office workers always revert to 'just enough to not get fired' or are they playing a longer game for promotions and bonuses?
What is this "exceptional service" people are talking about? Take the order without forgetting stuff and then bring dishes from the kitchen? Isn't that just a normal baseline for this profession? Or does it mean not spitting in the food (I'm joking)?
I sometimes leave tips, but not once have I understood why, because there is no such thing as "exceptional" in the waiting service imho. I only do it due to the social pressure, like a monkey in the story about water hose and a ladder.
I absolutely think that exceptional service is possible - for example, when I visit a restaurant with my elderly grandparents who have some extremely particular dietary restrictions, and the wait staff patiently discuss our options, help them create a meal that satisfies their preferences and remains interesting, I find that exceptional. I've had wait staff give us genuine recommendations on the menu, with honesty, indicating the dishes they don't like (much more rare) as well as those they do resulting in a good meal - I enjoy that candor and am happy to tip for the recommendation. I've also had staff stay late and keep a restaurant open because we were on the last train into a station with nowhere else to go and eat and didn't speak the local language - I found that exceptional as well.
Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.
No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness.
It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode.
If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some change in a tip jar if we only ordered drinks.
Traveling to the US as a Brit is an affront when you first experience "service culture". You become desensitised to it after a while (and can even have some fun with it) but initially it's a genuinely uncomfortable experience and it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).
> it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
Is that really true, though? The US is such a mix of cultures at this point (and even the more dominant cultures have diverged so much), that I'm not sure it's accurate to say that Brits and Americans generally share all that much culture. History is there, yes, but it's been over 200 years, and history fades.
These aren't "summer jobs" for pocket money or children's first steps into the workforce, they're the jobs adults depend on to keep their rent/utilities paid and their families fed.
Someone 25 years of age and older can deliver exceptional service, they just aren't paid enough to care to.
The GP poster was referring to the age of service workers in the UK, not the US. No idea if they're accurate for the UK, but I don't think US data can be used to refute what they're saying.
It's difficult to explain the cause. You can't really account for it by a simple tipping/no tipping divide. In other countries that don't do tipping, you'll end up wishing they did because the service is so abysmal. You can't get decent service or expect a good waiter or waitress, because nobody is motivated to do the job well.
I've been to Japan many times. Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya. Japanese culture is exceptional in many ways—you can't pretend that their culture is normative when applied to the west. My point still stands. You can't pay service staff minimum wage or slave wages and expect good service. This is why the tipping system developed.
Ah, that's bullshit. I've been all over the world and I'm guessing by your comment I'm more travelled than you. Currently, I'm in the Philippines, where there's no tipping. Go ahead, come down here on a trip and see what happens. No tipping. And the service is abysmal because nobody has any incentive to be an excellent waiter or waitress.
What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing in order to reward good service and provide a decent income to service workers. It's not perfect, but it's there for a reason.
I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada.
In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum.
In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious.
So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.