[tsmarsh]

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.

[seanhandley]

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.

[foldr]

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).

[kelnos]

> 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.

[marliechiller]

We share a huge amount of culture.

[foldr]

There's a significant asymmetry, though. Brits consume far more US culture than Americans British culture.

[autoexec]

> The service industry is what you do in high school or college

most people working in the service industry are not teenagers and college kids. For restaurants and fast food joints adult workers are more common.

https://datausa.io/profile/soc/fast-food-and-counter-workers

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percen...

The average retail worker is over 40.

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.

[kelnos]

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.