tipping

it's otm but i think dude really overestimates how much servers make especially in $2.13/hr environments. have never been a server tho so

Depends seriously on the restaurant. I imagine that an upscale farm-to-table operation probably has bigger checks than the Holiday Inn restaurants I used to work at.

At a bar in London last night they had a tip jar. Had never seen that in my limited time here. I threw all my change in it. No idea how much it was but it was probably a lot because people keep giving me these 1 and 2 pound coins.

Maybe things are very different in California than states where I've waited tables (and conducted workers' rights workshops), but based on my experience, these statements are wrong:

Because tips cannot legally, in most cases, be controlled by the employer, they are typically distributed (or not distributed, as the case may be) according to a social compact between the employees. That social compact is either unenforced or enforced through social means, like ostracization. In either event, the systems for both acquiring and distributing tips are easily gamed by members of the compact who are intent on doing so.

However, to give the tip money to every worker would be illegal. The law is historically very clear — the $220 in tips belongs to the two servers only, and cannot be distributed to any other employees.

Tipped employees can't be required to share tips w/ management, but tipping out bussers, expediters, runners, and even dishwashers, is legal and normal.

It's a small point, but so much of his point of view hinges on it.

Not that his model of 86'ing tips and paying a fair wage to all isn't pretty great.

"86'ing" oooooh, look at you mr. restaurant jargon.

Clever, no?

And his ideas of how tip-outs work is strange. IME, tip-outs are invariably based on sales, not tips received. The stingy waiter, withholding tip-outs, under-declaring tips is not very realistic.

it depends on how things are structured - a friend worked in a place that had tip-pooled and people would def underreport their tips at the end of the night by holding cash back or w/e. cases where you tip on out sales are more transparent but also less fair because the server ends up paying out of pocket for customers that stiff them

parts 3 + 4 of that blog post are out now btw

By perpetuating the idea that servers, and servers alone, won’t perform without the threat of pay withheld, we dehumanize our neighbors and peers who work taking care of us. I think this helps us not feel bad when we sometimes treat them badly. It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment meets Yelp.

"It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment meets Yelp."

New board description?

Thing I read the other day: tip your sommelier for 20% the amount of the wine, if it was an awesome recommendation and went well with your meal. I'm glad I never drink wine.

It's been nice, for the last two weeks I've done no tipping other than occasionally rounding up to the nearest pound/euro.

cases where you tip on out sales are more transparent but also less fair because the server ends up paying out of pocket for customers that stiff them

This is true, but it's made up for by making the percentage of sales-based tip-out correlate to a server's average take (say, 15% tips as opposed to being stiffed or 25%).

Works the same way as income tax based on imputed tip wages - some nights you make $100 in tips but pay taxes on $150, some nights it's the other way around.

Anyway caek OTM. Abolish tipping and bring on fair wages for restaurant workers.

It's been nice, for the last two weeks I've done no tipping other than occasionally rounding up to the nearest pound/euro.

― Jeff,

ey mang welcome 2 civilisation

there are plenty of folk who work in well-performing restaurants that would consider a base 'living wage' to be a pay cut.

I can see where for some waiters, who are working in slower restaurants (as I did), or ones that have lower ticket averages might benefit from it, but it would also make those nights of bringing home several hundred bucks or getting a surprise $50 tip from a dude throwing a party go bye-bye.

Yeah, there's lots here that doesn't apply to every restaurant, every state/municipality etc. But I just did some serious fuck-yeah nodding to Part 3, which lingers on a study showing the common-sense fact that given the choice between increasing quality of service and increasing number of his/her individual covers (at the expense of quality of service, or even quantity of food/drinks sold!), an economically rational server will choose the latter, since any lost tip revenue is almost immediately cancelled out by having turned over more checks. Meanwhile the customer is giving up on ordering dessert since the server is off doing something else, but whatever.

there are plenty of folk who work in well-performing restaurants that would consider a base 'living wage' to be a pay cut.

Definitely. The waiters at the place I last waited tables are making more than I am 7 years later. Plus service charges would be a pretty tempting target for cuts in order to lower prices.

OTOH, I don't recall if this guy says how much he is paying his staff, but the no-tipping sushi place in NY claimed they were paying "market" wages for waiters, i.e., $20-something/hour. A waiter in an upscale place could certainly make a lot more on a good night, but on average, $20-something/hour is not bad in exchange for the steadiness of the income.

Yesterday I tipped $9 on $46.22 and then felt bad abt it

it'll be ok

close enough,

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/09/against-tipping/

There's something here which could "collapse in a mound of idiocy," but it's not tipping.

do you work in the service industry

he's Doctor Casino, p sure he's well versed

haha, yeah, i'm back in school now but i did two separate two-year stints in hotel food service, and some other more miscellaneous non-tipped service industry jobs (a distinction svenonius totally erases btw)

what does svenonius totally erase?

The distinction between tipped and non-tipped service industry jobs. He seems to want to get us to a place where the US service economy is a house of cards where everyone is paying everyone else, but resting that on ''Almost all Americans have worked in the service industry at some point and many will only ever work in it'' obscures the fact that most of those people actually don't work for tips, and get paid by their bosses. He also seems to be writing from within a very small bubble of shmancy baristas and cocktail bartenders - I strongly doubt that a lifer at the post office, going to Sunday brunch at the Holiday Inn, is overwhelmed by paralyzing loops of social guilt and face-saving desire to seem cool in the eyes of the waitstaff. At least not based on the tips we used to get there. There are social pressures at work, yes, but not the same ones. It just feels gross, this article clearly written for an audience of people who have money, asking people who don't to not take it and trying to spin it as an outside-the-box way of breaking the system. All that can come of this is asshole owners of coffee shops taking away the tip jar and explaining that it's for everybody's good.

does that mean you missed this Meanwhile, a bus driver on a daily route will not be tipped, for example, though he or she is working hard to serve the public. Policemen are not tipped except in the form of donations by ass-kissers to the “fraternal order” in exchange for a sticker that is supposed to confer preferential treatment by officers. Public servants are not tipped. bit?

the tipping conventions he cites seem v conventional not small bubble shmancy it may be overegging to say the complexity and pressure of tipping culture is paralysing but seems to me his argument is as it is always and for ever that employees should be renumerated in a regular and reliable way by their actual employers although this would indeed have the further payoff of a world that doesn't strike fear into the hearts of post office lifers brunching at holiday inns win-win

The guy has some points, but something about the overly hard sell, especially with the projection about the kind of people that are in favor of tipping makes me distrust him. He may be selling the elimination of tipping as a righteous blow for social justice (he didn't eliminate tipping, he just made it mandatory), but it looks to me like he found a way to give his kitchen staff a raise without putting any of his own money on the line. Restaurant types are genius at this.

Wait, did Ian Svenonius open a restaurant?

Yeah, that whole 80 percent of Americans work in the service industry thing is misleading. That many people work in the service sector, but not at restaurants and shit. Most are paid salary or hourly wages. I agree with him that the system is fucked, but the last sentence is idiotic.

or rhetoric

?

does that mean you missed this Meanwhile, a bus driver on a daily route will not be tipped, for example, though he or she is working hard to serve the public. Policemen are not tipped except in the form of donations by ass-kissers to the “fraternal order” in exchange for a sticker that is supposed to confer preferential treatment by officers. Public servants are not tipped. bit?

I did read that, but tbh, the whole opening section with the 'survey of tipping around the world' or w/e is super dicey and class-centric ('here's what world labor conditions look like from the perspective of me visiting as a rich tourist') and anyway has no impact on the conclusions he draws. He ostensibly knows about non-tipped service industry workers but they disappear when it comes to his 'vast circle jerk' model. The tone and preoccupations are all of the rich person obliged to tip or throwing around their money in cool bars with other people who have money; the rhetorical attempt to imagine it from the tipped employee's POV is pretty superficial IMO, and he really doesn't attempt to imagine the economics of lifer wait staff as opposed to people who all dabbled in it once and therefore like to imagine themselves good tippers now that they are elite bloggers or music personalities or whatever, which seems to be his 'typical' service industry person.

imagine the economics of lifer wait staff

idk that you need to 'imagine' a system that works in a lot of places

what does Svenonius even do for a living at this point? find it hard to believe he's in the lap of luxury to the extent that Dr C is trying to make out

Dr C is someone else

antiantitippers seem to have a kneejerk defensiveness as though antitippers are suggesting that workers who currently rely upon tips should receive less money from their work than they currently do why is this

i think another interesting way to examine tipping is comparing it to workers who earn a significant amount of their earnings from commissions and sales/earnings based bonuses.

both tipped employees and commission/bonus employees have the same relation to their employers -- that their wages are contingent on the success of the employer's products

there are likely bad things about a commission structure, too, but i suspect tipping encourages worse behavior for everyone because it is essentially a side transaction. if you give a bigger tip because you were comped a side, the equivalent would be slipping the car salesman money for throwing in tinted windows or something.

agreed.

Look, I basically just think this is a too-long and not-thought-out op-ed on the internet, not sure why we have to take seriously his proposal that tipped employees bear the responsibility for solving the system by destroying their own livelihood via refusing tips. It's a dumb idea that won't happen and wouldn't work, so I would like to think I could reject it without having to sign membership papers with the ''antiantitippers'' and bear the burden of all their supposed whatevers.

doctor casino have you ever listened to a nation of ulysses album?

no why, are you on the svenonian street team too?

how do their albums stack up to this article, lengthwise?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nation_of_Ulysses#Political_concepts

Wow, twenty years ago he was in a band that wanted to fight the Man?? Then clearly nothing he says about tipping could ever be wrong! I take it all back!

i am saying the opposite: he is fun to indulge but he should be taken as a weird artist and not a serious essayist

Ahhhh, okay. Please accept the retraction of my knee-jerk sarcastic post.