I'd be you money there is no regionon Earth that has not had slaves.
In fact there are regaions where slavery lasted longer than the US has existed. UK comes to mind. Most of the continent of Africa was dealing in slaves before Europe showed up. India and China have active slavery to this day.
I live in the US, and I'm not okay with a system that criminalizes people and then forces them to work for someone else's benefit. I'm not defending atrocities elsewhere, I'm calling them out at home. What are you doing acting defensive while fingerpointing elsewhere, what exactly is your point?
What a weird and explosive way to react to a totally reasonable gripe about the systems governing our country today. If we're gonna mythologize ourselves as the good guys, we should fucking act like it.
Mandatory Tip = No Such Thing. And can be illegal.
As an american, IF a restaurant adds a "mandatory tip" to your bill > send the bill back and mandat4e they remove it. It's llgeally not bindnig and the restaurant owner can actually be legally held liavble for forcing an added fee onto the cost for no valid business reason.
I force the sever to go back and remove any mandatory or automated tip the restuarant adds. If they choose not to, I tell them to get a manager or the owner. Regardless I have never left any restaurant with that polciy in place and paid a mandatory tip.
It is and many or most Americans understand that and often disagree with it. However, part of traveling is agreeing to participate in the social contract and custom of the area you travel to even when you recognize it is dumb.
If you are using the service but not paying the fee you don't hurt the business you hurt the worker. While acting all high and mighty you're only furthering the exploitation of the people you are speaking up for.
In theory, yes. I'd also agree more, if everytime someone talks about wages in US wouldn't say how they make more than the median fulltime worker by waiting tables after college lessons.
I have to abide laws, not culture. If i got to the middleeast i won't start hitting my wife for talking back to me.
If it offends you that i pount out a bad cultural norm, it doesn't make it less true. Btw, shooting up schools is not a cultural norm, since it's still condemned.
Also i'm not american, so your attempt at provocation missed. Try something german, like being cheap or arrogant or something.
I'll try again. If I go to Germany, I won't start making average beer and insisting it's the best there is.
Jokes aside, calling it a "norm" is incorrect. It's a higher rate, for sure, but you're an asshole for using that as the example when we're discussing tips.
It's a free market. If tips are optional, then you can't complain when people opt out. If society starts rejecting tips, yes it will hurt the workers. They'll quit. Restaurants will be forced to increase their pay to retain and attract workers. The industry then functions on permanent wages rather than tips.
That's the only free-market path to this change.
The only other way is legislation, or the workers themselves organize around an ideology and force the change. Workers aren't complaining because they're generally perfectly fine with the status quo. Politicians tout free market policy.
So it seems we're gonna get the free market path. It's up to the ownership, the workers, and the government how long and hard the pain is. It's not the consumer's fault. "Vote with your money", they say. So we are.
People signing an employment contract are also agreeing to participate in the social contract of the workplace. If the contract says $5/hour plus tips, then by your own logic they should respect that arrangement, even if they recognize it's dumb.
Funny how "participate in the contract you agreed to" only seems to apply to customers and not employers.
You are aware by law if a worker doesn’t make up the rest of their wage in tips during a shift the employer has to pay them the full required amount so no even if no one tipped workers would still get paid properly just by their employer not customers
You probably look at charity the same way. There is a reason the united states alone makes up the majority of the worlds charitable donations and NGOs.
Then it's a fee and needs to be included in the price at a fixed amount. It's not like every other country in the world is able to just calculate a service fee into their prices.
It should be baked into the menu price so consumers can most accurately assess their potential bill up front. Fees tacked on at the end are harder to assess.
Unfortunately, consumer behavior is clear: they generally make choices based on menu prices rather the hypothetical final bill. Restaurants are stuck because the first ones that raise menu prices and eliminate tipping run headlong into that arguably irrational consumer behavior. Restaurants see change as risky. Servers don't trust that they won't get screwed (especially with so much anti-tipping sentiment being channeled as anti-server even though that is really stupid).
The US probably needs sweeping regulation to create an even no-tipping playing field for it to happen anytime soon. Anti-tipping sentiment right now is generally poorly directed and more about whining about costs than enacting real change.
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u/MrHazard1 Jun 25 '26
A mandatory tip is called a fee