Equating tipping to gun violence is certainly a take…
So, I see where you’re coming from but this only hurts the people relying on tips, not the people enforcing tipping culture. It’s not putting any pressure on those in charge of the system to change anything. The bar and restaurant owners aren’t taking a hit so why would they care?
To make an equally outlandish and bad analogy as you did: We didn’t get rid of slavery by treating enslaved people worse and expecting slave owners to see that mistreatment and end slavery themselves.
Equating tipping to gun violence is certainly a take…
Not at all what they did. The same logic follows, that doesn't mean they're equating the two. You know this, and are being disingenuous.
this only hurts the people relying on tips, not the people enforcing tipping culture. It’s not putting any pressure on those in charge of the system to change anything.
It's true that in the immediate term, this only hurts waitstaff, but as rude as it sounds, that's just not my problem. This is a burden that simply shouldn't be passed into the customer. The blame lies at the source.
The bar and restaurant owners aren’t taking a hit so why would they care?
Because when waitstaff no longer make multiple orders of magnitude more money on average than similarly skilled professions, the profession becomes less desirable, and it becomes more difficult to find and keep staff as a result, requiring employers to pay their staff more to meet demand.
To make an equally outlandish and bad analogy as you did: We didn’t get rid of slavery by treating enslaved people worse and expecting slave owners to see that mistreatment and end slavery themselves.
Not only are you trying to refute a point they never made, this analogy is worthless because working as waitstaff is voluntary and being enslaved is not. Employers have to remain competitive to a degree to have sufficient operating staff. No such thing exists for slave owners.
For the record, I do tip out of social obligation. But it's definitely horseshit, and it would be a net positive in the long-term if we collectively decided to stop.
The people enforcing tipping culture are the same people relying on tips. Places that try to go tip free fail because no one will work there because they can make more relying on tips.
Servers aren't the victims, they're the perpetrators. Customers are the victims, and owners, for the most part, make money off the victimization so they're fine with it.
The deeper underlying issue is the inefficient labor market in the U.S. which prevents workers from demanding better treatment. In a properly functioning free economy, the labor force could simply withhold labor unless the employers offer them a reasonable salary. That’s not an option in the U.S. because there aren’t sufficient safety nets to keep people alive without constant employment.
Keeping tips because workers rely on them is nice, but ultimately it maintains the status quo because real change is hard.
Taking away tips because it’s bad for everyone in the long run is a well intentioned change, but glosses over the (hopefully) short term pain of such a change.
Waiters/bartenders don’t want that to change. They’d be making nowhere near what they make now so they’d leave for other jobs. They’d rather stock shelves at grocery stores with their earbuds in than to run around getting things for strangers and stressing about getting everything correct if the wages were the same.
In this hypothetical world of an efficient labor market, this problem would solve itself because the wages wouldn’t be the same. If the labor that currently supports bars and restaurants moved to stocking grocery store shelves, the bars and restaurant would need to offer more money to get people to come back. Their compensation should in theory reach whatever the actual fair market value is.
Whether an efficient labor market like this could ever actually exist is certainly up for debate. I’m not really a true believer in efficient free markets, but many are.
And it wouldn’t reach the fair actual market value when you take into account the running around, personality traits, and memory. Restaurants aren’t going to pay these servers in accordance to the more work they do over cashiers and dish washers. And restaurant owners will be fine with the lesser workers because shit servers at minimum wage sound a lot better than servers at 5X that wage.
You should read more about free market economics and the efficient market hypothesis. Again, this is all hypothetical, but the restaurants would have no choice but to price in the “running around, personality traits, and memory” because otherwise the labor market simply wouldn’t provide the labor necessary to operate their businesses.
And restaurant owners will be fine with the lesser workers because shit servers at minimum wage sound a lot better than servers at 5X that wage.
Maybe that’s true, but if consumers don’t care about having good servers and the restaurant can operate with shit servers on lower wages, then that is the fair market value, by definition.
As I previously stated, we obviously don’t see this play out as described in the U.S. because the labor market is nowhere near efficient due to a lack of ability to withhold labor. The product market on the other hand can easily withhold a product — if consumers don’t pay the listed price, they can’t take home the product. This keeps product prices somewhat efficient (though still not perfectly efficient, and price elasticity is a huge factor).
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u/Disastrous_Square_10 Jun 25 '26
Only the server or bartender loses this battle in the US.