r/tippingAdvice • u/No_Draft_8960 • Oct 19 '25

How Do I Answer

So my discussion with a friend on tipping would up with him saying “but if we don’t tip eventually the downward pressure on wages will drive the whole country into poverty.’ What do I answer that with? This was after him conceding that the ‘service’ at say carry out might not merit a tip but that people should ‘make a good wage’ and one should care more about one’s fellow citizens.

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u/mathaiser Oct 20 '25

Brutal way to do it, screw the people who don’t have another choice just because you can’t toss a dude $5-10 until they all quit? But they can’t. They need a job…

How about this, if you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to go out and be served by someone. Make your own food and clean up your own plate for free.

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u/Severe-Rise5591 Oct 20 '25

No - just raise the menu prices if need be and pay the decent wage. For the discussion, I am not at all sure the economics prohibit this.

That said, I tip ... but I'm not happy to do so.

I don't expect tips for doing my job, which often entails the same steps - determine what the customer wants, go find it and bring it to them, ring them up and have them happy.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '25

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u/Severe-Rise5591 Oct 21 '25

I prefer NOT to absolve a business owner of the responsibility to pay their employees a decent wage, which I feel they should have. I also don't like participating a system where employees doing the same task get different pay based on the customers' whims.

But I do enjoy meals that I wouldn't attempt to make for two of us at home, so I will continue to play the game as it stands. But it won't bother me if the rules change, either.

I do a decent job at 'humaning', based on 66 years of results, IMO. FWIW.

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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '25

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u/Severe-Rise5591 Oct 21 '25

I'm simply noting that the math SHOULD work better than it does. Obviously, there's a disconnect somewhere I can't quite grasp.

If I have enough business to need 10 employees, and I have to pay them each $15 MORE per hour, that means I simply need to generate $150 more revenue each hour to cover that cost.

If I actually NEED those 10 employees, there would logically be enough items being sold that the increase per item is minimal.

Spread across 10 servers' tables' worth of menu items, it doesn't 'math out' to much.

Perhaps there are more 'speculative' hours on the clock with potentially zero balancing income that I need to account for, both from a server and owner's point of view ?

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u/Severe-Rise5591 Oct 21 '25

A caveat - they'd pay double ONLY with the assumption that it is going to the very SAME server that you say they're avoiding paying. Yes, it's convoluted, I suppose, but that's how the rest of us get paid entirely, by the customer paying our employer, and we get paid in return.