Perhaps you’ve noticed. We have reached a tipping point in the country over tipping.
To tip or not to tip has led to Shakespearean soliloquies by customers explaining why they refuse to tip for certain things.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers were grateful for those who seemingly risked their safety so we could get groceries, order dinner or anything that made our lives feel normal. A nice tip was the least we could do to show gratitude.
But now that we are out about and back to normal, the custom of tipping for just about everything has somehow remained; and customers are upset.
A new study from Pew Research shows most American adults say tipping is expected in more places than it was five years ago, and there’s no real consensus about how tipping should work.
Tipping is bad culture because we as customers should not need to directly subsidize the employees paychecks. There is too much variability in that. I’ve worked in restaurants where there is a slow day. I’ve seen servers on busy nights leave with $10 in tips because tables just refuse to tip anyone.
The restaurant should raise their prices and pay all employees a livable wage regardless of position. It’s not about being bad at math. It’s about some people not wanting to tip and the only one getting fucked over is the person on the very bottom with no control. It’s about that same person having to spend 8 hours on a slow Wednesday morning with maybe 2 customers all day just not getting the tips to feed their family. It shouldn’t matter how many customers a server gets. They should get paid for the hours worked, not the customers served
Then get a job that isn’t tip based. Folks take those jobs because “I usually make more in tips” but that’s literally the gamble you sign up for with that mentality. I don’t want to take that gamble, so I work a job that isn’t reliant on tips. I don’t have good days where some rich dude gives me 100 bucks for no reason, but I also don’t have bad days where I make less than I expect and don’t know how to pay my bills. Tipping culture is bullshit and it’s the owning class exploiting us all, but workers who sign up to work for tipped based jobs know what they are getting into and don’t get my sympathy any more than some dude working at Best Buy hating his life does
ThEN get a job ThaT ISnT tIp baSED
Yes, but not in mixed caps and in all seriousness