Eating out is already so expensive, every menu item is like at least $17 dollars nowadays (live in the city).
I’d rather give money to a homeless guy. The psychological warfare and the bullshit socioeconomic arguments for tipping are unconvincing for me. Leave me alone. Thank you.
It used to be simple. You set the price, we pay it for services and food. Now there’s a social expectation to give more? Fuck off. Fuck right off, don’t give me bullshit like “oh they don’t make a profit” well that’s their fucking problem. I paid, I paid no less than what was necessary, I shouldn’t feel bad about myself.
Sorry about the rant. I love eating out. But I hate feeling like a tightwad asshole for not tipping. Don’t get me wrong, I mostly tip like 99% of the time. I just didn’t tip today. The food took a long time to come out, they didn’t give us hot sauce, I had to go to the front to pay instead of the server handing me the bill.
I hate this, I hate what the tipping economy has become. It should’ve been simple.
Tipping itself isn’t problematic, but when you structure an industry that expects customers to tip, literally have infrastructure like point of sale devices that have a tipping window, there’s a problem. And the problem is that the capitalists are putting the pressure on the customer to pay the servers a living wage, which also create a more volatile environment for the worker and harms them when chances are people don’t tip. There’s also problems like, where does your tip actually go, does your tip get shared with the entire staff or go directly to your server, does the establishment get a cut off your tip? Because it varies restaurant-by-restaurant. For all I know Im literally just giving the establishment free money.
Aside from those considerations, in a sense, you’re right. People not tipping will harm workers in the short term. But also, the bigger issue here is the infrastructure around tipping, and the societal expectations for people to tip, which allows capitalist to justify low wages
So, in a way, we have two options going forward:
Preserve the status quo, don’t eat out without tipping.
Smash the status quo, collectively do not tip. This harms the worker in the short term, but we can hope that they either find something better due to lower wages or force their bosses to increase their wages
I’m not saying 2 is a good solution. I personally advocate for (1) before someone can figure out a way to get us out of this mess without harming the worker.
Here in the USA, as we usually do, we dug ourselves into a hole.