“Would you want to be a plumber if the way you got paid was that you showed up, did your best, and the customer paid you whatever they felt like?”
One difference between the quality of service of a waiter, and a plumber. If the plumber says they fixed the leaky sink, and you still have water flooding the kitchen, you won’t pay the lousy plumber.
If your waiter is getting paid no matter how good or bad their service was, what recourse do you have? If you ate the food, you must pay.
Do you not see how a system of tips based on the quality of the service of waiting on you and bringing you food will be the incentive for good service?
Yes, which is why I like tipping.
Do you understand the unfairness of leaving the vast amount of compensation for waitstaff to the goodwill of the customer? If so, why is it absurd to argue that the base pay of waitstaff should be reasonable for the actual work they do?
If I’m in McDonalds, and I sit down to eat the food, and it is prepared horribly, I return it and get my money back. I didn’t need the “tipping culture” to get what I paid for. Even in a restaurant where there is tipping, if the FOOD is bad, I complain to the owner and get my meal refunded, and then I tip the waitstaff, because they did their job.
I think some people are having trouble distinguishing between the argument of getting rid of tipping, and my argument which is that our modern culture of incivility now includes a large population that won’t tip and makes waitstaff’s life miserable, and the downward spiral of such a restaurant may require a higher base pay for the waitstaff.
I know the higher base pay will get passed on to the customers, but that might drive off the unsavory crowd of complaining non-tippers, and make the whole thing work better.
BTW, if a waiter did such a bad job that I would THINK to not tip at all, I’d probably tell them they were lousy, and if they responded poorly, I’d go to the owner and tell them.
Not tipping would make ME feel better, but letting the owner know a waitstaff is screwing with his business seems more helpful.
My favorite thing is to use a coupon for dinner, and then add the coupon value to my tip if the waitstaff was pleasant.
and finally, if the service is lousy, but the food was great, I still tip, since in general the tips are shared with the cooks, and it isn’t the cook’s fault that a particular waiter sucks. Again, that’s where telling the owner makes it better for all.
What is odd (remembering that I like tipping) is that people seems extremely adamant about how great tipping is, and yet you rarely see it in other fields where, if it is so great, you’d think it would be — like the plumber, where it is just the one guy, and so it’s easy to know who you are praising or damning with your tip.
So, a drywall guy comes, I get references, we bargain on time and price, and we sign a contract. But with waitstaff, they work totally in the dark as to whether they will be paid at all, or if so, how much. It may work, but I don’t see where this is the shining example of pure capitalism.