“McDonalds is NOT self-service. Unless you are going in the back and cooking your own food and packaging it and ringing it up, someone is serving you, and they can get it wrong.”
McDonald’s is self-service. You seem to be ignorant of the definition of self-serve restaurants, my Freeper friend.
You are not being waited on at the table at McDonald’s. Like any self-serve cafeteria, where you pick your own food out at the counter, and pay for it, and carry it to the table. I’m sure you actually do know the meaning of and difference between self-serve and waiter service.
“What makes you give “good service” to your employer? Does he give you tips when you provide good service, or are you evaluated and given a salary?”
This has zero to do with the concept of wait staff at a restaurant.
“how do you keep from getting bad service? If the employer is just paying $2.15 an hour, and each waiter is then compensated for good service with bigger tips, doesn’t that mean a bad waiter will get paid less, but will remain employed?”
A bad server will not make the income that a good server will. If the bad server is sound of mind, they just may make the connection between providing good service and larger tips—which is the very crux of this matter.
The rest of your post is filled with irrelevant ramblings.
I have tipped the guy doing my oil change, perhaps he has gone over and above the job, and I want to show my appreciation—with the full knowledge that that is not expected but certainly appreciated.
If, however, I come to find that the oil change guy did such a poor job that my engine is damaged, or he faked me out by charging me for a filter that wasn’t replaced, I can hold the shop responsible.
If a lousy waiter does something to ruin my dinner, my dinner stays ruined, whether I have to pay for it or not.
The system in place where wait staff earns the bulk of theor income from tips means that good service from wait staff benefits them, you, and the restaurant owner.
I am sorry that that system displeases you.
I should be clearer that your “it’s self-service” was a faulty argument to prove your point that they were not comparable. I then explained that it isn’t actually SELF-SERVICE, no matter what you call it. They simply don’t walk to your table.
Seriously. You walk into a sit-down restaurant, the guy comes to your table, takes your order, walks away, comes back later and gives you your food. In McDonalds, you walk up to the counter, the guy takes your order, walks away, comes back and gives you your food. Heck, if you had a seat at a counter, the only difference would be that you’d wait until the end of your meal to pay, and leave a tip.
So while you beg the question with your “it’s self-service vs wait-service”, I am ARGUING the question, asking what is so different that you get good service at McDonalds without a tip, but are afraid you’ll get lousy service if there is a seat at the counter when you order.
I’m open to an explanation, as I don’t tend to go to restaurants where I am in danger of getting lousy service from a waiter or waitress, because I tend to go places where the wait-staff is paid well enough that they are happy at their jobs and aren’t constantly pissed off at getting ripped off by the customers who don’t tip.
And then they know I’ll do a great tip, so they take extra-nice care of me, if it happens to be a restaurant I frequent. Otherwise, the tip is only good for someone else, as I can’t possibly have effected how I was treated by a tip I give after the entire service is done.
My problem isn’t with tipping, it is with the current class of customer who doesn’t tip, which has greatly impacted the ability of a tip to provide better service — a poorly-paid waiter who has a 50/50 chance of getting any tip at all is hardly well-motivated to provide good service.
That was the point of this thread, after all — the problem with customers getting so bad at tipping that restaurants are just throwing the tip onto the bill. This also means the wait-staff isn’t motivated by the tip, since it is ON THE BILL and they know exactly what it is going to be (realizing you can skip the tip even if it is on the bill, but most people don’t know that).
Your rejection of my second argument has no substance. Waving a hand and claiming “it is different’ is not an argument, it is again assuming the conclusion without doing the work of making a point.
If you are going to argue that a waiter can’t be expected to give good service simply by getting a higher salary, explain why your employer can expect to get good service from you, his employee, just by giving you performance evaluations and a salary?
What is so special about waiters that they almost uniquely can’t be trusted to work hard for fear of getting a poor evaluation and getting fired?
Dismissing my other arguments by asserting they don’t exist is also not a useful argumentative technique. It’s like saying “I can’t figure out how to answer those, so I’ll pretend they don’t exist”.
Thank you for dealing with the question of the $2.15 employee. Your argument is that getting bad tips will make the employee work harder for good tips. My argument is that the bad employee knew when they started that tips would be based on customer satisfaction. If they are performing poorly, they either don’t care, or can’t improve.
MY point is that if the waiter doesn’t care about tips, you will get bad service when you get stuck with that waiter, and since the boss is paying $2.15 an hour, he doesn’t care, until you actually COMPLAIN to the boss about it, or stop showing up because of bad service.
BUT, both of those things would work equally well to get rid of a bad waiter getting paid $6.00 an hour. So paying $2.15 an hour does not, by that argument, help get you better waiters. You’d get better waiters if the restaurant paid a bit more, and then was more picky about who they hired, and implemented a better evaluation policy to get rid of the bad waiters.
There are two ways a restaurant can get top-notch waiters. The first is to sell very expensive food. Then a 15% tip on a table is serious money, so the best waitstaff gravitate to those restaurants. Hardly a good thing for us, the customer, if we are looking for cheap food — the food might not be that much better, but it costs a lot more so we get better waiters because we also have to pay a much larger tip for the same task.
The second would be to actually pay the waitstaff more. That would compensate for being a restaurant with lower-priced meals. After all it is the exact same job waiting a table whether you bring out a $7 burger meal, or a $25 steak meal. The one pays you $1.15, the other pays you $4.
Of course, I never said I wanted to get rid of tipping. I said I preferred restaurants where the food was cheaper but reasonable quality, and the waitstaff was paid a bit more so they were motivated to provide good service.
I have provided my reasons why such an arrangement could make sense, and I’m sure there are good arguments against it.
I have never tipped the mechanic who works on my car. Well, for years I went to a one-man shop, so the mechanic was the owner, and since then I just go to the dealership so I never see my mechanic. I do tip the person who cuts my hair. Except I almost always cut my own now, but at the time, I kept going back to the same person, so it actually HELPED ME GET GOOD SERVICE because they remembered my good tips.