Unless you are with friends or a frequent diner at a restaurant or bar, the correct moral move is to stiff the waiter on the tip. If you’re traveling somewhere alone, you should universally fail to tip as you’re not likely to ever return there. If this fills you with immediate moral revulsion, you’re not alone.
I never tipped any waiter in my life. Tipping waiters seems to be an American idea. They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.
They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.
Maybe they should be, but In American restaurants, they aren’t—it can even in some places be permissible to pay them less than the minimum wage in the expectation that average (voluntary) tips from customers will bring their total compensation above the minimum wage. It might not be an efficient method of payment, but in the American context it isn’t a method that one can unilaterally do away with.
And it might even be more efficient than a salary, in the same way that performance-based pay is used in retail stores and other places where effort is harder to monitor than desk jobs.
Tipping, for all the grief it gives old-school economists, is actually a really efficient system if social norms are strong enough to maintain it.
I always tip ~15% for competent service. There have been a few occasions where I’ve simply refused to tip because I found something egregiously offensive about the service (usually related to quietly billing me for something without telling me it was extra).
I got comparably bad service as many times In two weeks of traveling in continental Europe, as I have in twenty years living in the States. A lot of waiters in Europe were incredibly slow, disrespectful, or otherwise below normal competence, which made perfect sense since there wasn’t a thing you could do about it.
I’ve never seen American waiters, but European waiters seem just fine to me. I never remember any spectacularly bad or spectacularly good service—it’s normally professional and competent—I’m not even sure what outstanding service would look like.
Really outstanding service would be where the waiter always shows up when you wish they would to refill (or replace) your drink or other bottomless item (chips and salsa are commonly unlimited in tex-mex places), remove dishes you no longer need, and generally is available to be flagged for whatever else you need without hovering.
Bad service can be where you’re ignored for almost the whole meal, or where they hover constantly and require reassurance every minute or so that you don’t need anything else, or act angry or as though they have some place else they’d rather be, or they mess up your order, or spill something or assist you in spilling something...
Bad service is enough to ruin a meal; really great service is almost invisible—things just happen when you would want them to, just before you’d think of it. :)
It takes a special kind of person to have the attention to detail, social skills, and intelligence to provide outstanding service as a waiter, and few people with those skills stay in that kind of job long, so outstanding service is very rare. Possibly this is less true at more expensive restaurants.
You could certainly make a consistent argument along those lines. To the extent that waiters get consistent tips, this should lead to either one of two outcomes:
Their employers will pay them less, correctly reasoning that since their effective income is boosted from an external source, the employer can pay them a lower nominal wage and still attract the same quality of employees.
If 1. doesn’t happen for whatever reason (e.g. because they’re already at the minimum wage), this will effectively push the waiter job into a higher pay grade, leading to job gentrification (i.e. restaurants will hire more competent and expensive employees, and the people currently doing waiting will no longer be qualified for the job).
Tipping might make sense if you did it selectively—if you tipped people proportionally to the quality of the service they gave you personally, and made sure the tip doesn’t exceed the gains you got through the better-than-baseline waiting. That would motivate them to produce more positive-sum gains while waiting you, and actually make society better off. But the trick here is the selective rewards, not the tipping.
I’d predict that restaurants would start charging 15% more on all meals. Waiters would still get about the same amount. The only difference is that the money would be taken equally from generous and stingy people instead of coming disproportionately from the generous, and given equally to good and bad waiters instead of going disproportionately to the good.
I’d predict that restaurants would start charging 15% more on all meals. Waiters would still get about the same amount. The only difference is that the money would be taken equally from generous and stingy people instead of coming disproportionately from the generous, and given equally to good and bad waiters instead of going disproportionately to the good.
My impression is that this is true, that the US has “good” waiters, the kind that are get big tips, but that this has nothing to do with restaurant service. That varies geographically, but is uncorrelated with tipping and has a similar range in the US and Europe. I recommend the discussions on Marginal Revolution
I’ve never given the topic of tipping much thought before, so i don’t have a very good idea of what constitutes average tipping behavior. But i’d have assumed that the whole point of tipping is to reward good service.
Do you give the same amount to a good waiter as you give to a bad waiter?
They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.
They are. It’s just that the role of employer is shared by two parties: the restaurant and the patron. These parties both contribute to the payment received by the waiter, and this payment in total amounts to a normal salary (as much as anything does).
I never tipped any waiter in my life. Tipping waiters seems to be an American idea. They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.
They are employees and they should be getting normal salaries.
Maybe they should be, but In American restaurants, they aren’t—it can even in some places be permissible to pay them less than the minimum wage in the expectation that average (voluntary) tips from customers will bring their total compensation above the minimum wage. It might not be an efficient method of payment, but in the American context it isn’t a method that one can unilaterally do away with.
And it might even be more efficient than a salary, in the same way that performance-based pay is used in retail stores and other places where effort is harder to monitor than desk jobs.
I think you meant to say “easier to measure”.
Where the results of effort are easier to measure, do you mean?
Tipping, for all the grief it gives old-school economists, is actually a really efficient system if social norms are strong enough to maintain it.
I always tip ~15% for competent service. There have been a few occasions where I’ve simply refused to tip because I found something egregiously offensive about the service (usually related to quietly billing me for something without telling me it was extra).
I got comparably bad service as many times In two weeks of traveling in continental Europe, as I have in twenty years living in the States. A lot of waiters in Europe were incredibly slow, disrespectful, or otherwise below normal competence, which made perfect sense since there wasn’t a thing you could do about it.
I’ve never seen American waiters, but European waiters seem just fine to me. I never remember any spectacularly bad or spectacularly good service—it’s normally professional and competent—I’m not even sure what outstanding service would look like.
Really outstanding service would be where the waiter always shows up when you wish they would to refill (or replace) your drink or other bottomless item (chips and salsa are commonly unlimited in tex-mex places), remove dishes you no longer need, and generally is available to be flagged for whatever else you need without hovering.
Bad service can be where you’re ignored for almost the whole meal, or where they hover constantly and require reassurance every minute or so that you don’t need anything else, or act angry or as though they have some place else they’d rather be, or they mess up your order, or spill something or assist you in spilling something...
Bad service is enough to ruin a meal; really great service is almost invisible—things just happen when you would want them to, just before you’d think of it. :)
It takes a special kind of person to have the attention to detail, social skills, and intelligence to provide outstanding service as a waiter, and few people with those skills stay in that kind of job long, so outstanding service is very rare. Possibly this is less true at more expensive restaurants.
You could certainly make a consistent argument along those lines. To the extent that waiters get consistent tips, this should lead to either one of two outcomes:
Their employers will pay them less, correctly reasoning that since their effective income is boosted from an external source, the employer can pay them a lower nominal wage and still attract the same quality of employees.
If 1. doesn’t happen for whatever reason (e.g. because they’re already at the minimum wage), this will effectively push the waiter job into a higher pay grade, leading to job gentrification (i.e. restaurants will hire more competent and expensive employees, and the people currently doing waiting will no longer be qualified for the job).
Tipping might make sense if you did it selectively—if you tipped people proportionally to the quality of the service they gave you personally, and made sure the tip doesn’t exceed the gains you got through the better-than-baseline waiting. That would motivate them to produce more positive-sum gains while waiting you, and actually make society better off. But the trick here is the selective rewards, not the tipping.
I’d predict that restaurants would start charging 15% more on all meals. Waiters would still get about the same amount. The only difference is that the money would be taken equally from generous and stingy people instead of coming disproportionately from the generous, and given equally to good and bad waiters instead of going disproportionately to the good.
My impression is that this is true, that the US has “good” waiters, the kind that are get big tips, but that this has nothing to do with restaurant service. That varies geographically, but is uncorrelated with tipping and has a similar range in the US and Europe. I recommend the discussions on Marginal Revolution
… and risk of low turnover would be taken by rich restaurant owners, not by below minimum wage staff.
I’ve never given the topic of tipping much thought before, so i don’t have a very good idea of what constitutes average tipping behavior. But i’d have assumed that the whole point of tipping is to reward good service. Do you give the same amount to a good waiter as you give to a bad waiter?
They are. It’s just that the role of employer is shared by two parties: the restaurant and the patron. These parties both contribute to the payment received by the waiter, and this payment in total amounts to a normal salary (as much as anything does).