If you believe no tipping will leave waiters to starve with no money, that’s not true. The very reason they are so severely underpaid is that restaurants know they’ll get their income from tips.
The less tips there are, the more your employer will have to pay you - in a form of salary that is way more predictable and reliable than tips.
Customers, on their end, will know price in the menu is final, and they won’t add crazy extra just so that they won’t feel like worst people on Earth.
In my country, tips do exist, but you are not expected to leave them by default and it’s totally fine and common not to. The result? Waiters get livable wage and can last a month without ever receiving a single tip (which they actually have, too, from time to time).
Pretty sure they’re only guaranteed minimum wage if they don’t receive tips. So yeah if you’re cool with your waiter making $7 per hour instead of $3, don’t tip.
Now you’re raising two different issues. The first is a truly abysmal minimum wage. The second is a lack of effort on the part of both the staff and the employer to negotiate an acceptable minimum wage, whether it includes tips or not, enabled by the reliance on tipping to provide an acceptable wage.
I’m not aware of how things are on the ground in the US; it’s more of a general perspective not tied to any specific country (which is my separate “meh” about strongly America-centric Lemmy, but it’s very tangential)
But seeing people actually hit the absolute mandated minimum is indeed depressing. I might expect that waiter’s income with tips is normally greater than the federal minimum, so maybe there’s a chance not all waiters will agree to work for that, which should balance it a bit?
If you believe no tipping will leave waiters to starve with no money, that’s not true. The very reason they are so severely underpaid is that restaurants know they’ll get their income from tips.
The less tips there are, the more your employer will have to pay you - in a form of salary that is way more predictable and reliable than tips.
Customers, on their end, will know price in the menu is final, and they won’t add crazy extra just so that they won’t feel like worst people on Earth.
In my country, tips do exist, but you are not expected to leave them by default and it’s totally fine and common not to. The result? Waiters get livable wage and can last a month without ever receiving a single tip (which they actually have, too, from time to time).
Pretty sure they’re only guaranteed minimum wage if they don’t receive tips. So yeah if you’re cool with your waiter making $7 per hour instead of $3, don’t tip.
Now you’re raising two different issues. The first is a truly abysmal minimum wage. The second is a lack of effort on the part of both the staff and the employer to negotiate an acceptable minimum wage, whether it includes tips or not, enabled by the reliance on tipping to provide an acceptable wage.
I’m not aware of how things are on the ground in the US; it’s more of a general perspective not tied to any specific country (which is my separate “meh” about strongly America-centric Lemmy, but it’s very tangential)
But seeing people actually hit the absolute mandated minimum is indeed depressing. I might expect that waiter’s income with tips is normally greater than the federal minimum, so maybe there’s a chance not all waiters will agree to work for that, which should balance it a bit?