- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
Summary
Tipping in U.S. restaurants has dropped to 19.3%, the lowest in six years, driven by frustration over rising menu prices and increased prompts for tips in non-traditional settings.
Only 38% of consumers tipped 20% or more in 2024, down from 56% in 2021, reflecting tighter budgets.
Diners are cutting back on outings, spending less, and tipping less. Some restaurants are adding service fees, further reducing tips.
Worker advocacy groups are pushing to eliminate the tipped-wage system, while the restaurant industry warns these shifts hurt business and employees.
Key cities like D.C. and Chicago are phasing in higher minimum wages for tipped workers.
good work Americans, keep it up.
don’t stop until the rate is 0%. paying workers is the employer’s job.
Sometimes people try to bring tipping culture to NZ. We show them the door.
Whats funny is when Americans dont care about our non tipping culture and tip anyway
I once worked for an American company that had a requirement that if you’re using company money to pay for a meal, you tip at least 20%.
That was very awkward in some countries…
saw that once. The waiter said “I am not allowed to accept tips” and the american looked confused/offended. Thought it was quite funny
One time after a meal out in Wellington, the waiter chased us up the street - he’d just realised he overcharged us for wine, and was bringing us the cash.
Yeah! Thank you so much for punishing the servers and delivery drivers instead of business owners and making it harder for me to pay rent and feed myself! You’re all such wonderful people!
That’s like employers holding someone hostage and then claiming any harm that comes to them is your fault.
I feel like this is 90% of politics; a gun is held to someone’s head for a hostage demand, and to not give in to the demand is to be as bad as the shooter themselves.
“How could you shoot down my bill for a Coal Chugging Committee? It would’ve created so many jobs111”
You’re still not supposed to shoot the hostages.
Not according to Jack Traven.
https://youtu.be/DuNqh2AOItM?si=ShootTheHostage
How about you be angry at the business owner for paying a shit wage? Tips should be a bonus you get for a job well done not something that makes your life liveable, that’s what your wage is for. We aren’t to blame if your boss is a piece of shit who refuses to pay you a liveable wage.
Yes, and the way to take that anger out on the business owner, is not by withholding a tip to the working class driver (who receives 100% of the tip, btw), it’s by not using the fucking service in the first place.
I assure you I am also angry at my corporate masters, but they’re irredeemable scum and aren’t on Lemmy. It angers me more when I see people cheering that food is being taken out of my mouth as though it’s some virtuous blow to my bosses. It’s not. You’re only further exploiting already exploited people
It angers me when I have to subsidize someone else’s wages because they’re not built into the price I’m paying.
Do you tip the cashier at the grocery store? The technology employee who recommended what TV to buy? The book store worker who helped you find a book?
No, you don’t.
Why? Because their pay is already factored into the price of the goods being sold or the service being provided.
If anyone’s stealing food from your mouth it’s your employer.
What cashiers? All of the cashiers have been replaced by electronic self-checkout systems.
Even if they have, that doesn’t negate the other two examples.
And every grocery store I’ve been to still has human cashiers even if they’ve implemented self checkout.
Good day, sir.
Yes, blame the exploited for their exploitation and never acknowledge your participation in it. You are a good American
the exploited are in on it in this case. Because, by federal law, “below minimum wage jobs” don’t exist. You either make minimum with tips, or the employer is forced to pay the full amount. So the problem is wage theft. That is not the concern of the clients, but of the relevant authorities, if the servers bothered to report, of course
Try to live off $7.25/hour, let alone raise a family. Servers make even less (~$3 something/hour?).
This shit is so fucking tone deaf and misguided.
A very good American.
“No! No! My employer shouldn’t be paying me a living wage, the people I serve should be paying me my living wage! My employer is categorically not at all responsible for paying me!”
— you, a very wonderful person, and a damned good American!
It’s so much nicer travelling in places where service workers are valued by their employers.
I still support the anti-tipping people though - it’s the single best option they have to effect change. It’s something small, concrete, and moves things to the desired end-state.
Stop tipping and donate the amount to community organizations fighting poverty instead.
Or better yet advocate for a minimum wage that is actually livable so people don’t have to rely on charity organizations that often come with religious strings attached.
I’m with you, these replies are delusional. Saying that the employer has to pay minimum wage if the servers don’t get tips is so ignorant it’s insane. Servers make like ~$3/hr in a big chunk of the US. That’s slave labor in our modern economy. $7.25 is not much better.
They think they’re making some grand statement by tipping their UberEats driver $0, while in reality they’re just taking money directly from other working class people. And if they actually wanted to make a statement, they would not have used UberEats in the first fucking place.
Edit: To be perfectly clear, when I say servers make $3, I am referring to the federal minimum wage for servers, and yes it is different and much lower than $7.25/hr.
I also agree with you but i wanted to point out that if the worker getting paid $3/hr doesn’t make enough tips to cover the remaining $4.25/hr in tips then theoretically the business is legally supposed to make up that remaining hourly difference. -I’ve never seen that happen but a server making such a low amount in tips repeatedly is a server i’d expect to not remain working in that role.
You are mistaken. The US has two different federal minimum wages. Servers have a lower minimum wage. It’s like ~$3/hour.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/15-tipped-employees-flsa
According to the DOL, an employer may not pay their employees less than $2.13 per hour even if they make enough tips that they’d still be making minimum wage just off of tips. So there is a separate, lower minimum wage for tipped workers.
At the same time though, tipped workers still have to make the full (federal) minimum wage. If your $2.13 per hour plus your tips only come out to $6 per hour, your employer has to pay the other $1.25 per hour.
Enforcement is another issue, of course, but tipped workers have the same minimum wage as everybody else. The tipped wage just allows businesses to count tips as wages up to a certain point. If a tipped worker is only being paid $3 per hour because they didn’t get enough tips, that business is stealing their labor and needs to be smacked.
I was a server in addition to an Office Assistant that adjusted payroll among other things in the hospitality industry here in the U.S.
-That additional amount is supposed to be made up for by the employer if the server doesn’t make enough in tips. If as a server you are not making at least 7.25/hr in wages or alternatively in combined pay and tips then you need to contact your local states Department of Labor because you’re likely having wages stolen.
You’re a victim of the system you’re protecting. Enough with the Stockholm Syndrome.
The ones funding my bosses and not me are doing a lot more to protect the system than I am. Not tipping has no effect on the employer and only punishes the person providing you a service.
Your employer is required to pay you minimum wage if tips don’t make up the difference. If people stop tipping entirely, it actually will impact your boss.
A. Wage theft is widespread and hard to fight without money
B. Minimum wage hasn’t been a livable wage since the 70’s
different problems. Maybe try to tackle those instead?
Sounds like you need a union.
This makes absolutely no sense. Do you even think before you type or…?
They’re absolutely correct though and it makes perfect sense. This is a systemic problem. Don’t use the service at all if you want to make a statement.
Use the service, and then refuse to tip (100% of which goes to the driver btw), and you are doing nothing but directly hurting other working class people. Good job.
Customers fund businesses. Customers who don’t tip still fund businesses. Not tipping makes no impact on the business’s pay scale.
We’re here talking about it
Tipping only benefits your employer.
I mean this is the better way to do it honestly. People generally tipping less means those positions basically pay less. The whole reason people work those jobs is because with good tips you can make some serious bank. Stop making bank, people will move elsewhere, can’t hire servers because tips don’t pay well enough? Then start paying them. If the alternative is everyone just stops tipping tomorrow then people would really be screwed, because they wouldn’t have time to transition.
Sure it sucks they’re getting paid less, but if the alternative is this “you better pay our workers so they can eat because we ain’t gonna do it” then I’d say it’s a pretty welcome change.
It’s also not like the tip amount dropped to 5% or something. Prices have been going nuts lately, so the tips are probably about the same cash amount as they have been, which is just a smaller percent of the now larger bill.
It’s not. The better way is for people who don’t want to tip to stop going out to places or using services where tipping is customary. That way nobody is increasingly encouraged to perform labor for less than they’re work is worth. If there are not enough customer’s because of this then the businesses will change or perish. All of this anti-tipping sentiment leads me to believe is that if these customers were to trade places with the owners then they’d pay their laborer’s just as little.
You negotiated what your labor is worth when you took the serving job; below minimum wage. Don’t like it? Go find a non tipped job that doesn’t rely on patrons subsidizing your wages.
What other industry relies on paying for something and then having to pay more after you’ve already paid the agreed upon price?
there are no “below minimum wage jobs”. Minimum is minimum. If you don’t tip, the employer has to pay the full minimum wage. If you end up with less than minimum wige, then you were stolen from by your employer. The proper response to which is to go to the authorities, which take this kind of thing quite seriously, not guilt tripping the clients
http://archive.today/J4ltA
https://www.reddit.com/r/restaurant/comments/1hr91nl/abolish_the_213_hourly_wage_for_servers_we_cant/
yeah those are both ignorant of the law. No, the job pays minimum wage. If you don’t tip, the employer must.
Wage theft is what’s going on. Which is a different problem. And if that is solved and minimum wage isn’t enough, then that’s a minimum wage problem. Which affects everyone. Servers aren’t special. Neither require tipping.
You agree to tipping by using services and patronising businesses where tipping is customary. Let’s not act like you don’t understand this ahead of time. People only argue against tipping in these fields to this degree because they want to virtue signal as a cope for making waiters, bartenders, porters, delivery drivers, etc just as poor as they are. -Which is too poor to use or patronize these businesses in the first place.
–They could also simply be astroturfing to sow discord.
If you really care about the businesses paying their staff the full wages then you understand that either way the cost will still be passed onto the patrons, regardless, and the people that claim to be upset are arguing over a pedantic order of operations in the finances.
I do not agree but am forced into this crap system like shitty “healthcare” or Papa John’s pizza.
When all servers claim 100% of their tipped wages on their taxes then we’ll talk. Until then STFU. And this.
So I take it you see yourself as a guy in the top-hat? Customers encouraging other customers to betray workers by refusing to pay for services rendered is a perfect example of a class-traitor.
nah, by law if nobody tipped, they’d have to be paid by their employer in full. You’re not punishing them, you’re just not accepting responsibility that, by law, is not yours
Paid in full to… checks notes, ~$3/hour (if they make server rates) or $7.25/hour (if they make federal minimum wage)? Wow. Not sure if they make the higher or lower of the two, but either way…
Also, lots of places straight up just won’t do that. They might eventually get caught, and pay a fine or whatever.
Refusing to tip, at the consumer level, will change nothing besides ruining the day/week of the person delivering your order.
there are no server rates. minimum is minimum. the server rate only applies if you tip.