this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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As I explained in my post, restaurants that do this struggle to stay open because people only look at the price and are less likely to want to pay it. Even places that keep prices the same and add a service charge receive many complaints and a drop in business. My source is that it has happened in multiple restaurants I've worked at.
I doubt you read my whole post because I also spoke against the system. I'm not brainwashed, I'm living in reality.
Edit: side note, all of capitalism is built on exploitation of labor, it's the defining characteristic
Just gonna add a source to back this up:
People are dumb. Even if they should know they're saving money overall by not tipping, they see a higher number and think it's bad.
The point is that the menu prices should not need to go up, because tips should never have been a necessary part of their profit margins.
They were literally subsidizing their expenses (including payroll) with tips, and that's made evident by the fact that the prices had to go up when tips were ended.
If your business cannot afford to survive without paying your employees a living wage, then your business shouldn't exist.
Ok, well, most restaurants have notoriously small margins (3-5%) with tipping. So, setting aside what you think should and shouldn't be, what is an actual solution? Eliminate tipping and raise prices? Restructure the agricultural pipeline to lower costs? Cap commercial real estate prices to reduce rental overhead? Because as it stands now, you can't eliminate tipping without getting the money somewhere, and it's not in the restaurants profits.
Thank you for the actual source! I knew there would be evidence aside from my anecdote but didn't particularly feel like looking it up. I've had this argument on lemmy a couple of times so I find it a bit tiresome. Appreciate the support :)
This could be solved by banning all tipping, then all restaurants would have to display the honest price upfront.
It would be better to just eliminate the tipped minimum wage and have everyone earn the same minimum wage (and raise that wage to at least $20 an hour). Banning tipping would be hard to enforce, and some people like throwing some extra change in their favorite barista's jar every morning. But if everyone knows that they're all getting a living wage, and your tip isn't a lifeline to servers, it will actually feel optional.
This is definitely one way to approach it, but I currently make minimum wage plus tips in a city where the minimum wage is over $20 and it's still hard to make ends meet at times. I'm a single adult with no dependents and although I have a reasonable standard of living I'm by no means thriving. The tips are still a very necessary part of my paychecks.
The problem is complex, like I said in my first comment. Lots of sub-industries thrive off of milking restaurants, and simply doing away with tipping is not going to fix it. I just wish people would have some sense of worker solidarity instead of attacking people who live off of tips.
Yeah, I haven't seen any recent data on this, but I suspect that $20 an hour still isn't a living wage. I remember hearing before the pandemic that the, "Fight for Fifteen," was outdated and needed to be the, "Fight for Twenty," and we've had two rounds of astronomical inflation since then.
If the minimum wage was appropriately adjusted, most people in the service industry should be able to make a decent living. The only group that will be difficult will be people who work in vacation towns in remote areas. Some of those people earn their annual income during the tourist season, and even if they wanted to work in the off-season, there just aren't enough jobs. Restaurants can feasible raise prices high enough to subsidize there employees during that time either, so the only real solution is a UBI system.
I have my concerns about UBI but I think it's likely going to become necessary in the near future. In time it will probably run into the same problems of minimum wage increases, where the CoL goes up and up as the income floor is raised meaning that being near the floor feels the same no matter how big the number is.
But despite my concerns, at this point I'll take it π
Most transactions are handled by card, it would be quite easy to enforce. At a minimum, payment processors could be legislated to not have the option for tipping. Banning the tipped minimum wage has already been done in a number of states and so they make minimum wage + tips, with that tip not actually being any more optional.
If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don't really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you're right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it's important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.
All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let's say you go to your local bakery; you've never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they'll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he's required to make up the difference anyway. At first it's great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren't earning enough tips, ane he's making up the differences. That's when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they're overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.
Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I'd have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.
At first you seem to be downplaying feeling of social pressure by saying you don't see the need to legislate it away, but then you go on to state that the pressure is part of an exploitation scheme. You could claim that blackmail is mere social pressure and that there is no need to legislate it away, yet there are laws against blackmail.
In the last paragraph, you state that eliminating tipping would hurt those industries because they would have to increase prices, but the prices are already increased through the use of tipping and social pressure. Eliminating tipping simply makes pays more consistent so that one employee isn't greatly out-earning their coworker just because they're a pretty young white woman.
I'm not trying to be a dick but this is about as short sighted as someone saying they should make crime illegal.
It works in civilized countries, why not in the USA ?
Because different things are different
What's really short sighted is not seeing how tipping develops into a bribery culture. We've already seen companies happily turning on the tipping option for the payment processor in situations where people used to never tip. Today you bribe your waiter to not shit in your food and berate you. Eventually you'll have to bribe government workers to expedite (i.e. bother at all with) your paperwork. Gotta hustle and get that bag above all else, right?
Ignoring that possibility, it's not like it's a just practice in any way. Tipping amount is largely detached from level of service and factors such as attractiveness, race, how the person is feeling that day, etc make a greater impact.
You are ignoring my entire argument. At no point did I say tipping culture in the US is good nor have I defended it as a just way to distribute pay. It sucks, and it sucks to live under it in my chosen profession. But it is the reality that I and other restaurant workers live with.
My point is that you should direct your ire at the systems that built this shit show. Removing tipping with no other corrective measures doesn't fix anything, it just makes life worse for people who are trying to make a living. Service industry jobs should treat tips as an added incentive for good service, but that's just not the real world. I've already detailed a few of the reasons in my other comments but you don't seem to be reading any of them anyway so I'm not going to waste anymore energy on this conversation.
The tipping system is precisely what has built this shit show. Remove tipping and make ALL restaurants post the honest prices on the menu. If the restaurant industry has to rely on price tricks to sustain itself then it's not really sustainable. Tell me, if tipping is so essential to the industry, how do other countries manage to have restaurants without tipping?