Does the opposite movement exist?
Like "No Tips".
Pay your employees, pay your taxes.
No nonsense on dividing tips between people that I did not interact with, minimum tipping, or with automated machines.
Tipping also means that if I want to know how much I'll spend in your restaurant I will have to decide how much I tip even before I walk in.
This is all just tax evasion with extra steps, enabling exploiting of people that have less contractual power.
I used to try practicing no tips. I live in a state with no different tipping wage. To me that makes the argument of "they get paid nothing" impotent. But, culturally, people will perceive you as a prick for not tipping at restaurants. It's not fair and I don't like it but, that is the culture that has spread from tipping wage states.
Now that I have given up on that battle I do scale my tip for how good the service is.
Is it a state where the minimum wage is no different? Or that they require traditionally tipped wages to actually be paid fairly?
All employees receive minimum wage regardless of whether they receive tips. Tips are not there to backfill the required wages nor can they be used for that. So this isn't the $2.13 min wage that must get to $7.25 when tips are added in.
In my area, the min wage is somewhere around $15/hr. Anything less than 20% tip on top of that $15/hr is considered stingy. The restaurants that do a service charge instead of tipping add 22% and sometimes a 4% fee to pay for employee health insurance.
Anymore, we really only dine out for special occasions or a monthly visit to our favorite spot.
As a statement of how things should be, I agree. But it is not true in most states. When servers are paid the same as the minimum wage there is no separate tipped wage. The words you are looking for in a particular state's labor laws are "tipped wage" or "tip credit". There are many states where the employer can count the expected tips as part of the wage they pay. So, they pay the employee something like $2.13.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
That’s the same thing.
The minimum wage is often not a fair wage.
If tipped employees are just earning that standard minimum wage and nobody tips them, then they just get the minimum wage. I can see situations where they'd be pretty mad -- there are a lot of restaurants where tipped employees make more than the standard minimum wage.
All of that said, I believe that tipping is horseshit and should go away. But I can't protest it by refusing to tip unless I want to punish the wrong people.
> No nonsense on dividing tips between people that I did not interact with
It is true that in some contexts, a good waiter elevates the experience. But in most restaurants the waiter adds nothing to my experience. If anything they're a hindrance. So I'm very much in favor of forced tip sharing with the people who actually made the food I enjoyed.
> If anything they're a hindrance.
Absolutely. As a brit used to waiters and waitresses in the UK and Europe generally leaving me alone until I ask for something, I find the constant fawning interruptions from American service staff cringe-inducing.
A refreshing aspect of US culture is the lack of a historical class system and associated cultural baggage that we have in the UK. So I find it so strange that once you step into a restaurant you are forced into this weird servant/master cosplay where you dictate the server's livelihood based on how you happen to be feeling that day and the resulting whim of your pen writing on the tip line.
> It is true that in some contexts, a good waiter elevates the experience the food is already marked up at least 300%, take the tip out of that
> Does the opposite movement exist?
Japan?
Most of the world, really.
Japanese people are offended, so don’t do it there. People in other places tend to be flattered, so you can, occasionally. But the idea that you should pay your employees a living wage has been a well established principle since the 19th century.
I've found outside the USA they tend to be confused when I tip. Or they will look me right in the eyes and say, "American, yes?".
I've found that when I go to restaurants outside the U.S. without speaking their native tongue they often ask where I'm from. Answering that you are from the U.S. will make the servers overly friendly and then they will ask for a tip.
You expect us to tip when we visit your country, why can't we expect you to tip when you visit ours?
Servers taking advantage of the tendency for Americans to tip shouldn't be conflated with anyone else traveling to the US.
Sort of, but they chose to outsource instead of paying people/taxes