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Comment by FactolSarin | Hacker News Reader

If the large chain won't adjust, that seems something that would give smaller businesses an advantage, and seems like a positive to my ears.

As for tipping, people don't tend to tip based on quality of service (see Adam Ruins Everything) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_vivC7c_1k], and instead tends to be based more on attractiveness and ethnicity. A normal wage is fairer.

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The argument though is that not all hours are created equal. If you are working during hours where utilization is peak, i.e. lunch and dinner, then you will make more money than if you were working off hours on a tipping system because you serve more customers regardless of the customer tipping criteria. This naturally incentivizes people to work the more difficult hours by compensating them better for those hours. If pay is flat at the minimum wage, then you incentivize the hours of least utilization where people do not have to work as hard for equal pay or worst case drives people into other easier professions.

Right. That's the issue with moving from tipping to flat wages. Yet the US is one of the only countries that does tipping, and plenty of other professions have this issue in the US, so how do they manage ?

I understand the problem, I want the next step of "how do we get to a less crappy system?"

Nurses commonly bid for shifts. Undesirable shifts pay far more than desirable ones. Christmas morning will pay far more than an ordinary Thursday afternoon.

I guess that isn't exactly flat wages, but it isn't tips either. I think it beats both.

So at the restaurant, early evening on Valentine's Day would pay a lot more than the late afternoon on an uninteresting day.

Total agreement on the fairness. In this case, the tipping issue is that, since it's per table, busy times result in more tip money than non-busy times, which a flat per-hour wage doesn't account for. With tips, a restaurant can get someone to come in for 2-3 hours because they'll be making quite a bit more per hour (even with the unfairness of tips) than if they had a flat wage. At slower times, a shift might be 4-8 hours and not make nearly as much, but the place doesn't need as many staff then.

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