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Comment by vecinu | Hacker News Reader

I'm so happy to hear this. I cannot stand tipping and genuinely get anxiety when I'm out with friends and the wife and she sometimes pays without knowing what the right "tip amount" is.

It happens to me too, where I have to pay attention to what the waiter/waitress is doing that is exceptional or bad so I can adjust my tip accordingly.

It's bad for the customer and the employee, the employer is the only one winning by exploiting its own workers. I wish we would just pay our servers a living wage with health benefits and stop hiding those as "Extra surchages" as San Francisco is doing.

While we're at it, show me the final price with taxes included please.

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You do not in fact have to pay attention to how well the server performs. You can just take the final price, divide by 10, multiply by 2, and round whichever direction you want. You should look at tipping as a cost sharing measure, not an incentive system.

Fascinating. Are we now at 20-23% (exclusive of taxes, as I think they're usually calculated, so the variance here is entirely how much meals tax you have on your meal) tip rates as the new normal?

15-20% has been the norm for my whole adult life, and the upper range (1) doesn't often materially change the price of a meal and (2) simplifies the math. Use whatever system you want, though; the point is: you are not actually on the hook to evaluate the server's performance. Think of it as tipping the institution of table service.

Oh interesting! My impression was that it was 10-15% about two decades ago and has now risen to 15-20% with most people I know tending closer to the 20% edge. Maybe it's simply that my social circles have become more generous tippers.

That's my impression as well.

It’s because wages haven’t been catching up with inflation for decades also. Not just food service, pretty much in every sector, maybe with the exception of tech.

Hasn't wage growth been even with inflation? I don't have sources at the moment, but that was my impression.

That's still not good (you'd hope for an increase in purchasing power), but not as bad as sliding backwards.

>Hasn't wage growth been even with inflation?

Definitely not: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

The headline and article content both say that it's been even, i.e. no real growth, but no backsliding either.

> For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades

and

> today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago.

Ah, yes. Sorry. Even with inflation but no growth. You would hope for growth given it’s been 40 years.

It just occurred to me maybe the reason some people find tipping so stressful, is that they think they're supposed to be grading someone with it.

Because in the US it's not like taxes are included either, and and the "default" tipping percentage is much easier to calculate than tax percentages.

I've lived in countries that tip and don't tip, it's honestly not a huge deal. The fact the menu says a service charge is included or not doesn't really change much at all.

I think people in the US (and perhaps visitors to the US) would be surprised how much more expensive high-end restaurants would need to be to account for tipping --- of course, what seems to be happening instead of tip abolition is just a mandatory standardized tip. Which is fine! It's the same thing either way.

> You can just take the final price, divide by 10, multiply by 2, and round whichever direction you want.

a) this sounds horrendous, and

b) so there's zero pretence that tipping is somehow related to quality of experience?

(I ask as a fairly well-travelled Australian, but who rarely sojourned into North America.)

There's still some correlation to quality. Personally, and I think my friends all do this as well, I have a default rate in mind that I then adjust up or down depending on service. Usually criteria for adjusting up is whether the server has a noteworthy level of service or whether I'm being an unusually needy customer. Adjusting down usually requires something fairly egregious.

That's correct.

Why is that horrendous? (I get "annoying"). It's the restaurant sharing the cost of labor with the diner, which you're doing one way or the other, but tips have less price stickiness than list prices.

There's certainly a "pretense" of tipping as an incentive, and you can treat it that way if you want to (to a point; you can't reasonably tip much below 15%). But you should ignore the pretense; it's not worth the psychic energy.

> Why is that horrendous?

Hmm. Imagine that you never had to consider any kind of unstated, fuzzy mathematical wrangling at restaurants, hairdressers, hotels, in taxis, at stores, etc - your entire life every financial transaction was straightforward.

If you came from that environment, this arrangement would seem horrendous (and annoying).

I understand that there's some cultural exceptionalism involved - there always is - but for most of the (rest of the) world this kind of intentional, onerous, relentless, and needlessly complex obligation is some combination of bewildering, disrespectful, and anathema.

Calculating 10% ain't that hard killer -- just move the decimal point over. 36.22 becomes 3.6. Multiply that by 2, round up/down as you feel is warranted, and go with it. Plenty of the card readers even offer pre-calculated options when paying with debit/credit (usually 15%, 18%, and 20%).

If that's too difficult, horrendous, and annoying to do then chances are you shouldn't be eating out in the first place.

Thanks, but as a metric-loving Australian, you don't need to espouse the benefits of base-10 to me.

My point remains that forcing everyone to consider a tip of varying amounts in a wide range of social / fiscal interactions, is a needless cognitive burden.

Approximately 95% of the planet gets by somewhere between 'just fine' and 'much better' without it.

I've never been to Australia, but my experience traveling in Germany, France and the Netherlands is that service ranges from "adequate" at best to "abysmal," with the average case being much closer to the latter.

In the US, I'd say service is "excellent" more than 95% of the time, and I don't think I can recall a single instance of worse than "adequate" in my life.

I have no idea if tipping sufficiently explains this, but it sure seems at least plausible...

FWIW, my anecdata is different. I've travelled - both short work stints and holidays - in ~30 countries over the space of a few decades.

I don't know if I could confidently pick the worst service experience across that time, but a sit-down dining comedy club in Manhattan (NY, USA) would probably be towards the top of the list.

I tend to be non-demanding, accommodating, and convivial etc, so that may have skewed most of my experiences across Asia and Europe towards the positive end of the spectrum.

There are some other contenders for "worst," but this is the most fun story to tell.

Restaurant in the Netherlands. We walk in, there's a podium and a sign to please wait for the hostess. We wait for several minutes, finally get impatient and walk around the restaurants. Find two young girls chatting away in the back. They notice us, but continue their conversation for another minute, then ask us what we want. We ask to be seated.

No problem, they seat us. Another 5 or so minutes go by, we get up and find the girls again. "Can we have some menus, please?"

It didn't get any better from there :P

Ever since that I avoid all sit down restaurants in that country, full stop. Luckily, I don't mind döner kebab for breakfast lunch and dinner!

Yeah, that would put anyone off.

I've only spent a week in Amsterdam, but I don't recall any negative experiences at all.

When travelling I do tend to eschew touristy areas - other than having to look at specific places / objects, access museums or historic sites, etc - then a quick escape to less tourist-heavy areas.

I'm sure we all do the same in places we live, and therefore know well, but I guess holiday mode puts us in a more sanguine mood.

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