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> I realized that when I tip, I'm usually not rewarding the waiter/waitress. That reward usually gets split across dozens of people and my waiter/waitress likely sees none of it.

This seems...really good! I’d rather be able to tip the people who actually make the food and clean the table (things that matter!), than the person whose only responsibilities are carrying the food to the table and not saying annoying or obnoxious things. I couldn’t disagree more with you here.

You missed the point.

They earn something like $4/hr + their portion of the tip share. If the tip share is not enough to bring their wage up to minimum ($7.25/hr in most cases), the employer must pay the difference. Tip share is almost never enough to make up the difference, so they earn minimum wage regardless of whether they're part of the "tip share". The waitstaff earns less with a "tip share" because their tips get deducted from in order to pay the other employees' minimum wages.

Here's an example: say you have a restaurant with 2 waiters, 2 cooks, and 1 host. "Tip wage" is $4/hr and minimum wage is $7.25/hr. The waiters each bring in $7.50/hr in tips ($15/hr combined).

Without tip share, waiters get $11.50/hr ($4/hr wage + $7.50/hr tips) while the cooks and host get $7.25/hr.

With tip share, everyone gets $7.25/hr ($4/hr tip wage + $3/hr tips + $0.25/hr difference from the employer).

It's just a scheme to fund wages for cooks and hosts using tips from the waitstaff.

>They earn something like $4/hr + their portion of the tip share.

You are posting this on Hacker News. Most of the people in this community live in states where waitstaff earn more than $4/hour base, thanks to state laws. Read the room.

What are you talking about? It's less than $4/hr in most states. Only 15 states have tipping wages higher than that (out of 43 who have legal tipping wages).

https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped

Only 2 of those states have a tip credit of less than $3/hr.

Where do you think most HN posters live?

From what I have seen, all over the world.

You're probably implying that most HN users live in CA, OR, and WA where tipping wages are not legal.

Hopefully you're not referring to the NYC area. NYC tipping wage is $5/hr less than minimum. NY state is almost $4/hr under. NJ and MA are more than $7/hr under. DE and RI are more than $6/hr under. MD is more than $5/hr under. PA is more than $4/hr under. CT isn't too bad, though, at within $2/hr under.

Somehow I doubt you're implying most HN users live in HI, IA, or ND - the only other states with legal tipping wages within $3/hr of minimum. I also doubt you're implying most HN users live in AK, MN, MT, or NV - the only other states without legal tipping wages.

Not that it matters. Even if the overwhelming majority of HN users lived in a west coast state (maybe it used to be that way, but I'm skeptical of that now), most HN users also probably don't work as restaurant staff. A bad thing isn't less bad just because it doesn't directly affect you.

Do you have an actual point to make against anything I've said?

I didn’t miss anything there. I said that it’s better to fund cooks and other staff than to just tip the waitstaff.

In theory yes what you missed is that it’s actually intended to defraud the back of the house and play less than minimum wage then use tips to barely bring back the difference.

How is it better? The cooks and hosts make the same wage because the tips aren't enough to make up the difference. The waitstaff makes less because their tips are deducted from to pay the cooks and hosts. The customer looses because they payed extra for their meal, but didn't actually increase the wages of the people who made it and served them.

The only winner is the restaurant owners who get away with paying their staff less.

In my experience, the waiters tipped the bar staff and the busboys out of our own tips A our discretion. And in general the bar staff did a good job, but they absolutely knew which waiters tipped well and which tipped poorly.

That seems absurd.

Also I've heard in some places, the amount to share is calculated from the overall tips. So if you had a bad evening and made less than your colleagues, you're actually paying part of the share out of your own pocket.

But still, there seem to be lots of people willing to do these jobs.

> But still, there seem to be lots of people willing to do these jobs.

You mean the students, fresh grads, and otherwise-unemployed who basically have no other choice? I'm not sure them being "willing to do these jobs" is a great defense for the practice considering their alternative.

This is effectively a "minimum wage tax" in addition to the sales tax. Alternatively, it can be seen as a clever way to monetize guilt, by redirecting the staff's anger from the boss to the customer.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...