Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

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> I tip extra for working hard to keep my meal hot on delivery, water topped up, checking in at appropriate times.

Those are things happen with good management, they have little to do with how hard an individual employee is working at a given time.

Besides the claim wasn't waitstaff gets "extra" tips for working hard, the claim was that waitstaff is tipped because they work hard. Don't move the goalposts.

>I honestly don't understand how you can say tips are not proportional to level of service and how level of service is entirely detached from working hard.

I tip the same if my service is shitty, I am not going to put an individual employee in a position of taking a pay cut when I can't know the exact reason something went wrong. I don't know enough about their operations to be punishing individual employees. Even if I could tell if it were an individual employee's fault, most places pool tips, so I'd be punishing the other employees working at the same time. So everyone gets the same tip from me.

I also simply just don't enjoy LARPing as a lord of my personal fiefdom.

Again, you get good service with good management, simple as that.

I will admit that I gave a really shitty tip the other week. I ordered the salad bar. All she had to do was refill my pop and settle the bill. She dropped the check off and didn't come back for 15 minutes. I walked over to the bar area to find someone to run my card and she was bullshitting with another employee. Yeah, no. I make it a point to tip well and just consider that part of the cost of my food. Not this time. I rounded up to the next dollar and I don't know why I even did that.

> waitstaff gets "extra" tips for working hard

All tips are 'extra' that's the whole concept. It's money on top of what I am obliged to pay.

> you get good service with good management

Good management would pay a good wage and negate the need for tipping.

> I also simply just don't enjoy LARPing as a lord of my personal fiefdom.

Low blow. You are implying that I am less than you because I have some kind of financial control over waitstaff that I enjoy. A rather bad faith position to be in given how pious and understanding you are striving to come across as.

> most places pool tips

So now you agree kitchen staff get tipped too

> I tip the same if my service is shitty

Good for you. I don't think many people operate like this, so I'd say you are an edge case.

> it has zero to do with how hard they work, it's simply custom to tip waitstaff, even lazy waitstaff

Again, this is how you operate. Wikipedia lays out the common perception of tipping

"The customary amount of a tip can be a specific range of monetary amounts or a certain percentage of the bill based on the perceived quality of the service given."

I've experienced living in the UK without tipping, and in N.America with tipping. All I can say is it's night and day. Very few make a career out of working as waitstaff in the UK, plenty of people have a career in the service industry in N.America. Working hard for large tips can give you a living wage. In the UK because everyone is treated the same, waitstaff do the minimum for the minimum wage (there are exceptions, of course) and then find a better job. Since I left the UK this has begun to change, it's now reasonably common to tip in nicer restaurants, and guess what? The service is better and the waitstaff I assume are happier with more money in their pockets for their effort.

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