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Comment by wfleming | Hacker News Reader

> And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas

I agree Uber is employing a ton of dark patterns and their fees are absurd, but for tips at least I think this is appropriate and ethical and is how I tip in person if I have a coupon or something. Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that, as it generally doesn’t for restaurant workers in the US. If you get a sandwich for half off or whatever, the cook & the delivery person still had the same amount of work to do, and the tip should reflect that.

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In practice tipping is mostly a question of tippers subsidizing non tippers. It’s just another form of price discrimination designed to extract maximum value for a business as employees would change jobs if they didn’t receive sufficient tips just as they would when underpaid doing anything else.

The difference in effort delivering 2 vs 10 items isn’t anything close to linear with their cost. I would suggest a fixed minimum + low percentage of the total order is vastly more reasonable than assuming you need to tip some silly multiple of the total bill. But even butter is to simply avoiding all businesses that use tipping, it’s both less mental effort and generally cheaper.

>Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that

Is it really? Genuine question! I'm from the UK, and here a tip is generally seen as something which is given for exceptional service, rather than subsidising an employer's lack of remuneration for the job at hand.

In the UK that's correct because those kinds of positions pay a reasonable wage. In the US, restaurant workers can easily be making less than minimum wage without tips. (The legality is weird and varies by state, but my understanding is that "traditionally tipped" jobs like waitstaff are exempt from minimum wage regulations on the assumption the tips will make up the gap. The restaurant owner is required to make up the gap if tips don't, so in theory you could just not tip and implicitly force the restaurant owner to raise wages that way, but in practice restaurants are the kind of low-legal-enforcement business in the US where owners already frequently try to under-pay staff so this strategy would probably mostly just hurt workers.)

So my personal approach to tipping in the US is that it starts at a base level as appropriate compensation, and goes up from there for quality of service (or very rarely goes down if service is atrocious).

It's a fiction. You can tell because the rule is consistent across differing legal regimes: tipped wage permitted or not.

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