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Comment by abecedarius | Hacker News Reader

Do what you wish, of course. But you seem to think this helps to level income, given the "level salaries" bit. What I'm saying is it doesn't. Markets equilibrate; they adjust when the form of payment changes.

I'd agree that after tipping culture is definitely established in a field, then stiffing someone is unfortunately bad, unless you can coordinate on reversing this harmful cultural norm. This is just very different from not helping to establish the harmful cultural norm, which is a positive, prosocial good; I believe you are doing the opposite of a prosocial good here, without realizing it. Of course I'm a fallible human.

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Well. I don't want to speak for other people. If I were an Uber driver I personally would like to make more money rather than less, and if that happened with tips I wouldn't grumble too much about it. Maybe that's just me.

Huh. Do you also think U.S. employees would be better off if Social Security had been created with a 12.4% tax paid by the employer, instead of a 12.4% tax paid half by the employer and half by the employee?

Non sequitur

Sigh. OK, I tried.

Did you? You asked a question about Social Security policy, in a thread that's arguably about individual tipping practices. Perhaps you regard the former as an illustrative thought experiment which helps reason about the latter via shared principles, but it's a shame you didn't elaborate on it because as it stands, I regard it as a non sequitur.

It's irritating to be accused of not engaging, when you've twice ignored my main point that expectation of tips lowers the posted price and makes life harder for all of the drivers/servers. Making life harder is not a benefit. I tried to probe for what is not coming through to you this third time, with another case where the legibility of a cost is shifted to no benefit.

Not going to continue here.

> It's irritating to be accused of not engaging

I can see how that might be irritating. Good thing I haven't done that.

> you've twice ignored my main point that expectation of tips lowers the posted price and makes life harder for all of the drivers/servers

That's not a point. That's a claim, which you have not persuaded me to accept.

> I tried to probe for what is not coming through to you this third time, with another case where the legibility of a cost is shifted to no benefit.

If only you had been clear that that's what you were doing, I would've told you that what's not coming through is the casual relation between tips and wages. You seem to believe tips necessarily suppress wages. I see no particular reason to believe that's true.

> Not going to continue here.

Suit yourself.

I think you both are speaking over eachother. You say on individual terms tipping makes sense and it does make sense in a vacuum like that. The other commenter is speaking in macro terms though. Having tips means theres less pressure to actually raise wages. It also fractures labor. You will have people getting no tips who really want higher wages and then people who are tipped well and comfortable with the status quo. This is a big issue with the restaurant industry; servers and bartenders in big cities might make most of their take from tips yet back of house struggles on the same base hourly wage since they aren’t tipped. Incentives are such that a high tipped server doesn’t want tipping to be replaced by wage increases sustained by menu price increases, since they will be splitting that now with back of house or less well tipped workers and will be making net less.

Well, from my first comment I have been speaking on micro terms, since I've been speaking for myself, an individual. I'm not speaking on the macro level because as an individual I have little power to make restaurants, say, pay higher wages, or Uber pay higher rates, or lower wages or lower rates. As an individual, whether or not I tip isn't going to change that one iota.

Now, if you want to talk about organizing collectively beyond the individual level, to use political and market power to make structural changes that raise wages but curb tipping, well that's a different topic that's worth discussing. But, absent that, I'm going to keep tipping.

Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up the restaurant experience too and how hard it is to begin to fix this there. I just try to keep my comments short.

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