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Comment by NegativeK | Hacker News Reader

Is it a state where the minimum wage is no different? Or that they require traditionally tipped wages to actually be paid fairly?

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All employees receive minimum wage regardless of whether they receive tips. Tips are not there to backfill the required wages nor can they be used for that. So this isn't the $2.13 min wage that must get to $7.25 when tips are added in.

In my area, the min wage is somewhere around $15/hr. Anything less than 20% tip on top of that $15/hr is considered stingy. The restaurants that do a service charge instead of tipping add 22% and sometimes a 4% fee to pay for employee health insurance.

Anymore, we really only dine out for special occasions or a monthly visit to our favorite spot.

As a statement of how things should be, I agree. But it is not true in most states. When servers are paid the same as the minimum wage there is no separate tipped wage. The words you are looking for in a particular state's labor laws are "tipped wage" or "tip credit". There are many states where the employer can count the expected tips as part of the wage they pay. So, they pay the employee something like $2.13.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

That’s the same thing.

The minimum wage is often not a fair wage.

If tipped employees are just earning that standard minimum wage and nobody tips them, then they just get the minimum wage. I can see situations where they'd be pretty mad -- there are a lot of restaurants where tipped employees make more than the standard minimum wage.

All of that said, I believe that tipping is horseshit and should go away. But I can't protest it by refusing to tip unless I want to punish the wrong people.

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