I've seen it normalized for parties of 6 or greater...but not for any party size until recently.
I find that completely wild. If that's the case it should be posted and announced prior to anything taking place.
Incidentally it was the worst service I had ever gotten in a very long time, presumably because it didn't matter at all
Additionally, if an employee is subject to the tipped minimum wage and fails to make the regular minimum wage over a pay period, the employer must make up the difference. That's why restaurant owners fight tooth and nail for tipping.
The reality is that tipping helps one person: the business owner. You don't have to subsidize their payroll if you don't want to.
The median annual wage for a hotel cleaner in Ohio (as an arbitrary middle-of-the -road example) is $28.4K per year.[1] (And on average, immigrant workers earn 6% less than their native counterparts.) And in Ohio, the official annual household income poverty line--based on an outdated food-cost-heavy model that doesn't properly account for the explosion of housing and healthcare costs--is $27.3K for a three-person household.[2]
To me, that very much is a poverty wage. I agree that tipping is a subsidy to business owners and ultimately depresses wages at the expense of consumers, but that doesn't change the fact that under the status quo, tipped workers absolutely rely on their tips to provide for themselves and their families. The type of work they do is, by and large, grueling and thankless; they deserve fair compensation from the business that benefit from it, but in the absence of government-driven intervention, those business will continue to externalize that cost to workers and consumers regardless of whether you and a handful of others decide to tip.
Refusing to tip on principle results in a direct and tangible harm to those workers, but doesn't move the needle at societal scale. A true solution would require top-down overhaul of our wage-and-hour regulations to eliminate tipping loopholes and impose steep penalties for businesses that subsidize employee wages through the expectation of tips from customers. Any bottom-up approach is likely to fail as it's a prototypical collective action problem, and a patchwork implementation of that strategy would disproportionately harm those who can least afford to shoulder the burden for a long time before ever impacting the businesses and policies directly responsible for the current state of affairs.
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/IAG/TGS/iag70.htm#:~:text=Earnings%20and... [2]: https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/v1778780151/jfs.ohi...
Essentially no one in the food service industry is having their wages subsidized up to the regular minimum wage level (except maybe in states with very high minimum wages), though I am sure employers prefer tipping so they don't have to think about it. But the notion those are the only people it helps is weird.
Hotel cleaning staff are harder to find than you think. If Maria is made or broken based on your $2, she can find a job that pays better. You enabling her through a system of random rewards may actually hold her hostage in a bad situation.
The thing about unskilled labor jobs is that anyone can do them. The market is very fluid, but the wage is different based on the market, how laborious the job is, and how customer-service oriented you have to be. Reliability (showing up) and consistency (of work product) are your main assets in unskilled labor, and they are rewarded. The idea that you are stuck in a job and cannot move around, especially as a cleaning person, is false.
Don’t be racist