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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

The slight against "Canadians" is probably that the customary tip is 12% to 15% in Canada, and for whatever reason Americans tend to prefer 20% to 30% for the same thing.

It's absurd that we have tipping at all. Why is this custom rampant in some countries, and totally unknown in others?

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The article clearly laid out what they were talking about when they said 'Canadians.'

They meant black people (read racial slur here) are cheap and don't tip. They didn't mean people from the Great White North.

The point was that both groups do not tip as well as other groups. 'Canadian' is substituted for black just to avoid having to say what they really think. IOW, the server would say the same thing if it was a table of Canadians.

It's referring to both. It says in the article that Canadians are also thought of as leaving low tips, and it's presumably easier to get away with calling black people Canadian than the other way around.

No, they did (last phrase of quote below).

"So now we have a restaurant industry where African-Americans are demeaned as “Canadians”, in reference to another group which is considered by US servers to be low tippers."

I assumed that they were saying that Canadians didn't tip well and waitstaff used that as a euphemism for anyone they don't expect to tip well. That's just the way I read it, I could be wrong.

That's what the article said, but I don't think it's true. I've heard this substitution many times and not always in restaurants. I don't think anybody is actually thinking of Canadians when they say it. I think they're just substituting a code-word they can safely use in public to communicate racist sentiments. I know what I mean, you know what I mean, and we have plausible deniability if an unsympathetic party overhears us.

Actually, the article specifically mentions Canadians as poor tippers:

"So now we have a restaurant industry where African-Americans are demeaned as “Canadians”, in reference to another group which is considered by US servers to be low tippers."

I expect that most people in the industry are probably unaware of how actual Canadians tip. Frequently encountering Canadians is probably a pretty geographically dependent thing.

Can confirm from the south here. No idea about real Canadians but "Canadians" pretty much never tip in my area. I was shocked when I first heard this, but I have friends who have been in the industry for years and it seems to be nearly universal. I asked a couple black friends about it once and they pretty much said it was just a cultural thing and they were not taught to do it as kids.

The reason is that servers get paid still up here, so there is no reason for tips. We tip anyways because we do everything that they do in the US, regardless of whether or not it is appropriate. It is becoming an issue now where servers up here are expecting higher and higher tips because they hear about tips servers in the US get. When you are getting paid a normal wage and bitching about getting a 22% tip on top of that, something is wrong.

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