Tipping is obviously a heated topic they often sparks emotional responses, so it’s often difficult to have a real discussion on the matter. The majority of the time I feel like I start my opinion and I’m simply met with “but servers don’t get a living wage! You gotta help them out you dick.”
I find the whole thing to be some ridiculous, borderline scam.
The company sets a servers minimum wage at roughly $2/hr (current federal minimum wage is $2.13/hr in the USA) BECAUSE they’re supposed to get tips, right? So they end up roughly around that $10-15/hr, yeah? Like, it’s in the equation from the beginning they will not pay a server more because they expect tips from the public. They care so passionately about a server NOT making more money than they’re worth, that they set their wage to $2, JUST IN CASE, they make too much money. Why should they pay their employee when they can just get the public to pay their employees instead? And even then, those tips you’re giving to that server are getting divided out amongst other staff members because they’re still too cheap to even give YOUR TIP to YOUR SERVER that you specifically wanted to tip.
The whole “yeah but servers don’t get a living wage, poor servers, tip them” problem starts with the justification that they don’t get paid more BECAUSE the public will pay them, so the company doesn’t need to pay them. People stop tipping or can’t afford to tip? The company (nor servers, nor other people who support tipping, nor just about anyone else) doesn’t respond with “oh you’re not getting enough money from tips? We expected you to get some, so we didn’t pay you more, but we realize we were wrong. We should take tips out of the equation completely and have the company pay their employees an appropriate wage instead, and any tips on top of that are happy little surprises.”
Instead! Somehow, everyone is trained to say “wow you’re not tipping? What a dick move. They don’t get a living wage.” like it’s my fault and then the server quits because they’re not making enough money and then the company hires another poor person (literally or metaphorically) to abuse with this stupid ass system until the EXACT SAME THING HAPPENS AGAIN, and then they will repeat, and repeat, and repeat until something changes. Which it never will.
Idk, lemme know.