Posted on 07/06/2014 2:10:26 PM PDT by Ben Mugged
OK, here is my rant about tipping. Not the kind where folks in Frisco are standing little cars on end or the practice of pushing sleeping cows over but the kind that takes place in restaurants.
I worked in food service and as a bartender for many years while in the Air Force. When I started out the business would pay me to serve the customers. If my service was good, the customers would reward me with a gratuity. Over time the businesses noticed their servers were making a lot of money in tips so they reduced their pay to minimum wage. The difference between that and what you should have been paid was made up by tipping. In other words the burden of paying the server moved from the business to the customer. Instead of working for the business, servers were now working for the customer.
It is still that way today with some businesses adding the "gratuity" to the bill automatically. Folks it is no longer a "gratuity" if it is mandatory and the only way the server gets paid. Let's call it what it is, a service fee.
I get self-service checkout. I pick up all my own groceries, I run them through the scanner, I scan my credit card, I take my receipt, bag my groceries, and off I go without ever talking to a person.
A self-service restaurant is a vending machine.
And they are working on a "self-service McDonalds". Where you go up to a kiosk and order your own food, and the machines deliver them.
The term for what you are calling "self-service" seems to in fact be Counter Service
I guess if you want to go through life calling counter service restaurants self-service, go right ahead. I'm not even going to argue the point.
Because MY point was that you didn't SERVE YOURSELF that McDonald's meal, a PERSON DID IT. All the things you fear from "bad service" from a waitstaff can happen with counter service at McDonalds. And yet you can get good service, and you don't have to tip, and they are paid a decent wage.
If you don't want to debate the point, that's fine as well. Getting hung up in a dubious terminology debate seems like a fruitless waste of effort.
Because God knows you wouldn't want to be confused when people talk about careers in Counter Service Or Drive-Through Service.
Or when people complain about the terrible COUNTER SERVICE at McDonalds.
You'll go crazy trying to run around correcting all those people shouting "that's SELF-SERVICE you idiot".
Your off-topic ramblings don’t change the fact that you don’t get waited on at McDonald’s by wait staff, you know, those waiters and waitress that work for tips that we were talking about—the better their service, the better their incomes.
OK, so now we are in agreement. At McDonalds, you do not get waited on by a person who is working for tips. You get served by a person being paid a straight salary.
You suggested that tips were what made sure you got good service. How do you expect to get correct service from McDonalds, or any restaurant where you order at a counter or a drive-thru? Or do you just assume they will all have lousy service?
My argument is that you CAN get good service, because there are different motivations. Most people who are employed provide good service for a salary or hourly wage because they feel they are compensated appropriately, and have a good work ethic.
Now, back to waiters and waitresses. Their service is not cooking your food, or bagging your food, or ringing up your order in a drive thru, like the jobs you mentioned.
Waiters and waitresses wait on you, at the table. If they do a better than average job, they will earn better than average tips. And that, for the umpteenth time, is their incentive to provide good service.
If you don’t like the system, then avoid restaurants with waiters and waitresses.
The studies referenced in this article say you are wrong: Managing Tips
A study from 2000 said the same thing, but you can only get to the abstract on the net: Relationship between tipping and service:
Numerous studies have found that tip size is only weakly related to service quality. Bodvarsson and Gibson recently challenged this finding—criticizing previous research and reporting that consumers say they would tip substantially different amounts with different levels of service quality. This paper presents a critical response to Bodvarsson and Gibson’s article. Contrary to Bodvarsson and Gibson’s claims, the weakness of the tipping–service relationship in the existing literature is not just a reflection of restricted variability in service ratings. Nor is it attributable to other methodological problems with service ratings. Furthermore, the data from Bodvarsson and Gibson’s role-playing survey is suspect, because what people say they would do in a given situation is often different from what they actually do in that situation.
Service personnel repeatedly acknowledge that their level of service has almost no relationship to the tips they receive. Women with large breasts get bigger tips. Men get bigger tips than women, whites bigger than blacks.
And an article from an owner of a restaurant who got rid of tipping, increased wages, and found his service improved. I include only for the quote that reinforces my argument that waitstaff are motivated the same as all workers -- I don't support the concept of adding a "service charge" to a bill, or endorse that tipping be eliminated, although I fully support the idea that a business owner be free to adopt a non-tipping paradigm, and that customers be allowed to ask for it, to seek it out, and enjoy it. Free market means not trashing people for wanting something different than you want:
Owner explains why abolish tipping:
Servers are motivated to do a good job in the same ways that everyone else is. Servers want to keep their jobs; servers want to get a raise; servers want to be successful and see themselves as professionals and take pride in their work. In any workplace, everyone is required to perform well, and tips have nothing to do with it. The next time you see your doctor, ask her if she wouldn't do better-quality work if she made minimum wage, with the rest of her income from her patients' tips. I suspect the answer will be a version of “no.”
We are used to tipping. Restaurants love it because they don't have to pay their servers. Servers who are good at extracting tips love it, because they know how to play the game. But there seems to be little evidence that YOUR giving a bigger tip provides YOU any better service, or that the notion of tipping causes waitstaff to provide a better quality of service.
I disagree. I do, in fact, know that my tips have insured good service.
If you don’t like the system, then don’t patronize normal restaurants.
Misstated assertion, an invalid solution, and an unnecessary adjective pretending to be argument.
And for extra credit, an unsupportable anecdotal claim of person experience expected to trump actual scientific study.
If you want to go to restaurants where you need insurance against bad service that involves bribing the people who are supposed to be your servants, and be blinded by the facts of the marketplace, and ignore the evidence that brings into question your perceptions, that is of course your prerogative, and I won't pretend to tell you where to go or what to do.
The evidence is clear, both from study, and from logic. Service poorly correlates with tips, people are not motivated by random offers of cash that most often are unrelated to their performance, the modern customer is highly unlikely to appropriately tip relative to actual service, instead using a variety of unrelated decision points, and in too many cases, tipping is no longer sufficiently backed by social mores to ensure it's practice.
Caveat: You CAN manage to create a relationship with a specific waiter, if you frequent the same place and get the same staff. This is more likely in places like haircuts, where you ask for "your" staff, and they know how well you tip. But my argument following is for the vast majority of cases, not the few special ones:
Logically, you walk into a restaurant, get a server you have never seen. It is virtually IMPOSSIBLE for the service YOU get from this server to be related to the tip you are going to give the server as you leave the restaurant. I suppose that if you explicitly told your server up front exactly what tip you were going to give, and your criteria for raising or lowering your tip, you may well achieve your goal -- but virtually NOBODY does that.
Your server is not motivated by the tip, which if you are a civil customer is going to be 15% pretty much at base service, and at best 20% with outstanding service, and if you are an uncivil customer won't likely be anything at all -- because there is no convention that starts with "zero tip" except in cases of direct malfeasance. And the waiter has no idea if you are going to tip at all, or how much. TO the degree your waiter is trained to give better service for better tips, they will perform this service even if you leave NO TIP, since they have no way of knowing you are going to leave NO TIP until they are done.
In fact, your service is much more likely if at all to be based on how good the person just before you tipped. It is a classic case of the "commons", where at best you can hope that everybody is tipping well for good service, and therefore has trained the waiter before you arrived.
I don't fault you -- I am a crazy-good tipper, and I used to think that mattered. Now it is just because I know how much it sucks to be a waiter/waitress, and figure on the off chance I do happen back in and get the same person, they won't remember me and want to take revenge.
Last point: What people call "outstanding service"? That is what I EXPECT from a sit-down restaurant, every time. I can't think of one thing I could get with a huge tip known to be coming that I should NOT GET just for being in that seat.
To wit: The waitstaff should greet me promptly, take my order correctly, answer questions politely and completely, offer me suggestions if asked, tell me of specials, bring my food at the right times, at the right temperature, be attentive to needs during my meal, not pester me if I don't want to be, clear my table but not make me feel rushed, offer desert/drinks, refill my drinks and bread and whatever else is refillable, and bring me my check as soon as I am done.
There is no reason that every patron should not get this treatment, and little reason why any patron should get BETTER treatment than others through some luck of assignment. A good restaurant should get all of their staff trained to excellence.
The tip was automatically added to your bill because groups of people are notorious for stiffing the waiter/waitress
Surely you know this. Check with Denny’s. They must have a policy of tip being added to the bill for groups of six or more
Your rantings are reaching insane levels.
In the real world, working for tips, an exceptional server will make more in tips.
Now back to your rantings.
Because of several factors, which were clear in my “rant”.
But we aren’t talking about the “exception”, we are talking about the norm. An exceptional professional baseball pitcher will be set for life, but that doesn’t help the typical high-school athlete.
Why does an “exceptional waiter” make more in tips?
It isn’t because the person being waited on needs to pay more to get better service, right? Because they got the exceptional service before they gave any money.
And it’s not because the waiter knew the person would give more money, because how would the waiter know what some person was going to do before they did it?
It’s the philosophy of “commons” — so long as most people are tipping better waiters more, you don’t have to tip at all to get good service, because the good waiter will be good.
EXCEPT — you have no choice in whether you get the exceptional waiter, or the crappy waiter. The waiter is randomly assigned to tables, and you are randomly assigned to tables. So, you can go to an excellent restaurant that has exceptional waiters, and then before you get to tip someone a huge sum of money, you get a lousy waiter.
Then you get 15% gratuity added to your meal (the point of this entire thread). And you are like “hey, if I tip more, I’ll get better service”, except you already got lousy service. And you might not tip at all, but the guy knew he was lousy, he was doing the best he could, and not getting a tip is really not normal because most people are trained to give 15% for almost any service at all where the waiter doesn’t swear at you.
And maybe you don’t, but most do, and you’ve got no control over it.
On the other hand, if you went to a restaurant where they only hired exceptional waiters, then you would be certain to get an exceptional waiter, and exceptional service, and you wouldn’t have to bribe anybody after-the-fact in the hopes that it would help the next person get better service.
If I was a waiter, I would get excellent tips. On the other hand, if I worked at a restaurant where they just paid waiters for their competence, I’d also make an excellent salary, and the customers would get the same great service from me, because the concept of being bribed to do your job is not particularly motivational to me.
That is wonderful, truly wonderful.
Wait staff working for tips are on the merit system: lousy service, low or no tip. Adequate service, average tip. Exceptional service, higher tip. Theoretically, of course, depending on whether the customer is or isn’t a stiff.
A lousy waiter working for tips isn’t immune to dismissal due to customer complaints to management - enough complaints, goodbye. One less lousy waiter (just like in your non-tipping examples). This is another benefit to tipping, it weeds out lousy wait staff and is designed to help minimize bad service.
The gratuity system allows for some wait staff to make a ton of money more than they would if they were limited to a capped out salary. That is the *incentive* to avoid bad service and promote good service, and even, dare I say it: exceptional service.
You don’t like the system? Don’t patronize restaurants that work that way. To each his own.
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