In all businesses the customer pays the salary of the employees- the money just doesn't spring out of no where. As I stated to another poster, waiting is like working on commission, except, instead of the commission being decided by some manager figuring out his profit margin, you as a consumer can determine the value and compensate accordingly.
If you go and buy a $50k car, you are paying the sales person probably around $5k in commission whether he treats you well or poorly. Tipping allows you to set the rate of what you think the value of service is.
Tough $h!+ if the government wants a bite.
Tipping is a holdover from the way restaurants used to run in the late 19th and into the 20th Century. They way it used to work was that the waiter was an independent contractor, and when you ordered your food, it was actually the waiter who was buying it from the restaurant operator, paying for it up front at the exact same cost printed on the menu. Tips were the entire way they made money. Slowly, the practice was introduced of making waiters an actual employee of the restaurant and, later, of giving them a small token wage. I can still remember in the early 80s, the waiters at the Berghoff, in Chicago, lining up at a cash register to pay for the food before bringing it to your table.
That’s a good point....that this really is a service and a way of judging that. I certainly thought of it that way, but understand more now about the rationale for tipping and why it is different from the cashier etc.
The cashier doesn’t serve me, just check me out etc.
Thus, they aren’t quite comparable.
But, it still bothers me we are elevating one group of people over another.
Doesn’t mean I won’t tip though. I always do unless it is just flat terrible service (unfortunately happens more often that it used to since I moved to Texas where everybody leaves to go into the oil field).