It’s also worth pointing out that servers generally under-report their tip income - particularly cash tips. When people charge their tips it automatically gets reported. Cash tips are reported at the discretion of a server. As a server I would have preferred to see establishments getting away from tips and moving to a gratuity based system, as they have in Canada and Europe. Being stiffed by a cheap customer who received excellent service is one of the most demoralizing things for a server.
BTW, I recently visited my brother in Miami, and see that a lot of restaurants there are switching to a gratuity based system where a certain percentage (usually about 18%) is automatically added on to pay the server. Additional tips above that can still be made, but the server is at least guaranteed to not be stiffed. This probably has to do with the large number of foreign tourists who are used to paying that way. A gratuity based system also helps mitigating the sort of bargaining that sometimes goes on between servers and customers, whereby a customer may sometimes try to pressure servers into getting something extra (an extra dessert or something like that) with the implication that if they don’t cooperate, they won’t get a good tip.
Everyone else in the restaurant pays taxes, only the waiter doesn’t.
Gratuities suck, and I avoid
any place that employes them.
It’s just an added fee over and
above what the employer is
willing to pay it’s servers.
I owned a restaurant. The quality
of a good server is evidenced
in their tips. I won’t pay for
a servers lack of ambition
to benifit the establishment.
The flip side is a guaranteed tip can make some servers lazy.