Today, Americans love tipping more than ever. Tipping accounts for around $44 billion in the U.S. food industry alone. However; tipping isn’t what it used to be. Tipping has turned from a gratuity into a moral obligation and it has become more of a problem then you might think.
Despite common belief, tipping doesn’t incentivize hard work. The factors that go into tip size have virtually nothing to do with the quality of service. Credit card tips are larger than cash tips. Large parties with sizable bills leave disproportionately small tips. We tip servers more if they tell us their names, touch us on the arm, or draw smiley faces on our checks. Quality of service has a laughably small impact on tip size. According to a study done in 2013 by
…show more content…
According to Daily Mail, in a survey held in 2012, “40% of waiters discriminate against black customers.” This is under the perception that black people don’t tip as much as white people. For the same reason, waiters also discriminate against teens; who are commonly perceived to tip very little if at all. Waiters are predetermining how well they are going to serve customers based off of your appearance.
Probably the biggest problem about tipping is that restaurants don’t pay their employees a living wage. The federal “tip credit” allows restaurants to pay their tipped employees as little as $2.13 per hour, as long as tips make up the shortfall. This turns the customers into co-employers. Often times this leaves unaware or underinformed employees making less then minimum wage because they had a slow night and the tips didn’t make up the difference.
Now there is a solution to all this. We need to scrap the current American tipping system all together. First, what we need to do is abolish the federal tip credit. This would bring all food industry employees up to their state minimum wage solving the problem of underpaid servers. This also makes it so the customer isn’t paying the waiters wage allowing them to be treated as a