‘Pure greed:’ Etiquette expert explains why tipping has gotten out of control
Perhaps you’ve noticed. We have reached a tipping point in the country over tipping.
To tip or not to tip has led to Shakespearean soliloquies by customers explaining why they refuse to tip for certain things.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers were grateful for those who seemingly risked their safety so we could get groceries, order dinner or anything that made our lives feel normal. A nice tip was the least we could do to show gratitude.
But now that we are out about and back to normal, the custom of tipping for just about everything has somehow remained; and customers are upset.
A new study from Pew Research shows most American adults say tipping is expected in more places than it was five years ago, and there’s no real consensus about how tipping should work.
Versus how is always worked before?
Because there is consensus on that, it was a very straightfor rule.
The tip was a private transaction between a customer and an employee who went above and beyond the service that the employees' boss require them to do, to perform the job to the customer's satisfaction.
It had nothing to do with the boss or the company they were working for (no tipping automation on the registers, etc.).
And it wasn't ever used in lieu of the employee receiving enough of an income at the company they worked at.
Unfortunately that is not true. Restaurants in most states in the US have a law that allows employers to pay tipped employees a much lower wage (about 2 bucks an hour) with the expectation that tips will bring them back up to minimum wage or higher.
Important to add that they're legally required to make up the difference if it comes in below minimum wage, though this is often skipped.
Nor is minimum wage a viable income.
You should check the year that those laws were implemented. They are a more recent phenomenon.
Also as it's been mentioned by someone else already, those laws included clauses to make sure if the tips were below minimum wage the employees income earned would be raised to minimum wage.
And as an aside (as I'm sure somebody will mention this), I'm not saying that minimum wage is a living wage.
But that is a different subject than the one that's being discussed here, the responsibility of customers to tip employees so that they may have a living wage, in lieu of employers paying employees a living wage directly.
I'm talking about the past, not the current situation.
The vast majority of people had living wages back then.
The article is saying "before" as in "before the changes that happened because of COVID". I don't know when the inflection point was where we shifted to shit wages for traditionally tipped jobs, but it was many many years ago. When COVID hit we were not giving living wages to servers.
No. Tipping culture 100% existed before COVID. This isn't an opinion. It's well documented. You are either willfully ignorant or a troll. This discourse has run its course.
"So shall it be written, so shall it be done." /waveshandsabout