It would be nice if tipping was just gone, and everybody got paid a living wage, like in most of the rest of the world. We're in a Nash equilibrium right now where if you don't tip, you're an asshole. Other people might even tip more if they hear about it, which reinforces the status quo. So I keep tipping well, and disliking that we're stuck here.
How can we end tipping culture and just have everyone be paid a living wage?
we currently have a federal minimum wage in the USA that is extremely low, but that minimum wage does not apply to servers at restaurants.
raising minimum wage, capping the ratio of CEO pay to average employee pay, and allowing everyone in the US to benefit from a minimum wage would probably get the tipping beast to slow down.
if we knew all servers were making at least $30/hr and their big boss was not making more than $750/hr (25:1 ratio - a shitty ratio for CEO pay; this would be one of the poor ones) then i think tips would be a bit rare.
Minimum wage is meaningless. Sure it is low, but it is a minimum not a maximum. Labor obeys supply and demand laws, which is why you can't find a job around me for less than twice minimum wage even though it is allowed.
If minimum wage was indeed meaningless, you wouldn't have so many capitalist fighting to get rid of it.
If businesses weren't regulated, they would bring back slavery since it is more profit on their bottomline.
The term is classical liberal. Capitalist is a strawman used by Marx to be some unrealistic thing they can knock down. Minimum wage is not compatible with the deep freedom message of of classical liberalism.
And mostly nobody is fighting minimum wage because it isn't a factor - you can't find someone willing to work for that anymore in most places anyway - which is to say supply and demand is working. They will fight increasing it because that is against the rules of supply and demand and ends up hurting the people who are the most disadvantaged.
Classical liberals were starting to fight against slavery before Mark was even born because it is not compatible with their freedom message.
Businessmen were against slavery before Marx was born as well - slavery is inefficient to a business. It is much more efficient to pay people to work and let them figure out how to get their own food and shelter. Slaves need to eat even when you don't have work for them to do. Because of this the classical liberal message of freedom was an easy one to sell to business owners since there was no cost to them anyway. (many businesses are of course inefficient and so you can find businesses that had slaves)
I get what you're saying, but minimum wage really isn't meaningless because if employers could pay us less they would.
Minimum wage contains just enough money that if you live an incredibly poverty-stricken lifestyle, you can just barely manage to scrape by by using all of your spare available energy to survive until tomorrow.
Escaping minimum wage as a lifestyle requires a fortuitous stroke of luck or the support of people who are not living the minimum wage lifestyle.
The more companies as a whole can crack down on the ability of the average person to escape from the minimum wage lifestyle, the more people they have available to subjugate into the minimum wage lifestyle and keep their own expenses down, allowing them to accrue more wealth more quickly.
By all reasonable means, minimum wage should increase to a compensate for the extraordinary amount of lifestyle creep and inflation that has stricken America over the last 15 years.
If that happened, more people would escape from poverty, meaning that there would be less money available for the richest people at the top of the scale.
they already are - servers are not bound to the federal minimum wage. they have a lower minimum wage for that specific industry... it churns my stomach :(
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
I'm pretty sure that if the tips work out to be less than the minimum wage that the proprietor of the establishment has to back pay them, the problem is enforcing that, because many servers do not report their wages or do not report a portion of their wages in order to avoid having to pay taxes on those wages, And as a former tipped employee myself, I have been indirectly told that if my tips do not bring my wages above minimum wage, that I would no longer have a job, because that would be indicative of my poor performance, rather than some sort of issue with the company itself.
So whenever possible, friends, tip in cash so that Uncle Sam doesn't get to dip his dirty little fingers inside of the employee's pockets that's making $2.13 an hour.