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?
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.