If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don’t really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you’re right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it’s important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.
All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let’s say you go to your local bakery; you’ve never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they’ll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he’s required to make up the difference anyway. At first it’s great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren’t earning enough tips, ane he’s making up the differences. That’s when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they’re overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.
Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I’d have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.
At first you seem to be downplaying feeling of social pressure by saying you don’t see the need to legislate it away, but then you go on to state that the pressure is part of an exploitation scheme. You could claim that blackmail is mere social pressure and that there is no need to legislate it away, yet there are laws against blackmail.
In the last paragraph, you state that eliminating tipping would hurt those industries because they would have to increase prices, but the prices are already increased through the use of tipping and social pressure. Eliminating tipping simply makes pays more consistent so that one employee isn’t greatly out-earning their coworker just because they’re a pretty young white woman.
If someone is being paid a real wage, you are not obligated to tip them. I don’t really see the need to legislate away your feelings of social pressure. That being said, you’re right that payment processors have gotten out of control with their tipping demands. There is no reason that a simple retail transaction should be presenting you with a tipping option. However, it’s important to understand that this pressure is part of an exploitation scheme.
All an employee just needs to qualify for the tipped minimum wage is to regularly make $30 a month in tips, at which point their employer can start using those tips to subsidize their wages. So, let’s say you go to your local bakery; you’ve never tipped their before, but now they have a POS system that prompts you to tip, so you do. Once each employee makes $30 per month in tips, the owner switches to a tipped minimum wage. He tells his employees he thinks they’ll make more money overall, and if they make less than minimum wage in tips, he’s required to make up the difference anyway. At first it’s great for employees; their paycheck is much smaller but the tips more than make up for it. But soon, the owner notices that, on certain days, the employees aren’t earning enough tips, ane he’s making up the differences. That’s when he decides to cut hour to maximize his newfound savings on staffing. Now employees are losing hours, they’re overworked and understaffed when they do work, and rhe customer is paying more. Everyone loses except the owner.
Eliminating tipping will fix this, but it will also hurt the industries that traditionally have tipped employees. I did a lot of service work and a lot of retail work when I was younger, and I can tell you, restaurant work is easily harder. If I had been offered the same wage for retail or service work, with no tips, I’d have gone with retail every time. Now, you might think that the solution would be for restaurants to just pay servers more, but restaurants already have small margins (3-5%), and there would be a price increase just to make minimum wage viable. Without other massive reductions in cost (which would require changes to both the agricultural and real estate industries), there are basically two options; eliminate the tipped minimum wage, which would eliminate employers incentives to exploit the staffing subsidies it creates, and have tipping be a nice perk, or eliminate tipping altogether, which would either lead to massive increases in restaurant prices or staffing shortages in the service industry.
At first you seem to be downplaying feeling of social pressure by saying you don’t see the need to legislate it away, but then you go on to state that the pressure is part of an exploitation scheme. You could claim that blackmail is mere social pressure and that there is no need to legislate it away, yet there are laws against blackmail.
In the last paragraph, you state that eliminating tipping would hurt those industries because they would have to increase prices, but the prices are already increased through the use of tipping and social pressure. Eliminating tipping simply makes pays more consistent so that one employee isn’t greatly out-earning their coworker just because they’re a pretty young white woman.