It feels dystopian. As you finish repeating the order, the cashier turns a sleek ominous-looking screen your way. ‘It’s gonna ask you a question,” they say.
It’s not a question. You’re being asked to tip on top of an $18.35 burger with a side of fries and a fountain drink. And it’s awkward—not just for you, but for the cashier as well.
But time and again, you do it anyway. Or at least, you do it sometimes.
At this point, I could end things. Because in the grand scheme of life, tipping $3.24 on a burger run is not a big deal.
But why is it that this sort of ritual—tipping on an iPad everytime you order food–is the new norm? And when did this happen?
We tip the waiter, the bartender, or the ride to the airport. But why is it that, all of a sudden, we tip cashiers? Why does it feel like, out of nowehere, everyone is asking for a tip?
It’s confusing. Who deserves to be tipped? Who or what deserves to be tipped the most?
All of these questions, concerns, and other rightful inquiries get spun around and spit out. But in the end, they each point to the same thing.
Greed.
If you ever travel abroad, you”ll notice that some things really aren’t that different. For the most part, people are the same. We have the same hopes and dreams. And more and more, we consume the same music, wear the same brands, and follow the same trends.
Though if there’s one aspect of America and our culture that doesn’t migrate or isn’t emulated in other places, it’s our notions of tipping.
In Japan, for instance, tipping is considered offensive. And in Greece, you only tip if you really, really enjoyed the service. And even if you do decide to tip, it’s usually just one or two euros extra.
Tipping just isn’t a big part of the global paradigm. In a lot of ways, it’s a uniquely American experience.
But there are reasons why tipping is such a uniquely American experience. It’s not just by accident that this is how we do it here. And those reasons involve none other than all-American greed.
Big-wigs, restaurant chains, and owners don’t pay their staff nearly enough for what it costs to pay for rent, buy groceries, and finance bills. And by doing so, they cheat out their employees. And in the process, they commit wage theft—which they later justify with their buzzwords of choice: entrepreneurship, investment, or R&D.
Restaurants rake in profits from overpriced menu items and in turn, keep the pie of profits for the very top.
It’s unfair. And instead of taking accountability, they make you—the customer—pay their staff. They make you do their job for them.
It’s easy to become frustrated. It’s easy to say “screw it, I’m done with tipping.” I get the feeling. Cause when you go out, you gotta always take paying extra into the calculus
But the staff needs your tips, especially the waiters and waitresses whose base wages are made up of tips.
At one time, tipping may have been “thank you for getting me two refills and making sure this thing doesn’t have nuts in it because I have a nut allergy.” Now it’s more of “here’s the 5 dollars in tips that you need to live.”
That’s just the reality. This is the world we live in.
Okay.
I understand that not every restaurant undercuts its staff. I don’t think that the majority of managers, owners, and higher-ups you find in the foodservice industry are all terrible and addicted to the dollar signs or to the precise profit margins either. I actually think you’ll find that a lot of these managers, owners, and such care about other things like work culture, food quality, customer satisfaction, and restaurant ambiance.
But in life, we tend to play within the rules beset to us. We’re chess pieces on a chess board. And so when a couple of restaurants opt to install tipping iPads, the rest of the industry follows suit. Parity is contagious in a lot of things, and foodservice isn’t an exception.
But from time to time, new regimes emerge. And new ideas–previously scoffed or mocked—can spread.
One such idea is sectoral bargaining—which has worked in other parts of the world and is just being tried here in the U.S.for the first time.
For each sector of the economy, the national government, union bosses, and business leaders sit down and work out what the minimum wage should be. There’s some push and pull, but the result usually entails that workers in the particular industry have better benefits and higher wages than before.
In California, this policy has been implemented in the foodservice sector and as a result, foodservice staff are now being paid, on average, $4 dollars more per hour than they were last year.
Critics say that this policy will result in higher priced menu items. “Burgers will be too expensive!,” they say on Twitter and from the halls of Congress. But this hasn’t been the case. Prices have increased, sure, but the prices have only gone up by very tiny increments—between 1 cent to 1 dollar depending on the menu item.
There’s some promise there, for sure. And I can live with this idea moving forward. Because in a world where I have to pay 13¢ more for fries—but don’t have to face the evil iPad and the cashier taking my order at the counter gets a bigger slice of the pie—is a world I want to live in. And I hope that’s a world you want to live in too.
Cover Photo Courtesy of KCRW
Gusto Journal 