We dug into how American tipping culture got so broken, and the fight to fix it.
It turns out that your tips are subsidizing the payrolls of multi-billion dollar chains, while they pay their workers under minimum wage.
It’s a system rooted in slavery, and pushed by a wealthy restaurant owners onto the rest of us.
But there’s a growing movement to change it.
In the short term it might, but ultimately the moral burden is on the employers, it shouldn’t be pushed on to the customers. Stop going to those businesses is fine as well but I think it would have the same effect.
If you stop going to those businesses you aren’t partaking in the exploitation of workers, and furthermore, you aren’t literally giving money to the exploiters.
From the worker’s perspective there’s quite a difference between “I didn’t make tips today because no one came to our business” and “I didn’t make tips today and still had to work my ass off to serve no-tip customers”.
From the employer’s perspective, too, there’s a difference between “I can’t find anyone to work for poverty wages without tips” and “I can’t find anyone to buy my shit” even if both result in their business collapsing.
You aren’t going to change Applebee’s from the inside.
Well like I said, I’m not American so it’s not really my battle anyway. I’ve only heared about the broken tipping culture in the US, and it always surprises me that threads complaining about it are often still filled up with comments like “but make sure you still tip generously” when that sounds like the most counter-productive thing you can do to deal with the problem. That’s the extent of my observation.
That’s why I said we have to stop visiting these businesses in the first place - that’s what’s really counter productive, because it literally gives money to the businesses that exploit their workers.
But if you still do business there and then just refuse to tip, you are not hurting the business. You are only hurting the worker. Sure, maybe if the worker is hurt badly enough they’ll stop working there, but maybe they’re so fucking desperate that they’d rather work for $2.50/hr without tips than stay home.
It’s like, you could technically hurt these businesses if you slashed all the workers’s tires. Maybe don’t do that tho
Well there’s not much danger of me walking in to an Applebee’s, that would involve long and expensive flight.
Ugh. I’m using the generic “you”, not like, literally you.
But if people still do business there and then just refuse to tip, those people are not hurting the business. They are only hurting the worker.
Get it?
I don’t know, you seemed to think I knew about Applebee’s earlier, I had to explain I’m in a different country in some way because you didn’t pick that up and assumed I was familiar with your local brands. You said “tip generously or stay home”, that was what I was responding to, I stand by my assessment that tipping generously seems counter productive, you can choose to make boycotts or lobby your government to make changes in your country but that’s none of my business (besides internationalist worker solidarity which can only go so far).
omfg if you don’t live in a shithole country where tipping is normal then it doesn’t apply to you, fucking obviously lol