As a person who writes about food and drink for a living, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about Bill Perry or whether the beers he sells are that great. But I can tell you that months before opening The Public Option, a brewpub in Washington DC, the man has already landed in my good graces. That’s because he plans to ban tipping in favor of paying his servers an actual living wage. Bill Perry might just be the most progressive thing going in Washington right now.
I hate tipping.
I hate it because it’s an obligation masquerading as an option, and a bizarre singling-out of one person’s compensation, just dangling there, clumsily, outside the cost of my meal. I hate it for the postprandial math it requires of me. But mostly, I hate tipping because I believe that I would be in a better place – as a diner, and as a human – if pay decisions regarding employees were simply left up to their employers, as is the custom in virtually every other industry, in pretty much every civilized corner of the earth.
Most of you think that you hate to tip, too. The research suggests otherwise. You actually love tipping! You like to feel that you have a voice in how much money your server makes. No matter how the math works out, you persistently view restaurants with voluntary tipping systems as being a better value.
This makes it extremely difficult for restaurants and bars to do away with the tipping system. Which is a shame, really, because tipping deserves to go the way of the zeppelin, pantaloons and Creationism. We should know better by now.
Forget merely inefficient; tipping is irrational from an economic perspective. Standard economic theory says that we only give something if we’ll get something in return. Leaving an optional payment after a service has already been provided – even if you have no intention ever to return – benefits a diner in no way. So why do we tip at all? Altruism? Empathy? Actually, social pressure. Make that reason number five why I hate tipping.
One argument that you tend to hear a lot from the pro-tipper crowd seems logical enough: the service is better when waiters depend on tips, presumably because they see a benefit to successfully veiling their basic contempt for you. Well, if this were true, we would all be slipping a few Benjamins to our doctors on the way out their doors, too. But as it turns out, waiters see only a teeny, tiny bump in tips when they do an exceptional job compared to a mediocre one (one estimate puts the variation at a 2% difference). Patrons actually vary their tips for less palatable reasons, like their server’s race, gender and body language. Waiters, wily observers of humanity that they are, are catching on to this; in one poll, a full 30% said they didn’t believe the job they did had any impact on the tips they received.
You may think that, as a customer, wielding the power of the tip entitles you to special treatment, but that’s only true, apparently, if you look like the kind of person that tips well. Bad news for black, Hispanic and Christian diners: under a voluntary tipping system, you can expect to receive worse service than the table full of white atheists next to you. Surveys have found that waiters actually perceive these groups as bad tippers and, as such, ignore them in favor of more lucrative tables.
Eliminating voluntary tipping would do away with these prejudices. It would also allow restaurants the freedom to spread its revenue among employees in whatever way allowed them to attract the best talent and provide the best service – just as, come to think of it, every other business is capable of doing.
Food service is a team sport. The diner’s experience is the result of a vast and interconnected web of efforts, from the farmer to the prep cook to the food runners to those waiters at the front of the operation, whose income is mysteriously treated as a stand-alone item.
So come on, people: get on board with ditching the archaic tip system. Pay a little more up-front for your beer or burger. Support Bill Perry’s tip-free brewpub, and any other bar or restaurant that doesn’t ask you to do drunken math.
