San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tipping not the solution for broken economic system
In its recent all-encompassing etiquette guide, New York Magazine advised that the new, ideal range of restaurant tips should be between 20% to 25%, admonishing that “anything under 20 percent is rude.”
On online message boards about services like DoorDash, a common refrain among drivers is that tips — usually determined when someone places an order and displayed on potential orders for a driver to take — are really bids by customers competing for their attention.
Meanwhile, at an increasingly wide variety of non-restaurant businesses, from grocery stores to marijuana dispensaries, it has become standard operating procedure for cashiers to swivel white tablets toward customers, bashfully averting their eyes for the sake of that inevitably awkward “Add a tip” phase of payment. (They can’t see what you’ve tipped, but the guy behind you in line can.)
So, what the hell is a tip, anyway? On paper, it’s a discretionary bonus for great service — granted by a customer who allegedly has every right not to give one. But that’s a perspective that seems terribly antiquated in the pandemic era.
In reality, a tip is a complex muck of irrational emotions and motivations.
You might tip well because, as a current or former restaurant server, you empathize with the tough economic straits that come with that work. Maybe you’re extra appreciative that your delivery driver endured a typhoon for the sake of your dinner. Or perhaps you do it to show off your magnanimous nature to potential partners (business or otherwise).
A 2010 survey of people in the U.S. and Israel found that 60.2% of the Americans polled cited guilt as one of several motivations for tipping, alongside showing gratitude and the knowledge that waiters depend on tips for income. COVID no doubt strengthened that motivation. In the first years of the pandemic, organizations like the Independent Restaurants Coalition and the National Restaurant Association pressed that restaurants were in crisis, and a highly publicized UCSF study found that line cooks were at the highest risk of dying from the virus.
Even before COVID, however, many restaurant workers couldn’t earn a living wage without tips. In
California, tipped employees are guaranteed a baseline minimum wage with tips as a supplement, but that still isn’t enough for most people to rent a decent one-bedroom apartment, let alone buy a home, near their workplace.
The economic deficiencies of service industry work are so glaringly obvious at this point that restaurantgoers can’t pretend to not know them.
Recent tipping patterns reflect this knowledge: According to statistics provided to The Chronicle by payment processor Square, tips grew by a whopping 68.5% at quick-service restaurants and 101.6% at full-service restaurants in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the same timeframe in 2020. In 2022, as pandemicera restrictions largely receded in the public square, tipping continued to grow by 15.8% and 16.5%, respectively.
We might all mean well when we tip heavy — 20% is my absolute minimum — but it’s a short-term and frankly unsustainable way to make up for the fact that the United States lacks a meaningful social safety net. With no guarantees for health care, shelter or food, low-wage workers are instead forced to rely on a strained and piecemeal system of gifts that are dependent on how much they please the rest of us.
Tips, by nature, are fragile — hostage to the whims of diners. When workers experience wage theft, they can pursue legal recourse to get the money they’ve earned; when a customer doesn’t leave a tip, social and legal conventions mean that a worker can’t do anything
about it, even though the material consequence is the same.
“Restaurant workers deserve livable wages,” says Andres Pomart, associate director of Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, a worker’s rights organization in San Francisco. “Tipping is a Band-Aid to an industry that doesn’t really provide much job security or livable wages to its workers.”
On the other hand, the National Restaurant Association, which aggressively lobbies against raising the minimum wage and opposes unionization efforts in the industry, heavily favors the tipping system.
Recent spikes in tipping have shown that, in times of crisis, we want each other to thrive. So how do we redirect this sentiment into something sustainable?
Tip culture persists because it subsidizes businesses with thin profit margins and cushions workers from the financial lows that come with service industry work. But there have been numerous cases in the Bay Area where tip-free restaurants have backtracked on their policies, either due to customer outcry or protests from staff who experienced tip-free work as a pay cut.
But tipping can never patch up deficiencies that responsible economic policies can and should fix — like a minimum wage that people can actually live on.
Try as we might, we can’t tip our way out of our responsibility to each other.