These Tips Ain’t Working?

The custom of tipping service employees as payment accompanied by the low wages should be replaced with an adequate income for all, not based off uncontrollable identities. For example, if an 18 year old black male working his hardest and is the best employee the company has, but his coworker who is a 25 year old white woman who perhaps may be very beautiful, but terrible at her job, is leaving her shifts with more money. An occurrence like this is a possible outcome of a customers beliefs and/or thoughts about the uncontrollable identity of the employee.

Going out to restaurants and using other tip collecting occupations, consumers caught on to the common system of good work generally earns a 15-30% tip and poor work generally results in 0-10% tip. To start, the insane inconsistency of this system is undeniable as not all customers believe in the same % of the bill is what an employee deserves. Also, such percentages would not serve equality as an employee doesn’t get to decide how much or what the customer is buying. One productive employee may serve five tables all with bills in ranges $10-$20 and receive all great percentages of tips at 30% which totals to a possible $15-$30 in tips. Whereas another unproductive employee gets an equivalent five tables with bills generally totaling around $30-$40, but receiving poor tips of 20% which totals a possible $30-$40. The better server is receiving the worse tips by the fact of serving smaller bills while the unproductive employee is leaving with a higher tips.

Customers or “tip givers” are also a huge factor into the tipping system needing a replacement. Statistics show certain customer beliefs and identities highly affect their tipping decisions. Democrats, women, teens, and southerners being categorized as the worst tippers. The best tippers being men, republicans, northeasterners, and gay men. Employees of restaurants and hair cutteries have been questioned to which customers tipped the worst vs the best and the examples above were the answers given. Staff members don’t control who they provide their services to as it is a job and they are chosen randomly. Once again following a scenario; one employee could be providing their services to all women and teens while another could be servicing men and republicans. Customers are uncontrollable and it affects these subminimum wage workers as they do their job. In conclusion, some tip well, others poorly.

Integrating some sort of flat rate that is efficient to these employees would be the proper way to handle such poor fairness in the tipping game. Employees clearly wouldn’t make great living if they only received hourly pay, but it would be much easier for them to receive that minimum wage pay while still receiving tips. Service employees would still be making a fair amount of income even with the poor tipping system in place today. Setting the minimum wage for these service employees equally to the nationwide minimum wage will much better the lives of the staff and make them go to work knowing they will still be getting their fair income with the enjoyment of getting tips, too.

The Tipping System is Immoral

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