One of my first jobs, I worked in a private members-only clubhouse where tipping was prohibited. The service was held to a higher standard than most restaurants open to the public. If you didn’t do your job well, you’d no longer have a job.
We were paid quite a bit higher than minimum wage, so we were fine with it. Most people are fine doing their job well for a decent hourly wage.
If you’re the kind of employee that acts out with poor service towards a customer because you’re upset with the wage your employer pays you, then you need to find a job that isn’t customer facing.
You can also incentivize people by firing them when they don't do the job well, as every other industry does. Why are you even hiring people who aren't going to do the job well?
What kind of crappy attitude is that? "I know you hired me and you're paying me and I'm here to do this job, but I'm going to do it really poorly unless you pay me extra"
Do you not find that some people in the service industry do a better job than others, and make your day more pleasant as a result?
> really poorly
Your words, not mine. Obviously if you're consistently terrible at your job you can get fired. But what's the incentive to go above and beyond, vs "good enough"? And how are tips for a server different from an annual performance based bonus for a white collar worker? I don't hear people raging about that one.
Going "above and beyond" is, by definition, unnecessary. The manager / business owner can set the standard of the level of service they expect and then ensure the staff provides it. That is their job, it is not the customer's job.
> and how are tips for a server different from an annual performance based bonus for a white collar worker?
Because the bonus is provided by the employer, not the customer. It's done by someone who is familiar with your work over the course of an entire year and who is much more aware of all the surrounding circumstances, not someone who met you for an hour or two while you were also doing 10 other things they knew nothing about.
It's also subject to all the same labor laws and regulations as a wage. A company can't say "we're not going to give bonuses to black employees" without getting sued out of existence. Any customer can decide they aren't going to tip based on whatever reason, valid or not, that they want. Or no reason at all.
the problem with retail specifically is that you are never paying enough to make that a credible threat. If anything, your staff might just turnover every two years naturally, especially if it's only a part time job. Most retail in an area either is lifer staff or constant churn; in a particularly bad job I had, we turned over entire staff almost in a year.
IME it’s not “no customer service” as much as “less customer service” in many of the non-tip places. The staff checks on you less often and you sometimes have to actively flag them down or end up waiting for quite a while.
For an American who is used to the standard “Drink? —> Order —> Refill —> How’s everything? —> Refill —> Anything else? Dessert? Just the check?” cadence to dining it is strange and may seem like the service is more rude, though I’ve heard from folks unfamiliar with the American style that it’s overbearing, high pressure, and feels like you’re being hustled through the dining process.
If you go through a German hospitality school (yes, actually get some education in customer service), you'll learn the standard there is to give people time to chat and relax, so the delays in interactions in some areas are on purpose.
> The staff checks on you less often and you sometimes have to actively flag them down or end up waiting for quite a while.
What you describe is fairly common in American restaurants where people tip. Between a third to a half of the times I eat out I cannot rely on them checking up on me and I do have to flag them. And waiting is common in about 100% of them.
(And no, I don't think they're doing it only to me because I'm a nasty brat - I've observed this to be normal with the other customers as well).
Good sir, don't believe what you "have heard". Go to Europe and sit down at a Michelin starred restaurant in Italy. Then you will learn what exceptional service means.
My wife and I spent most of 2019 traveling through Europe on a mix of backpacking and remote work, and while there was an adaptation period - American servers interact more with the customer, altho after Europe, it frequently feels pushy and overbearing - the service was, on average, pretty good. Much like in the US, there were places where the service was phenomenal, places where it was average, places where it sucked. There was no common denominator (again, exactly like the US).
This argument always feels weird to me, because most customer-facing jobs in the US aren’t tipped, and most of the people working in them still work hard and try to do a reasonably good job.
Extreme generalisation of 50+ countries, each having own cultural identity and internal/local differences. All from a third party you heard. Are you sure that's information worth spreading / relying on?
(tipping exists in multiple countries in Europe BTW, it's just not that common)
This would be better described as "tips are _intended to_ incentivize doing a job well", as I'm not clear there's a strong relationship between tipping and performance.
That's true in more or less every job, it can be done well or done poorly. Incentive should be keeping the job at all. Tips are an infuriating hidden cost.
There's actually no incentive to keep low paid service jobs for any length of time. One of the saddest things in retail for example is the longer you work, the less you actually make; retail pay is so low that your raises will be less than inflation adjusted minimum wage or new hires if you work at a job long enough!
I've seen/had this happen. Bosses had to go to bat for their long term workers because even with raises, they wound up making less than people hired in the past month.
I don't think it fixes i would say, but more likely people wouldn't waitress for very long then, just like they don't stay at stores or other service positions for every long. Part of the reason tips work is that those restaurants wouldn't pay close to what the servers make otherwise. They'd end up giving them $10 an hour with a 25 cent or 35 cent raise every year.
It's really low. I've worked in a place where people will literally throw away money equalling an hours worth of the wages of a service person into a pool of water for good luck.
Here's what I think the likely outcome would be. High end restaurants that pride themselves on good service would increase their pay to keep good staff. At the very bottom end waitstaff would no longer have to tolerate the worst of their customers behaviour just to scrape by on tips. In the middle you'll see the increased turn over that you predicted.
Do you tip other service positions like the employee that helps you at best buy or the cashier at the grocery store? Why are they different? If people staying in one job longer is a good thing and tipping helps that why wouldn't you?
Why do some jobs in the service industry have tips, and others do not?
I've yet to find someone who pays tips for excellent customer service in the big mall stores. I'm sure they exist, but almost no one does it, and this is acceptable. Why?
Generally you have little to no service interaction in these stores. The people in them are order takers, not sellers; whenever they are pushed to sell, the customer finds it intrusive since normally its value-less or negative products (cough, extended warranties).
There also never is enough staff. The staff doesn't have time to provide customer service in meaningful ways; they more or less clean, stock, cashier, and do everything instead of be dedicated sales people. They literally cannot do so unless its very high value sales where the service is the key to making a big, infrequent sale over many small ones.
BeetleB, Most of that old-style retail is dying out though. The department store model of Sears and Macys lost to the big-box model of walmart and best buy. These days you are lucky if there is enough staff to run the registers in a pinch; big box retail and specialty can be absurdly cheap.
Like the whole gamestop debacle-go into the store and you'll find maybe they have barely enough payroll to have more than one person in the store on non-peak days.
Getting to the discussion at hand: Are they dying because of a lack of tips? It seems their decline is orthogonal to the issue.
Also, as someone pointed out, they typically get paid commissions, but my there are lots of other places where one does get pretty good service without tips or commissions:
> Generally you have little to no service interaction in these stores.
Actually, in stores like Nordstrom, you get a lot more service (if you want it) than at a restaurant - even when you don't want it. I avoided them for years for this reason. They have a fair number of people who spend much much more time providing these services than doing the other stuff you mentioned.
Fair enough. A key difference, of course, is that the commission is well defined compared to the tip, which is left to the whims of the customer.
Getting back to my original question: I often get better service from grocery store workers (depending on the chain, of course), than I do from restaurant workers. Yet no one pays them a tip. Same goes for Costco employees. Often the worker at the REI store will spend an inordinate amount of time helping me. No one pays them a tip, and they don't get a commission. From my perspective, all of these people are actually providing a service to me that I actually want, when I want it. Whereas with waiters, they are typically forced upon me. It's usually the exception that I want some service that requires a waiter.
The point being: There are more ways than tips to build a culture of good service, and it's inane to think tips are needed to maintain quality.
In my experience the only thing it sometimes successfully incentivizes is getting preferential treatment at a bar/restaurant...not saying that's a good thing, just a personal observation
