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Photo showing a hand putting money into a tips jar.

Ever been a broke college student, eating at a restaurant, when suddenly the bill arrives and you are thrown into a moral conundrum, wondering how much to tip your incredible server while they loom above you? Of course you have. 

Don’t get me wrong, tip your servers, treat them well, pick up after yourselves. But why are we letting this situation get out of hand? Let’s start paying our servers fair wages that they can survive off of. Tips are becoming a substitute for adequate wages rather than a reward for good service.

In many parts of the world, like Japan or South Korea, tipping servers is seen as rude. Meanwhile, here in the United States, it’s mandatory.

To be fair, underpaid workers are not a problem in every state. For example, in states like New York, Connecticut and California, the minimum wage is around $16 an hour, which is a livable wage depending on how much work you put in a week. 

Then we have states like North Carolina, North Dakota and New Hampshire, where the average minimum wage per hour is around $7.25.

These people are parents, students, people just trying their best to get out of the situation they are in, and they are treated as lesser. Service workers not only deserve respect for the work they do and the hospitality they provide to us, but also fair wages so they would not have to resort to working 3 jobs and live paycheck to paycheck.

At Fuji’s Japanese Steakhouse, for example, servers have to tip out 7% of their total sales to a tip pool, which can go up to $100 each night. So, if someone does not tip, the servers are paying for them to eat.

Hence, if restaurants incentivized sales to their employees, instead of relying on tips from customers, and added profit based on the productivity of the servers, it would be a better system, not a broken one. 

If countries like Japan, South Korea and even Bangladesh can pay their workers a livable minimum wage to sustain a stable lifestyle, the great land of America should be able to as well.

I say Bangladesh as if we do not have a million child labour violations and criminally underpaid labourers, but even then, we do not have such an elaborate tipping culture, and workers do not expect tips. Rather, it is a rare occasion when they do receive it. 

Ultimately, it comes down to issues with the labour rights, putting a high risk of instability on workers and a sense of responsibility on consumers, developing static communication between the two. Reforming these laws and wages would only create a more honest experience between employees and their consumers.

Categories: Opinion