Comment on Tipping culture npcs
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 8 months agoIt’s basically an artifact of how pay is set. The USA has a system where pay for certain professions is adjusted only by a new law. Since in capitalism the capital class has power over policy and the working class does not, the tendency is to resist increasing salary.
Now for most workers this would simply be untenable, but for jobs that get part of their income through tips the workers can make up the difference by increasing the portion of their income they receive through tips.
So over time the tip rate has increased. It’s actually an interesting proxy for how fucked capitalism has become in the USA. The higher the percentage of cost that workers need to receive semi-formally through tipping, the more the imbalance between capital and labor.
SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Still doesn’t make any sense. We all know how the tipping system works, it’s funked but that’s not the pint here.
A fixed % of a restaurant bill in the 70s, 80s or 90s should give hospo workers the same amount of money adjusted to inflation so if 10% was good enough money then, it should be now too.
Hell, I could argue that prices have gone up at inflation rates while salaries have remained stagnant, so a fixed % of an inflated restaurant bill makes hospo workers the only ones that actually have their income adjusted to inflation. Everyone else (salaried) gets a well below merit increase year on year. And that’s even before you take the socially accepted tip from 10% to 25 or 30%
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 8 months ago
Imagine in 1979 that 30% of the cost of a meal went to server salaries. Imagine that now it is 15%. Either the server takes a 15% pay cut or that money gets paid directly by the customer as extra tip.
SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honest question, are servers paid a fixed amount of the cost of a meal by their employer, or you are just implying that their fixed amount went down adjusted to inflation like it happened to all other industries?
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 8 months ago
Most people who get a tip are paid by the hour by their employers in the US (and everywhere else that I know). Tips are a portion of the cost of the meal, usually.