Is the American tipping system a relic of slavery and if so why do Americans still put up with this?
Slaves didn’t get tipped. It’s a legacy of having servants. The reason we “put up with it” is because the employing class loves it.
They (a) get to have the customers pay their employees, (b) they get to wiggle out taxes, (c ) most importantly, they get the customers to discipline the staff, basically doing their managers job for them, (d) they can fuck with employees by taking them off the floor and making them do side work, (e) in most states, the owners are allowed to legally steal from the tip jar.
Here’s what happens when the bosses are fired…
Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘ Señor ’ or ‘ Don ’ or even ‘ Usted ’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘ Salud! ’ instead of ‘ Buenos dias ’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy.
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Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell ofc. One of the best books ever.
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This is the Police Brutality thread, sirs.
Police are tipped employees lots of places. For example: the southern sector of my home town.
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I think that’s usually called coerced bribery.
You say extortion, they say tip. Who’s to say who’s right? Anecdotally, Muni cops in MX make most of their income from “tips”, just like servers.
Here, it’s called la mordida (the bite).
ETA:
the average wage for a municipal officer in Baja California is about 66 pesos or $3.44 an hour.
The most recent Citations Needed podcast drew connections between the explosion of tipping as a practice in the US to the influx of freed slaves doing menial jobs. It’s a good listen.
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Every online discussion eventually turns into tipping
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This is why I asked…
The trouble now with tipping is if you get rid of it, you just exacerbate the wealth gap even more. Without tipping, even if you made the minimum wage $15/hour, most servers (and casino dealers!) would be taking a pay cut. So the very people that tipping “hurts” will be hurt just as much, if not more, if tipping was done away with.
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Yeah I was gonna say the vast majority of people I know who make tips make way more than even 15/h.
Though 15/h is shit and not a living wage in coastal states at least. Needs to be like 20/h
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Yeah, I’ve been recommending this podcast for the peeps here, it’s always been a good listen.
The latest is about how country music became right wing propaganda. I’m saving it for when I can really pay attention. These guys are incredibly smart and insightful.
I started listening because of your rec.
@Riverman, my bad, the penultimate episode discusses tipping. And yes the country music episode was great. These guys could make anything interesting, I trust their judgment.
Whenever I hear Sweet Home Alabama on the radio I change the station.
Or, we could do what they do in AU… pay serves a living wage, instead of a sub-minimum wage and expect them to hustle tips. WTF with just assuming we’d just let the absentee owners extract the difference.
Also… I really resent a mandatory snap math quiz every time I get up to go on to the next bar. Fuck that.
well yeah, but the gap between what TPTB would deem a “living wage” and what servers make now would still be big…and a pay cut.
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It’s like healthcare and guns… most of the rest of the world seems to be able to deal with this stuff. But we got a fatal case of American Exceptionalism, I guess.
This whole problem goes away with worker control, as G.Orwell observed.
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