As a person who writes about food and drink for a living, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about Bill Perry or whether the beers he sells are that great. But I can tell you that months before opening The Public Option, a brewpub in Washington DC, the man has already landed in my good graces. That’s because he plans to ban tipping in favor of paying his servers an actual living wage. Bill Perry might just be the most progressive thing going in Washington right now.
I hate tipping.
I hate it because it’s an obligation masquerading as an option, and a bizarre singling-out of one person’s compensation, just dangling there, clumsily, outside the cost of my meal. I hate it for the postprandial math it requires of me. But mostly, I hate tipping because I believe that I would be in a better place – as a diner, and as a human – if pay decisions regarding employees were simply left up to their employers, as is the custom in virtually every other industry, in pretty much every civilized corner of the earth.
Most of you think that you hate to tip, too. The research suggests otherwise. You actually love tipping! You like to feel that you have a voice in how much money your server makes. No matter how the math works out, you persistently view restaurants with voluntary tipping systems as being a better value.
This makes it extremely difficult for restaurants and bars to do away with the tipping system. Which is a shame, really, because tipping deserves to go the way of the zeppelin, pantaloons and Creationism. We should know better by now.
by Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Francois Lenoir / Reuters
I hate tipping.
I hate it because it’s an obligation masquerading as an option, and a bizarre singling-out of one person’s compensation, just dangling there, clumsily, outside the cost of my meal. I hate it for the postprandial math it requires of me. But mostly, I hate tipping because I believe that I would be in a better place – as a diner, and as a human – if pay decisions regarding employees were simply left up to their employers, as is the custom in virtually every other industry, in pretty much every civilized corner of the earth.
Most of you think that you hate to tip, too. The research suggests otherwise. You actually love tipping! You like to feel that you have a voice in how much money your server makes. No matter how the math works out, you persistently view restaurants with voluntary tipping systems as being a better value.
This makes it extremely difficult for restaurants and bars to do away with the tipping system. Which is a shame, really, because tipping deserves to go the way of the zeppelin, pantaloons and Creationism. We should know better by now.
by Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Francois Lenoir / Reuters
