Excerpt from the article:
Schenker says that after his years in the service industry, he has watched tipping evolve into a major part of his pay.
“If there is some means of tipping that’s available to you, that should signal to you that workers there aren’t being paid enough,” says Schenker. “Tipping is sort of an acknowledgment of that fact.”
To Schenker, customers who don’t tip are not understanding that businesses treat tips as a baked-in part of workers’ wages.
“They subsidize lower prices by paying employees less,” he says. “If you aren’t tipping, you are taking advantage of that labor.”
He was so close… Especially for someone who says himself does not make much money.
I disagree that customers are happier. People constantly complain about tipping. Those people are clearly not happy. Much of the world doesn’t do the tipping model, so it doesn’t seem like it is worthwhile for quality of service.
I do agree that staff are happier because they on average would make more (at least more than the paltry minimum wage most states have). But it comes at the cost of taking advantage of customers (basically trying to guilt trip them into paying more). I don’t support such business practices. Not to mention it’s not actually fair pay. You’re not actually being paid for quality of service. You’re paid for how much they like you, which leads to racial and gender pay disparities.
And the real winner? The business that gets to pay pennies to wait staff. They could incorporate the average tip into their prices and maintain the same pay. But they don’t want to. They want to advertise low prices so that they can get the full value from low tippers. They often even outright push mandatory tipping with auto gratuities, which is peak sleazeball behavior.
People only complain about tipping online. In the real world, that doesn’t happen.