Should You Always Tip Your Waiter?

Picture this: you've just finished dining out. The restaurant is packed tonight, and service has been a little slow. The bill, which you just received, turned out to be a little higher than you expected. Also, you've never dined at this place before, and you're not sure you're really nuts about the food. So, you decide you're not going to bother to leave a tip.

Wait a minute. Is that really fair? Let's examine this thinking a little...

First of all, your waiter isn't responsible for the fact that the place is understaffed, but he's had to work extra hard for the whole shift to make up for that fact (and most likely, he's had a lot of people stiff him on the tip for the same reason). Nor is your waiter responsible for the taste of the food, and he doesn't see very much of the big bill the restaurant is charging you.

What most people don't realize is this: servers, because they are expected to make tips, can legally be paid a lower minimum wage, and they nearly always are - usually as little as two to four dollars an hour! This means that they need tips to in order to earn even a meager living income.

Even if they're tipped well, tip income is going to cost them on tax day. Because employers don't deduct taxes, servers have to do it themselves, and that means a higher percentage of this money is going to go straight to Uncle Sam (due to the fact that employers are required to match Social Security deductions).

So why do people think it's okay to stiff on the tip?

For one thing, we have a weird, nasty habit in this society of looking at the employees of the business we're patronizing and thinking that they have a fundamentally different relationship with their employer than we have with our own. I mean, most of us look at our own jobs and find them oppressive - we work because it pays the bills, and we do what we're told because we have to, not because we have any great love or loyalty for our company. And generally, whatever we think of the way "our" company runs things, there's really not a lot we can do about it.

Yet somehow, when we're dealing with the employees of the business that's getting our money, we utterly forget that they're in the same boat that we are. So we blame the teller for the bank's bad policies, we hold the hotel maid partially responsible for the sky-high price of the room, and we threaten violence to the call center agent who's being paid starvation wages to deliver bad news that he hasn't had any part in creating.

There's something fundamentally wrong with this picture.

I think it's time for us to come up with a new way of thinking, one where working people realize that we have more in common with each other than we do with the people we work for, and where we stick together and help each other out based on that idea. Let's start by tipping our waitstaff.