I live in Central Europe and I think our version of tipping makes a lot more sense than what's common in North America.
If we receive exceptional service, we pay a little extra - usually 10% or less.
Staff doesn't expect to be paid from tips, business owners don't expect their staff to be paid from tips, customers don't have a guilt trip because they feel like if they don't tip generously the staff will be underpaid.
U.S. tipping doesn't make any sense from a European point of view.
Just set the prices of things at a level where you can afford to pay your staff from your revenue.
> U.S. tipping doesn't make any sense from a European point of view.
Because you're thinking about it too hard or otherwise unaware of the inner turnings of the system.
Where it matters, servers are almost their own industry, swapping gigs at this or that restaurant to work with this or that regional manager. The restaurant gets their money from the bill, the server gets their money direct from the customer they helped.
My server goes to a different restaurant -- I go there and keep getting awesome service.
This type of arrangement gets really close to a guildhouse/coop more than a franchise.
In places with less stable relationships (tourist restaurants), asking for tips might be a predatory thing -- or you can see it as paying it forward: "hey person working to get people their demands in a moments notice, I hope this tenner will help you hold that smile in the face of another consumerist monster. Thanks for being a human."
> swapping gigs at this or that restaurant to work with this or that regional manager
This or that restaurant or this or that regional manager could give them a fair wage and incorporate their labour cost in the prices of the items on the menu.
I just had a chat with an AWS customer support agent earlier today... should I send them $10 for their service? Next month they could be working for GCP (or this or that) support, how can I expect AWS to pay them directly?
> This or that restaurant or this or that regional manager could give them a fair wage
They do... usually by way of appropriate schedules or other logistics of the job which delivers access to the richest streams of tips. This is why the good servers follow them.
The conversation around tips and it's appropriateness is largely blind to the other aspects of the hospitality industry. Real people with real jobs responding to real stimulus -- it takes coordination on many axes to deliver a golden hour. The conversation of where on the scale from 0-20% to fall is all bourgeois.
Franchises never have much margin to begin with -- they're mostly real estate vehicles. It's why a Chipotle will operate at 20% staff like it's a normal thing.
A local restaurant might actually be profit seeking enough to have optimized a return on the food/drink service -- but that's usually reflected in the servers wages already.
If you're an European waiter working in a touristic restaurant you get the best of both worlds. European pay and benefits plus large tips from unknowing USA tourists.
If we receive exceptional service, we pay a little extra - usually 10% or less.
Staff doesn't expect to be paid from tips, business owners don't expect their staff to be paid from tips, customers don't have a guilt trip because they feel like if they don't tip generously the staff will be underpaid.
U.S. tipping doesn't make any sense from a European point of view.
Just set the prices of things at a level where you can afford to pay your staff from your revenue.