Tipping waiters for their services is an inferior and inefficient system

Tipping waiters has become almost ritualistic in today’s society. So ritualistic that waiters and waitresses receive more of their income from the customer than they do from the establishment. I support the notion that this is an inferior system to incorporating the tip amount into the food price and paying the waiters a base rate, giving bonuses to waiters who are seen to repeatedly do their job with excellence. The current system is unfair to the waiter, the customer, and everyone else involved in the restaurant business.Tips are meant to reward good waiters and punish bad ones by allowing the customer to decide for themselves. Good waiters will get tips for doing a good job and bad ones will receive few tips. This is idealistic when considering the job of the waiter. A great waiter is one who does their job; a bad one is one who doesn’t. There is not an infinite scale of the job of a waiter when considering quality. Many times, the quality of service has no correlation with the tip amount at all. People have a preset amount of money they will give to the waiter, withholding the payment only in cases of extreme incompetence. This system is inefficient and is simply the monetization of social pressure.The non-standardization of tipping leaves much room for inefficiency. Waiters are chasing tips, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they are chasing good service. Waiters have developed a keen eye for knowing which customers will tip well, and which won’t. With the current system, who can blame them? Their lively hood is based off of arbitrary tips for arbitrary reasons. This system leaves motivation to ignore customers which are believed not to tip and fight over the customers they believe will. Waiters know that what they do will have little effect on their tip. All they can do is do their job and hope for the best; and choose the right customers. This puts unnecessary stress on waiters who would be better off receiving a base rate for doing their job.Tipping is also unfair to the customer. Tipping benefits people who do not care and punishes people who are altruistic. The people who tip the waiters support those who don’t. Customers are trapped in a situation where they feel they must tip, regardless if they feel the waiter deserves it. Everyone knows that waiters receive a very low base rate for their work and therefore tipping waiters is the only way they will be able to support themselves. While I agree this is true, I do not agree is it unpreventable. Waiters receive a low base rate only because they will be tipped. The management knows this ahead of time and pays accordingly. Customers who are unable to afford a tip feel embarrassed and the waiter is angered. This is easily avoidable with a higher base rate provided by higher meal prices. This forces customers to support the waiters regardless if they want to or can afford it. A base rate pay would create even more pressure for the waiter to do a good job because instead of receiving a low tip for very poor service, their manager will hear about it. The tipping platform for customers venting frustration has very few sanctions for the waiter. They will receive a small tip, if any. This does not mean they lost out. They may sacrifice low paying customers’ service for high paying customers’ service and reap the reward.The tipping platform leaves much room for discrimination against waiters based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other fader for discrimination. Customers may leave low tips for groups of people they dislike; consciously or not. This is extremely unfair to the waiter as they depend on tips for much of their income. It is very unlikely that with a base rate pay for waiters, customers would use the new medium of expressing the quality of their service and tell the management that they were unhappy with their service because their waiter was black; even if they were extremely discriminatory. With the current tipping system, a customer could provide a smaller tip based on the race of the waiter and no one would notice.Sources:1) http://www.salon.com...2) http://www.wisegeek.com...