The tipping system in restaurants is flawed

"This means the customer pays less" You'll need numbers to show this, because as far as I know the price would remain the same. If the food prices were to increase, they would likely increase by 15-20%, so the customer would be paying the same. "This is one of the main reasons why people go to the restaurant, they do not want to have to cook, clean the dishes, carry the food, etc. They merely want to sit down and chat while all the work is done for them. This is part of the dinning experience." I will go ahead and drop this one. This is more of a, "should there be servers in restaurants" type of debate and not the one we are having. " Instead paying a high price on the food that they order, the customers are expected tip the waiter/waitress. Why should it matter if the customer is paying the restaurant directly or paying part of the servers salary? If anything this simply just give more power to the customer which is were it should ultimately lie in a free market or efficient business." Because the restaurant has the responsibility to pay their employees a fair wage based on the duties the employee is expected to perform. The tip is no longer a "part" of the servers pay, it is most of it, and after taxes; ALL of it. This may not be a problem if the server knew the average amount of tips they could expect per day, but because it's based on so many variables, it's impossible for them to properly gauge. One week they might make enough to buy groceries and pay the electrical bill and the next they might make half that and barely have enough to buy ramen noodle while they save for rent. Such a variable amount of pay is only suited for jobs that have higher upper limits of pay and a softer lower base; not 0-$50. "For this scenario to be similar, the serves fee for the other job would be lowered and than a standard tip would be assumed based on the amount that the serves fee was lowered by." The scenario is meant to represent "satisfaction gratuities" that servers supposedly get. We don't tip the other service positions because they usually make enough that we don't have to. When we start thinking, "We have to tip because servers don't make enough" we fall into a backwards thinking trap. The servers aren't paid enough 'because' it's expected they will make tips, two different modes of thinking. "As oppose to other minimum wage jobs?" As I said, I'll drop this section of my argument as it's wholly irrelevant to this particular debate. "A restaurant chef makes more money than a waiter, so I don't really understand the comparison. And the better the restaurant the more the chef salary increases on average." For clarity alone: This was a reference to the amount of work a customer doesn't want to have to perform when they go to a restaurant. It's trivial to walk to a counter and pick up your plate, but it takes more skill to cook the meals provided at restaurants. Again, section dropped. "The tipping rate is 15%, people ussaly chose to go under it or over it depending on how they feel about the waiter and the price of the meal." That's the average tipping rate yes, but there is a gradient depending on location and the policy of the restaurant. You basically just reiterated what I said as I was only describing the way the tip is handled. "The 15% rate is arbitrary rule that is not a measure set in stone. Most people tip reasonably but do not offer a 15% rate if they paid for a very high meal. This position cannot be proven from either side since tipping income is not declared and therefore their is no way of reliably measuring it." What I meant, as it seems you misread, was that if you buy a $40 bottle of wine versus a $400 dollar bottle, why should the server get more money just because one bottle is more expensive? The server themselves lose nothing by handing over the more expensive bottle and they do the exact same amount of work lifting the bottle and carrying it to your table. Regardless of the tipped amount, if it's based on a percentage higher than 1%, the server will gain extra money they didn't do any extra work for. This causes servers to push more expensive items on the menu onto the customer and to discriminate the "service" they provide based on the perceived "worth" of the customers. "Tipping is a substitute for meal cost which gives more power to the customer." This "power" is an illusion if one is to avoid social stigma and revenge delivered by the servers upon return to the restaurant. According to a study done on tipping, "evaluations of service quality accounted for less than 2% of the variability in tips expressed as a percentage of the bill."[1] So where does the other 98% come from? The answer is race, gender, table location, food quality, food preparation time, time spent at the restaurant, and many other small insignificant factors that have nothing to do with how nice or attentive the server actually is. Tipping also perpetuates racism against both the server side [2] and the customer side [3]. As servers will often assume a table with black people will be less lucrative than a table with whites, they will put on a "bigger" smile for the whites and attend to them more often. Then there is the fact that many restaurants have their servers do the cleaning and preparation of the restaurant while only making $2.13/hour. When are they making tips during the 2-3 hours of opening and closing time? How about the down time when the restaurant is slow or dead? There are only a few busy times of the day when a server actually makes decent money from tips, otherwise they are making an unlivable income. If tipping is the customer providing payment based on service satisfaction, why would that tip be shared with the likes of bussers and hosts? They have little to no interaction with the customer. Or how about the managers? There are many restaurants that mandate that the managers (who get paid fine) to have a share in the tips just because they were involved in the customer interaction. Overall, this can all be fixed by increasing a servers hourly wage to an acceptable level. It doesn't have to be minimum wage, even if it might be, we can't prove that it will. It would increase food prices, but this is already happening regardless [4]. So this is no excuse for not paying a hard working server a fair hourly wage. Sources: [1] http://tippingresearch.com... [2] http://www.psmag.com... [3] http://tippingresearch.com... [4] http://www.usatoday.com...