> The filet-mignon crowd usually chipped in. Some customers couldn’t. (Food stamps can’t be used for gratuities.) “The tipping system is there to keep the base price affordable for folks like them,” Reed said.

This is stated near the beginning of the article but then doesn't, as far as I am concerned, get anywhere near enough discussion later on (in fact, it is an idea which seems to just get dropped).

It feels, to me, as if what we are really doing as a society with tripping, is trying to figure out how to deal with our crazy levels of wealth inequality using a social norm to establish a makeshift wealth tax used to subsidize costs.

While there are always momentary shocks and disruptions, over time the market always ends up taking this stuff into account: in the same way that restaurants realize they can lower the base pay if the server receives tips, the server is mentally weighing the compensation of being a server as including them (a premise that this article does explain near the end, with a story of the restaurant who realized that they have to keep bumping the pay of their kitchen staff to prevent them from realizing they should quit and get a front-of-house job).

While we stare at this often with how we pay people, it also affects the price paid by customers, driving the base prices down. A lot of people seem to refuse to do this analysis as they just assume that businesses can charge whatever they want, but a business that can charge whatever they want is a good sign that they are some kind of monopoly (a good test to apply to cases where the monopoly status is less obvious, such as Apple/Google and their app payment schemes).

If a restaurant is receiving a lot of tips, competition with nearby restaurants--which can be brutal and downright cutthroat--is going to cause the base prices see on the menu to be lower than they would be if no one were legally allowed to tip. Of course, competition isn't perfect and some psychology effects here lead to indirect price collusion, but the denser the market the more this effect is going to work...

...but, even if the revenue to the restaurant starts to equalize--with both the base wages to staff and the base prices of menu items going down--in the same way that specific servers are going to end up getting paid more for any variety of maybe-awkward reasons (the article early on mentions a pretty explicit one involving physical features), customers are also going to end up now paying different amounts.

And so, in a world with tipping, while on average we should expect most people to pay something similar for their meals (again: if you don't think this is true, you must not really believe in capitalism very much), some people are going to be paying less as they decide to feel OK not tipping (or maybe are forced not to, as in the example in the article I quoted involving food stamps) and yet are benefiting from the lower base price.

This, to me, makes the situation really complicated. Like, I sort of don't think I actually mind the wealth tax that I feel like this causes: I can tip and so I find myself tipping more than people who don't have the resources to tip the same way I do... but, it also feels unfair to me that I know there are people who do have the resources but are choosing not to tip, and my tips are going to subsidize their meals being cheaper.

Like, when you see someone saying they don't tip, you might think they are hurting wait staff... they actually aren't, really, as the existence of these people means the base price of menu items is going to trend a bit higher to compensate. What they are actually doing to wait staff is merely adding a force which equalizes their total compensation slightly by moving some of their wages from the tip column into the salary column: they are, very indirectly, causing people who tip a lot to attractive wait staff to also pay a bit more for their food and for that money to go to someone who fails to get as many tips.

They also are getting food which is massively subsidized by the people like me who pay a lot more via tips because we can and feel bad if we don't (and also probably like the weird social high it gives us, a thing I have written about in prior comments on this topic).

If you like the premise of tipping due to the wealth tax premise, this sucks, as we are actively paying these people to exist (by indirectly transferring wealth to them); if you want a wealth tax we should just add a wealth tax using government, so everyone pays for it fairly--and the people who benefit aren't heavily biased towards the most attractive people--rather than using awkward social pressure to make people feel bad for not participating in the broken simulation of a tax scheme. Remember: if you actively go out of your way to subsidize people who don't care about what society thinks of them you are just training people to be assholes on all sorts of topics :/.

(And, if you don't like the scheme--whether because you dislike the wealth tax or you dislike the broken de fact implementation of it and the biases it results in on the other side of the payments--maybe you can learn from this kind of analysis that you can have an outsized-amount of impact when you refuse to participate, as you aren't just benefiting yourself: that benefit comes from harming the people who disagree with you, and you also are actively contributing to the effect you wanted to see.)