I'm curious who would get the tip in this scenario. The sushi chef? Ok, I guess. The restaurant owner? I'm going with 0%. The robot? Maybe if it can pass a Turing test.
The social contract is currently approximately 'when I interact with human wait staff I am expected to add some cash to what the bill says on it' This is evident from, for example, the drive-thru example. There is no waiter / waitress, you just get your stuff and keep rolling. A tip jar is sometimes available but is rarely expected. If I never interact with a human and the restaurant expects a tip I think they should tweak their presentation to more closely adhere to that social contract.
In actual fact I wish we could stop dancing around the fluffy idea of when to tip and when not to tip and just expect restaurant owners to pay their staff and include that in the price charged for the goods. It's super annoying having to think about this stuff all the time.
Except that in most areas, tips are legally required to go end workers (not management or ownership) and in jobs where tips are allowed, end workers make more than in service jobs where tips are not allowed on average. We're talking about America, I don't know why you would expect restaurant owners to pay workers a dime over the market clearing price. The chances service employees get employer provided health insurance is very low.
I don't know your financial situation and noone is forcing you to tip. But if you make, say, more than 3 times what the people servicing you make, and you choose not to tip, I think that's quite selfish.
...Wages are also legally required to go to end workers.
I'm suggesting employers pay their employees. This isn't a radical concept and works just fine everywhere else. They already do this everywhere other than restaurants. If they aren't paying employees enough, that's a problem. You don't solve that problem by adding an optional tax on customers that is kinda-sorta-not totally required. All that does is ensure that in a certain percentage of cases employees get paid zero percent of the invisible tax. I'm just saying make the tax visible and required and stop this weird dance we do in america.
Only in the past few years has it been remotely expected that you'd have to tip someone who didn't actually take your order at a table and then walk your food out from the kitchen.
We've all been tricked into tipping in situations where, honestly, the management should be paying better. And yeah, I know that means that the cost of things will be higher on say the menu, but the real cost of a $20 dinner should be $24, why not just pay the $24 up front and raise the base wages to what they should be.
I'm pretty sure this is only an American lunacy too.
Yeah but if you are in America where higher minimum wages or public healthcare are not happening anytime soon, maybe you should tip the hourly workers if you can afford it?
I think people just don't want to be confronted with the idea that the people servicing them make a pittance. It brings up uncomfortable feelings to have to decide how much a service employee "ought" to be paid, each time you eat at a restaurant.
> What an iconoclast, refusing to tip hourly workers...
If everyone refused to tip, wages and prices would adjust.
(Tipping isn't even that old in the American culture. Perhaps a hundred years or so. And its introduction was seen as thoroughly unAmerican, and more in-line with those supposedly obedient Europeans groveling for handouts from their social superiors, instead of a proper American transaction amongst equals.)
Those hourly workers are getting screwed by an employer who won't pay them what they're worth. It isn't my responsibility to feel shame and make up for their circumstances with an arbitrary tithe.
