Tipping sucks… and if you are in the food service industry, I just pissed you off.

But hear me out.  Here is the thing.  Tipping in the US has reached a level where it is not a measure of the level of service one is receiving, but rather an integral part of the income food service workers rely on.  And why is that?  Well, for a lot of reasons, which, like any other financial problem, are complex and multi-faceted and not easily explainable.

But I will try.

Americans like to go to restaurants.  A lot.  We want good food cheap – and we want a lot of it.  But producing food is expensive.  Running a restaurant is expensive.  There are a lot of regulations to meet when opening a restaurant and most restaurants are owned not by corporations but by families with limited budgets.  Going out to eat used to be a luxury, a special occasion or a celebration of some kind like a college graduation.  Or a first job.  Or little Timmy learning not to put his fingers into the light socket. 

But now going out to eat is … you don’t feel like cooking.  Because you had a hard day, and you are tired.  Moms used to stay home and cook and clean, but moms now go to work and have been for decades to provide for the family and so cooking and cleaning are now chores they have to do in addition to working full time.  But people want to go out to eat and they don’t want to pay a ton of money for food, so they demand cheaper alternatives.  That reduces the funds a restaurant owner has available to pay his or her staff so… the staff has come to rely on customers tipping so they can get by.  Barely.  Were it not for tips, the restaurant industry would grind to a halt. 

But I resent the fact that it has come to this.  The necessity of tipping wouldn’t be a thing if we didn’t have an absolutely insane 50-year experiment in a heated greed fast for currency that makes the land rush of the 1800s look like child’s play.  We have a diminishing value due to the proliferation of said currency because some people want to be not only millionaires, not only billionaires but billionaires tens and hundreds of times over.  So, our money is worth about half of what it was when Reagan took office. If that.

But restaurants can’t charge twice as much for their products every year just to pay the wait staff a living wage because nobody would go to their restaurants, and they would go out of business.  Even by exercising an extreme form of penny pinching, most restaurants fail anyway just because it is a shitty business with high costs and low margins.  So, the cost of taking care of the staff falls on the consumer – and in a very direct way.  If you don’t tip your waiter or waitress, they may not eat tomorrow.  Not like … if you don’t tip the wait staff, they may have to cut back a little – no, they will fucking lose their shit if you don’t tip them.  That is about as drastic and direct as you can get. Their 1995 Mazda will get repo'd because they won't be able to pay the $155 dollar car note.

So I despise the notion of tipping because the fact that there are about 2800 billionaires in our country, and due to the regressive form of capitalism we practice has resulted in the concentration of ever and ever greater amount of wealth in a more and more restricted circle of people at the top, we, the restaurant going public have to crowd fund the staff who works there because the owners can’t or won’t.  That is if we want to eat at restaurants. 

In the meantime, a billionaire somewhere is buying his 3rd luxury yacht – one for the Atlantic, one for the Pacific and one to cruise from Monte Carlo to Rome once a year because he just can’t even fathom the idea of sharing the skies with the peasants even though he would be in his very own, luxury Bombardier jet.