Tiriol wrote:bobalot wrote:Ideal country? Think rest of the Western World. It's only your country with this retarded custom. I love it when people assume that American customs must be the norm for hundreds of millions of other people.
Which doesn't change the crux of his argument at all. This problem is US-centric, something which Simon_Jester admitted.
Exactly. Broadly speaking, on this issue the world can be divided into three parts:
-The ideal world: most of the West. Tips are not required for anybody, because of high minimum wages. Assuming there's no downside to high minimum wages, this is wonderful, and I'm not saying there IS any downside.
-The totally fucked up world: places where not only is mass tipping expected, but it's routine in places where it causes major social problems, such as at police checkpoints.
Baksheesh is not a good system.
-The partially fucked up world: the US and any other countries where tipping is still routine and expected in
some places, but not in places where it causes crippling problems. Waiters may expect a tip in the US, but police officers don't.
I, and roughly three hundred million other Americans, AT LEAST, live in the "partially fucked up world." I know this. But I maintain that if you come over to the partially fucked up world, you don't have grounds to bitch about having to choose whether to tip waiters or be seen as an asshole. The issue is not so important that your personal preferences have a sacred right to trump the local custom, especially since it's money you'd be spending ANYWAY if we went to the ideal system and the restaurants had to charge more to pay their waiters more.
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Stark wrote:I guess it's great I never said that, then.
Yes, it is.
I'm talking about the circular nature of this 'habit' or 'custom', whereby it's wide acceptance means it will never go away, because it's such a powerful expectation. Hell, I bet there are people in hospitality in the US so stupid they'd HATE higher wages/less tipping, because they'd feel like they were making less (and probably that everyone would magically stop tipping).
I suspect it would go away after a few years; when you get down to it these things are all about the money. Remember, most of the high minimum wage world had to go through that shift at some point themselves, unless it was
never customary to tip there, even before the minimum wage was invented.
Being in a country where everyone is expected to tip for regular service means a) less pressure to increase wages b) people take lower wages because of the expectation of recieving tips and c) concern for tipping visible low wage earners but no interest in improving wages. The tipping 'culture' creates the tipping culture. It's bizarre and hilarious.
Yes, but it also happens in any place that has a society. Many social rules are arbitrary, because there are usually several ways to solve a given social problem that will work.* But you still have to pick ONE such solution, and whichever one you pick becomes self-reinforcing.
Take personal space. There's no obvious law of nature that explains why acquaintances should be uncomfortable standing a handspan apart and talking to each other. And yet in many (all?)* parts of the world, they do. If we were meeting in person and I got up in your face like that, even if I was talking and acting just like any normal person would, you'd probably be disturbed.
That's not because it's objectively better for people to maintain a larger personal space, it's because it is a custom to do so. The custom is arbitrary and self-reinforcing, because people use it as a shibboleth. We get into the habit of shunning or punishing people who break custom, probably because it's a convenient (if not very reliable) way to identify people likely to make other kinds of trouble. People who don't follow local customs are either outsiders (in which case they aren't part of your social network and you have no particular reason to trust them), or somehow messed up in the head (in which case they are unpredictable and liable to start doing things that it will cost you serious time or effort to handle).
And yes, it's kind of dumb when you put it that way. It
is dumb, but it's also a quick-and-dirty solution to a difficult social problem.
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*I know of no place where ten centimeters is considered normal personal space for a conversation between acquaintances, but that doesn't mean no such place exists.
**To varying degrees of "work," usually, but they all function on a basic level and allow people to get on with their lives.
