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Willson Tuck

Mrs. Pettay

ENG 112, 4B

03 March 2017

Make Tipping Great Again

Your tips are never required, but always appreciated is just another way of saying

Please tip...because it is the right thing to do. Tipping is a social norm in society and serves as

the right thing to do when someone else takes care of you in a public setting. Waiters and

waitresses begin their shift and end their shift on the feet, usually having worked til late the night

before, and doing all of this for less than $5 an hour. Without tips, waitstaff wouldnt make

enough to live off of, let alone provide for a family, as many of them do. There are many reasons

why tipping should be on everyone's mind when they sit down to enjoy their meal, whether it be

at a seafood restaurant, Chinese, Italian, or a mom and pop diner, but perhaps the two main

reasons tipping is absolutely necessary in the restaurant industry is the motivation it provides to

servers and the rating of service it provides to management and waitstaff about a customers

experience. Tipping, serving as an cash incentive and reminder to the server, is imperative to the

restaurant industry, no matter the customer, restaurant, or hour of service.

Tipping is a critical part of the American restaurant industry because it relies on a trust

between the wait staff and the customer. Tipping allows for a customer to decide how much the

server should be thanked for their service during the dining experience. Signing the line that

includes a gratuity, or crumbing a few dollar bills on the table, allows for the customer to express
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to their server whether or not they were pleased with the service they were given throughout the

meal. There are other forms of customers expressing their emotions toward a server, whether it

be their body language, physical complaints or compliments, or a comment card for the customer

to fill out. But, perhaps the best measure of a customers gratitude, is the cash left as a way to say

thank you to their server. Ofer Azar, author of The Social Norm of Tipping: A Review, insists that

tipping serves as a repeated interaction between a customer who chooses how much to tip and a

service agent who chooses how much effort to provide, meaning that the trust is left in the

customer and the server to provide service and financial gratitude. Without tipping, servers

would have no way of knowing whether the customer was pleased with the service. Another

great quality of tipping is the fact that it allows for sole judgement of the service experiment, not

necessarily quality of the food. Customers can still tip even if the food was poor, but they

enjoyed their server; or, they can not tip because the food was enjoyable, but the service was less

than acceptable. Tipping allows for the measurement of happiness, as well as provides for the

motivation a server needs to work for such a low hourly wage.

Tipping motivates servers to come in for their shift, to put the extra pep in their step they

need, to smile when they approach a table, and to bring out the correct side dishes for each

customer. According to Ofer Azar, author of Optimal Monitoring with External Incentives: The

Case of Tipping, tips promote higher service quality, which is beneficial for both the server and

the restaurant as a whole which strives to ensure quality service. Tipping helps promote the

proper service needed in a restaurant and encourages the servers to keep smiling and serving

their customers needs. If servers were only making an hourly wage, even if it was higher than

the few dollars an hour they do make, there would be nothing pushing them to work harder to

earn the extra money-because the extra money would not exist. In addition to just servers, all
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sections of a restaurant benefit from tips. More often than not, servers are required to tip out

their gussets, hostess, bartenders, and foodrunners, lessening the amount the get to keep, but

benefitting everyone financially. Customers leaving the tip for the server to keep is both a way of

saying thank you, and a constant reminder to the server to continue to please their tables.

While tipping is beneficial to everyone in the restaurant industry, many argue that tipping

is a waste of money and that restaurants should do away with it completely. New York Times

Room for Debate on Tipping has two main opponents to tipping in the restaurant industry. Steven

Shaw, author of Tipping is Not Capitalism, argues that tipping encourages practices that aren't

appropriate for the workplace, for example making more based off attractiveness or flirting. Saru

Jayaraman, author of Tip or Not, Raise the Minimum Wage, argues that minimum wage

should be raised to ensure food for minimum wage workers, electricity, and basic needs that may

not be provided if the minimum wage stays the way it currently is. However, raising the

minimum wage and doing away with tipping would cause the restaurant to have to pay more for

each employee; therefore, raising prices on the menu and costing more money to the business as

a whole. Because of this reason, keeping tipping the social norm and acceptable way of thanking

and motivating servers, is a necessity in the restaurant industry.

Tipping is a critical part of the restaurant industry, and should be continued because it

benefits the wait staff, the restaurant industry, and service while dining-out. If a customer cannot

afford to tip, the shouldn't enjoy a dinner out because waiters and waitresses work hard to ensure

proper service and should be rewarded for the work they put forth. Lawyers and doctors make a

large salary because their work is beneficial, while the benefits servers provide to the customers

are not nearly as large as the benefits provided by lawyers and doctors, benefits are benefits and
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deserve rewards For servers, this can be given in small monetary amounts left from every table

as a means to ensure happiness in the service and a measurement of happiness in the customers.

Works Cited

Azar, Ofer H. "The Social Norm of Tipping: A Review." SSRN Electronic Journal (n.d.): n. pag.

Academic Search Complete [EBSCO]. Web. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

Azar, Ofer H. Optimal Monitoring with External Incentives: The Case of Tipping. Southern

Economic Journal, vol. 71, no. 1, 2004, pp. 170181., JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/4135319.Web. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.

Jayaraman, Saru. Tip or Not, Raise the Minimum Wage. The New York Times. 23 June 2013.

Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.

Shaw, Steven. "Tipping Is Not Capitalism." The New York Times. 23 June 2013. Accessed 1
Mar. 2017.