Here's a tip for you

The custom of tipping for service in restaurants is a complex one with several arguments for and against. I noticed recently that in these arguments there are some resemblances with the arguments for and against the benefit system, or social welfare.

In the U.K it is customary to tip approximately 10-12.5% in restaurants where service charge is not automatically added on. As a waitress of a good standard (but by no means exceptional) I can safely claim that approximately half of all customers ignore this custom. Some will tip 5%, some will leave a few pennies of change, and only a few actually tip 10-12.5%.

Leaving aside the cultural backgrounds of customers and the tipping customs of their own cultures, the overriding assumption among many restaurant goers seems to be that leaving a tip is completely up to them, their particular dining experience, and whether they are feeling flush that month.

An argument against tipping is that leaving a percentage means you tip more for an expensive meal, when the service may be the same as that of a cheaper meal. This seems unfair if what you are supposed to be tipping for is the quality of service. Another argument is that people do not tip according to the quality of service, but to other factors such as the race, gender and class of their server (and I can attest to the truth of this, as my manager jokingly suggested I try to be less 'middle-class'). The final argument often espoused by the customers themselves is that the price of the meal includes the wage of the waiter, and their job is to serve the food, therefore why should they be paid extra to do precisely what is in their job description?

Although (unsurprisingly) I strongly believe in tipping, it seems the first argument has some validity. Why should a waiter in a restaurant with an average spend-per-head of £20 take home more in tips than a waiter in a cheap pizza restaurant, when they are working equally as hard? As to the second argument, why should a person's pay packet (to which tips contribute to substantially) be dependant on their race, gender or class? Indeed, this amounts to a kind of discrimination which would be intolerable in any other job.

And so we come to the final argument: that the job of a waiter is to serve, and that therefore they should not get paid any more for fulfilling their job description. The answer is that without the tips, a waiter's salary is not enough to live on. Nearly every restaurant pays nothing more than the minimum wage, and especially in London that is not enough to live on. Therefore we rely on tips to make up our wages, and importantly, the restaurant owners know this. Owners know that they will always get people to work as waiters because customers will make up the difference between a minimum wage and a livable wage. As the other two arguments against tipping demonstrate, this is not a fair and just way to make a decent wage. It depends too much on the whim of certain customers, how much their bill comes to, and whether the waiter is white or black, male or female and 'posh' or 'chavvy'. So essentially customers are right, why should they pay a certain percentage to bump up a wage when the waiter is just fulfilling their assigned role. It should be the role of the restaurants to pay a decent wage in the first place.

Here we come to the similarity with the benefit system. In a recent discussion with some friends, I was faced with the old argument, "why should I pay so that some lazy couple and their million kids can live in a nicer house than me and not have to work?" The answer is that there are many factors that lead to that benefit-reliant lifestyle. What we need to do is understand what has lead someone to think that having no ambitions and living on handouts is preferable to getting a job and having a challenging and stimulating career which contributes to society? People are not born lazy and disinterested and unable to form goals and ambitions, it is poverty and inequality which gets them there.

So what we need to do is eradicate the circumstances that make people so benefit reliant, this means increasing equality and providing real opportunities. Importantly however, in the mean time, these people still need the benefits that our taxes provide. Similarly, in the case of tipping, we need to eradicate the need for tipping by paying waiters a decent wage. Importantly however, in the mean time, waiters still need tips to survive. The point then is remove the circumstances that essentially  mean some people must rely on the handouts of others. Providing a better minimum wage would go along way to doing this.

The problem is that while customers are tipping, and while taxes pay out to the perpetually benefit-dependant, restaurant owners and the government respectively have little incentive to change the system. It is a chicken and egg situation, but what should come first? Should we stop the tips/benefits so that the people in charge are forced to deal with the underlying causes of the need for restaurant tips and social benefits? If we do that, an untold number of people in that crossover period will suffer greatly. This is unacceptable and it should not take that amount of suffering to cause the decision-makers to take action. So society must keep giving, we must give in tips and we must give in benefits, but at the same time, we must demand the changes that will hopefully make such giving unnecessary.