[Porsche-O-Phile]

I personally can’t stand the US model for tipping and restaurant service; I greatly prefer the European model (as others have mentioned) where food and dining are actually valued and considered an important part of culture and hand-in-hand with that, servers and chefs are paid real wages and respected.

In the US dining seems to be looked upon as a waste of time or a bother and we tend to not care about it or those who put the effort into preparing and serving our food. We get what we encourage by perpetuating a slave-labor system - servers are usually poorly trained, overworked and the experience often is part of something that’s a bother, a nuisance and an inconvenience rather than a truly valued experience. There are some exceptions of course but I think the tipping culture here evolves out of a sense of shame that restaurant staffs are really treated and paid so horribly (in turn a reflection of our collective unwillingness to admit that such work has value and compensate it accordingly in the first place...)

That said it drives me nuts that everyone, everywhere now expects a tip for simply doing their job. I’m not about to be guilted into tipping someone for that unless they do it very, very well and the service is outstanding.

There are a few restaurants now that actually promote themselves on providing their employees living wages, benefits, etc. I’d like to see more of that. Maybe it’ll catch on. I hope it does. The ROW gets this one right but I think without a cultural shift of thinking to the point where we start to value what we eat and the experience of doing so, we’ll continue to have what we do - throngs of fat people shoving processed cheap glop into their gobs at the drive-thru because they can’t be bothered.

Sad.

Sure, sometimes you need it fast / convenient and for that Uber Eats or GrubHub are fine - and I’ll tip a couple of dollars for the convenience. But that’s it - at the end is the day it’s still someone just doing their job.