[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by getbak

They'd just raise their prices to compensate, and you'd pay the same price for horrible service that you now only pay for excellent service.

If you think service in Calgary sucks now, imagine what it would be like if they weren't "hustling" for tips.

Read the link I posted earlier. According to the evidence, there is very little correlation between the amount of the tip received and the quality of service rendered.

A few choice quotes:

Probably the most common reaction to our service-charge-no-tips policy, from people outside the service industry, was along the lines of, if there’s no tipping, then how will the servers be motivated to do a good job?

When you step back and think about this for a second, it’s actually kind of hilarious. The person asking this question would have a full-time job as a software developer, or lawyer, or journalist, or doctor, always working to a pay rate that was negotiated ahead of time. We would never suggest that a code jockey or surgeon would be motivated to do better work by the thought that their clients, if pleased with the service, might toss in a few extra dollars.

And yet, we restaurant-goers (and I include myself in this, in the days before I worked in restaurants) are not hesitant to suggest that, unlike all other working Americans, restaurant servers are a class of simpletons who require a drip of money every few minutes to keep them on task. By perpetuating the idea that servers, and servers alone, won’t perform without the threat of pay withheld, we dehumanize our neighbors and peers who work taking care of us. I think this helps us not feel bad when we sometimes treat them badly. It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment meets Yelp.

Meanwhile, restaurant workers know what’s up. People who worked in the restaurant industry wouldn’t ask us this question — what will motivate servers to do a good job? Because, inside the restaurant, we know that while the customers think their tips allow them to control the server, in fact the control is illusory. The story of the server being motivated by the customer’s power to tip, is instead a fiction created to make the customer feel important.

One night a few months into the Linkery’s existence, I asked our best server about a table of high-maintenance guests who had just left the restaurant. Specifically, I was curious, given how demanding they were, if this group had tipped high or tipped low.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never look at the tips until the end of the night. It basically always evens out, if one table tips low, someone else tips high. You always make about the same percentage of sales.”

Another of our better servers joined the conversation to say that she did the same thing. Because, she said, “there’s too much to think about already. You have to not think about the money so you can take care of your tables.”

I wasn’t expecting this attitude from high-performing servers; I had accepted on faith that it was only the tips that motivated them to do good work. Now curious, I started an informal study of our team, watching how they handled the tipping part of the job over the weeks and months. Without exception, the best servers never talked about their tips — as far as I could tell, they never even thought about their tips — until after their shift was over. The best performers were fully engaged with simultaneously filling the needs of 25 people in a busy, crowded restaurant. It’s a complex job and they brought their full selves to it.