Tipping is a repugnant custom. It’s bad for consumers and terrible for workers. Tipping isn’t even good for restaurants, because the legal morass surrounding gratuities results in expensive lawsuits.
Tipping does not incentive hard work. According to a 2000 study, a customer’s assessment of the server’s work only accounts for between 1 and 5 percent of the variation in tips.
And tip size isn’t the real problem anyway. The real problem is that restaurants don’t pay their employees a living wage. The federal “tip credit” allows restaurants to pay their tipped employees as little as $2.13 per hour, as long as tips make up the shortfall—which turns a customer into a co-employer. The tip credit has turned the gratuity into a moral obligation, and we ought to cut it from our statute books.