Tipping also creates more space to display your bias. A customer can give zero tip for certain demographics and deny their wage.
By the way, as a fresh immigrant I nearly never tipped. I'd do this only if the service was exceptional. This changed once I learned that the staff makes less than the minimal wage because of tipping.
> Tipping also creates more space to display your bias.
One of the reasons tipping became a big thing in the US was specifically so people could display their bias without running terribly afoul of the law. Tipping allowed people to discriminate against minority workers, who were thus forced to be pretty much servile to have any hope of being paid decently.
> This changed once I learned that the staff makes less than the minimal wage because of tipping.
I don't recall if this was originally the case when the tipped vs non-tipped minimum wages were established, but by law if a tipped worker's tips + base wage doesn't add up to the non-tipped minimum wage, the employer still needs to pay the difference. In practice though, that worker is getting fired.
As I also said in another comment, some of the most vehement supporters of tipping nowadays are tipped workers, or at least a subset of them. So I wouldn't feel terrible about tipping less.
> allowed wealthier restaurant patrons to discriminate against minority workers
Curious for evidence of this. I’ve seen minorities treated quite horribly in non- and low-tipping Germany. And London’s restaurants feature a level of self-effacing service that makes even this Manhattanite blush.
Treating minorities badly is unfortunately a timeless worldwide phenomenon. If you look at the history of tipping in the US, some states banned the practice early on too, but were eventually forced to unban it, partially because many southern states kept and fought for the practice. If you consider the circumstances that this was right after the US Civil War, and right during the heavy southern pushback against emancipation, it's not a terribly hard line to draw between wanting to keep tipping as a practice, and treating minorities bad.
And when in 1938 the federal minimum wage was established, and they made the tipped one significantly lower, it enshrined the ability to use tipping to legally discriminate in law.
> And London’s restaurants feature a level of self-effacing service that makes even this Manhattanite blush.
I believe tipping originally came to the US from the continent, with the practice being especially promoted by the British wealthy.
> some states banned the practice early on too, but were eventually forced to unban it, partially because many southern states kept and fought for the practice
Georgia, a slave state, was the latest to ban tipping [1]. South Carolina, the original secessionist, was another, alongside Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee [2]. There appear to have been more former slave states to have banned the practice than free (Washington and Iowa).
> believe tipping originally came to the US from the continent
It originates in “criminal circles as a word meant to imply the unnecessary and gratuitous gifting of something somewhat taboo, like a joke, or a sure bet, or illicit money exchange,” being later popularised in Tudor England. It didn’t broadly take root in America until Prohibition, when “hotels and restaurants, who lost the revenue of selling alcoholic beverages,” welcomed tips “as a way of supplementing employee wages” [3].
The timeline for linking the end of slavery to tipping doesn’t seem to line up. It has roots in servility. But the racist-roots hypothesis appears to be modern and misplaced.
By the way, as a fresh immigrant I nearly never tipped. I'd do this only if the service was exceptional. This changed once I learned that the staff makes less than the minimal wage because of tipping.