In the US waiters and bartenders are legally allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. So it’s pretty standard for waiters to earn $2-3 an hour at which point a 15-20% tip on each table they serve makes up the majority of their salary lol
Fucking horrible system, I hate it. Cheeky restaurants making the customer pay for the staff as well.
Fuck me, $2-3 an hour is outrageous! Basically indentured servitude. Makes sense now
Yeah so that’s why even if the service was dog shit you’re still obliged to leave 10% and why waiters etc. will literally come after you and yell at you if you don’t leave a big enough tip (in their opinion).
In certain East Asian countries it’s an insult to management to tip staff.
America is one weird as fuck country lol
The one that gets me is when you pay the waiter and he or she asks, “Do you want the change?” Fucking right I do. No tip for you, pal.
I hate the concept of tipping, it’s bullshit - people should be paid fairly but it’s not like minimum wage remotely lines up to cost of living anywhere.
I also hate when big corporations ask you if you want to give your change to starving orphans. It’s like fuck off Domino’s I just spent 30 quid on a pizza that’s probably costing you about 2 quid in parts and labour to make. How about you go save these doomed kids and let me keep my 89p you cunts.
I detest the concept of tipping and stay firm on it as much as possible. Even had a date judge me for not tipping but fuck her.
Include the cost of service into your menu and pay your staff proper salary.
It is but it seems the tipping culture is available in Europe as well.
Experienced it in Barcelona and Vienna.
Most decent London restaurants add a 12.5% discretionary charge to the bill. Never seen any refuse to pay it
I have done a few times before, I think it’s a piss take that they just add 12.5% on and that you have to go out of your way not to pay it. Maybe just pay your staff properly.
And yeah I’d say I’ve noticed this 12.5% thing in the last 5-6 years.
Difficult to refuse when you are asking the waiter himself to deduct it.
Here in the UK the bill often has two numbers, one with and without the 12.5% so you can choose. If you’re with friends and you’re paying for what you had to eat and drink individually it’s easy enough to avoid.
This is brand new information to me 
Either this isn’t a widespread thing or I just haven’t paid any attention
Yeah it definately isn’t widespread. Majority of bills I’ve seen come with the service charge included.
I’ve never been able to choose, before lockdown I would eat out a lot and most places had it as a mandatory service fee, it’s basically a work around for the restaurant so they don’t have to pay more than they have to for their staff and ultimately pass it on to the customer.
I will say though that majority of waiters in the UK don’t really offer that type of service that warrants tips, in the states they are usually more enthusiastic and are always readily available where as most here are always missing when you need them sometimes got wait ages just for the bill to come!
The automatic tip/service charge added to a bill is just ridiculous and defeats the point of what a tip is.
If I receive okay service I’ll always tip at least 10% (UK), but by having to either ask to have the auto-tip removed or even worse having a mandatory tip what incentive is there to the server to even provide “okay” service?
Even worse than this is when the restaurant keep all or part of the tips you give anyway without telling you.
You can agree or disagree with the American system, but at the end of the day you pay less for the base cost of the food/drink because they don’t have to pay as much in wages, so total cost for a diner ends up being about the same, except you get good service.
A restaurant in the UK with mandatory tipping/service charge generally means you’re paying more and for worse service, because unless your experience is truly awful not many people are going to raise the topic of taking the tip off.
In my experience that’s not actually true
A few times the waiters/waitresses have actually said this to me when I asked for an option to tip. 
I swear Greed knows no bounds.
All I can talk about is my experience, portion sizes were bigger and it was cheaper than what I was used to