Don’t Believe in Tipping? Here’s the Best Way to Handle It

Everyone in this country knows that the tipping culture is as out of control as my naturally curly hair is when I’m out of product. At every turn, we are expected to leave a tip, even when it seems there was no service provided. I’m looking at you, frozen yogurt cashier on the Upper West Side who watched me serve myself from beginning to end. While some tip requests are questionable, there are plenty that are truly necessary since the employee is only making $2.13 an hour. I’m looking at you, Olive Garden waitress in Texas who doesn’t even get a paycheck because your taxes take it all. Servers rely on tips from customers to make a living.

While there are a lot of ideas on how to ease tipping fatigue, there’s one tactic that does absolutely nothing and despite its uselessness, it’s the most prominent. That is to not tip your server at all. The people who do this claim to be proving a point so that things can get better for servers. They don’t feel they should supplement the income for a restaurant owner and while their feelings can be valid, all this does is hurt the very person they say they want to help. 

Don’t blame the waitstaff for the tipping system

Servers didn’t create the tipping system. It’s been around for a long time in this country and it really hit its stride after the Civil War when formerly enslaved Black people found jobs in the food service industry. Employers, not wanting to pay decent wages to these new employees, suggested that customers leave tips to make up for the much lower salary. Almost 160 years later, the federal minimum wage for tipped employees is still $2.13 an hour. There are states that pay more than that, but by law, they don’t have to. 

Your protest note on the tip line doesn’t help

When someone goes to a restaurant and writes “I don’t believe in tipping” or “your boss should pay you, not me” on the tip line, how do they think that helps? Even the people who say they do it because nothing is going to change until people take a stand, have to know that all it does is make a server work for free. Believe me, if the server had any kind of power, they would increase their hourly wage to $27 and gladly say goodbye to the tip line. But they don’t have that power. These are people who can lose a job for giving out a Coca-Cola refill without charging for it. 

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Just like how servers have nothing to do with the prices on the menu, they don’t have control of legislation that would actually change laws. Every once in a while, a restaurant will try the “no tipping” policy and raise the menu prices in order to pay the staff more, but then customers complain about the higher prices and stop going altogether. So, the restaurant lowers the prices, goes back to tipping, and then a customer writes on the tip line, “I still don’t believe in tipping.”

What to do if you don’t want to tip

If you’re really tired of tipping restaurant servers, the next time you want to write a complaint on the receipt, write it in a letter instead and send it to your congressperson or representative. Or write a letter to the restaurant owner. Or scribble it onto a small piece of paper, roll it up, put it inside a tube attached to a homing pigeon’s leg and send it to the heavens because leaving a passive aggressive note to your server who you don’t want to tip does nothing for anyone. 

Please don’t hurt the people who can afford it the least

We can all agree that tipping is tiresome, but stiffing your server isn’t going to make things better. No matter the point you’re trying to make, it makes you look cheap and selfish. And it makes the server have to work twice as hard because now they have to make up for lost tips. Maybe tipping is so culturally ingrained in our country that it will never completely go away, but not leaving a tip isn’t going to make it better. It will only make it worse for one very specific person and that person might only be making $2.13 an hour. Until things change, please continue to tip your servers.