You obviously haven’t been talking to servers that make $200 a night in cash tips they don’t pay taxes on. My fiancé works in marketing for a large winery, and some of the kids they would bring in to work the restaurant would be making tons of money from it. Those are the people who love it
You don't talk to enough servers that aren't 20 year old blonde chicks. And even then, there are slow nights where they bring home $50 in tips. It's a predatory system for all involved except the owner class.
Okay? The point is that there are people who like the system, and those are the people I outlined. That’s the point of my comment as a reply to the comment above. No one here has said it’s not predatory.
Or the people in the back of the house that bust their ass, are sometimes highly trained, and take home less than the person carrying food back and forth.
Waiting tables. Bartending. Hospitality, food delivery, beauty salons, rideshare driving. The service industry, as anyone who has worked in it knows all too well, is notorious for relying on tipping to undercut employee wages and deputize individual customers to determine how much money a worker should be able to take home. Amid increasing recognition of these injustices, a number of campaigns and new laws surfaced, pre-pandemic, to abolish or meaningfully reduce the practice of tipping.
But despite the best efforts of these campaigns, tipping remains the industry - and American society - standard. Indeed, the perverse logic of tipping has broadened into an ever-present 'snitch economy' - an ecosystem of tactics like mystery shoppers and Uber and Yelp rating systems designed to police the behavior of workers while outsourcing the costs of said supervision to customers and other workers.
In the process, our snitch economy pits those being surveilled against those doing the watching, and the judging. Through a ubiquitous public-facing network of rating and reviewing other people’s labor - and often the behavioral disposition they exhibit while working - people with otherwise very little power are elevated to temporary positions of authority over others, fostering a culture of surveillance rather than one of solidarity. The snitch economy serves the dual purpose of not only giving working people a false sense of power when they’re the ones being served, but also reducing millions of human interactions to opportunities for not only snap judgments, but subjective rewards and retribution.
These screens aren't usually touch-sensitive, no? I don't usually fill up at Valero's, but those buttons on the side are often used because the screens aren't designed for touch. I'm in a cold climate though, so maybe they just don't use them here...