The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
Sure. How it’s better for the waitress: We make more money than we ever would under a flat wage, obviously. We also get rewarded proportionate to the work we do; busy, stressful weekend shifts pay more than calm weekday lunches, allowing us to tailor our work-life balance to suit our needs.
How it’s better for employers: Lower labor costs are a benefit of themselves, of course, but they also allow greater flexibility in scheduling, something essential in an industry where the amount of business varies so significantly from day to day and month to month. And since the number one factor affecting tips is the subtotal of the check, servers are incentivized to sell more, driving up revenue.
How it’s better for patons: The tipping system encourages attentiveness and better service; not so much in individual interactions (studies show that people tip what they’re gonna tip, regardless of service) but rather by keeping restaurants with attentive, professional servers busy and keeping those servers in the industry. We all saw the dip in quality post-lockdown when the most talented and experienced cadre of servers left for other industries, right?
Unlike a wage system, tipping also puts more power in the hands of the consumer. As a “pay what you think is fair” system, it gives immediate recourse to patrons who feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth.
Why it’s better for society: It allows the worker to sell her labor directly to the consumer without the capital class acting as a middleman and taking a cut. We all know that if prices were raised 20% across the board servers wouldn’t see even half of that as a wage increase. The tipping system sidesteps around corporate greed by creating a direct financial transaction between consumer and producer of labor.
In short, we have this one industry that’s figured out how to pay a living wage. It’s not a system that was designed, it evolved over time, and it’s very efficient; because if it wasn’t, it would collapse on its own. Obviously as a waitress myself I’m personally invested in this system, but I also think that it’s wrongheaded to take the system that, again, organically pays a living wage and tear it down because it doesn’t conform to a preconceived notion of what an employment relationship should look like.