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Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: MCI
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I don't look at it as meritocracy anymore. Anyone who's waited tables for more a while can probably tell you what he/she is going to make in tips for a given shift along with a fairly narrow standard deviation. I'm not saying this is right or wrong - I just don't think there's much incentive intensity in the tipping culture. Most people just write out a 15-20% tip unless you did something really awful or really great. I had really bad service at a pizza joint two weeks ago and thought I was being a major d*** by writing out a 10% tip.
Because it's not really incentive-based compensation, the overall waitstaff labor market has already mentally figured it into its pay demands. That's what allows a restaurant owner to pay very little above the mean tip rate. The fact that there's a government minimum wage and everybody I ever knew who waited tables in college made EXACTLY that base wage tells me that the real economic equilibrium was somewhere closer to $0/hr. (Heck, for all I know, it could be even lower: a revenue-sharing scheme where the waiter "buys" his/her tables for some percentage of tips.)