We’ve all seen that white screen staring back at us: Leave a tip? 15%, 20%, 25%, custom, or no tip. The employee spins the tablet around. Even if they’ve done the bare minimum service, and I don’t tip, I feel the immediate judgment from their glare. Tipping is seen as a cultural practice here, but the underlying cause is a systematic issue in the United States.

While it may seem counterintuitive, the act of tipping workers actually harms them in the long run. In forty-three states, it is legal for tipped employees to earn wages far below the minimum wage, due to the belief that the tips will simply cover the rest. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, but if an employee earns tips, their wage can be as low as $2.35 per hour. There are systems in place that require employers to pay workers the difference if the addition of tips still does not add up to the federal minimum wage. However, tip pools can complicate things. With tip pools, employees “pool” all their tips to distribute them equally among workers, rather than keeping individual amounts. Unfortunately, this distribution is not always equal. Employers might pocket some of the extra cash and give unfairly low tips to their hard-working employees. These problems might seem somewhat inevitable in this world, but European countries seem to be doing just fine without tips.

In Europe, tipping is not expected in most places because a gratuity fee is already added to the prices. However, in some places such as the UK, tipping is considered polite if their service was truly exceptional; even then, the complement of a tip is usually 5–10%, nowhere near the amounts that the US tipping system expects. In places like Germany, France, or the UK, the average wage of a server is around 10–12 euros, already higher than the $7.25 in the United States. This only begs the question: if Europe can pay its workers a livable wage, why can’t the United States? 

 Another detrimental effect of tipping culture in the United States is its tendency to perpetuate discrimination in the workplace. A 2014 study showed that 80% of female restaurant workers reported some type of sexual harassment at work, and female servers are also three times more likely to report instances of their boss telling them to dress “sexier” to gain more tips from customers, proving that tipping in the United States is a skewed practice. The fact that these women, sometimes paid subminimum wage, would have to be “sexier” just to earn a living wage is sickening. Furthermore, this tipping system encourages racial profiling. According to the U.S. Census Bureau of Labor Statistics, white servers made more tips than workers of any other racial group. 

The US tipping system has numerous negatives stacking up against it with subminimum wages, biased tip pooling, and the perpetuation of sexism and racism. With all these things considered, I feel that it is time for the United States to evaluate this social pressure to tip workers. Should the burden to pay employees be on the consumer, or should it be on the employer?