Are we the baddies?

For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availability.

So yes. Status seeking, and differential price seeking probably is a-social as a pattern when it's weaponised against the consumer.

That said, I hated Uber, they actually offered to underwrite people breaking the law to get foot in the door (how that didn't get them excluded as a corporate scofflaw is beyond me) and they continue to export all the profits offshore, but taxi services had become shit and now we have got used to Uber and I just don't worry about surge pricing. I got boiled slowly.

My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

The European push to mandate included luggage in flight is seeing a fair bit of trolling. So there are still true believers who think needing clean underwear is weak.

> My fellow Australians all feel a bit shit about the introduction of tipping in paywave and food service. That's unaustralian. We have legally enforced minimum wages and penalty rates. Turn that feature off.

I think non-Americans need to take a stand against this. Refuse all tipping. Its a slippery slope - I know these guys are underpaid but if you start tipping the wages will just drop and we're all worse off.

Here is the core problem laid out:

1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.

2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"

3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.

4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.

5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.

In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.

The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.

as someone who survived on tips for 2 1/2 years while studying comp sci, you're missing one key detail.

tips introduce a situation where harder/faster-paced workers get a higher pay per hour than workers with average productivity. a pizza driver that optimizes their routes and memorizes stop light patterns in their delivery zone will get more deliveries per hour than that of a new hire. so even though they work the same number of hours, the higher skilled driver earns more because they get more tips.

this "work harder => more pay" incentive is pretty unique in the industry; in manual labor jobs where each day has a set limit on the amount of work that can be completed, like grocery merchandising, workers that work harder get paid less than average workers. stock incentives are the closest comparison, but it's too far removed from the individual worker's output when the company's size grows above 100 employees.

the point is, part of the problem is the lack of other incentives that reward the hardest/best skilled workers.

There is nothing I would like more than seeing tipping implemented in retail. And then the more you think about it the more you realise everything should have a tipping option.

personally id love to see something like tipping implemented in frontline support. kpi's that focus on monthly case resolve goals and TTR are incentives that reduce quality, and 5 star kpi's are easily gamed. if customers could tip frontline support engineers based on their experience with a support case, we'd see quality go way up.

Why would I pay a company’s support rep extra to deliver the service that I’m already paying their employer for?

why would you tip a pizza delivery driver or a bartender, when youre already paying their employer for a pizza/drink?

over time, your experiences with any company will vary, due to the cycle of new workers joining the company and experienced workers leaving. tipping after a good experience incentivizes the skilled worker to stay longer in their position, thus increasing the odds that your future interactions will also be handled by a skilled worker.

A robust performance evaluation process does this just fine. If they do well they get a bonus, if they do poorly they get fired.

There is also no massive and obvious corruption risk in me paying either of those people to do a job as there is with a support engineer.

Maybe I should tip customs officers too, for processing my passport quickly and not looking too closely at my luggage?

Or perhaps if I take a speeding ticket to court, maybe I should tip the judge based on the outcome?