> I understand that this is an old thread, and that opinions have probably changed after 3 years or so, but I followed the link in a recent thread to the thread this post is in, and there's one remark in this particular post that caught my eye that I'd like to respond to.
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> > I like tipping at restaurants, because I enjoy great service at restaurants, and I like that the system provides an incentive for servers to give it.
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> To my mind (and bear in mind I'm from the UK, where tipping isn't customary), it seems that this sort of thing amounts to making people beg. It may be an incentive to provide good service, but from what I read from the other posts here it's more like a necessity.

Basically, yeah. The necessity comes almost exclusively from social convention, as there is no law about it, and until Minamoon's post I never heard of a restaurant turning away customers who didn't tip properly. Still, I agree with you, as I said in that same post, that the idea of tips that are expected or mandatory is problematic. In my ideal world, servers would get paid well by their salary, but non-mandatory tipping would be practiced on top of that. I want what I see as the best of both worlds.

I'm not sure that I see where you're coming from with the analogy to begging, though. I've never really seen a server come out and ask for a tip, or a higher tip, or anything like that, though there are odd cases I've heard of, such as the story Dave told of the pizza delivery guy saying to "fill out these three lines," one of which was for the tip amount.

But ultimately the difference for me is that begging is asking for something for nothing, whereas a tip for a job well done can be looked at as compensation and/or a thank-you gift for a job well done, both of which are classier and consistent with good old fashioned capitalist values. Even if you see tipping as a charity rather than a wage, it's still a more noble than outright begging, because one is receiving money for good work, not for just nothing at all.