By Stephanie Starks | Staff Writer
Tips make up a majority of a waiter’s income. We should be kind to our service workers and tip them. This causes around 5.5 million United States workers to miss out on the income that they rely on.
By tipping food service workers, customers can show them that they recognize both the physical and emotional toll that wait staff incur of handling multiple tables.
Food service workers depend on tips because they make up the majority of what is earned. According to Texas laws on tipping, employers can use a tip credit system to pay workers a lower cash wage if their earned tips make up the difference to reach minimum wage.
Since Texas follows the federal minimum wage for servers, waitstaff depend on tips to make up their paycheck. Of the Texans who do tip at a sit-down restaurant, most tip their wait staff around 20%.
While most Texas adults do tip at sit-down restaurants, some do not tip their waitstaff. This could be because customers have recently moved from a country with a different tipping culture. Other countries have different financial systems that influence their distinct tipping cultures. For example, leaving a tip in Japan might indicate that the bill is wrong.
Another reason customers might not want to tip wait staff is that they feel like waiters should be tipped for their performance. While there may be circumstances where a waiter providing poor service might warrant a lesser tip, servers, like any other occupation, are paid for their time not their performance.
In other professors, workers don’t get less of a paycheck when they make mistakes or are not affable towards others. Waiters should be tipped because their wage structure is set up differently. Deciding not to tip a waiter based on their performance causes them to struggle unnecessarily.
For students, money can be tight and they may not be able to tip their servers. Even still, that is not a reason to not tip wait staff. Students can save money and not hurt servers financially by meal prepping or by going to the grease pit where waiters do get paid without tips.
Regardless of why people chose not to tip, food service staff depend on their tips to make ends meet.
We should be kind to the wait staff who depend on tips since they have a fixed wage structure. We can create a more positive world if we take a simple step of helping other people out. Customers should give servers a part of what makes up a server’s wage since they served them.
To a server, a tip could be the “thank you” that gets them through the week. A simple tip could be the answer to someone’s prayer.
