I just got back from a European trip, and I have to say I did not miss tipping. I especially appreciated not having to do the song & dance typical of larger groups in sit-down restaurants in the USA where you figure out how much you’re going to tip on a communal basis, when everyone has different tipping set points and perceptions of service and such. The money is less of an issue than the extra wasted time at the end of a meal & drinks which are spent on the terms of calculation rather than more conventional conviviality. In fact now that I think about it way too much time in my life has been spent discussing the etiquette of tipping, often outside of a situation where people are going to have to tip imminently. I thought about this after seeing this post in The Atlantic on tipping. One correspondent observes:

I lived in Japan for a while. There is no tipping there, and it works great. If we could be like Japan, I’d be all for it. However, I don’t think we’d be like Japan. Anytime I have ever eaten somewhere that does not practice tipping, service has been abysmal. Customers herded through like cattle, dishes brought out late, then diners rushed through them, eyes rolled, etc. We just do not have the service culture that would allow us to disconnect pay from performance and continue to expect the same kind of service.

The point about national culture is well taken. I experienced some bad service in Italy and Finland, but the quality of badness was very different, in keeping what with you’d expect from the respective national cultures (though in general I experienced service as good as in the states in both places).* But the empirical observation about American restaurants without tipping having lesser service suffers from sampling bias. Establishments which don’t have tipping are generally lower-end, verging on cafeterias. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison. A better one would be looking at higher end restaurants which have mandatory gratuities for large groups vs. those which do not. Even here you have the peculiar distortion of the larger group, which can often be more difficult for a server to manage.

Of course one’s perspective on this probably varies by the amount of disposable income one has. If you don’t have much disposable income the small but repeated investments of time & energy which go into tipping might be worthwhile if you can manage to pay less than you would otherwise. If you have a fair amount of disposable income the marginal potential savings introduced by greater price variation which you can control at the cost of time & energy needed may not be worth it.

* I had to bargain very hard with a Finnish server on whether I could handle Indian levels of spiciness. This was obviously a well rehearsed conversation on her part, but I thought she should have updated her priors in my case. The lighting was dim, but not that dim. Usually American servers at Indian restaurants aren’t too resistant when I assert I can handle high levels of spice.