Tipping at a doctor’s office
Okay, this has gone too far! A receptionist at a doctor’s office asking if you would like to leave a tip? Absurd. Outrageous and disgraceful. As several respondents remarked, contact the AMA and report it. It’s downright unethical.
As an aside, do you realize that the USA is the only country in the world that makes a segment of their workforce dependent on tips? People in other countries find this hard to come to terms with and unacceptable. So, how in the world did this come into practice?
“Tipping in Europe is just viewed as the exception because waiters are being paid decent wages. After World War II, European countries also begin providing free health care and education.”
“In the 19th century, people critiqued tipping because it meant servers had to ‘pander for wages,’ It’s a critique that’s still relevant to this day.”
Andrew Haley
Its origin actually stems from Europe in the Middle Ages, when wealthy people gave extra money for services to people in lower classes. Then in the 1800s, Americans who had seen this, thought it would be a wonderful idea to introduce it to America, according to Stephen Zagor, a professor at Columbia Business School, specializing in the restaurant industry. However, many on US soil were against it finding it as undemocratic and therefore un-American.
At the end of the Civil War, employers took wild advantage of formerly enslaved people and immigrants and hired them for jobs that paid very little. It was they who encouraged patrons to tip the low-income workers, as a supplement to their wages. As you can see, it shifted responsibility away from the employer to the customer! The biggest culprit? the Pullman Company which built and operated railroad cars.
Europe eventually did away with tipping. But in America, pressure from powerful corporations resulted in a two-tiered wage system for tipped and non-tipped workers. Formalized in 1938 in the first minimum wage law as part of the New Deal, this separate and unequal system stated that employers were not obligated to pay a base wage to workers whose minimum wage was met through tips.
Did you know that a few states outlawed the practice around the 20th century?
Leaving a gratuity for your waiter has long been standard practice because restaurants is the lowest paying industry, with the highest proportion of workers earning wages at or below the federal minimum.
…your waiter at a restaurant is not paid the same minimum wage as a cashier at a grocery store or coffee shop. “The lower hourly rate is justified by the opportunity for the waitstaff to earn generous tips, which should theoretically bring their wages to or above the state’s minimum wage,” Dr. Peters explains.