16 ms·

Despite how effective this generally is, I feel dirty every time and I hate doing it.

• drivingmenuts 16y ago
  Seems unethical to me, strictly speaking. Sure, everyone's doing it. Doesn't mean cheating someone else out of their fair share is right, though.
  • forensic 16y ago
    it's not unethical. It's the market economy.
    • acon 16y ago
      Do you think bribing government officials to get preferential treatment is also OK? If not, what is the difference?
      • scott_s 16y ago
        Government officials are not a part of the market economy. It's paying for service, it just goes through unofficial channels. I live in a small college town. I eat at the same vegetarian restaurant for lunch almost every single weekday. I sit at the counter with a book, and make small talk with the cooks and servers as appropriate. I unquestionably receive preferential treatment from them. The cooks sometimes slide me extra food if it's not enough to sell as a full meal, or if someone sends back food that's fine to eat. The servers take my order almost the moment I take a seat at the counter and it's usually served the moment it's ready. I don't tip extravagantly ($2 for an $8 meal), but I'm friendly, easy to serve and they know they'll see me every day. I get preferential treatment, but I'm also giving them preferential treatment by coming in every day. You have a right to be treated the same as everyone else by the government. You have no such right at a service establishment - yes, they cannot refuse service for the all of the standard prejudices. But they most certainly can offer a higher level of service to people who pay more.
        • willyt 16y ago
          OK, what about if you employed someone to tender contracts for you and one of the tenderers took this person out for an extravagant lunch in the expectation of influencing the bidding process? Wouldn't that be immoral?
          • scott_s 16y ago
            I would think so, yes. But restaurants, bars, massage parlors, etc. are service-oriented places where tipping is already the norm. The precedent for more-money-means-better-service has already been set.
          • dedward 16y ago
            No - it would be a gamble. Immoral, and possibly a fireable offence, would be if your employee actually gave them a better deal in exchange for the kickback - in which case you, as their employer, can deal with them as you see fit.
      • tomsaffell 16y ago
        You only get to choose your government every n years, so as part of their pitch to you, they make a promise (in law) that their officials will not be bribable - any subsequent bribe violates that promise and that law. By contrast, you can choose which restaurants you visit (on a day-to-day basis), so they have no need to make such formal promises or contracts, so they don't. They are then free to offer service x for price y, you are free to accept or reject, and they are free to change it the next day.
    • poet 16y ago
      The underlying assumption that being a market economy precludes a market from being unethical strikes me as overly simplistic.
      • scott_s 16y ago
        I believe his point was that if you're going to call this unethical, then you have to also consider, say, an inferior television costing $200 and a superior television costing $800 unethical.
        • mquander 16y ago
          No, you don't. The difference is one of transparency. Information about various televisions and their pricing is freely available to anyone who asks, whereas reliable information about the necessity or possibility of bribes is hard to obtain. The end result is a less efficient market.
          • scott_s 16y ago
            And a less efficient market is necessarily unethical? I also don't think the situation is opaque: tip well, be genuinely friendly, and you'll receive better service.
            • mquander 16y ago
              People will find a market unethical if it's consistently biased in a way that seems unnecessary and "unfair." In this context, since bribery isn't a common part of American culture, it seems unfair to give an advantage to people who are skilled at it. The situation you described is very opaque, compared to the television market. How well is "well," and how much better might the service be? The answers vary wildly depending on your manner and the establishment in question, and you're almost never going to know them before you pay.
    • sp332 16y ago
      This isn't "buying" a better table (although that can happen). This is about building a positive relationship with a person. You do something positive for the maitre'd, and now he's on your side. It's more about making a contact with someone "on the inside" and less about making a purchase.
    • dagw 16y ago
      Except the maitre'd isn't the restaurant, and what he's selling technically isn't his to sell. So as such it's more of a black market for stolen goods. If the restaurant had a stated policy where tables where auctioned off at busy times then that would be different.
      • dedward 16y ago
        You don't know whether it is or isn't his decision to make - that would be between him and his employers. He may very well have the discretion to bend the rules a bit for the right kind of people to keep the place popular - wealthy people who like to buy their way to the front of the line are also people who are likely to spend more extravagantly on the wine.
  • helmut_hed 16y ago
    It's an interesting question, and to me a real ethical gray area. At my favorite bar, I usually tip very generously, and all the bartenders know me. I tend to get my first drink free, and if I stay for a while, often a shot with the bartender later. For those, I tip extra big - not quite, but almost, the cost of the drink. For a while I felt bad about "taking advantage" of the system. But in fact I think this is part of the system, because every bar needs regulars, and since people like me and I don't cause trouble, my patronage is useful even to the owners (though they may get less revenue from my drinks). I also think this may constitute a sort of perk for the bartenders - to be able to give free drinks to a limited number of friends probably makes them enjoy their job more. I do notice that after I get a free one the bartender makes some sort of note on a piece of paper near the register, so maybe this is an official part of the system. I'm not sure if the restaurant business is the same, but I can imagine that the owners anticipate this sort of thing, and maybe even encourage it, since it means their employees get more money and might be happier as a result. But yeah, it doesn't seem particularly fair, at least the way I was raised to think of it.
    • scott_s 16y ago
      I think it's fair. On any given night there's probably quite a few people in the bar who outspend you. But you're a regular. That means that over a long period of time, you probably hand over more money to the bartenders and the bar itself than most people there that night. They are both rewarding and encouraging that behavior. What you described is the original "rewards program."
  • sp332 16y ago
    "Fair share"? As if each person deserves to be served? Talk about a sense of entitlement. The restaurant will serve whomever it likes. You wouldn't think it unethical for the restaurant to give regulars a friendlier smile, or a specific table they like? If you have a personal relationship with someone, no matter how tenuous, they will give you better service. It's not "cheating." Especially for busy restaurants, there is no reason for them to serve an "average" customer and ignore a "good" customer.
    • jerf 16y ago
      '"Fair share"? As if each person deserves to be served?' Everyone does deserve to be served. Why? Is it because it's an immutable ethical truth? No. It's because that's our culture. The US is a pretty egalitarian society. It isn't perfect but it's still in our cultural DNA. A lot of the objection is the issue of slipping the seater a $100. If it was an open auction at the door and everybody had to bid for seats, that would just be the way it is, but in America the act of slipping someone $100 to be seated is basically sneaking out of the egalitarian society into a society of privilege, and the egalitarian among us find that offensive. If you want to buy privilege, which is a perfectly valid thing to do, buy it on the open market, not with bribery. If everybody engages in bribery, and everybody knows it, the sneaky cheating aspect goes away, though I tend to agree with other posters that this creates a moral hazard. Not being a cultural relativist, I am free to say I believe the egalitarian culture here produces superior results to a culture that accepts bribery routinely. It really does lead fairly directly to things like paying off inspectors to not do the inspections, in a non-trivial percentage of the population.
      • tkahn6 16y ago
        Don't you think it's kind of a dangerous thing when you start saying you deserve something by virtue of the fact you perceive it to be a cultural norm? "I work hard but was laid off from my job. America is all about rewarding people for working hard so I got screwed. Therefore it's OK for me to rob a bank in order to compensate myself for my monetary losses which society owes me."
        • 16y ago
  • scott_s 16y ago
    Why do you find it unethical? I'm not being glib. You can see why I don't find it unethical in posts below.
    • jpark 16y ago
      Many companies would find similar behavior among their employees to be unethical and cause for termination. For instance, large retailers have strict gift rules in place so that suppliers cannot "bribe" the retail buyers to get their stuff on shelves.
      • scott_s 16y ago
        But those are instances where there is no precedent for tipping.
      • JoeAltmaier 16y ago
        Our Walmart contact in their technology center wouldn't accept a cup of coffee during a site visit, without putting a quarter on the table. They Strictly enforce a ban on gifts and favors, calling it all bribery and grounds for getting fired.
• BrandonM 16y ago
  Everyone else waits a few extra minutes, but meanwhile the maitre d's work income is vastly improved while you get a quick seat for a fee. In the end, the net effect on society is probably neutral at worst. At best, no one else even notices and both you and the maitre d' have a great night.
  • btmorex 16y ago
    The effect on society can be much, much worse than neutral. If it happens enough, all of sudden it's expected and then people will start intentionally delaying service/making it difficult unless you pay them. (for reference, see any country with petty corruption/bribery problems) What's the difference between this and say slipping the building inspector a hundred dollars to "not have any problems"?
    • benreesman 16y ago
      I imagine it's mostly down to the grizzly corpses that won't need to be pulled out of the rubble?
    • jemfinch 16y ago
      > What's the difference between this and say slipping the building inspector a hundred dollars to "not have any problems"? What's the difference between this and paying Southwest $10 to get early boarding? For that matter, what's the difference between this and patronizing a top-notch doctor whose high prices result in a short surgery waitlist in order getting some surgery done more quickly? We can bandy around analogies all day long, but when it comes down to it, the actions of private individuals prioritizing private resources for a fee is a fundamentally different thing than the actions of public workers prioritizing public resources for a fee. In the private sector, it's price discrimination. In the public sector, it's bribery. The difference is in who owns the resources that are being prioritized.
    • ZachPruckowski 16y ago
      >"The effect on society can be much, much worse than neutral. If it happens enough, all of sudden it's expected and then people will start intentionally delaying service/making it difficult unless you pay them. (for reference, see any country with petty corruption/bribery problems)" A mitigating factor is that restaurant owners/managers will only tolerate this behavior from their employees when customer demand exceeds seating supply. If a hostess has an empty table and refuses to seat a party until they bribe her, she will be fired. >"What's the difference between this and say slipping the building inspector a hundred dollars to "not have any problems"?" The hostess's job depends on allocating scarce tables to customers with no good indicators of customer quality. The inspector's job is to only certify safe buildings, and he has loads of indicators to make that determination, and the certificates are not scarce. That said, I don't see what's wrong with a system where you can pay to short-circuit some slowdowns. It would be worth $20 to me to go from a half-day's wait at the DMV to a 30-minute wait, and I'm sure there are parties willing to pay tens of thousands to put their building plans at the top of the pile (without circumventing any inspections or anything, just getting the next available inspection). The downside to this is that, while it raises revenue, it detracts from government's duty to serve all citizens equally.