I went to a religious university and there was a certain ethics class everybody was required to take. A discussion topic one day was about how to advertise you were a member of this faith while out and about, and the topic of tipping came up. The lecture pretty much worked out like you should be tipping big! People don't treat waiters so well after the religious service ends! At least 20% to share the good news:tm: with them! Oddly, this same class never took the same effort to address how to advertise to any other class of people.

I get this sounds like a random aside, but tipping is something that religious communities at least try to connect to people with (which surprisingly includes patrons who leave $0 tip and a "here's a tip, your pathway to %afterlife%" business card). If there was a push to make it not the social norm, I could see churches crusading to keep it a part of our culture forever.

Maybe it'd be OK to outlaw it.

I propose a middle way: Outlaw tipping unless the establishment posts an upfront notice of what their tipping expectation is (what percent, for what services, for what satisfaction level).

Under that system:

- You can still have tipping with only a trivial amount of extra work.

- There would then be common knowledge -- in the technical sense [1] -- across all parties, leading to expectation alignment.

- There would be a clear mechanism for competition over expected tipping levels, letting people know they're getting into at each place.

I expect that such a system would to more establishments preferring the no-tip option, but even if not, it would remove the worst parts of the tipping system.

[1] i.e. where everyone knows the same things, and everyone knows everyone's else's level of knowledge about those things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

Not sure how to do that when business can just decide not to pay fair wages and rely on strangers to supplement employee's income through tipping.