Comments on: Poor tippers aren’t the problem, it’s our 3rd world economy

By: Tucson Blonde

Tucson Blonde — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:28:00 +0000

Fundamentally, people have to be doing much worse than they already are before anything will change here, despite the blatantly poor education that fuels the bigotry-run-rampant in this country. I am an (romantic) idealist, who hopes that people will wake up to the causes of disparity.

One *can* only hope that the working-poor/underemployed/unemployed will wake up to realize the wool has been pulled over our eyes, once the austerity measures are pushed through, and the “drip system” of welfare is removed from our veins… . Once there is nowhere else to go for help, people will most certainly take to the streets to demand that our “millionaire” politicians hear our cries!

By: Audra

Audra — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:59:58 +0000

Thanks for sharing your experience.

The incredible insanity of food service aside — my husband’s Scottish and we’ve spent much of the last 6 years we’ve been together watching the news (we’re both current events and politics fiends) and over the years we both came to the conclusion that the US just wasn’t the kind of place we wanted to live. A lot of it has to do with the grim realities of living there as a ‘regular’ working person. The mythology of America is that if you work hard, you can succeed and really the evidence shows that is no longer the case.

So, last year when the opportunity came up for us to come to Europe we took it and even though we’re on one income, our quality of life and opportunities have gone up substantially. Heck, even the food we eat (ok, horse meat jokes aside) is better (i.e., less genetically modified and chemistry experiment components) and we just feel better being here.

The US doesn’t support low-income earners, our assistance programs are almost set up to dissuade people from taking initiative and risks, and health care is a joke. Many Americans seem to believe they can be Mitt Romney or Donald Trump and that mistaken belief combined with sloth in understanding the world around them is damaging the US in such fundamental ways that I don’t know how or when things will fundamentally change there.

By: Tucson Blonde

Tucson Blonde — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:24:10 +0000

Thank you so much for this thoughtful post on servers. When I was a college student my mother would complain to me about my “exorbitant” tips on the few occasions that I did go out to eat. See, I grew up in Europe and she couldn’t understand that servers were not actually paid a living wage here. Once I made it clear to her, she only recommended that I stop going out for dinner as often, so that I could actually afford the 20-25% tip that I gave my “regular” waiters.

Now that I graduated into a recession, I’m the one earning below subsistence level income as a freelancer, and often times the only work I can get pays on average $1-$2.5 an hour because it’s project oriented and it doesn’t matter to the “employers” that I need to spend 4x and 5x as much time getting their projects done on schedule than I am being paid for.

Needless to say, I live off foodstamps and don’t go out to eat more than 2 or 3 times a year now. So much for supporting other low-income earners!