The 3-Second Rule I saw in a diner bathroom made me rethink tipping
Watching a guy at the counter in Cleveland leave 15% on a $48 tab while his server fixed his order twice... I looked up the actual wage data on my phone, servers make like $2.13 an hour in Ohio. How do we just accept that as normal, anyone else ever run the math on a receipt?
The "how do we just accept that" part is what gets me, because I read a piece last year about how the tipped wage started as a loophole to avoid paying newly freed slaves a real wage after the Civil War. That history almost never comes up when people argue about tips, they just say it's how restaurants have always worked. Knowing where the $2.13 came from makes the whole thing feel less like tradition and more like a bill nobody ever paid off.