Tipping is not a city in The Philippines either.
Tipping is not normal .
When you are at a resteraunt in Phil, the waiter will never ask if you would like the check, In America, a good waiter will check on your table at least with a glance every now and then, but not very often in phil. Because they are not expecting to receive a tip, the more they look at you the more work they have to do, and they are not compensated for that work by a tip.
Better resteraunts in Phil do add a gratuity to the price, and the service is noticably better, in many cases, but it is still inferior to resteraunt service in America.
psychologists have shown that to make the rat the most eager of button pushers you should reward the rat randomly for lever tipping, not only in frequency of the reward but also in quantity. The rat never knows how long he will have to repeat the task, but once he’s trained, he’ll sit there and trip that lever for hours.
Waiters aren’t rats of course, but the tipping is a similar reward and leads to modified behavior. Currently, most waiters and waitresses just do the bare miniumum for each customer because they do not expect to be rewarded for providing better service, making it difficult to justify giving them a tip, because in most cases they have not provided the level of service what merit the tip.
In American resteraunts I’ve known professional waitresses (LOL, as if waiting tables could be considered a profession. That I should participate in the bastardization of the term professional is shameful in itself.) who compete to make the most tips, and even cooperatively work as teams to maximize tips and the quality experience of the customers.
How could this be fixed? I think time is the answer, time and the willingness of people like me to give tips even when it is not deserved, in the hope that the next time I come to that resteraunt they will remember me and then deserve the tip, because it is not going to work if people were to only tip when it was deserved, as it would never reach a critical mass that way.