Soundbyte Psychology

You’re in a restaurant. Why are you there? You’re a waiter/waitress, a really good one. Your pay amounts to very little. You survive off tips. Because your tips are your life, you have become better and better at waiting. Then, just today, the word comes from management that your restaurant is switching to tip-share. That means all customer tips go into a pool, then it is divided up evenly at the end of the shift. Do you still perform as well, even if any increase in tips will go, primarily, to other people? You don’t, do you? If you were a customer, would you then prefer to visit a restaurant with a tip-share system, or one where your money went to award or punish the person who waited on you specifically? It’s an important question, as communism is tip-share, whereas fascism would have management receiving most of the cut and choose who gets paid and how much. Capitalism, caught right in between these two, means the waiters and customers getting more of what they deserve.