Have tips become passé? Not yet, but no-tips restaurants are starting to trend, according to CBS News. At Brand 158 in Glendale, the owner says that he gets better results paying a stable living wage and putting both customers and employees at ease with each other:

Are we headed for the end of restaurant tipping? Yet another eatery is opening up to great fanfare, mostly because it has decided to do away with tips.

The Brand 158 restaurant in Glendale, Calif., has adopted the no-tipping policy because owner Gabriel Frem said he wanted to discourage competition between his employees. And he isn’t including a service charge or upping his prices to make up for it, either.
Frem’s theory is that tips disrupt the working environment and leave workers unsure of their take-home pay from week to week. “We think that if we stabilize the lives of our employees, they can then focus on the customer,” he told The Los Angeles Times.

No-tip restaurants are by no means common, but the idea is starting to take hold across the country. In New York, a Japanese-style pub called Restaurant Riki has banned the practice because it’s more in line with Japanese customs. It’s raised prices to compensate.

Another restaurant, Sushi Yasuda, even goes so far as to chase down customers who left in order to return their tips. According to owner Scott Rosenberg, diners are tired of having to rate their servers and then doing the tip math based on the performance.

A new brewpub scheduled to open this fall in Washington, D.C. will also do away with tipping. The founder of the restaurant, Public Option, plans to pay workers at least $15 an hour. Any money left on the tables will go to charity.

Will this catch on? What do Hot Air readers prefer? Take the poll: