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Last month, a widely circulated Reddit post complained a Vancouver liquor store was now asking customers to tip on their purchases. “What’s next, the freaking grocery store??” said writer OutrageousCamel.

Clearly, it’s gut-check time as a country. Tipping, a wildly irrational practice at the best of times, is beginning to enter entirely new frontiers of madness.

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As many as 40 per cent of Canadians want tipping abolished and restaurants such as Earls are beginning to experiment with new “no tipping” policies. Despite this, the practice only seems to get stronger.

And it’s far from a harmless tradition. Below, some hard truths about the state of tipping in modern Canada.

Some tipped workers are staggeringly well paid

In 2014, the Canadian job-finding site Workopolis.com interviewed a former waitress who had once pulled down the after-tax equivalent of $100,000 a year. Kate (her true name was concealed because she had evaded tax on much of those earnings) worked at a hotel bar and was pulling down as much as $6,000 per month in tips. “Sometimes I would make my rent in one shift,” she said. This is an anomaly, but it is not unusual for servers at bars or fine dining establishments to pull in wages much higher than the Canadian median. The University of Guelph’s Bruce McAdams is a restaurant industry veteran who has studied the effects of tipping on Canadian restaurants. His data showed that when tips are accounted for, the average Canadian server is making about $30 an hour — with a select few making the meteoric wages enjoyed by “Kate.” These are wages equivalent to those pulled in by a registered nurse, making serving one of Canada’s most lucrative jobs that can be obtained without post-secondary education. Server wages are particularly high in Canada because tips are often piled on top of high minimum wages. In select U.S. states, the salaries for restaurant workers are as low as $2 per hour, leaving servers almost wholly dependent on tips. But in Canada, the absolute lowest minimum wage is $9.45 in Quebec, with Albertans making as much as $15.