A TIP FOR mayor-presumptive Matt Gonzalez: abolish tipping in restaurants. Let all menu prices reflect a service charge, and let restaurant employees be paid accordingly. This simplification would not only make sense – never, in America, sufficient reason for doing anything – but would also relieve some of the discomfort restaurant owners seem to be feeling at the recent voter-mandated increase in the city's minimum wage to $8.50 an hour.

There is a not-frivolous argument that servers should be exempted from the new requirement, since most of them earn far more than minimum wage through tips. A proposal for such an arrangement is already circulating. The problem with it is that it means to protect a set of unjust and (not coincidentally) Byzantine arrangements in which restaurant operators do not really accept responsibility for a basic aspect of their business – service – while those who provide the service enjoy, shall we say, certain Form W-2 advantages afforded by the slipshod nature of the transaction.

The local dining public probably doesn't much mind the tipping jabberwocky. We all know how to ballpark by doubling the tax. Most of us are aware that that tax and tip surcharges add about 25 percent to menu prices, so something that ostensibly costs $12 will really cost $15. Those of us who grew up in the land of flimflam know how to play this game.

But given the importance of tourism to this city – international tourism particularly – it might behoove our restaurateurs to run their various shows in more straightforward fashion, perhaps on the European model, in which service is included and is therefore presumed to be satisfactory. No need to let the customer decide how much, if anything, to pay for service; after all, we do not let customers help themselves to discounts on the food and wine if it wasn't cooked quite the way they hoped or they simply didn't like it or wished they'd ordered something else. Real dissatisfaction with service or fare is another matter, but it is usually one best resolved through discussion – not by the unilateral and punitive withholding of money.

One suspects the power to make this change is not vested in the Mayor's Office. If it were, the power-happy incumbent surely would have exercised it by now. But one does feel a breeze of renewal beginning to blow. On political landscapes great and small, there is a sense that the old ways have run their course and it is time to try something other than the mixture as before. Will someone free us from the proverbial, and lately airless, box we find ourselves in? Mayor Matt, I presume.