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Change your example from McDonald's to a diner or nicer restaurant and does the answer change? When I go to a diner for breakfast and have the $3.99 breakfast special, I tip the waitress. The social convention is that I should tip the waitress at the diner so I do while that same convention does not hold at McDonald's. The last time I was in Vegas the wife and I had dinner at Picasso. The tab was over $400 and I left a significant tip. It would be logical to ask why. One could easily assume that if you drop over $400 for dinner for two the expectation should be top quality service so no additional compensation should be required.
See, that's exactly my point. We tip the minimum wage server at the diner because that's the convention. We don't tip the minimum wage server at the fast food place, because
that's the convention. This isn't about who needs the money, nor who deserves the money. It's about what we're expected to do because other people do it, and anyone pretending it's anything more is being obtuse.
Fwiw I give in to convention a fair amount, even though I'm normally an advocate of rationality, I think because it just gets hard to keep bucking the convention. I overtip the waitress at the diner (if she's competent and hard working), and usually undertip at fancy places unless I can tell that it's being split among many people (and I can tell, as I used to do that work myself), unless I have a date with me (in which case I bow to practicality — a date is paying for the opportunity to get some one to like me and maybe to **** me, and tipping is just part of the price), but I don't tip the McDonald's cashier. I tip the dealers a lot of the time, because it's too much work not to, but I never tip any that I think are doing a poor or lazy job, which means between a third and a half of them in most places.