Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.
Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.
Yes I'm sure the businesses that are getting bonus money are very angry that their technology prohibits them from removing the feature asking for bonus money. The people you should be mad at are the technology companies who are forcing this extra money gathering opportunity on these poor, technologically illiterate business who absolutely do not want to get bonus money.
The businesses don't get the money. They must give 100% of it to the staff by law. Management doesn't care and would probably prefer a machine that isn't customer-hostile by asking for a tip in a circumstance where no tip is expected.
They also must pay their employees overtime "by law". And not require them to work when clocked out "by law". And give them a certain amount of breaks "by law".
How many of these laws do you think businesses break on a regular basis?
And they put the highest tip button right over the "No tip" button. My hand once slipped and I gave a 40% tip to a barista who handed me a sandwich when I meant to give 0.
I hate tipping so much, I want to start a "no tipping" movement. Then hopefully the industry will figure out how to pay their people a living wage without making paying a game of social pressure for me.
A few years ago I was talking to my aunt, a restaurant owner. I found out she wasn’t paying the tipped minimum wage for her area, but the non-tipped wage even though they did tips. I was complementing her on doing this, as it’s a good precedent to set and whatnot. Quickly realized the reason she was doing that was that she didn’t know there was a lower potential wage for tipped employees, so I quickly shut up and changed the subject, and didn’t accidentally screw over her employees.
Tips should become less of a thing and tipped wage should go away.
Maybe I am a chud but if I am driving to pick up my food and the cashier is just ringing me up, nobody's getting tipped and I have no problem hitting no tip.
I don't find that to be a valid reason. After all, some low paid (but still decently skilled) workerbee prepared the food and packaged it up. When I tip, I'm tipping for both the food and the service. It's a crap shoot about whether it's the practice for the servers to tip the kitchen very well, but they usually tip them something.
Why don't we tip bus drivers then? Why don't we tip dental hygienists? Why don't we tip the pilots on our flights or the janitors at our libraries?
The choice of who we tip is entirely arbitrary. How much we are supposed to tip is also arbitrary. There is no logic behind it. The system is entirely stupid.
It clearly existed so that the proprietor can delegate the duty of finding and punishing bad service employees to the customer... which is, again, a terrible system that makes no sense, and it make even less sense now that it's spreading to all manner of jobs where this tenuous connection doesn't even exist!
How do you know it's low paid? Why not tip 100%? You seem very certain about parent invalid reason as well as your own assumptions. Please enlighten us
IMHO, more people need to grow a spine and never tip via a screen.
I never tip at my local Starbucks counter. They ask for it before any service has been rendered. That’s not how a tip is supposed to work. And who knows how the tips are getting to the workers.
I tip in cash after a service is rendered. If it’s on a screen there are renter seekers between you and the person who helped you.
In my view, a drawback of tipping is that it's impossible to predict how much a job actually pays. This makes it harder for workers to compete for higher wages by changing jobs. Thus it probably has the net effect of depressing overall earnings.
Not knowing how much people get paid probably also frustrates collective bargaining.
It also leaves the price / performance relationship up in the air for customers. They're tipping, but they don't know how the tips are being split. Between people tipping habitually, and not knowing where your tip is going, I'm not sure that "reward for good service" is a meaningful incentive. It may be as much a reward for quality management.
Disclosure: Both of my kids are tipped workers. They both receive a split of the tips depending on what job they're doing. I also receive cash tip income as a musician, but it's not my main job.
Everyone -- including Fox -- seems to have missed the tax-avoidance game: Tips are deductible, wages are not. So one of the few employee and management mutual interests lies in short-circuiting a share of revenue directly from customer to employee, with no filtering through the IRS.
Originally, yes. But Trump campaigned on eliminating taxes on tips, and that was part of the BBB.
Workers are now allowed to deduct up to $25k of their tipped income from their federal income tax, though they still have to pay into Social Security and Medicare from their tipped wages.
Of course, in aggregate, it would still be far better were Congress to eliminate the distinction between tipped minimum wage and regular minimum wage, then raise the overall minimum wage, and we as a culture did away with tips entirely.
There is pretty much one way to stop this: stop patronizing carry-out and counter service establishments that throw a tip question into the checkout process. It's not enough to just elect zero tip. Stop giving them your money, period.
No problem tipping for good sit-down table service, or a good bartender at a bar. But at carry-out and self-service places, there's no service provided so nothing to earn a tip.
I suspect that the "service" distinction is no less arbitrary than tipping in general. It might not seem that an occupation has a service component until it vanishes. How can counter service go wrong? Famous last words. If tipping sets up a relationship between quality and pay, it could affect any job.
Who gets tipped is a matter of social custom, though each person is free to come up with their own criteria.
Disclosure: I earn tip income in my side job as a musician.
You can only vote with your feet if there’s somewhere else for you to walk. You may do the best you can avoiding all these places. But then you’re there at a local arena for a show. You take a beer out of the fridge and check out. The cashier takes your card and flips the screen towards you and the screen wants 25% on a $15 beer for the cashier’s labor of cracking the can (which they have to do anyway by policy).
A tip needs to be for the part of service you can directly evaluate. If you give the same tip everywhere you are doing it wrong. If you don't stop think about it that is wrong. If paying for the group the tip is a group discussion even if the rest of the cost is kept secret.
A confounding factor is you don't generally know whether a server gets the tip. Many places create a pool of tips that gets distributed across the wait staff and sometimes even the rest of the staff.
A good way to bypass this (and increase your privacy) is to just pay cash. Then you don't interact with the screen at all and there isn't even any expectation of a tip. Funny how it changes.
WE ARE A CASHLESS VENUE. You may convert your cash into an interest-free loan for the venue at the inconveniently-located customer cash extraction machine.
No service provided? Like, the line cook isn't juggling 8 orders in order to package your stuff and get it to you in a timely and accurate way? Agree that you don't really know how well they did until you open up your order, but I also disagree that the tip is based only on "good" service. The idiotic wage structure we have right now makes workerbees dependent on some level of tips.
This reads to me (and pangram agrees) as almost entirely AI-written. I wonder if that matters anymore. Did someone express editorial judgment? Or did they just prompt “write column about tipping defaults, go”?
Anyway, the most egregious tip request I’ve ever seen was in a self-service airport kiosk. I chose my bag of nuts or whatever; no human even in the kiosk, completely unmonitored; I scanned and tapped my credit card and there it was — [15%] [18%] [20%]? So insulting.
At least in that case the card reader probably came configured that way, and why bother turning it off and refuse free money?
The most egregious I've seen was in the check out flow of a web store. Someone actually went to the effort to implement a tip nag at the end of check out, to ask for more money for a no-humans-present transaction.
IMHO, if I paid for something, and the only “service” was just handing me the thing I paid for, it was a transaction, not service. The bare minimum is to hand it to me, or put it on the counter, which is REQUIRED to not count as theft, so ya, like other comments mentioned, if I’m waited on and have someone meet my additional needs, (extra this, or sauce me that, or a double Lagavulin, neat of course) then that different.
Someone else mentioned dental hygienists, bus drivers, and now I think of teachers, mechanics, lawyers, etc, what ARE the rules of tipping? Cuz apparently it’s not really that cut and dry
Tips are evil. They essentially treat service industry jobs as charity funded, destroy dining and other experiences by forcing the customer to become the manager and hide costs in a way that make the customer or the employee the bad guy and not the industry. But they won't go away without some sort of change in regulatory structure. I think there are two problems creating this in the US at least:
- We are conditioned to expect that the price listed is not the actual final price. If I see 1 euro as a price in Italy, I can hand them 1 euro and walk away. In the US if I see $1 as the price I could get a bill for??? 1.20? then tip? 1.40? Some random magic number I have no idea how it happened? The price listed should be the price paid. Period. Stop pretending taxes aren't part of the price.
- We have legislation that makes tips part of expected compensation. Minimum wage is different for servers. Get rid of any legislation like that. Every job should pay a living wage (including benefits) or shouldn't exist. If that were in place you would see a lot fewer places begging for tips since the cost of things would be higher to match the salaries they would need to pay. So right now if you don't tip you are actually taking away someone's paycheck and that is wrong on all levels.
Of course all of this is also part of the American psyche. We really like being lied to about price. Show us a lower number, even though we know it is fake and we will end up being charged way more by the time the transaction is done, and we will hop there. Take the taxes off the price and don't include the cost of labor on the listed price and we go 'Look! A bargain!'
What's really fun are the places (typically upper-scale restaurants) which automatically include a tip, and then still add a space for custom tips, hoping you won't notice that there's already a line item for a 15/18/20% tip.
Tips should be pay for great service. It should be a pleasure giving a large tip because it means you got good service, and painful to get the service that results in a good tip. That also means most places asking for a tip are not giving the service needed for a top. Of it isn't a tip to a specific person providing service it isn't a tip.
Some Amazon grocery choices for delivery come with a $5.00 tip by default, no way to opt out or change this default. You are only allowed to edit it, every single time, at purchase time (if you notice it).
Since we're riled up about the state of compulsory tipping, I'll throw in my bugbear: the calculated percentages are frequently based off the post-tax total! Tipping has historically been based on the pre-tax cost, but the rise of receipts and screens that do the math for you has smuggled the taxes into the tip umbrella. Infuriating.
This what I do. I learnt this from one of the HackerNews comments months ago.
Tip the person if they do a direct service to you, which may involve touching your body. Barbers, massage therapists (all kinds, you know!), Facials, nails etc.
Also (as per another comment in this thread), no tip if we pay before we use the service (or food).
If it isn't any of the above, say "Thank you, I enjoyed your great service. But at this time, I don't have money to spare. How do I get past this screen?"
I tip for service I’ve already received and I’ll tip in advance if I’m using the space. E.g. if I go to a coffee shop to work, I’ll buy something and leave a tip. I’ll tip if you make something for me, like a cappuccino.
I don’t tip at point of sale simply because it isn’t fair. I don’t tip at grocery checkout. Why would I tip for a drip coffee?
Personally I make almost double the median wage in my HCOL small town. It’s hard to make it here, i know it. People are sleeping 3 to a studio. So it’s simple, I just choose not to be a miser and I hit yes on the lowest tip option for every purchase and never give it a second thought.
That was internally directed. Also the lowest is like 18% everywhere for counter service which I feel is generous. Ain’t like I’m making bay area money.
I just wanna know how everyone thinks is acceptable to tip for a product that you did not even receive yet. How do I know if it’s even good? Can I take my tip back if it’s not?
I don't think it's acceptable, and I don't tip if I pay before I eat. Ironically, I also don't adjust the amount I tip at sit-down restaurants based on how the service was. I refuse to allow tipping to expand beyond where it was customary when I was growing up. There should be less tipping, not more. It should be outlawed entirely.
My thought is that this doesn't shift the burden to those that can afford to pay (and choose to tip) it shifts the burden to many of those who (for a lack of a better way to put it) don't have the money but feel bad if they don't tip. Also I fully understand why businesses do this but it creates a negative feeling at the point of purchase in terms of rejecting and not tipping.
It's getting increasingly common in Germany as well, especially at bakeries and the like.
I recently had one at one of the big coffee chains where it offered 10%, 15%, 20% and an unlabeled fourth option. The fourth option went into a submenu with 5%, 10%, 15% and this time a labeled none option, which sent you to a another yes/no screen.
I don't avoid the business but I do not feel bad at all not tipping when there is no service involved. And, no, the 3 second interaction of handing me out goods from behind the counter doesn't count. When there is service involved it usually is already included in the price and rounding up is a courtesy but not required.
In my state, and I suppose other areas of the US, it is a win-win for a business to institute tips-plus wages.
Firstly, the business is permitted to pay below minimum wage and play accounting games with "tip credits" and having the employees pool/share their tips in common. So, the business contributes less to those wages overall, and therefore can hire/keep more staff than it would, ordinarily, and run on a slimmer margin, when food service is generally not very profitable.
Second, the business can advertise lower prices! If tipping pays wages, and tips don't need inclusion in the menu prices, then your $5 hamburger isn't going to cost $5 at checkout, but if you're the owner, you still get to print $5 on the menus and put $5 burgers on your website.
At this point, customers are being shamed and goaded into tipping, because if we don't, we're the bad guy: we're the wage thieves; we're the rude customers who can't afford to eat but do it anyway.
It is a valid strategy to boycott/avoid businesses that mandate tipping unjustly, but ultimately, that seems to be another way you're hurting the workers trying to make a living, where that includes being forced to accept a job in a "mandatory tipping" industry.
I like the way the payment processing systems give an option to leave a tip. It makes tipping really easy. I always tip generously for any service-oriented purchase (mostly restaurants).
Every time there is an initiative to require paying living wages, food and bar service representatives fight to get it killed because they make _more_ money from tips than they would from regular wages. Tip-earning workers in America are well represented.
Except the actual workers don't: very very few consistently earn a higher wage, instead on a "good night" they count the win and ignore the losses when it's not.
Even with reliable good nights the off nights eat away at that margin.
Few talk about the Skinnerian mechanics behind tipping. It's the addictive element which keeps gamers gaming, microtransactors microtransacting, pattern day traders day trading, and gig drivers gigging. The excitement of the gamble. The irrational belief that the next customer may be George Soros and they'll leave $10K on the table.
Could ban tipping by law. Businesses where employees are caught accepting tips get fined. The price on the menu or shelf must be the final price at payment (including sales taxes and other fees).
I think this is a fiction we tell ourselves, but it doesn't function like this in reality. The majority of people just tip according to habit and not are not performing some kind of micro performance evaluation at each interaction. In many of the places we are expected to tip, there's not really any performance to evaluate anyway. Filling a cup and handing it over the counter is hard to screw up. Even food trucks expect tips these days.
Given that tips are a percentage of the overall bill, could you explain the potential performance difference between pouring a $7 bottle of wine and a $700 bottle of wine? Assuming that the customers already clearly know what they want to purchase, so the waiter didn't offer recommendations of any kind.
But even if we take that last point into consideration, a good waiter that cares about their customers can offer a cheaper, more suitable bottle than something expensive. How can they receive a higher tip than the person who does not offer suggestions but merely pours a more expensive bottle?
This is not even mentioning that the baseline of "performance" is sub-par indeed. Americans tend to gloat about how their tables never receive water top-ups or someone never asks how their food is going so they have an opportunity to ask for condiments or napkins. But most people in the world typically know how to ask for themselves if they require something, and don't need a pseudo-butler hovering over them. Not to mention that when it comes time to actually pay the check and leave, Americans tend to be some of the slowest at actually fulfilling this process.
The first thing you seem to not consider is the percentage. When someone does exceptional service you give them an exceptional tip. I do 20% of the total (so including tax) as baseline. Yes I "overtip" but I decided a long time ago that being generous with service staff was something I want to do. If someone went above and beyond I would add a few dollars/extra percent to the tip.
The question about 7 and 700 dollar bills is illustrative. If I am buying a hotdog or I am buying an exceptionally high end meal - implies a big difference the sophisticated of service and the experience of staff. At the higher price point I expect the waiter to be capable of (whether I need it or not) help the diners navigate the menu and the wine list for example.
That's mainly what I was getting at. By the time you are a waiter in a high end restaurant you are financially good and better than any alternative.
Generally the place serving expensive stuff has more staff per customer so they should get a larger tip as they have time to give better service while the cheaper staff have to rush to to he next customer.
That doesn't explain the $7 vs $700 though. It would $10 vs $40
Isn't that interesting? Here is another human who is unaware of traditional tipping culture.
In traditional tipping culture, the tip is calculated on the subtotal for food and drink, minus your bar bill. Therefore, alcohol, taxes, fees, whatever? Those are not part of your tip calculation at all. For tipping a bartender, or if all you did was drink, I'd usually drop a fraction on each drink served, whatever they were.
The POS tipping prompts are all wrong, and they're encouraging more than just mandatory tip-shaming: they are forcing a shift in the basic calculations which was never intended by ordinary tipping customs. A $700 bottle of wine in a restaurant warrants an identical tip to a $7 bottle.
The person paying $700 for a bottle of wine at a restaurant (a bottle that would probably be less than half that price at retail) has no problem throwing an extra $100 on the bill for the server.
It doesn't make a lick of difference what a customer can afford but the fact is that the calculation would not take that into account. Neither the server, nor the business, should expect an extra $100 just for serving expensive liquor. The tipper should not feel compelled to throw on that extra because of some non-traditional method of calculation being forced via POS or their pre-printed receipt.
Extravagant tipping can be a real source of contention and trouble with the employer, too. There was a recent case where a "very generous patron" left something like $10,000 for a server, and she was subsequently fired, with litigation pending.
There are, in fact, many POS systems that will inhibit extravagant tipping. Unusual tipping patterns could be indicative of coercion, criminal activity, or money-laundering.
Generous, rich people can believe they're doing a magnanimous favor in throwing stacks of cash at a random, struggling server, but that is not the road to charity.
I've been paying restaurant bills and tipping since the 1980s and never heard of excluding the bar items, unless they were paid separately at the bar. I never bought anything close to a $700 bottle however.
I try to tip in cash, avoids "the system" and avoids the employer keeping part of it.
Tipping a percentage of the bill never made sense. Tip by the number of plates/bowls/glasses/etc served. The server doesn’t do more work for $50 plate vs a $10 plate.
Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.
Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.
Yes I'm sure the businesses that are getting bonus money are very angry that their technology prohibits them from removing the feature asking for bonus money. The people you should be mad at are the technology companies who are forcing this extra money gathering opportunity on these poor, technologically illiterate business who absolutely do not want to get bonus money.
The businesses don't get the money. They must give 100% of it to the staff by law. Management doesn't care and would probably prefer a machine that isn't customer-hostile by asking for a tip in a circumstance where no tip is expected.
Yeah? "By law?"
They also must pay their employees overtime "by law". And not require them to work when clocked out "by law". And give them a certain amount of breaks "by law".
How many of these laws do you think businesses break on a regular basis?
https://worldmetrics.org/wage-theft-statistics/
https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-...
And they put the highest tip button right over the "No tip" button. My hand once slipped and I gave a 40% tip to a barista who handed me a sandwich when I meant to give 0.
I hate tipping so much, I want to start a "no tipping" movement. Then hopefully the industry will figure out how to pay their people a living wage without making paying a game of social pressure for me.
A few years ago I was talking to my aunt, a restaurant owner. I found out she wasn’t paying the tipped minimum wage for her area, but the non-tipped wage even though they did tips. I was complementing her on doing this, as it’s a good precedent to set and whatnot. Quickly realized the reason she was doing that was that she didn’t know there was a lower potential wage for tipped employees, so I quickly shut up and changed the subject, and didn’t accidentally screw over her employees.
Tips should become less of a thing and tipped wage should go away.
I’ll join your movement but we won’t be popular among our peers or our servers
Maybe I am a chud but if I am driving to pick up my food and the cashier is just ringing me up, nobody's getting tipped and I have no problem hitting no tip.
Been that way all along.
I don't find that to be a valid reason. After all, some low paid (but still decently skilled) workerbee prepared the food and packaged it up. When I tip, I'm tipping for both the food and the service. It's a crap shoot about whether it's the practice for the servers to tip the kitchen very well, but they usually tip them something.
Why don't we tip bus drivers then? Why don't we tip dental hygienists? Why don't we tip the pilots on our flights or the janitors at our libraries?
The choice of who we tip is entirely arbitrary. How much we are supposed to tip is also arbitrary. There is no logic behind it. The system is entirely stupid.
It clearly existed so that the proprietor can delegate the duty of finding and punishing bad service employees to the customer... which is, again, a terrible system that makes no sense, and it make even less sense now that it's spreading to all manner of jobs where this tenuous connection doesn't even exist!
How do you know it's low paid? Why not tip 100%? You seem very certain about parent invalid reason as well as your own assumptions. Please enlighten us
Then why don't we tip at the deli counter? Or at the supermarket? Tips have always been about the service.
IMHO, more people need to grow a spine and never tip via a screen.
I never tip at my local Starbucks counter. They ask for it before any service has been rendered. That’s not how a tip is supposed to work. And who knows how the tips are getting to the workers.
I tip in cash after a service is rendered. If it’s on a screen there are renter seekers between you and the person who helped you.
In my view, a drawback of tipping is that it's impossible to predict how much a job actually pays. This makes it harder for workers to compete for higher wages by changing jobs. Thus it probably has the net effect of depressing overall earnings.
Not knowing how much people get paid probably also frustrates collective bargaining.
It also leaves the price / performance relationship up in the air for customers. They're tipping, but they don't know how the tips are being split. Between people tipping habitually, and not knowing where your tip is going, I'm not sure that "reward for good service" is a meaningful incentive. It may be as much a reward for quality management.
Disclosure: Both of my kids are tipped workers. They both receive a split of the tips depending on what job they're doing. I also receive cash tip income as a musician, but it's not my main job.
Everyone -- including Fox -- seems to have missed the tax-avoidance game: Tips are deductible, wages are not. So one of the few employee and management mutual interests lies in short-circuiting a share of revenue directly from customer to employee, with no filtering through the IRS.
Wait, what? This sounds important, but I can't quite parse it.
He’s saying no tax on tips.
This is really, really recent though. The tip-everywhere phenomenon has been growing for a lot longer than the tax deduction.
Well, more specifically, people don't (always) report (all) tips.
Originally, yes. But Trump campaigned on eliminating taxes on tips, and that was part of the BBB.
Workers are now allowed to deduct up to $25k of their tipped income from their federal income tax, though they still have to pay into Social Security and Medicare from their tipped wages.
Of course, in aggregate, it would still be far better were Congress to eliminate the distinction between tipped minimum wage and regular minimum wage, then raise the overall minimum wage, and we as a culture did away with tips entirely.
That’s too recent of a change for it to be what they’re talking about.
There is pretty much one way to stop this: stop patronizing carry-out and counter service establishments that throw a tip question into the checkout process. It's not enough to just elect zero tip. Stop giving them your money, period.
No problem tipping for good sit-down table service, or a good bartender at a bar. But at carry-out and self-service places, there's no service provided so nothing to earn a tip.
I suspect that the "service" distinction is no less arbitrary than tipping in general. It might not seem that an occupation has a service component until it vanishes. How can counter service go wrong? Famous last words. If tipping sets up a relationship between quality and pay, it could affect any job.
Who gets tipped is a matter of social custom, though each person is free to come up with their own criteria.
Disclosure: I earn tip income in my side job as a musician.
I was told, when growing up, that if they come to your table, take your order, bring your food—you tip.
Otherwise, negatory.
You can only vote with your feet if there’s somewhere else for you to walk. You may do the best you can avoiding all these places. But then you’re there at a local arena for a show. You take a beer out of the fridge and check out. The cashier takes your card and flips the screen towards you and the screen wants 25% on a $15 beer for the cashier’s labor of cracking the can (which they have to do anyway by policy).
Well you can just not buy the beer.
I have a problem tipping for anything now. If a tip is something someone expects, it's no longer a tip, it's a hidden charge, and I don't like it.
A tip needs to be for the part of service you can directly evaluate. If you give the same tip everywhere you are doing it wrong. If you don't stop think about it that is wrong. If paying for the group the tip is a group discussion even if the rest of the cost is kept secret.
Pay for value, the percent is a suggestion.
A confounding factor is you don't generally know whether a server gets the tip. Many places create a pool of tips that gets distributed across the wait staff and sometimes even the rest of the staff.
A good way to bypass this (and increase your privacy) is to just pay cash. Then you don't interact with the screen at all and there isn't even any expectation of a tip. Funny how it changes.
WE ARE A CASHLESS VENUE. You may convert your cash into an interest-free loan for the venue at the inconveniently-located customer cash extraction machine.
No service provided? Like, the line cook isn't juggling 8 orders in order to package your stuff and get it to you in a timely and accurate way? Agree that you don't really know how well they did until you open up your order, but I also disagree that the tip is based only on "good" service. The idiotic wage structure we have right now makes workerbees dependent on some level of tips.
It's close to 100% of carry out/counter service establishments. This advice isn't practicable.
A tip at McDonald's. Hello I ordered at the kiosk and just spoke literally one word to the young lady over there why am I tipping...
McDonalds used to not allow tips. I suspect that hasn't changed but they didn't configure the kiosk
God please yes. That time is better spent on paying customers.
This reads to me (and pangram agrees) as almost entirely AI-written. I wonder if that matters anymore. Did someone express editorial judgment? Or did they just prompt “write column about tipping defaults, go”?
Anyway, the most egregious tip request I’ve ever seen was in a self-service airport kiosk. I chose my bag of nuts or whatever; no human even in the kiosk, completely unmonitored; I scanned and tapped my credit card and there it was — [15%] [18%] [20%]? So insulting.
At least in that case the card reader probably came configured that way, and why bother turning it off and refuse free money?
The most egregious I've seen was in the check out flow of a web store. Someone actually went to the effort to implement a tip nag at the end of check out, to ask for more money for a no-humans-present transaction.
IMHO, if I paid for something, and the only “service” was just handing me the thing I paid for, it was a transaction, not service. The bare minimum is to hand it to me, or put it on the counter, which is REQUIRED to not count as theft, so ya, like other comments mentioned, if I’m waited on and have someone meet my additional needs, (extra this, or sauce me that, or a double Lagavulin, neat of course) then that different.
Someone else mentioned dental hygienists, bus drivers, and now I think of teachers, mechanics, lawyers, etc, what ARE the rules of tipping? Cuz apparently it’s not really that cut and dry
Time to start the #NeverTipper movement!
Tips are evil. They essentially treat service industry jobs as charity funded, destroy dining and other experiences by forcing the customer to become the manager and hide costs in a way that make the customer or the employee the bad guy and not the industry. But they won't go away without some sort of change in regulatory structure. I think there are two problems creating this in the US at least:
- We are conditioned to expect that the price listed is not the actual final price. If I see 1 euro as a price in Italy, I can hand them 1 euro and walk away. In the US if I see $1 as the price I could get a bill for??? 1.20? then tip? 1.40? Some random magic number I have no idea how it happened? The price listed should be the price paid. Period. Stop pretending taxes aren't part of the price.
- We have legislation that makes tips part of expected compensation. Minimum wage is different for servers. Get rid of any legislation like that. Every job should pay a living wage (including benefits) or shouldn't exist. If that were in place you would see a lot fewer places begging for tips since the cost of things would be higher to match the salaries they would need to pay. So right now if you don't tip you are actually taking away someone's paycheck and that is wrong on all levels.
Of course all of this is also part of the American psyche. We really like being lied to about price. Show us a lower number, even though we know it is fake and we will end up being charged way more by the time the transaction is done, and we will hop there. Take the taxes off the price and don't include the cost of labor on the listed price and we go 'Look! A bargain!'
What's really fun are the places (typically upper-scale restaurants) which automatically include a tip, and then still add a space for custom tips, hoping you won't notice that there's already a line item for a 15/18/20% tip.
Tips should be pay for great service. It should be a pleasure giving a large tip because it means you got good service, and painful to get the service that results in a good tip. That also means most places asking for a tip are not giving the service needed for a top. Of it isn't a tip to a specific person providing service it isn't a tip.
Its not even a request.
Some Amazon grocery choices for delivery come with a $5.00 tip by default, no way to opt out or change this default. You are only allowed to edit it, every single time, at purchase time (if you notice it).
Since we're riled up about the state of compulsory tipping, I'll throw in my bugbear: the calculated percentages are frequently based off the post-tax total! Tipping has historically been based on the pre-tax cost, but the rise of receipts and screens that do the math for you has smuggled the taxes into the tip umbrella. Infuriating.
This what I do. I learnt this from one of the HackerNews comments months ago.
Tip the person if they do a direct service to you, which may involve touching your body. Barbers, massage therapists (all kinds, you know!), Facials, nails etc.
Also (as per another comment in this thread), no tip if we pay before we use the service (or food).
If it isn't any of the above, say "Thank you, I enjoyed your great service. But at this time, I don't have money to spare. How do I get past this screen?"
I tip for service I’ve already received and I’ll tip in advance if I’m using the space. E.g. if I go to a coffee shop to work, I’ll buy something and leave a tip. I’ll tip if you make something for me, like a cappuccino.
I don’t tip at point of sale simply because it isn’t fair. I don’t tip at grocery checkout. Why would I tip for a drip coffee?
Personally I make almost double the median wage in my HCOL small town. It’s hard to make it here, i know it. People are sleeping 3 to a studio. So it’s simple, I just choose not to be a miser and I hit yes on the lowest tip option for every purchase and never give it a second thought.
> I just choose not to be a miser and I hit yes on the lowest tip option for every purchase
Calling others a miser but always hitting the lowest tip option
That was internally directed. Also the lowest is like 18% everywhere for counter service which I feel is generous. Ain’t like I’m making bay area money.
I just wanna know how everyone thinks is acceptable to tip for a product that you did not even receive yet. How do I know if it’s even good? Can I take my tip back if it’s not?
I don't think it's acceptable, and I don't tip if I pay before I eat. Ironically, I also don't adjust the amount I tip at sit-down restaurants based on how the service was. I refuse to allow tipping to expand beyond where it was customary when I was growing up. There should be less tipping, not more. It should be outlawed entirely.
Just today a waitress offered my kid to taste a few different things before we committed to what he would eat. It was an example of amazing service.
Are you saying you wouldn't reward someone like that with a few extra bucks?
American tiping culture is a form legal discrimination, were customer tip less for workers of different races, religions, genders, sexual orientation.
Only a minority do that. Most people tip based on service not racism.
My thought is that this doesn't shift the burden to those that can afford to pay (and choose to tip) it shifts the burden to many of those who (for a lack of a better way to put it) don't have the money but feel bad if they don't tip. Also I fully understand why businesses do this but it creates a negative feeling at the point of purchase in terms of rejecting and not tipping.
In Germany, it is not very common. Where I see it, I avoid the business.
It's getting increasingly common in Germany as well, especially at bakeries and the like.
I recently had one at one of the big coffee chains where it offered 10%, 15%, 20% and an unlabeled fourth option. The fourth option went into a submenu with 5%, 10%, 15% and this time a labeled none option, which sent you to a another yes/no screen.
I don't avoid the business but I do not feel bad at all not tipping when there is no service involved. And, no, the 3 second interaction of handing me out goods from behind the counter doesn't count. When there is service involved it usually is already included in the price and rounding up is a courtesy but not required.
Just buy with cash. Then you don't even have to look at the machine.
but you gotta look at the tip jars spread everywhere.
In my state, and I suppose other areas of the US, it is a win-win for a business to institute tips-plus wages.
Firstly, the business is permitted to pay below minimum wage and play accounting games with "tip credits" and having the employees pool/share their tips in common. So, the business contributes less to those wages overall, and therefore can hire/keep more staff than it would, ordinarily, and run on a slimmer margin, when food service is generally not very profitable.
Second, the business can advertise lower prices! If tipping pays wages, and tips don't need inclusion in the menu prices, then your $5 hamburger isn't going to cost $5 at checkout, but if you're the owner, you still get to print $5 on the menus and put $5 burgers on your website.
At this point, customers are being shamed and goaded into tipping, because if we don't, we're the bad guy: we're the wage thieves; we're the rude customers who can't afford to eat but do it anyway.
It is a valid strategy to boycott/avoid businesses that mandate tipping unjustly, but ultimately, that seems to be another way you're hurting the workers trying to make a living, where that includes being forced to accept a job in a "mandatory tipping" industry.
American sucks balls with this tip thingy, which has racist root in the first place. America is racist.
If you put more effort into this comment—-like explaining how “this tip thingy” is rooted in racism—-I might have left you a tip.
hm. i really want to use my ais to answer other bots like this... HN is really starting to push me
Shamelessly AI generated articles on the front page of a national news site (albeit not a very good one). What has this world come to
I like the way the payment processing systems give an option to leave a tip. It makes tipping really easy. I always tip generously for any service-oriented purchase (mostly restaurants).
Americans are beggers because they don't have employee rights. Some people euphemistically call this "tipping culture"
Every time there is an initiative to require paying living wages, food and bar service representatives fight to get it killed because they make _more_ money from tips than they would from regular wages. Tip-earning workers in America are well represented.
Could always do what we did in Canada: pay living wages but still inexplicably keep tipping culture
Several states do that.
> pay living wages
But have you thought about the poor shareholders? /s
This is a dummiest reason tippers come up with. "require paying living wages."
Except the actual workers don't: very very few consistently earn a higher wage, instead on a "good night" they count the win and ignore the losses when it's not.
Even with reliable good nights the off nights eat away at that margin.
It's a false economy.
Few talk about the Skinnerian mechanics behind tipping. It's the addictive element which keeps gamers gaming, microtransactors microtransacting, pattern day traders day trading, and gig drivers gigging. The excitement of the gamble. The irrational belief that the next customer may be George Soros and they'll leave $10K on the table.
Could ban tipping by law. Businesses where employees are caught accepting tips get fined. The price on the menu or shelf must be the final price at payment (including sales taxes and other fees).
I would say that America has a culture oriented towards rewarding performance. A good waiter's tips net them more pay that their foreign counterparts.
It's the same as looking at an American engineer's bonus that's 3x a foreign engineer's whole pay and calling them a beggar.
I think this is a fiction we tell ourselves, but it doesn't function like this in reality. The majority of people just tip according to habit and not are not performing some kind of micro performance evaluation at each interaction. In many of the places we are expected to tip, there's not really any performance to evaluate anyway. Filling a cup and handing it over the counter is hard to screw up. Even food trucks expect tips these days.
Given that tips are a percentage of the overall bill, could you explain the potential performance difference between pouring a $7 bottle of wine and a $700 bottle of wine? Assuming that the customers already clearly know what they want to purchase, so the waiter didn't offer recommendations of any kind.
But even if we take that last point into consideration, a good waiter that cares about their customers can offer a cheaper, more suitable bottle than something expensive. How can they receive a higher tip than the person who does not offer suggestions but merely pours a more expensive bottle?
This is not even mentioning that the baseline of "performance" is sub-par indeed. Americans tend to gloat about how their tables never receive water top-ups or someone never asks how their food is going so they have an opportunity to ask for condiments or napkins. But most people in the world typically know how to ask for themselves if they require something, and don't need a pseudo-butler hovering over them. Not to mention that when it comes time to actually pay the check and leave, Americans tend to be some of the slowest at actually fulfilling this process.
Ok.. let's run through the basics.
The first thing you seem to not consider is the percentage. When someone does exceptional service you give them an exceptional tip. I do 20% of the total (so including tax) as baseline. Yes I "overtip" but I decided a long time ago that being generous with service staff was something I want to do. If someone went above and beyond I would add a few dollars/extra percent to the tip.
The question about 7 and 700 dollar bills is illustrative. If I am buying a hotdog or I am buying an exceptionally high end meal - implies a big difference the sophisticated of service and the experience of staff. At the higher price point I expect the waiter to be capable of (whether I need it or not) help the diners navigate the menu and the wine list for example.
That's mainly what I was getting at. By the time you are a waiter in a high end restaurant you are financially good and better than any alternative.
Generally the place serving expensive stuff has more staff per customer so they should get a larger tip as they have time to give better service while the cheaper staff have to rush to to he next customer.
That doesn't explain the $7 vs $700 though. It would $10 vs $40
Isn't that interesting? Here is another human who is unaware of traditional tipping culture.
In traditional tipping culture, the tip is calculated on the subtotal for food and drink, minus your bar bill. Therefore, alcohol, taxes, fees, whatever? Those are not part of your tip calculation at all. For tipping a bartender, or if all you did was drink, I'd usually drop a fraction on each drink served, whatever they were.
The POS tipping prompts are all wrong, and they're encouraging more than just mandatory tip-shaming: they are forcing a shift in the basic calculations which was never intended by ordinary tipping customs. A $700 bottle of wine in a restaurant warrants an identical tip to a $7 bottle.
The person paying $700 for a bottle of wine at a restaurant (a bottle that would probably be less than half that price at retail) has no problem throwing an extra $100 on the bill for the server.
It doesn't make a lick of difference what a customer can afford but the fact is that the calculation would not take that into account. Neither the server, nor the business, should expect an extra $100 just for serving expensive liquor. The tipper should not feel compelled to throw on that extra because of some non-traditional method of calculation being forced via POS or their pre-printed receipt.
Extravagant tipping can be a real source of contention and trouble with the employer, too. There was a recent case where a "very generous patron" left something like $10,000 for a server, and she was subsequently fired, with litigation pending.
There are, in fact, many POS systems that will inhibit extravagant tipping. Unusual tipping patterns could be indicative of coercion, criminal activity, or money-laundering.
Generous, rich people can believe they're doing a magnanimous favor in throwing stacks of cash at a random, struggling server, but that is not the road to charity.
I've been paying restaurant bills and tipping since the 1980s and never heard of excluding the bar items, unless they were paid separately at the bar. I never bought anything close to a $700 bottle however.
I try to tip in cash, avoids "the system" and avoids the employer keeping part of it.
Tipping a percentage of the bill never made sense. Tip by the number of plates/bowls/glasses/etc served. The server doesn’t do more work for $50 plate vs a $10 plate.