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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!'
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).
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
It's close to 100% of carry out/counter service establishments. This advice isn't practicable.
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.
God please yes. That time is better spent on paying customers.
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...
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.
That’s too recent of a change for it to be what they’re talking about.
Time to start the #NeverTipper movement!
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?
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!'
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.