> In Connecticut, Mr. Dimyan, who says he feels his $3 coffee is pricey enough as it is, vented about the electronic tip prompts in a Twitter post earlier this month.
> Square replied from its official Twitter account: “Tap `No Tip.’”
Considering that every aspect of my banking is now online (including depositing checks), yeah, it is actually kind a hassle to have to keep making trips to one of my bank's ATMs just to refill my supply of small bills so that I can buy coffee.
You replied to a comment saying that people should pay cash, someone says that they don't carry around cash, so now you're moving the goalposts and saying the person is privileged and doesn't know how to press the "No Tip" button. If you stop changing the subject every other comment, maybe you won't be so confused with people's responses.
It is a problem because not tipping is seen as a massive faux pas in the US, and it is very possible to get publicly shamed for hitting the no tip button even if, like the article says, you are being handed a ready-to-go item.
Is it really? I have never seen it happen to anyone, or heard of it happening. I'd expect it to be far more common to be publicly shamed for peering at the screen while someone else is making a purchase.
A lot of people just plain don’t carry cash to spend any more. To say that five years ago (with typical CC PoS systems) that would have been fine but today thanks to these startups we’ve regressed to having to pay with cash or else need to pay 15-30% more is ridiculous.
1. The sort of beans used in the $3 cup of coffee are probably quite expensive. E.g., the espresso beans that my local coffee shop uses retail at about $1 per espresso drink ($20/lb of beans with 20 or so double shots in a pound). Plus electricity, amortized cost of the espresso machine, and cost of milk. In the end, a home-made cappuccino of equivalent quality costs about $1.20 - $1.25 to make at home.
2. It takes me about 10 minutes to make a cappuccino and clean up the mess. And I'm pretty experienced with a nice setup. I am paid a lot more than $6/hour. Hell, my college side gig paid a lot more than $6/hour.
3. Coffee shops are a nice place to get work down outside of work (eg side projects or self-learning). Especially relevant for those with kids at home.
So for a $3 drink, he's paying $1-$2 for an hour or more of shared work space and 10 minutes of saved labor time.
That seems like a fair deal.
And this is assuming that it's even possible for him to make the drink he wants when he wants it. If he works in an office without an espresso machine, it might just be straight up impossible for him to make the coffee he wants when he wants it.
Now, maybe Folgers from a drip machine should be good enough. But if we're going to be pragmatic robots, we should really just buy super cheap caffeine powder in bulk and mix it into our free water.... Folgers is for snobby suckers. Plus, I bet you have some hobbies/mini-luxuries I don't care about and could scoff at ;-)
I don't feel guilt when they swivel that ipad around, more like annoyance. When I'm asked to tip for someone handing me a cup of coffee, I say no tip. We should really be pushing to get away from this relic of slavery, and don't tip unless it's absolutely clear we need to; i.e. at a sit down restaurant.
Tipping was something that the patricians/bourgie upper class did to help uplift the waiters/service staff in Europe. It caught on in the USA in the late 1800s and fell out of favor from that upper class in Europe by then.
Largely, USA coopted a "noble gesture" from wealthy Europeans and it has persisted ever since for like a century.
I think the parent is referring to this [1] and other articles like it that have surfaced in recent years. I only recently read about it although I can't remember where at the moment. The linked article below is very similar though. It talks about a lot more than tipping in the US having roots tied to slavery but it's mentioned. This is just a snip out of the article, it's a long read but an interesting take on tipping in the US.
That's another wrinkle that many people don’t know about, right? Tipping in the United States actually dates back to slavery.
The origin of tipping is really the feudal system, it’s this idea of noblesse oblige. But when tipping came to the United States, it had a real racial tinge to it, because, originally, the workers who earned tips were almost exclusively black workers—they were newly freed slaves.
There was this massive anti-tipping movement to protest the practice, a resounding populist movement that actually got anti-tipping bills passed in six states across the country, including Washington state and many southern states. What’s interesting is that that movement, the anti-tipping populist one, ending up spreading to Europe and succeeding, because the labor movement picked it up and said ‘we are professionals, and we shouldn’t have to live on tips, because we should be paid by our employers.’ That’s why you see so little tipping in Europe. What we started here spread there and actually killed it at the origin in Europe.
We, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction in the states. The restaurant industry, which was hiring newly freed slaves as tipped workers, really wanted the right to hire these workers but pay them next to nothing. So they put forth this idea that they were valueless and really shouldn’t have to be paid by their employers. They essentially made the argument that newly freed slaves should get a zero dollar wage.
How is tipping at a sit down restaurant not a relic of slavery? The idea that restaurant personnel earn so little that they need to live on tips is barbarous.
Part of it is the waitstaff avoiding tax on tips, the other part is that it allows the business to avoid payroll tax on the majority of waitstaff's earnings. In order to get a waiter to an effective $10/hr after-tax income you'd have to pay $15-16/hr versus $2+$8 in tips.
That doesn't make any sense. Who's paying 37% taxes as a waiter/waitress? Even before Trump's tax cut, wait staff would still likely be in the 10-15% bracket, and you'd add on 12.5% FICA taxes. And this is after deductions, so effective tax rate will be much lower. Unless your state has 20+% income tax, there's no way a waitress is paying 35%.
Corporate taxes don't factor in either because they are only on profit over and above all expenses. Increasing wages of an employee and shifting payment from tips to w2 income merely ensures the employee pays the taxes they should've be paying in the first place and will not increase corporate taxes.
If wait staff shifted to higher wages, the employer would increase prices and could note on the menu that tipping is not necessary, but appreciated. If that was the case, I would still tip, but only for above average service.
It's not really a sexist construct since an attractive man easily makes more in tips than an unattractive woman... It's more the societal construct that attractive = good, which is pernicious but quite deeply ingrained in human society.
If you're getting audited when you're working at or near the poverty line, the world's fucking broken. There are billionaires out there running around paying next to no taxes because they just don't feel like it and the IRS hardly ever shows up at their doors. They only like to stick it to the millionaires - especially celebrities and other "rags to riches" stories - since that "sends a message" to us work-a-day salaried folk not to get too shifty with the IRS.
If the IRS went on a crusade against underreported tips, there would be an absolute bloodbath in the poorer parts of this country, as tips easily represent more of their income than wages. Fortunately untaxed tips have dropped dramatically now that fewer and fewer people are using cash for transactions, so the IRS has had to take no such corrective actions.
Thank you for showing that. Most people don't understand these things.
My son was a waiter and did very well for himself while in school. Far better than working in my fast food restaurant when he was younger and I paid more than minimum wage.
Given the choice, I had several staff quit on me because they got a waitressing job and getting tips to make more money was the reason. I had several waitresses tell me that was the reason they would not work for me.
My son always tips 20% or more, no matter the service, because he was a waiter once. I tell him he's foolish as I tip 15% for good service and adjust up/down accordingly.
While my experience in Europe has been just fine, in Italy, Germany, and the UK. Though in the UK I was confused about the lack of service, until I realized that I needed to order at the bar.
There is a stereotype that blacks are worse tippers than whites. As https://www.ebony.com/news-views/are-black-people-really-bad... comments, it might be because blacks have "Insufficient education about tipping", or "a loop of circular behavior where Blacks have been traditionally discriminated against, Blacks expect to be treated poorly and treat servers with disdain, servers treat Black patrons with less care because they “know” Blacks tip poorly, and Blacks continue to tip poorly because they continue to get substandard service." (there are a couple of other proposed reasons).
See for example http://www.tippingresearch.com/uploads/JFSBR_race_revision_a... which includes the quote “I will not take Black tables unless I have no other option; call me racist, but I also walk out with more money than the people who end up with them.”
Yes, if you are a black American, you might get rudeness and lack of service in service in your own country - because wait staff think you won't tip well.
Then go to Japan on your next trip, and you will realize that no, tips are not necessary at allow for excellent service. Not only that, but you will also realize that service in the United States is nothing to boast about.
There's a bit of survivorship bias; those who don't do well on tips don't last in tipped industries, both because tips are a big part of income and because tips are used as performance metrics.
In most of the EU you tip for good service. IE; only if your food came in a timely fashion, was not mis-prepared or incorrect and if the wait-staff are generally being polite, kind, courteous.
The idea is that you’re rewarding good service, not that your bound by social convention to give a percentage extra on top of what was agreed upon when you read the menu.
While we’re on the subject, the idea of excluding tax on good until you reach checkout is absolutely insane to me.
I'm a manager in a US restaurant. I've run the numbers and, given the maximum price increases our market could bear, the upper 3/4ths of our wait staff would make ~$1-2 less an hour than they do now.
I was also a waiter in the restaurant. I hated the stress, but could find no jobs with comparable schedule flexibility/required qualifications that paid as well.
Ouch, having worked in cafes and restaurants as an undergrad I pretty much always tip 20%. Is it absurd? Of course, but given how badly most waitstaff are paid, the idea that you will somehow eliminate the practice by stiffing a few barristas seems both sadistic and highly unlikely to change the world. Until robots hand me muffins, I accept it as a tax on eating out.
It's only "stiffing" if we start with the assumption they are supposed to be tipped.
I'm not well-versed in the history of coffee shops, but it seems to me that it is not a well-established norm -- as compared to bars and restaurants, for example. But I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken about this.
Coffee shops are a unique one, though traditionally you tip the barista in particular, not the cashier. It's been somewhat on its way out culturally over the past few decades in the US however.
The countries that have been consuming espresso for decades before it became common in the US don't treat making an espresso-based beverage as a skilled trade. I recall ordering a perfectly serviceable latte at a gas station in Israel.
Yes. Any front-of-house restaurant staff that gets a share of tips are subject to those laws, and it's ridiculous. Worse, some restaurants even force the tips to be split between dishwashers, who actually are making minimum wage in many cases, so waitstaff get crushed even harder.
It's illegal to force waiters to split tips with non-tipped workers unless the restaurant gives up the "tip credit" (referring to the portion of the minimum wage that they get to treat as paid out of tips) for the split tips.
>If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any week, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate
I'm old enough to remember a time that giving extra money to someone for handing you a cup of coffee would be thought absurd. Sit down eatery? No problem, there's prior art before I was born, disagree though I might. But this recent bullshit of "tip, because my employer doesn't pay me enough", whether its Starbucks, McDonalds, or your fave local coffee shop: yeah, fuck that. McDonalds doesn't need my subsidy.
No, but the person to makes and hands over your coffee does.
> I'm old enough to remember a time that giving extra money to someone for handing you a cup of coffee would be thought absurd.
Then you're probably also old enough to remember when wage increases tracked with productivity increases, or when minimum wage kept up with inflation and the cost of living.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but what is the line of which workers to tip? Gas station employees do a similar job, and I have never seen anyone tip them. I have very rarely seen anyone tip a Subway sandwich worker even though they typically do more customization and work than a Starbucks employee.
I'm old enough to remember not needing to tip at starbucks or Panera, but not old enough to remember minimum wage keeping up with inflation.
The place where I first noticed the "tip your cashier" thing happening was the Panera at my university. Why in the hell would I tip someone who's job is literally to take my order, and maybe hand me a pastry? These people aren't making minimum wage either, I had some friends there and the job paid significantly more.
I didn't even know tipping at cafes was a thing. Don't they earn above minimum wage? I know waitresses get 2$/h, but baristas, they must get above 8$/h.
I don't eat at McD's, but you general see that cafes have a tip jar at the register (not Starbucks, but your local coffee shop, that is), while chains of all sorts don't. Oddly this isn't because they pay their staff a fortune... (though as was pointed out earlier, perversely many states have laws which allow for paying below minimum wage for jobs with tips, so ultimately no one in food service can really win).
I worked my way through college as a waiter and bartender. My first job was as a golf caddie. I've dried cars at car washes and operated a rickshaw. In all of those cases, there is an understanding that a tip is part of the purchase. More importantly, there is some actual work being done or service rendered for the tip (less so for bartenders, which do get paid above minimum wage).
Buying a muffin at a coffee shop and not paying a premium on top of the asking price is not sadistic. It's a normal commercial transaction. Based on your logic, why don't we tip fast-food workers, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, etc...
> More importantly, there is some actual work being done or service rendered for the tip.
No, that isn’t for the tip, that is literally the job they are paid to do by their employer. Choosing to tip should only be if they have gone above and beyond what you would expect. I’m from the UK and find the US tipping culture bizzare and stressful - I had truly terrible service in a restaurant in New York once and they literally chased me to the door when they realised I hadn’t tipped and threatened to call the police if I didn’t tip him at least 10%.
I'm saddened that this is part of what you remember when you think about visiting the US. You absolutely should not tip if the potential recipient of the tip treated you poorly.
They were bullying you by threatening to call the police. The cops would have been annoyed to show up for that, and nothing about what you did is illegal.
Forgetting to tip is a fairly common tourist memory, though fortunately I've never had any threat. Not knowing when or how much to tip is also a problem.
- I was 12 the first time we visited the US. My dad was at first confused, since the hotel porter was hanging around, then he was embarrassed, as he didn't have any small cash.
- In New Orleans on a business trip, I kept forgetting to tip the barmaid. Other people at the bar were throwing her dollar bills on my behalf.
- Most recently, chip cards were fairly new — although I've had one for 14 years. I don't want to tip by card, it complicates my expenses, but navigating the dark-pattern UI on the payment machines was often confusing. Several waiters assumed I was stuck with the "new" chip card.
That's fine, but my problem with that line of thinking is that the norms we live with now have evolved to reward the workers who are serving the most affluent guests, not necessarily those working the hardest or who are paid the least.
For example, do you make a point of tipping the cashier at McDonalds? I'd bet that if you tried to and a manager saw you they would refuse it because the company doesn't want others to feel compelled to tip because they want to retain their image of a low-cost restaurant. Coffee shops selling $5 cups of coffee don't have that concern because people who frequent those places probably are a lot less price sensitive than those who eat at fast food restaurants.
15% used to be the norm across the board and adjusted from there based on the level of service. Now 20% is expected regardless of the level of service. In restaurants where a 20% gratuity is included in the bill I've noticed a significant drop-off in the level of service, even to the point where I would tip less than 20% if given the option, and I say that as someone who worked as a waiter at one point.
In my neck of the woods, servers make $12/hour. Before tips, because LA no longer lets restaurants rely on tips for wages. (And that's increasing to $15/hour by 2020). So unless service is really good, I default to 10%.
And quite frankly, it's disgusting that the person who spends may 30 seconds providing service gets X% of the bill when 99% of the work is done in the kitchen by guys who don't get paid anything extra.
ACH and CC networks shoulder the burden of maintaining the system, fraud checks, chargebacks, etc. They provide a convenience function that lets me avoid having to carry cash around everyone, and lets the vendor minimize their cash-related costs. It's all worth the 2-5% they charge (and if you're paying more than that you've got bad negotiating skills). Cash isn't cheap--after security-related expenses, it costs just as much if not more than accepting credit cards, but the expenses aren't as easily traced back to individual transactions.
A guy bringing me a plate someone else cooked has not earned 20% of the bill.
The merchant doesn't need "the system or fraud checks" to sell lattes. Furthermore they get hit with chargebacks, which are a feature offered by the CC, not the coffee shop. You're justying why business A shoulders business B's expense. That's like saying Visa should wipe down the espresso machine.
I'm highlighting this part because it's one of the main contributing factors to dining out less and less, for me, and that includes coffee shops. I always tip well when going out; ergo, I don't go out as often.
Going off of the "I'm not very unique" rule of thumb, businesses are losing some amount of money because of tipping culture.
>businesses are losing some amount of money because of tipping culture
Only in the most trivial sense that people know that, between sales tax and tipping, they're going to be paying a price that's 25-30% more than what's printed on the menu. And most people have some degree of price elasticity.
But I honestly can't imagine it matters much whether those adders are folded into the price up-front or you just know that you're going to be paying more than the printed price when you get the bill.
Path dependence. The problem is that, if just one restaurant does it, a lot of people see the higher prices and don't realize a service charge and sales tax is included at that one particular restaurant. It's not unheard of to do but it's very uncommon and mostly doesn't work out well. (Plus both waiters and customers are mostly just used to the current system.)
This is starting to happen, albeit slowly. It's tied in to a push to equalize income between the back and front of the house. In the currently-prevailing model, back of the house is totally screwed money-wise relative to the front.
In the first place, I tip well partly because of information asymmetry: I don't know how well the staff are paid from one place to the next. This means that one place may pay their staff pretty well, and I'm still adding 20% to the cost of my ticket, and another place may pay their staff pretty poorly. This is placing the two businesses on an uneven competitive footing, and encouraging more businesses to pay their staff as poorly as they can get away with. This may be business-as-usual in the current American business culture, but the end result is that I'm subsidizing bad business practices.
I'm also subsidizing poor tippers. I know there are people out there who, for whatever reason they justify to themselves, don't tip, and I know that there are some businesses that don't pay a living wage (probably most, today), so I try to cover an extra portion of that cost.
It's also removing much of the incentive for food service businesses to seek out untapped efficiencies. I'm pretty sure labor costs are the largest expense category for any food service business, yet they continue to pile on more staff because people like me are helping them get away with it. I can order a Starbucks from an app on my phone, right? So why is there someone at a cash register who punches my order in to a machine when they've already got the software that would let me do it myself?
If tipping were banished and these businesses had to pay all of their staff a fair wage, it's likely that my total bill would go down.
As somebody from a state with a high minimum cash wage I am astounded that servers still expect 15-20% tip because of the cultural influence from states that have a cash wage set at federal minimum. I am curious how you feel about tipping 20% to a server you know is making $9-15/hr.
But when pushing, it's worth it to be mindful of where you exert your force. The causal flow (from not tipping to wages being raised to the point where tipping is not necessary) is indirect enough that it is uncertain to effect the desired change. Might there be other paths to achieving this goal?
I dislike the tip-at-purchase-time paradigm. I haven't even seen my order yet, how am I supposed to evaluate how much of a tip it warranted? But that gets to the heart of it really: tipping is more about subsidizing payroll than rewarding good service.
DoorDash does this as well, and I don't understand why. Why should I commit to a tip before my order is delivered? At one occasion the delivery guy completely forgot about my delivery until I called 1 hour later saying I still see the food waiting at the restaurant. I still had to pay the tip.
This is the heart of it for me. If I tip cash, even if the tip jar is next to the register I always make a point of going back to tip at the end of my drink / food if the experience was good. A digital version should be some kind of contactless payment point at the door where you can easily set a tip amount and tap your phone / card.
Since we're talking about coffee shops: the Starbucks app allows to add a tip for a certain period of time after a a mobile order (something like an hour)
Do you use Square every day? The last time I went somewhere with specifically a Square reader was probably two weeks ago. Even if I went back tomorrow, am I going to remember my last experience enough to judge a tip?
Even if I go to the same coffee shop and use the same Square every morning, unless I'm holding a grudge it's de facto back to front end tipping rather than upon services rendered.
The tip at purchase time paradigm is in many cases an artifact of integrating credit card workflows with cash businesses with established pay up front and tip after workflows (fast casual dining, etc.) If you are against it and not against tipping, just bring cash for tipping and tip on the back end.
Tipping on a digital device (iPad register) also doesn't make sense because the tip money is going straight to the bank account the owner connected to the point of sale software.
Not the parent but:
I would imply exactly such a thing. Just like how, in some/most states you are supposed to pay a tipped employee minimum wage if they don't make the equivalent in tips.
As far as I can tell from having worked in food service: that payout never happens.
I was a waiter for years. I personally never made under min, but I knew people who did. They got paid. I also got paid every cent of every cc tip. What are you basing this on?
Sure, and murder is still a thing even though we have laws against it. All laws are broken by some people, but the matter at hand isn't "does this ever happen?", it's "does this happen so often as to constitute a massive and consistent pattern of wage theft?"
I owned two Domino's pizzas for 15 years. I paid every cent in credit card tips to the employee, and never passed along the transaction fees. There were routinely thousands in tips weekly and I never even thought of keeping any of it. I started at the store answering the phones and did years of delivering. I understand tip money is the difference between eating and going hungry.
What you've described is a state crime, a federal crime, and a violation of several different state and federal labor laws. Easily a dime worth of prison time, plus criminal fines, plus civil penalties, plus having to pay out the stolen tips to your employees with treble damages for the intentional tort you've comitted.
Not really worth it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the calculus is so bad that it's extremely rare to happen at scale. Especially if there's a digital trail run by a third party...
I can understand why you might think it never happens if you are completely ignorant of the facts on the ground but nevertheless familiar with the criminal and civil sanctions involved. It's about lack of enforcement.
I see a short article about a few dinner parties this author attended wherein the owners were keeping the tip. Am I missing the real data here? Is the real story somewhere else? That's a far cry from "this happens _all_ the time."
It has been years since I read her series of articles on the topic of tipping, although I remember it being influential at the time. It's possible I linked to the wrong thing, but in my defense I didn't realize that my post would be required to rise to the level of mathematical proof. Ahem.
Obviously, none of these are scientific studies but I don't know if there are any done in the industry.
What I'm trying to point out is: Wage theft of all types happens all the time and I've known people too poor to risk losing their job who suffered under this issue.
I'm sure it doesn't happen often -at scale-, in chain restaurants with big corporate backing but in an industry where most close after their first year and the workers are frequently undocumented or transient. It happens.
When the employers multiply these consequences by the (extremely low) probability of a legal claim, they may just decide that it's worth it to pocket the tips...
This is my personal experience from having worked in a restaurant when I was 17: the owner would "pool" the total tips for the night and then distribute them to the workers before we went home. The owner said pooling would keep the tips distribution "fair" because some workers wouldn't get a chance to wait tables if they had to handle takeouts behind the register for most of a shift.
However, pretty quickly us workers discovered the math wasn't adding up. We would pool $300 of tips for the night and only have $200 equally distributed to us. When we asked the owner, he would say something like "you must have added wrong" or "the receipts only show $200", which was bullshit. After that happened, us workers made it a point to always make up an excuse to the customers why we couldn't handle electronic tips, and then immediately pocket the cash tips and split them ourselves.
Fortunately, most of us left before the owner caught on to the point of becoming confrontational (it was a short job before university). Moral of the story is some guy in his mid-40s, who made enough money to drive a BMW, felt that he could deceive some young kids because he had the chance. In hindsight, now I know more about things like labor laws and enforcement hotlines, but at the time most of us were also being paid under the table (which we didn't even understand because this was our first real job) and were scared of having to face the IRS and lose the money we made.
That was the first thing I asked the barista once I became a regular and tipped Them: do you actually get these tips? She reassured me they did.
What bothers me is the ACH networks still get their cut of the tip (assuming they get a percentage of sale and not a flat rate). No visa, you don't need 5% of the waitress hard work.
You could choose to ditch the credit cards and just go cash only. Of course, you'd have to deal with your customers spending significantly less money. Plus you'd have to deal with the extra security costs of collecting, storing, and moving that money to the bank.
The reason that vendors accept credit cards is because it's usually worth the additional costs. If you don't think your credit card processor is worth the cost, try dropping them and seeing how it affects your sales. In some instances, vendors have dropped processors entirely (like Amex and Discover) without noticeably impacting their bottom line.
I love it. No awkwardness of a zero tip after being served. Anyway there are very few places I've seen with that where there isn't also a tip jar. If you indeed felt the service was tip-worthy you can drop a tip in the jar on the way out.
I don't understand why people (buyers) are so thin-skinned about this. Leave a tip or don't. Whatever.
Even if the tip were scheduled differently, how often do you find yourself adjusting tip in an attempt to adjust service?
If you get good service, will good tip ensure a good experience the next time around? If someone gave you bad service, do you make it known? I think most would prefer not to say anything.
Yeah, admittedly, I almost never adjust my tip amount based on perceived service quality. I don't think tipping generally affect service quality. The only way I really react to bad service is by not going to the establishment.
How is this any different than not tipping with cash? Everyone behind you in line can see whether you put anything into the tip jar. Or is it that there's some plausible deniability that you can claim with not having cash which isn't present for card tips?
You have to make a specific action to not tip in one. The other if you make they minimal amount of actions (pay for your item, grab the item) then you haven't taken the action of not tipping.
Also the visual difference between tipping 20% and 10% is huge with this, it's hard to tell with cash and change
and I tip 15 percent, not 20, so if there's no 15 option I just give 10. And that's only in a sit down restaurant I never tip if I'm not being waited on.
“But my A/B tests proved that a 20% rather than a 15% default led to an increase in total tipping, and vindicating my claim of a downside-free benefit to ‘nudging’ customers to tip more!”
The introduction of iPad-tip-for-everything ridiculousness has made me reevaluate tipping in general. I've found myself tipping less even for the more normal things, all because the iPads forced me to start thinking about it.
Sometimes I pay cash to avoid the awkwardness of the whole tipping thing with the iPad. This allows me to choose to tip what I want rather than default to 20%.
Oh no I don't think we should be tipping anybody, but these are the industries that abuse their employees.
Hair stylists, taxis, sit-down restaurants, they all usually need tips. You don't tip the stylist though if it's the owner as of course they would just set their price.
It's really just a matter of whether it's customary, which is only loosely related to whether it actually makes any sense.
Your taxi driver gets most if not all of your fare, but it's still expected to tip them. A grocery store cashier gets none of your payment directly, but you don't tip them. Don't try to make sense of it, just do what others do.
Then there are a fair number of cases where reasonable people disagree. Maid at hotel, others at hotels/parking attendants/etc., Uber/Lyft, the subject of this article, limo driver, bartender (in a bar or at an event), and so forth. You can tip in all those situations but I'd argue it's not the strong expectation that tipping at a sit-down restaurant is.
Those are amusing examples, as taxi drivers are traditionally tipped, though not as much anymore. For taxi drivers and hair stylists, it's a bit of a different scale.
Taxis/Ubers, I usually just add a couple bucks to the fare, or just pay with a slightly larger bill on purpose, and have them keep the change (if a $17 fare, give a $20). Similarly, bellhops at hotels are a similar role of giving a couple dollars instead of a percentage once they've brought your bag to your room (as there is no exchange of money during the entire process). Valet drivers are another example.
Hairstylists should be tipped because their payment structure is different. They aren't usually employed by the place you get your hair cut at, rather they lease a chair from the location. They are forced to use the prices displayed, and they get a small cut of that. You then tip them additionally depending on how well of a cut they did. I personally usually do (with a $15 haircut as an example) a $5-6 tip for a good cut, and $3-4 if it's just OK.
Where exactly are these unwritten tipping laws written? I've been living in US for the last one year and I feel that the entire tipping culture is a social custom that you are expected to adhere by. I was told that I should always tip at least a $1 per drink at a bar or cafe and I've been doing that but I notice that people go for "No Tip" on these iPads.
So if most people are choosing "No Tip", where did this unwritten rules of tipping go. If I should be concerned of living wage, why is there no consumer pressure on business owners to make these changes? If people keep on complying with this unwritten culture of tipping, most people will always be in a dilemma when they are expected to tip.
Not tipping underpaid staff is a dick move, that's why you have to tip. if you want to change it, lobby your government or write to the business owners. Don't penalize $4/hr staff just to make a stupid point.
The unwritten rule is, tip your less than minimum wage staff that is working for you.
Some advice from a less recent immigrant: tip everywhere. It's much simpler than figuring out the rules, esp (as the existence of the article points out) the rules change.
The old 15% became 20%. The places you used to tip (solely personal service situations like a waiter or hairdresser) became everywhere.
If it was done right, everyone would be paid well, there would be no tips, and your stuff would just cost 20% more. I find it simpler to just tip 20% on everything.
I personally think it's because employers choose to lower wages and prices, and externalize it to their customers. Also, the government chooses to set low minimum wage boundaries. If people did not need tips, I doubt we would see tip jars everywhere.
No, the old 15% is not 20% (it’s a percentage so it’s automatically inflation adjusted with the price of food), and you definitely don't need to tip everyone. I don't even mind not tipping waiters, it's not the customer's job to fix stupid minimum wage laws.
No guilt. No tip. Never. If they want more than the listed price they should raise the listed price. Social customs/expectations/guilt/whatever be damned. I never tip. Never have, never will.
That's not stiffing, the price is written on a check, so what you probably mean is "economic transaction". Paying waiters low on the other hand is stiffing.
I do. But I never tip. They get the price they ask, that I can see before I order. That should be enough or they should change their prices/wages so tipping is not necessary. And no, I don't feel the least guilty about that.
If you want to claim to be principled about this then you should inform the waitstaff at the start of the interaction that you don't intend to tip. The price they ask has expectation of tip built in implicitly - failing to disclose that you won't tip is therefore a lie of omission. I hope you're not that sort of person.
2 thoughts. #1 - I feel you are assuming requirements about the optionality of tipping. The gratuity is optional for whatever reason, regardless of social expectations. So in my opinion one can be moral and ethical without disclosing why they don't tip.
#2 - I waited tables, and a very good waiter once told me that he gives every table the same service whether they do or don't tip, and no matter how much they tip. I feel many servers lack this mentality; which leads to more people tipping less. When I waited tables, 10% was an okay tip, 15% was stellar. Now it seems like 20% is assumed and folks have a social signalling competition to tip 25-30%. Doesn't make sense.
You're right that the gratuity is optional, but there is still a strong general expectation that most people will tip. The optionality gives the tipper discretion in any specific situation, not an indefinite free ride with no social consequences. The server wouldn't work for $2.13/hr (presumably) without the expectation, so by never tipping the GP is freeloading on the other customers.
Likewise there is an expectation of good service from waitstaff, but they're not obligated to give good service. They too have the option of giving better or worse service at their discretion. So if a server wants to give everyone equal service that's their right. But if I want to develop a reputation as a good tipper to get my service prioritized over GP by servers who differentiate then that's ok too, and rational I think.
That's simply not my problem. Why should I care? If they are unhappy with their wages they should complain to their employer. It's not my job to fix their wages.
Due to how US wage laws work for "service" employees, you _are_ somewhat of an "employer" while they're servicing you. You pay them a tip for their service. If you don't want to tip, you don't get served a sit-down meal. Stiffing is a serious asshole move, and it doesn't contribute anything positive.
Luckily I don't care one iota about that. And my bank balance likes me for it. You seem to be obsessed with how other people view your actions. I'm not. Simple as that.
That's an unfortunate attitude. I thought a lot like you, but when I realized the wage disparity here - I could afford to go eat at these fancy places, which my servers definitely could not - I chose to make it my problem.
Other people's problems are not yours, but if you can choose to help (for example, if you can afford to help), you should.
> Other people's problems are not yours, but if you can choose to help (for example, if you can afford to help), you should.
The problem with this is that by tipping you simply move the problem of underpaid waiters to the next customer and to the next day. If everyone just stopped tipping, the tips would be included in the prices, everybody would be paying taxes, and the tipping issue would just cease to exist. The prices would stay more or less the same, as those are the prices that people are willing to pay, whether the tip is already included or not.
> If everyone just stopped tipping, the tips would be included in the prices, everybody would be paying taxes, and the tipping issue would just cease to exist.
That is not my understanding of how the world works.
I agree that if the convention for the tip is a fixed percentage of the value of the purchase, then a waiter is basically guaranteed a share of the owner's revenue (revenue, not even profits!)
At the same time, the vast majority of the jobs don't warrant tips- including all waitressing jobs outside the US- and this doesn't prevent workers from making a living wage out of them.
So yes, I think that if people stopped tipping, owners would be forced to pay waiters more, and raise their prices accordingly, as everybody already does elsewhere. On the other end, it's true that waiters might end up making less money, as the revenue-sharing model might be unreasonably generous in some cases.
Now, I'm not suggesting they provide any less of a service, but I've eaten at taco carts that expect the same level of tipping (15-20%). These are places that the server definitely _could_ also eat at. If they are making the same amount of money (and possibly more), why is it still the customers responsibility to tip? At that point it isn't for the employee to make up for low wages. It is also usually paid prior to receiving your food, so it isn't for improved service. In this case the business could increase the base price and reject tips. If they directed that money to employees it would make budgeting easier for them and make no difference to the customers.
That's not a very robust moral imperative and hinges on what you mean by "afford". It also ignores the case that some people don't want your help because it would cheapen the feeling of overcoming their problems on their own.
I'm not sure it's constructive to accuse such a large category of people of not "feeling" the right way. It's not as if they're ignorant of the situation.
well, when 100,000 Iraqis where killed for 9/11, I didn't see that much outrage. Those waiters are on an open job market.
But I would just change the law: set a normal minimum wage and advertise tax included prices. And probably nudge as much as possible against the tip (I don't think it's bad enough that we need to make it a crime), but IMF has a dim view on the tip, it encourages corruption in all society.
I can guarantee that you've never worked as a waiter/waitress. This is so fundamentally insulting that I can't believe anyone actually would hold this position. When you sit down at a restaurant you are paying the wait staff to serve you. If I ever saw you a second time, I would insist you pick up your own orders, drinks, and bus your own table you skinflint.
If picking up my own plate/drink and wiping the table down after myself was an option, I would take it every time. I frequently drive to pick up the pizza/takeout I order in order to avoid tipping. In fact, many "fast casual" restaurants operate this way: at Panera Bread, you place an order at the front, get your drink cup, and receive a buzzing tile to notify you when the order is ready. Places like this have no reason to include tips.
I agree with the principle behind your choice, and even consider it laudable. However, in my opinion, your behavior is badly misguided - in fact, I'd characterise it as a naive and childish attack on innocent people. Sorry, I know that's pretty insulting, but it's my best attempt at a full and honest, but measured description of my opinion. Part of why it's so harsh is because, reading your posts, I don't think you suffer from a misunderstanding, but are rather expressing malice that, while justifiable, is being applied in a knowingly untargeted manner.
Thank you for the straight forward and honest opinion. You are right, I don't suffer from any misunderstanding. I simply don't want to pay more than advertised and I think tipping is just the wrong way to pay for services - that should just be included in the price. And then I guess I'm simply not a very empathetic person and I have no problem with other people considering me a jerk - I simply don't care. And as long as others pay something that keeps prices low for me, I benefit, so although I don't like the system it pays off nicely and I'm not ashamed to exploit that.
You say you feel no guilt because you "have no problem with other people considering me a jerk." To me, guilt has little to do with the sense that other people consider me a jerk--guilt is about the knowledge that I've hurt someone.
I think it's respectable, even admirable, to not care about what other people think of you. But if you hurt people when it benefits you and you can get away with it, it's not quite sufficient to explain it by saying "I don't care if other people think I'm a jerk." It would be more complete to simply say "I don't care if I act like a jerk."
If everyone behaved as you did, then you would get either substantially worse service or substantially more expensive restaurants. Right now you're arbitraging the good will of other people to pay for the service that you're not willing to pay, i.e., freeloading; because you're still benefiting from the current system and not the experiencing other system you'd consider to be "fair".
I'm not a fan of tipping either, but because the convention is clear and essentially universal, the waiter has a completely reasonable expectation that you will tip unless there is a problem.
If you go into the situation intending from the beginning not to follow this convention but receiving the benefits of it, then you are not acting in good faith. You are, through nonverbal communication, misleading the waiter.
Consent should matter when two parties enter into a transaction, and it should be informed consent. If you think what you're doing right now meets that standard, then next time try telling the waiter at the beginning that there will be no tip, and see if it makes a difference.
I knew someone who was a waiter at one time working full time at a restaurant. When he began work, he found some customers would not leave tips. So he would cordially ask the customers if anything was wrong with their service. And inform them that for people in his line of work where they serve their customers, their earnings are mostly based on tips.
Minimum wage is different for tip receiving employees, but if the tips do not add up to normal minimum wage, then the employer is required to supplement their paychecks until they hit minimum wage.
So if you like the service that the waiter brought you, you got to tip. The money goes to them only. If you get a haircut, then you got to tip if the barber/stylist went a couple of steps further and made sure you got the haircut you like. You got to show your appreciation for workers who went above and beyond their requirements to serve you better.
If anyone here has been to Japan, tipping is handled much more elegantly and with a lot more business integrity.
Instead of guilt-tripping customers into tipping, businesses in Japan up their prices if they need more money.
I remember once when I was in Osaka I was at a really good sushi place that I had visited several times prior. There was no tip option on the receipt (didn't see it anywhere in Japan) and there was no tip jar. I asked the server if I could tip.
She told me they couldn't accept my tip because they believed the food was priced correctly.
It was a totally different experience than in America where not tipping gets you poor service and unhappy waiters.
My parents didn't know when they went to Japan; they tipped at a restaurant and walked out the door. They were promptly chased down the street and their money handed back to them.
I had the opposite experience in Raleigh, North Carolina. My family and I ate at the ten ten Chinese buffet and when we paid I, as a good European, didn't add a tip, it just never occurred to me and anyway the only service we had received was a waiter slopping pink lemonade into glasses from a jug as he wandered around the tables.
We were chased by an irate waiter asking why I hadn't tipped. So I tipped him a single dollar bill to make it clear how little the service was worth.
In Japan, a tip can often even been seen as offensive. "What, you work at a curry shop? Here's a few hundred yen you poor thing." sort of message that is implied by tipping.
I remember someone on reddit said there was a coffee shop in Iceland that tried to be American-themed, and it had a fake tip jar with fake bills and coins in it, just to look like it would in America.
It is quite opposite way from the Korean's point of view - Korean tourists learn about the tipping culture when being asked for the tip by an American waiter for the first time in their life.
> Tipping actually originated in the aristocratic homes of feudal Europe.... When tips came to the United States in the late 1850s, 1860s, there was a massive anti-tipping movement. It was actually considered to be undemocratic, un-American.... Well that movement, which came right around the time of the emancipation of the slaves, was squashed by the restaurant industry, which argued that they should have the right to hire newly freed slaves and not pay them anything as valueless people and essentially let them live on customer tips. And so many of the first tipped workers in the United States were former slaves.
> After the Civil War, wealthy Americans began traveling to Europe in significant numbers, and they brought the tip home with them to demonstrate their worldliness. But the United States, unlike Europe, had no aristocratic tradition, and as tipping spread — like “evil insects and weeds,” The New York Times claimed in 1897 — many thought it was antithetical to American democratic ideals. “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape,”
What some of us left Europe to escape. The irony of a monolithic ‘we’ at the New York Times lamenting a return to aristocracy. I understand it was 150 years ago, still comical.
I have heard a subtly different explanation: it is considered rude to judge and tipping is in fact judging. Also, it implies that a business could deliver a substandard service, which is also judgemental.
Employers have to make up the difference if tips don't get them there though. No one should be making less than min. The issue is that min wage isn't really enough.
"Employers make up to min wage if you don't get tipped enough" is the biggest joke, because if you don't get enough tips by the end of the night a few times, employers will often slowly push you out by only offering you unfavorable shifts, or outright fire you in states with poor labor protections.
This is a weird just world view though, because tips are a lagging indicator of job performance more than anything. If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?
I view the policy which "forces" employers to makeup the differences in pay as the same one that permits them to underpay workers. Perhaps the point in net is the exploitation of the working class in restaurants.
One must question why a subset of the food service industry should be treated so differently than any other. Is the McDonalds restaurant worker (who gets no tip) just doing so well that they don't deserve the same consideration from the public as someone working in a ramen shop? Or does that employee face a different commute and living situation? The delineation is strange.
So, to be clear, I don't actually accept your premise to begin with. I was a waiter for years and never saw this sort of thing. I did see poor waiters get crappy shifts, but... well of course they did. Lacking any actual evidence I don't see where this can go.
>If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?
The point would be to... establish a _minimum_ wage, regardless of performance. What about that is confusing?
When I waited in college this sort of thing happened all the time, but that's kinda beside the point. I guess to me it's weird that tips convey a sense of whether someone "deserves" their wage, whereas there's nothing really dictating why a waiter "deserves" their money more than the cashier at a grocery store. Minimum wage jobs are minimum wage jobs, so is there a particular reason for the custom of tipping (beyond the usual "tipping helps a subset of people make more than minimum wage").
These laws should also force any business using them to visibly post the wage they're paying the employees in question. If the argument is we need to pay charity to these employees then people should see it as such. Guilting customers should cause some shame for the business.
Every place has their customs. The Japanese may not tip, but they have different customs and you have to follow them. Nobody is going to take kindly to you if you say "hey, I'm a sovereign citizen, I won't use the appropriate honorifics and I'll keep my shoes on thank you very much!"
No tipping policies in the US will never work as long as tips are untaxed. Otherwise, it is a lose-lose. Diners pay more than with tipping, servers' take-home pay is reduced. That is why most restaurants that have tried no-tipping have gone back to it.
Only cash tips are untaxed, and only if the worker evades taxes by not reporting them. Given how common card tipping is (and the article is entirely about this) I don't imagine it makes a particularly big difference.
They're just hugely underreported because the kinds of people that work off tips are people making $2.15/hr instead of actual minimum wage (which is still criminally low). That's what needs to change in this equation - paying workers what they are due.
Spoilers: Tips are taxed. It's just that loose cash without a paper trail is extremely hard to track for the IRS and most waiters aren't committing enough fraud to warrant the manpower.
Tipping won't go away until restaurant owners stop being dorks about the whole matter. They also benefit because the unaccounted for tips don't count as income to them, and thus they benefit as well.
The bottom line is, patrons get sticker shock when they see the real price of a meal. This happens when restaurants change prices after a few years because the cost of product goes up, or if they switch to paying a living wage to their employees. If the culture as a whole doesn't switch, then people are just going to keep supporting poor labor practices by the industry because they typically have their own issues to focus on.
>>That is why most restaurants that have tried no-tipping have gone back to it.
Citation absolutely needed. Many restaurants have never tried it, and many of the restaurants that have tried it kept it.
You could probably get away with shortchanging the IRS where tips were all cash but with cash declining on a value + volume perspective I think those days will be behind us soon enough.
I think a big factor in restaurants trying, and failing to implement no-tipping is that society expects to do it. A good portion of people just won't accept not doing it.
It's true, but I reckon[1] I can ask for the bill in 6 European languages :-)
I've had Danish waiters press the "No tip" button on their machine. One of them even said it was only used for "foreigners", which I took to mean Americans.
Own your privilege and tip the goddamn 15-20%. If you can afford to spend $3 on a coffee, you can afford to spend $3.60 on a coffee. You almost certainly make a lot more than the guy or girl behind the counter. (I love the iPad payment thingy because I always feel guilty never having cash to put in a tip jar.)
Your response misses the point. It isn't that someone who pays $3 for coffee can't afford the extra 60c but rather that the coffee should just cost 3.60.
Further, is there a difference between someone serving a full meal and someone that is just punching buttons?
I can sympathize with the feeling of wanting to share with those less fortunate, and that tipping provides me with a non-awkward way of doing so (instead of "here, want a dollar?"). But this:
> If you can afford to spend $3 on a coffee, you can afford to spend $3.60 on a coffee.
It might be that $3 is right at the limit of what I am willing to spend on a cup of coffee, and that doesn't deserve a "check your (expletive) privilege."
When a coffee costs $3, the marginal buyer will be willing to pay $3. But many other buyers would have been willing to pay more, i.e. they would've bought the coffee at $3.50 or $4. In economics, this is called "consumer surplus." Tipping as it exists in the U.S. is a way to share some of this consumer surplus with the wait staff. If you really would not have bought the coffee at $3.50, then don't tip. But the majority of people probably would've bought the coffee at $3.50 or even $4.50. Unless you are really one of those marginal customers, you should just tip.
(Note that people tipping is also good for the marginal customer. Like other forms of price discrimination, it allows the provider to price the product lower and allows customers to purchase the product who otherwise could not have done so.)
This is strange and not at all how I think about tipping. I tip if the service can be a differentiator (servers, bartenders, baristas at smaller coffee shops). If the person is just giving me change and handing me some food/drink and barely interacting with me, a tip really isn't warranted IMO.
Why would I think about it that way? That is the exact attitude that I do not want prevalent. I actually LIKE the tipping system for the traditional service-heavy jobs like the ones I mentioned, because it separates the product and service. I think that makes sense and I generally tip at least 20%. Generally the servers I know agree with this, although there might be some survivorship bias.
With other jobs (e.g., a cashier), the position is more of an operational necessity for the employer than it is a differentiator for the customer, and in that case, I'd like to see the employer responsible for higher wages even if that means higher prices. I do not see that happening if they are let off the hook by guilt-ridden customers deciding to tip every single employee at every single transaction.
At the places I go, sometimes your $2-$3 coffee purchase will show suggested tip amounts of $1, $2, $3 on the display. Generally I'll tip a buck when I get coffee from a fancy coffee shop. Despite that I don't think it's unreasonable for people to want the price listed at the counter to incorporate the full cost of goods and services.
It is reasonable, but it's also reasonable to factor in the actual situation, which is that tipping is the norm in the US. You can either make the coffee $3.60 - and seem more expensive than the place next door - or you can make it $3 and assume everyone tips.
Also, if you make it $3.60, everyone will still try to tip.
After losing my keister in the housing bubble I made a deal with myself to never use credit again and to always tip at least 20% to make the world a better place. Pretty much all non-salary jobs are underpaid now by a factor of 2-4 so tips can add up to more than a paycheck. I also like to think that it makes up for the people who undertip or don't tip at all.
Edit: I now have one $2000 expense card that I pay off each month and typically stays under a 50% balance to build my credit.
I think this is most likely a fallacy. A positive action by me to increase wages shouldn't be blamed for the negative actions of others (mostly business owners) to suppress wages.
I could see taking responsibility though for not choosing to eat at more expensive restaurants that generally pay their staff better.
Probably what it comes down to is that restaurants are entertainment so aren't needed by society the way that grocery stores are. Then again, so is just about everything else in our economy. 10% of our labor could supply all our basic needs, the rest is just wasted keeping up with the Joneses. What I'm saying is that there may be no free market solution to the service industry being underpaid, which is why I support a $15 minimum wage and universal basic income, among other things.
Not tipping in America rarely if ever gets you poor service. You have to return to the same business and happen to get served by the same server enough times for them to remember you. It does deprive the server of a living wage.
A British friend of mine was chased down the street and harangued by a waitress when he tipped 10% (pretty standard in the UK for decent-if-not-amazing service). I get the feeling they'd remember someone who left a tip which was that underwhelming, let alone no tip, wouldn't they?
Was this a small family-owned cafe? I know a lot of people in the service industry who would love to chase down certain customers down the street if they were allowed to.
When dealing with 8 or so tables, I generally wouldn't be able to remember who sat where unless they were particularly notable, ex. extra messy, or annoying. I'd generally get decent tips too. few dollars - five dollars on a buffet lunch meal ranging from $8 a person.
That said, its just the right thing to do for servers are trying their best. Finding a few dollars per table makes their day a little brighter.
The UK may be one of the most potentially confusing places. Some places where a waiter takes your order include "optional" service charges and others don't. And, of the ones that don't, some prompt you to add a tip on the PoS terminal and others don't.
It's not really confusing. Basically, don't tip anywhere except restaurants with table service where you pay at the table after the food. Then it is 10% (unless they did particularly good or bad service).
Yes, but you're only given the opportunity to add a tip to your credit card some of the time even when a service charge isn't added. I guess you're expected to leave some cash in that case.
Then maybe the server should tell the customer how much they need to be tipped?
"Welcome to AppleBees. My name is Trevor and I need an additional $24.89 in tips today so that my employer isn't obligated to pay me the minimum wage for this state."
Also, should I be under-tipping waitstaff that I think are rich enough?
Employers have to make up the difference if tipped employees don't make enough tips to meet the minimum wage. However, minimum wage is often not a living wage.
> Employers have to make up the difference if tipped employees don't make enough tips to meet the minimum wage
This is not true in all states. Kentucky has no provision for this, e.g. (I worked in restaurants through college, so I have hands on experience here.)
Employers use tips as a performance metric, and particularly use needing to top-up an employee's tips as a firing cue, so in practice in places where cash tips are possible employees will often, at a minimum, report sufficient cash tips to avoid top-up even if they don't recieve them.
I've noticed this with food trucks (like the article mentions) and some mall food court places. It definitely feels awkward. It's resulted in me avoiding these types of places or using cash. It's kind of a relief to know that it bothers other people.
The 'politics' of tipping aside, one thing that really grinds my gears is that they calculate the tip after taxes are applied. I feel that the tips should be calculated based on the exchange I had with the establishment/person and that the taxes should considered separate from our interaction. Like, here's the 20% tip on the 100$ I spent. Not, here's the 20% tip on the $100 + 5% tax, $105 total. I know why they do this, it's more money to them, but, to me, it's disingenuous (or they don't realize it being done this way, which may be worse).
It's not really obscured. Actual costs and taxes are stated separately on every receipt or invoice. It's just that the advertised price has to include taxes.
It also has two VAT rates (MwSt A and B), and each item is marked according to the rate. The yoghurt and müsli has a lower rate than the soft drinks and electronics.
Yeah, and for a really capitalistic reason: you can compare a night at the restaurant with a night at the movie to allocate your budget, wheras in the US you have to know the tax on movie tickets, the tax on food (good luck, theses are defined by town), and the tip you will leave.
Capitalism only work if both side of the transaction have the same information, that's how Stiglitz got his Nobel prize. (another US trope: collecting the Nobel prizes and never reading the papers)
The convention in the US is to compute the tip on the pre-tax amount. If the pre-tax price is $10, a 20% tip is $2 and 8% tax is $0.80, for a total of $12.80.
Now, some of this software has come along and tried to sneak in a change to the formula where the tip is computed on the post-tax amount. They take $10, add 8% tax to get $10.80, and then compute 20% of that for the tip, for a total of $12.96.
They have deceptively changed the tip rate from 20% to 21.6%.
Whether prices are listed tax inclusive or tax exclusive isn't the issue. Even with tax-inclusive pricing like Europe has, it still would have been possible to sneak in a change to the formula for computing the tip.
> They have deceptively changed the tip rate from 20% to 21.6%.
It's simply a bug. I got a suggested tip amount on a bar bill, the other day and it was clearly derived from the total of all the food and beverage, before taxes. It was all there in writing, and the figures were easy for me to check in my head.
Oh, with drinks it's even harder to calculate in the US. The 'typical' tip, regardless of (a reasonable) price is $1 flat. For a $3 domestic, that's a ~33% tip. For a $7 microbrew that's ~14% tip. Even with $10 martinis, $1 is 'typical'. Trying to factor that all in to the tip on the bill makes for a heck of a problem, especially after a few drinks!
I just meant that to simplify literally everything you could just work only in post-tax numbers like the rest of the world does.
Obviously this would indeed increase tip amount, but it would definitely decrease confusion and probably fix itself over the long run if the new tip amount was too big.
Also, at least here in Norway, the service workers have to pay taxes on the tips. How does this work in other countries? It it just a way to dodge taxes for the owners?
Minimum wage laws also applies to the pre-tip salary so it's not really expected most places unless you get exceptional service. I've never seen "pre-calculated" tips either here or elsewhere in Europe.
I feel that the tips should be calculated based on the exchange I had with the establishment/person
You're free to calculate the tip however you like. Just because some junior programmer took the easy way out to make the math easier doesn't mean you have to along with it. I don't recall a digitized tip screen that didn't let me enter a custom amount.
True, but it is dishonest at best and negligent at worst. The 'error' is in their favor, not the customers. It sends a bad signal that they are willing to 'cheat' you over less than a dollar. What else could they be 'cheating' the customer on?
This is configurable in the point of sale system. In my experience at local places it seems relatively evenly split between pretax and posttax. Not clear if there's a consistent default across all the various POS systems.
Tipping shouldn't be based on a percentage of the bill either, it should be based on the service. If you give me good service, it doesn't matter if I spent $10 or $100, you should be rewarded the same.
I have kids, and I know they can be a pain for servers. If they handle my kids well (e.g. sitting us in a booth near a wall is better than a table in the middle of the room) and/or my kids make a mess, I'll leave a bigger tip. If they ignore is for more affluent looking customers, I'll leave a smaller tip. When I bring my kids, I'm not paying a sitter, so that money is up for grabs.
My wife and I will often order and give some to the kids instead of them having their own meal (they only pick at it anyway), so basing the tip on the bill isn't a very good way to do it. I also don't like to buy drinks (I don't drink alcohol and I prefer to avoid sugar), so my bill will always be way less than someone who goes all out.
After all, those muffins just materialized in the display case, everything here functions so seamlessly that I don't really know why these self-styled 'employees' are cluttering up the place.
tell me this kind stranger, what is it I do tip for? 'cause I've never figured this out, is the muffin supposed to land itself in my hand or is the plate supposed to walk itself from the cook to me. these are the basics of any restaurant. why should I have to pay 'extra' for this? and who decided 20% is the right tip amount for the right way to deliver your food to you. OTOH if it is optional then why frown when I decide to exercise my options.
As I see it its just a way for restaurants to punt the responsibility of providing livable wages to workers and externalizing every nickle and dime to me the consumer. its just a way to put you on the spot and shame you into paying extra.
Because the employer wants to display a low price to attract you into the store, labor protections in the US tend to be weak, and employers tend not to like transparency about their labor costs - it's an uninteresting distraction to most consumers and a free gift to the competition. There's a first mover disadvantage and if the relationship between employer and staff is adversarial then employees generally lack leverage in corporate-decision-making.
I'm confused. If the point of your commenting is that tipping is the best way to achieve the desired outcome (of employees being paid for unseen labor), then I would have expected your original comment to explain that, instead of just vaguely hinting that they do indeed deserve to be paid more. I didn't think anyone was disputing the latter.
Tipping is the best way to achieve the desire outcome of hospitality workers being adequately paid until there's a plan to address the first-mover issue I raised. I also want a frictionless consumer experience but I recognize that there are competing incentives between corporate actors which obstruct optimization.
I really liked it when Uber started up and tips were not part of the experience. That was always an annoying part of taxis.
Now that it's standard for Uber and similar companies, well, it sucks but there we are. It's always been customary to tip taxi drivers, so it's not weird, just an unfortunate failure to change the culture.
I never tipped Uber drivers, but I stopped using Uber before they added the option to tip through the app. On Lyft, I've always tipped ~15% if the car was clean and the driving seemed safe, often more for <$10 rides. From what I've read, it's not easy to make a good living driving for Uber/Lyft, so adding a bit of a tip doesn't bother me too much.
Sometimes I take a regular cab home from the airport because the Port Authority has (seemingly) intentionally made using app-based services as inconvenient as possible. At least now everyone has Square for credit card payments, but the cab drivers often have the minimum automatic tip set to 25% (or even 30%!) so I have to take the time to manually enter something more reasonable. I'm sure they get a significant number of passengers who are in a hurry and can't be bothered to do so.
Back in college when I drove pizza delivery, I used to like being assigned to the upper class neighborhoods.. Nice and safe. That is until, in my experience, I saw how little they tipped, and how much they expected for it. Yet when I delivered in the neighborhoods full of gangs, working class folks, and migrant farmworkers, I'd receive generous tips for my delivery. It was quite striking. The poor know what a tip means to another poor person.
I tip not because of guilt, or because I feel like I need to pay for the service.
I tip because I frequent local restaurants, bars, coffee bars, etc - and the 20% is a little good will towards the establishment. How can I walk around complaining about Amazon and big corp dominance when I won't even cough up 20% for a small local place?
*note how I'm only mentioning local establishments. To hell with everyone else
I tend to tip more than average, though I usually consider small counter transactions (like a $3 coffee) to be worth a 15% tip max. I don't like when the kiosks are configured to either not have 15% as an option, or make it look like the bare minimum. I do feel that social pressure from the people behind me or the cashier to tip at least 20% which is the middle option on some of these, or on some even 25%. Those I feel are often quite high for the level of service.
I grab an ice cream about once a week. It's normal Sysco ice cream, nothing fancy, but the location is always popular with a line. The cashier aggressively points out the tipping buttons and watches closely while you make the selection. I watch nearly every person ahead of me tip a dollar for a 4 dollar ice cream. A dollar every thirty seconds. I'm quite jealous of that hourly rate.
What I would love is to use tech to be able to split the tips. In a restaurant I'd love to tip the guys in the kitchen who went to culinary school, the guy who worked in the fields to grow and collect the vegetables, the people who cleaned the restaurant. As for the person that wrote down your order and asked if "everything is OK", they can go jump.
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[ 1010 ms ] story [ 6907 ms ] thread> In Connecticut, Mr. Dimyan, who says he feels his $3 coffee is pricey enough as it is, vented about the electronic tip prompts in a Twitter post earlier this month.
> Square replied from its official Twitter account: “Tap `No Tip.’”
Or.... Pay cash for a $3.00 item?
2. It takes me about 10 minutes to make a cappuccino and clean up the mess. And I'm pretty experienced with a nice setup. I am paid a lot more than $6/hour. Hell, my college side gig paid a lot more than $6/hour.
3. Coffee shops are a nice place to get work down outside of work (eg side projects or self-learning). Especially relevant for those with kids at home.
So for a $3 drink, he's paying $1-$2 for an hour or more of shared work space and 10 minutes of saved labor time.
That seems like a fair deal.
And this is assuming that it's even possible for him to make the drink he wants when he wants it. If he works in an office without an espresso machine, it might just be straight up impossible for him to make the coffee he wants when he wants it.
Now, maybe Folgers from a drip machine should be good enough. But if we're going to be pragmatic robots, we should really just buy super cheap caffeine powder in bulk and mix it into our free water.... Folgers is for snobby suckers. Plus, I bet you have some hobbies/mini-luxuries I don't care about and could scoff at ;-)
Do HNers still use cash? It's been years since I carried a wallet that has a slot for cash.
and cause I like to play cards.
Yes. And not even for the ultra-privacy-minded people.
I use cash for bodegas (small corner stores in NYC) because they have card minimums I don't want to hit.
... what?
Tipping was something that the patricians/bourgie upper class did to help uplift the waiters/service staff in Europe. It caught on in the USA in the late 1800s and fell out of favor from that upper class in Europe by then.
Largely, USA coopted a "noble gesture" from wealthy Europeans and it has persisted ever since for like a century.
Anyways, I hate tipping as well.
That's another wrinkle that many people don’t know about, right? Tipping in the United States actually dates back to slavery.
The origin of tipping is really the feudal system, it’s this idea of noblesse oblige. But when tipping came to the United States, it had a real racial tinge to it, because, originally, the workers who earned tips were almost exclusively black workers—they were newly freed slaves.
There was this massive anti-tipping movement to protest the practice, a resounding populist movement that actually got anti-tipping bills passed in six states across the country, including Washington state and many southern states. What’s interesting is that that movement, the anti-tipping populist one, ending up spreading to Europe and succeeding, because the labor movement picked it up and said ‘we are professionals, and we shouldn’t have to live on tips, because we should be paid by our employers.’ That’s why you see so little tipping in Europe. What we started here spread there and actually killed it at the origin in Europe.
We, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction in the states. The restaurant industry, which was hiring newly freed slaves as tipped workers, really wanted the right to hire these workers but pay them next to nothing. So they put forth this idea that they were valueless and really shouldn’t have to be paid by their employers. They essentially made the argument that newly freed slaves should get a zero dollar wage.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dar...
Corporate taxes don't factor in either because they are only on profit over and above all expenses. Increasing wages of an employee and shifting payment from tips to w2 income merely ensures the employee pays the taxes they should've be paying in the first place and will not increase corporate taxes.
If wait staff shifted to higher wages, the employer would increase prices and could note on the menu that tipping is not necessary, but appreciated. If that was the case, I would still tip, but only for above average service.
It constitutes a HUGE part of your take home pay for two reasons:
- If you are a waiter, tips will be multiples of your hourly pay.
- Tips will be under the table, saving you another ~25% easily.
So if you make a tipped hourly wage in Ohio:
- $4.15/hr * 7 hour shift (5pm open to 12pm close): 29.05
- Wait 6 tables, each with 3 seated parties, that tip you each $10: $60 * 3 = $120
Tips represent 4x of your salary. If your job gave you an untaxed 400% bonus at the end of every day, would you vote against it?
Shouldn't you compare to the minimum wage at least? Or you could compare to a standard wage similar to what would be paid in other countries.
Not in the state of Ohio, apparently. In many states, waitstaff can be paid below minimum wage, because tips!
I'd be rather more worried about getting caught by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.
If the IRS went on a crusade against underreported tips, there would be an absolute bloodbath in the poorer parts of this country, as tips easily represent more of their income than wages. Fortunately untaxed tips have dropped dramatically now that fewer and fewer people are using cash for transactions, so the IRS has had to take no such corrective actions.
My son was a waiter and did very well for himself while in school. Far better than working in my fast food restaurant when he was younger and I paid more than minimum wage.
Given the choice, I had several staff quit on me because they got a waitressing job and getting tips to make more money was the reason. I had several waitresses tell me that was the reason they would not work for me.
My son always tips 20% or more, no matter the service, because he was a waiter once. I tell him he's foolish as I tip 15% for good service and adjust up/down accordingly.
Wait staff love tips because it gets them paid significantly more than if they worked a retail job.
After visiting Europe, tips are necessary for good service. The rudeness and lack of service was culture shock.
All Europe was like this?
There is a stereotype that blacks are worse tippers than whites. As https://www.ebony.com/news-views/are-black-people-really-bad... comments, it might be because blacks have "Insufficient education about tipping", or "a loop of circular behavior where Blacks have been traditionally discriminated against, Blacks expect to be treated poorly and treat servers with disdain, servers treat Black patrons with less care because they “know” Blacks tip poorly, and Blacks continue to tip poorly because they continue to get substandard service." (there are a couple of other proposed reasons).
See for example http://www.tippingresearch.com/uploads/JFSBR_race_revision_a... which includes the quote “I will not take Black tables unless I have no other option; call me racist, but I also walk out with more money than the people who end up with them.”
Yes, if you are a black American, you might get rudeness and lack of service in service in your own country - because wait staff think you won't tip well.
Over here, more than a single interruption ("is everything OK?") is intrusive. Fake smiles and fake enthusiasm aren't desirable either.
In most of the EU you tip for good service. IE; only if your food came in a timely fashion, was not mis-prepared or incorrect and if the wait-staff are generally being polite, kind, courteous.
The idea is that you’re rewarding good service, not that your bound by social convention to give a percentage extra on top of what was agreed upon when you read the menu.
While we’re on the subject, the idea of excluding tax on good until you reach checkout is absolutely insane to me.
I was also a waiter in the restaurant. I hated the stress, but could find no jobs with comparable schedule flexibility/required qualifications that paid as well.
I'm not well-versed in the history of coffee shops, but it seems to me that it is not a well-established norm -- as compared to bars and restaurants, for example. But I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
>If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any week, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate
I'm old enough to remember a time that giving extra money to someone for handing you a cup of coffee would be thought absurd. Sit down eatery? No problem, there's prior art before I was born, disagree though I might. But this recent bullshit of "tip, because my employer doesn't pay me enough", whether its Starbucks, McDonalds, or your fave local coffee shop: yeah, fuck that. McDonalds doesn't need my subsidy.
No, but the person to makes and hands over your coffee does.
> I'm old enough to remember a time that giving extra money to someone for handing you a cup of coffee would be thought absurd.
Then you're probably also old enough to remember when wage increases tracked with productivity increases, or when minimum wage kept up with inflation and the cost of living.
The place where I first noticed the "tip your cashier" thing happening was the Panera at my university. Why in the hell would I tip someone who's job is literally to take my order, and maybe hand me a pastry? These people aren't making minimum wage either, I had some friends there and the job paid significantly more.
Do you also tip at McDonalds?
Buying a muffin at a coffee shop and not paying a premium on top of the asking price is not sadistic. It's a normal commercial transaction. Based on your logic, why don't we tip fast-food workers, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants, etc...
No, that isn’t for the tip, that is literally the job they are paid to do by their employer. Choosing to tip should only be if they have gone above and beyond what you would expect. I’m from the UK and find the US tipping culture bizzare and stressful - I had truly terrible service in a restaurant in New York once and they literally chased me to the door when they realised I hadn’t tipped and threatened to call the police if I didn’t tip him at least 10%.
They were bullying you by threatening to call the police. The cops would have been annoyed to show up for that, and nothing about what you did is illegal.
- I was 12 the first time we visited the US. My dad was at first confused, since the hotel porter was hanging around, then he was embarrassed, as he didn't have any small cash.
- In New Orleans on a business trip, I kept forgetting to tip the barmaid. Other people at the bar were throwing her dollar bills on my behalf.
- Most recently, chip cards were fairly new — although I've had one for 14 years. I don't want to tip by card, it complicates my expenses, but navigating the dark-pattern UI on the payment machines was often confusing. Several waiters assumed I was stuck with the "new" chip card.
For example, do you make a point of tipping the cashier at McDonalds? I'd bet that if you tried to and a manager saw you they would refuse it because the company doesn't want others to feel compelled to tip because they want to retain their image of a low-cost restaurant. Coffee shops selling $5 cups of coffee don't have that concern because people who frequent those places probably are a lot less price sensitive than those who eat at fast food restaurants.
15% used to be the norm across the board and adjusted from there based on the level of service. Now 20% is expected regardless of the level of service. In restaurants where a 20% gratuity is included in the bill I've noticed a significant drop-off in the level of service, even to the point where I would tip less than 20% if given the option, and I say that as someone who worked as a waiter at one point.
And quite frankly, it's disgusting that the person who spends may 30 seconds providing service gets X% of the bill when 99% of the work is done in the kitchen by guys who don't get paid anything extra.
Yikes,wait till you find out how much the ACH and CC networks get for providing a fully automated service.
A guy bringing me a plate someone else cooked has not earned 20% of the bill.
I'm highlighting this part because it's one of the main contributing factors to dining out less and less, for me, and that includes coffee shops. I always tip well when going out; ergo, I don't go out as often.
Going off of the "I'm not very unique" rule of thumb, businesses are losing some amount of money because of tipping culture.
Only in the most trivial sense that people know that, between sales tax and tipping, they're going to be paying a price that's 25-30% more than what's printed on the menu. And most people have some degree of price elasticity.
But I honestly can't imagine it matters much whether those adders are folded into the price up-front or you just know that you're going to be paying more than the printed price when you get the bill.
In the first place, I tip well partly because of information asymmetry: I don't know how well the staff are paid from one place to the next. This means that one place may pay their staff pretty well, and I'm still adding 20% to the cost of my ticket, and another place may pay their staff pretty poorly. This is placing the two businesses on an uneven competitive footing, and encouraging more businesses to pay their staff as poorly as they can get away with. This may be business-as-usual in the current American business culture, but the end result is that I'm subsidizing bad business practices.
I'm also subsidizing poor tippers. I know there are people out there who, for whatever reason they justify to themselves, don't tip, and I know that there are some businesses that don't pay a living wage (probably most, today), so I try to cover an extra portion of that cost.
It's also removing much of the incentive for food service businesses to seek out untapped efficiencies. I'm pretty sure labor costs are the largest expense category for any food service business, yet they continue to pile on more staff because people like me are helping them get away with it. I can order a Starbucks from an app on my phone, right? So why is there someone at a cash register who punches my order in to a machine when they've already got the software that would let me do it myself?
If tipping were banished and these businesses had to pay all of their staff a fair wage, it's likely that my total bill would go down.
At what point do we begin to consider that choice stiffing the waiters you would've tipped if you did go out?
P.S. I also avoid going to coffee shops where tipping is expected.
There are articles on the internet. Just type in "tipping slavery" in google. The Time magazine's article should come up on the first page.
These are different.
But when pushing, it's worth it to be mindful of where you exert your force. The causal flow (from not tipping to wages being raised to the point where tipping is not necessary) is indirect enough that it is uncertain to effect the desired change. Might there be other paths to achieving this goal?
Even if I go to the same coffee shop and use the same Square every morning, unless I'm holding a grudge it's de facto back to front end tipping rather than upon services rendered.
The tip at purchase time paradigm is in many cases an artifact of integrating credit card workflows with cash businesses with established pay up front and tip after workflows (fast casual dining, etc.) If you are against it and not against tipping, just bring cash for tipping and tip on the back end.
Because they almost always do and it's illegal for the owners to keep it?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-w...
https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-r...
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-p...
https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-ste...
Not really worth it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the calculus is so bad that it's extremely rare to happen at scale. Especially if there's a digital trail run by a third party...
I can understand why you might think it never happens if you are completely ignorant of the facts on the ground but nevertheless familiar with the criminal and civil sanctions involved. It's about lack of enforcement.
https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-r...
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-p...
https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-ste...
Obviously, none of these are scientific studies but I don't know if there are any done in the industry.
What I'm trying to point out is: Wage theft of all types happens all the time and I've known people too poor to risk losing their job who suffered under this issue. I'm sure it doesn't happen often -at scale-, in chain restaurants with big corporate backing but in an industry where most close after their first year and the workers are frequently undocumented or transient. It happens.
However, pretty quickly us workers discovered the math wasn't adding up. We would pool $300 of tips for the night and only have $200 equally distributed to us. When we asked the owner, he would say something like "you must have added wrong" or "the receipts only show $200", which was bullshit. After that happened, us workers made it a point to always make up an excuse to the customers why we couldn't handle electronic tips, and then immediately pocket the cash tips and split them ourselves.
Fortunately, most of us left before the owner caught on to the point of becoming confrontational (it was a short job before university). Moral of the story is some guy in his mid-40s, who made enough money to drive a BMW, felt that he could deceive some young kids because he had the chance. In hindsight, now I know more about things like labor laws and enforcement hotlines, but at the time most of us were also being paid under the table (which we didn't even understand because this was our first real job) and were scared of having to face the IRS and lose the money we made.
What bothers me is the ACH networks still get their cut of the tip (assuming they get a percentage of sale and not a flat rate). No visa, you don't need 5% of the waitress hard work.
The reason that vendors accept credit cards is because it's usually worth the additional costs. If you don't think your credit card processor is worth the cost, try dropping them and seeing how it affects your sales. In some instances, vendors have dropped processors entirely (like Amex and Discover) without noticeably impacting their bottom line.
I don't understand why people (buyers) are so thin-skinned about this. Leave a tip or don't. Whatever.
If you get good service, will good tip ensure a good experience the next time around? If someone gave you bad service, do you make it known? I think most would prefer not to say anything.
Also the visual difference between tipping 20% and 10% is huge with this, it's hard to tell with cash and change
I often tap "no tip" on Square terminals.
You should tip hair stylists and restaurant staff that brings you food or drink. I generally only tip 15 percent and I never tip at a buffet.
For food I can kind of understand of since they decouple serving and preparation + ingredients.
Note that I am not American and am new to tipping. Just curious
Hair stylists, taxis, sit-down restaurants, they all usually need tips. You don't tip the stylist though if it's the owner as of course they would just set their price.
Your taxi driver gets most if not all of your fare, but it's still expected to tip them. A grocery store cashier gets none of your payment directly, but you don't tip them. Don't try to make sense of it, just do what others do.
Taxis/Ubers, I usually just add a couple bucks to the fare, or just pay with a slightly larger bill on purpose, and have them keep the change (if a $17 fare, give a $20). Similarly, bellhops at hotels are a similar role of giving a couple dollars instead of a percentage once they've brought your bag to your room (as there is no exchange of money during the entire process). Valet drivers are another example.
Hairstylists should be tipped because their payment structure is different. They aren't usually employed by the place you get your hair cut at, rather they lease a chair from the location. They are forced to use the prices displayed, and they get a small cut of that. You then tip them additionally depending on how well of a cut they did. I personally usually do (with a $15 haircut as an example) a $5-6 tip for a good cut, and $3-4 if it's just OK.
So if most people are choosing "No Tip", where did this unwritten rules of tipping go. If I should be concerned of living wage, why is there no consumer pressure on business owners to make these changes? If people keep on complying with this unwritten culture of tipping, most people will always be in a dilemma when they are expected to tip.
The unwritten rule is, tip your less than minimum wage staff that is working for you.
The old 15% became 20%. The places you used to tip (solely personal service situations like a waiter or hairdresser) became everywhere.
If it was done right, everyone would be paid well, there would be no tips, and your stuff would just cost 20% more. I find it simpler to just tip 20% on everything.
Stiffing waiters in the same establishment more than one is a risky proposition at best.
Like it or not just because you feel justified in something doesn't mean that others will.
#2 - I waited tables, and a very good waiter once told me that he gives every table the same service whether they do or don't tip, and no matter how much they tip. I feel many servers lack this mentality; which leads to more people tipping less. When I waited tables, 10% was an okay tip, 15% was stellar. Now it seems like 20% is assumed and folks have a social signalling competition to tip 25-30%. Doesn't make sense.
Likewise there is an expectation of good service from waitstaff, but they're not obligated to give good service. They too have the option of giving better or worse service at their discretion. So if a server wants to give everyone equal service that's their right. But if I want to develop a reputation as a good tipper to get my service prioritized over GP by servers who differentiate then that's ok too, and rational I think.
You are being unrealistic.
That's an unfortunate attitude. I thought a lot like you, but when I realized the wage disparity here - I could afford to go eat at these fancy places, which my servers definitely could not - I chose to make it my problem.
Other people's problems are not yours, but if you can choose to help (for example, if you can afford to help), you should.
The problem with this is that by tipping you simply move the problem of underpaid waiters to the next customer and to the next day. If everyone just stopped tipping, the tips would be included in the prices, everybody would be paying taxes, and the tipping issue would just cease to exist. The prices would stay more or less the same, as those are the prices that people are willing to pay, whether the tip is already included or not.
That is not my understanding of how the world works.
At the same time, the vast majority of the jobs don't warrant tips- including all waitressing jobs outside the US- and this doesn't prevent workers from making a living wage out of them.
So yes, I think that if people stopped tipping, owners would be forced to pay waiters more, and raise their prices accordingly, as everybody already does elsewhere. On the other end, it's true that waiters might end up making less money, as the revenue-sharing model might be unreasonably generous in some cases.
Now, I'm not suggesting they provide any less of a service, but I've eaten at taco carts that expect the same level of tipping (15-20%). These are places that the server definitely _could_ also eat at. If they are making the same amount of money (and possibly more), why is it still the customers responsibility to tip? At that point it isn't for the employee to make up for low wages. It is also usually paid prior to receiving your food, so it isn't for improved service. In this case the business could increase the base price and reject tips. If they directed that money to employees it would make budgeting easier for them and make no difference to the customers.
But I would just change the law: set a normal minimum wage and advertise tax included prices. And probably nudge as much as possible against the tip (I don't think it's bad enough that we need to make it a crime), but IMF has a dim view on the tip, it encourages corruption in all society.
I think it's respectable, even admirable, to not care about what other people think of you. But if you hurt people when it benefits you and you can get away with it, it's not quite sufficient to explain it by saying "I don't care if other people think I'm a jerk." It would be more complete to simply say "I don't care if I act like a jerk."
If you go into the situation intending from the beginning not to follow this convention but receiving the benefits of it, then you are not acting in good faith. You are, through nonverbal communication, misleading the waiter.
Consent should matter when two parties enter into a transaction, and it should be informed consent. If you think what you're doing right now meets that standard, then next time try telling the waiter at the beginning that there will be no tip, and see if it makes a difference.
Minimum wage is different for tip receiving employees, but if the tips do not add up to normal minimum wage, then the employer is required to supplement their paychecks until they hit minimum wage.
So if you like the service that the waiter brought you, you got to tip. The money goes to them only. If you get a haircut, then you got to tip if the barber/stylist went a couple of steps further and made sure you got the haircut you like. You got to show your appreciation for workers who went above and beyond their requirements to serve you better.
Instead of guilt-tripping customers into tipping, businesses in Japan up their prices if they need more money.
I remember once when I was in Osaka I was at a really good sushi place that I had visited several times prior. There was no tip option on the receipt (didn't see it anywhere in Japan) and there was no tip jar. I asked the server if I could tip.
She told me they couldn't accept my tip because they believed the food was priced correctly.
It was a totally different experience than in America where not tipping gets you poor service and unhappy waiters.
We were chased by an irate waiter asking why I hadn't tipped. So I tipped him a single dollar bill to make it clear how little the service was worth.
I think tipping is very rare in most of asian countries.
And sugar-heavy foods (coca-cola and soft drinks, sugar-heavy processed foods, etc)
> Tipping actually originated in the aristocratic homes of feudal Europe.... When tips came to the United States in the late 1850s, 1860s, there was a massive anti-tipping movement. It was actually considered to be undemocratic, un-American.... Well that movement, which came right around the time of the emancipation of the slaves, was squashed by the restaurant industry, which argued that they should have the right to hire newly freed slaves and not pay them anything as valueless people and essentially let them live on customer tips. And so many of the first tipped workers in the United States were former slaves.
And from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12tipping-t.html... :
> After the Civil War, wealthy Americans began traveling to Europe in significant numbers, and they brought the tip home with them to demonstrate their worldliness. But the United States, unlike Europe, had no aristocratic tradition, and as tipping spread — like “evil insects and weeds,” The New York Times claimed in 1897 — many thought it was antithetical to American democratic ideals. “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape,”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
In other words; if you're bad at your job, you probably won't have it for very long. Yeah, well no crap.
One must question why a subset of the food service industry should be treated so differently than any other. Is the McDonalds restaurant worker (who gets no tip) just doing so well that they don't deserve the same consideration from the public as someone working in a ramen shop? Or does that employee face a different commute and living situation? The delineation is strange.
>If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?
The point would be to... establish a _minimum_ wage, regardless of performance. What about that is confusing?
Many servers just don't bother to report cash tips (aka: tax fraud).
They're just hugely underreported because the kinds of people that work off tips are people making $2.15/hr instead of actual minimum wage (which is still criminally low). That's what needs to change in this equation - paying workers what they are due.
Tipping won't go away until restaurant owners stop being dorks about the whole matter. They also benefit because the unaccounted for tips don't count as income to them, and thus they benefit as well.
The bottom line is, patrons get sticker shock when they see the real price of a meal. This happens when restaurants change prices after a few years because the cost of product goes up, or if they switch to paying a living wage to their employees. If the culture as a whole doesn't switch, then people are just going to keep supporting poor labor practices by the industry because they typically have their own issues to focus on.
>>That is why most restaurants that have tried no-tipping have gone back to it. Citation absolutely needed. Many restaurants have never tried it, and many of the restaurants that have tried it kept it.
You could probably get away with shortchanging the IRS where tips were all cash but with cash declining on a value + volume perspective I think those days will be behind us soon enough.
I've had Danish waiters press the "No tip" button on their machine. One of them even said it was only used for "foreigners", which I took to mean Americans.
[1] Bad Anglo-German pun?
Further, is there a difference between someone serving a full meal and someone that is just punching buttons?
> If you can afford to spend $3 on a coffee, you can afford to spend $3.60 on a coffee.
sounds like a logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#Paradox_of_the...
It might be that $3 is right at the limit of what I am willing to spend on a cup of coffee, and that doesn't deserve a "check your (expletive) privilege."
(Note that people tipping is also good for the marginal customer. Like other forms of price discrimination, it allows the provider to price the product lower and allows customers to purchase the product who otherwise could not have done so.)
With other jobs (e.g., a cashier), the position is more of an operational necessity for the employer than it is a differentiator for the customer, and in that case, I'd like to see the employer responsible for higher wages even if that means higher prices. I do not see that happening if they are let off the hook by guilt-ridden customers deciding to tip every single employee at every single transaction.
Also, if you make it $3.60, everyone will still try to tip.
Edit: I now have one $2000 expense card that I pay off each month and typically stays under a 50% balance to build my credit.
I could see taking responsibility though for not choosing to eat at more expensive restaurants that generally pay their staff better.
Probably what it comes down to is that restaurants are entertainment so aren't needed by society the way that grocery stores are. Then again, so is just about everything else in our economy. 10% of our labor could supply all our basic needs, the rest is just wasted keeping up with the Joneses. What I'm saying is that there may be no free market solution to the service industry being underpaid, which is why I support a $15 minimum wage and universal basic income, among other things.
That said, its just the right thing to do for servers are trying their best. Finding a few dollars per table makes their day a little brighter.
Pay at the bar before receiving food? Don't tip.
Buying drinks at a bar? Don't tip.
Ordering an Uber? Don't tip.
Etc.
Then maybe the server should tell the customer how much they need to be tipped?
"Welcome to AppleBees. My name is Trevor and I need an additional $24.89 in tips today so that my employer isn't obligated to pay me the minimum wage for this state."
Also, should I be under-tipping waitstaff that I think are rich enough?
This is not true in all states. Kentucky has no provision for this, e.g. (I worked in restaurants through college, so I have hands on experience here.)
Maybe it was different when you were in college?
They also almost definitely remember (and talk about) people who don't tip at all.
No, the owner of the place deprives his/her employee of a living wage. I don't see how can that be possibly the responsibility of the customers.
Tipping is being fundamentally exploited as a way to make everything look cheaper.
On the middle one, you can see there are two different tax rates ("MOMS" = VAT), depending on the category of goods.
Here's one from Germany: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Aldi-Qui...
It also has two VAT rates (MwSt A and B), and each item is marked according to the rate. The yoghurt and müsli has a lower rate than the soft drinks and electronics.
Capitalism only work if both side of the transaction have the same information, that's how Stiglitz got his Nobel prize. (another US trope: collecting the Nobel prizes and never reading the papers)
The convention in the US is to compute the tip on the pre-tax amount. If the pre-tax price is $10, a 20% tip is $2 and 8% tax is $0.80, for a total of $12.80.
Now, some of this software has come along and tried to sneak in a change to the formula where the tip is computed on the post-tax amount. They take $10, add 8% tax to get $10.80, and then compute 20% of that for the tip, for a total of $12.96.
They have deceptively changed the tip rate from 20% to 21.6%.
Whether prices are listed tax inclusive or tax exclusive isn't the issue. Even with tax-inclusive pricing like Europe has, it still would have been possible to sneak in a change to the formula for computing the tip.
It's simply a bug. I got a suggested tip amount on a bar bill, the other day and it was clearly derived from the total of all the food and beverage, before taxes. It was all there in writing, and the figures were easy for me to check in my head.
Obviously this would indeed increase tip amount, but it would definitely decrease confusion and probably fix itself over the long run if the new tip amount was too big.
Minimum wage laws also applies to the pre-tip salary so it's not really expected most places unless you get exceptional service. I've never seen "pre-calculated" tips either here or elsewhere in Europe.
At the bottom of the menu it says something like "A discretionary service charge of 10% will be added to your bill [for groups of (4|5|6) or more]"
Then it ends up like this: https://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/28hfOrBSZ1SYPD--tlNU...
I don't like it; it makes the prices on the menu appear smaller than a competing restaurant.
You're free to calculate the tip however you like. Just because some junior programmer took the easy way out to make the math easier doesn't mean you have to along with it. I don't recall a digitized tip screen that didn't let me enter a custom amount.
For example, Square's documentation: https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5069-accept-tips-wit...
>You will need to select if you would like your tips to be added before or after your taxes have been applied to the sale.
Feelings will be hurt, people will talk over each other, and no one goes on doing anything different than they did before.
Might as well as be debating tabs vs. spaces while we're at it.
I have kids, and I know they can be a pain for servers. If they handle my kids well (e.g. sitting us in a booth near a wall is better than a table in the middle of the room) and/or my kids make a mess, I'll leave a bigger tip. If they ignore is for more affluent looking customers, I'll leave a smaller tip. When I bring my kids, I'm not paying a sitter, so that money is up for grabs.
My wife and I will often order and give some to the kids instead of them having their own meal (they only pick at it anyway), so basing the tip on the bill isn't a very good way to do it. I also don't like to buy drinks (I don't drink alcohol and I prefer to avoid sugar), so my bill will always be way less than someone who goes all out.
As I see it its just a way for restaurants to punt the responsibility of providing livable wages to workers and externalizing every nickle and dime to me the consumer. its just a way to put you on the spot and shame you into paying extra.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding you.
Who do you tip at the self-service gas station? The gas doesn't just get to the pump by itself.
Who you tip when you buy something from Amazon? The product doesn't get to and from the warehouse by itself.
A few informal polls awhile ago (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/theres-stil...) couldn't come to a consensus.
Now that it's standard for Uber and similar companies, well, it sucks but there we are. It's always been customary to tip taxi drivers, so it's not weird, just an unfortunate failure to change the culture.
Sometimes I take a regular cab home from the airport because the Port Authority has (seemingly) intentionally made using app-based services as inconvenient as possible. At least now everyone has Square for credit card payments, but the cab drivers often have the minimum automatic tip set to 25% (or even 30%!) so I have to take the time to manually enter something more reasonable. I'm sure they get a significant number of passengers who are in a hurry and can't be bothered to do so.
I tip because I frequent local restaurants, bars, coffee bars, etc - and the 20% is a little good will towards the establishment. How can I walk around complaining about Amazon and big corp dominance when I won't even cough up 20% for a small local place?
*note how I'm only mentioning local establishments. To hell with everyone else
You goddamn nerds.