And at that point I would expect fine dining service. Someone coming to my table asking for order. Then bringing it with condiments. And when I leave someone will come and pick up the trash.
Your base bill is lower because it’s a built in assumption that your gratuity is part of the service worker’s pay. It was normalized for most service jobs that actually pay a living wage in the US over a long period, and it’s been extended to other jobs as they’ve become part of gig work. If you don’t like it, I agree, but we have to be willing to pay workers a decent wage to do work for us.
Well we have to be willing to pay when we hire those worker directly. I don't find it okay that I need to pay worker separately when I am paying business for whatever product/service they provided to me.
I don’t like it either! But I also don’t like projecting my wishes and wants onto people whose livelihood depends on accounting which is inconvenient to me.
I don't know how normal this is across the country, but in my area fast food workers are paid starting at about $15/hour, they are not the service workers getting the sub-$3 "tipping assumed" base wage.
$15/hr was considered a living wage when that movement started approximately a decade ago. It’s not a living wage now. People aren’t getting rich on $15+tips, they’re trying to pay their bills and afford their car or transit to get to work to serve you.
Sure, we can agree that $15/hr isn't enough to be considered a living wage. But it is comparable to other low-skill/manual labor jobs that don't have any exposure to customer tipping.
I looked back and tried to take the most charitable interpretation of your original response as I can imagine. Here’s what I came up with: I actually do want underpaid workers to be paid a living wage, but I’m consciously posting ammunition for people who want to selfishly deny them that.
I don’t want to misrepresent you, but I’m grasping for more charitable interpretations than that.
Meanwhile, in every other developed nation, the cost of restaurant food is significantly lower than in the US, even though servers there are paid a decent wage.
Irrelevant. The point is that restaurant food is ridiculously expensive in America for some reason, and it shouldn't be: America is a huge food producer and exporter, so if anything, it should be cheaper to eat out in America than in other places that have to import a lot of their food (like Japan). Instead, it's the opposite. So something is fundamentally very wrong. Many other things are significantly cheaper in America too, such as electronics and cars and gasoline, so it's not a case of everything being more expensive. Even grocery store food in America is fairly cheap-to-reasonable in my experience, compared to other developed nations, it's just restaurant food that's ridiculously overpriced.
We weren’t before, and you certainly changed the subject to that, but I’m still talking about the topic we started on. Which I know annoys people, but you replied to my comment to change the topic.
The topic in this thread was my point that restaurant food in the US is ridiculously expensive, and you haven't bothered to address that, and instead you seem to think it's just a given. I guess you can't follow a conversation.
Historically, I’d round up and put the leftover change into the tip jar. But with digital payments I routinely skip if it’s someone just bagging a pastry I chose from a case. Of course, if they’re giving me an extra level of service - I’ll tip.
I’m getting irritated with how common it is for every service organization to now prompt for tips when paying electronically. A Venti plain Starbucks coffee is over $4 now. I’m sorry, I’m not tipping for that.
Back in the day I went to the same bagel shop every morning for the commute. I'd tip by giving all of the counter guys/gals mini-champagne bottles at holiday time. Put a smile on their faces and prorated over 250 days was next to nothing for me to spend.
You have to walk to counter each time you want something in fast food restaurant, in a regular restaurant you have waiter for that. But yeah it's his job for which he is paid, so tips still don't make sense just for doing the job, I don't get tips for doing my job, neither does my wife and most of the occupations.
To me it's not about what I have to do, but the fact that someone else is serving me for probably a pitiful wage. I'd rather they get paid well, but they don't. So I tip. Even if they do a bad job because I know everyone has bad days.
Because it works. Our local 'decent' fast food chain (Burgerville) now asks for a tip. Even at the drive-thru window. They apologize every time and let you know you can just say no if you want. I guess it's good they feel a little uncomfortable about it, though it wasn't the worker's choice.
At some point small businesses, food carts, etc, realized that if you just put a tip jar on the counter, many people will throw money in it just because it's there. It's culturally expected now. I find it slightly infuriating.
And on top of that, a PBR is a lot less work to serve than a coffee/espresso drink. Agreed that $1 to the barista doesn't seem like a heavy lift, considering.
We should of course just eliminate tipping as a standard practice and just pay people more, but I imagine then there'd just be a lot of belly aching about how expensive a coffee is now and it was better when they could just not tip but feel justified because they still thought the coffee was too expensive.
Yeah, it is in fact promoting it. These kinds of things just makes me reluctant to buy any food/snack/drink that is not from grocery store or its in-house deli. So far I have not seen this forced tipping there.
I think the day is not far where there will be tip for paying tip because tips cause extra calculation for businesses hence they need to be tipped for processing tips for you.
I don't tip, ever. I've never done it in my entire life. I'm not legally obligated to. What are they going to do, arrest me? If they actually need the money, I'm sure they can bake it into the price of the product or service they sell me. I'm used to it, coming from a non-tipping culture. It works perfectly fine overseas.
Overall what I noticed is that tipping is a sub-strategy among others in the American shopping experience where companies try as long as possible to hide the total price charged to a customer. You can see it everywhere from various fees, taxations, and tipping. I am shocked that it is so difficult to know the final cost of things until the very last second. Tipping is just one strategy in the toolkit, but tech companies are deploying it everywhere now, it's hard to escape.
It's tricky in some situations. Delivery drivers cannot see whether they got a tip or not, so they can't choose whether to serve you or decline, and they end up working for close to nothing. But of course, I blame the food delivery brokers.
As you should. It's illegal to pay below minimum wage. If they don't get tipped enough to make minimum wage, the employer has to make up the difference. Of course minimum wage needs to be increased but that's another topic.
> Delivery drivers cannot see whether they got a tip or not, so they can't choose whether to serve you or decline
This is not true for DoorDash - they can see the tip amount before accepting the order. I think that such a "tip" should not be treated as a tip for tax passthrough purposes - it's a bid for service.
This is a moral dilemma that was invented and forced upon Americans by the latter group. If they invented it, they can fix it. I refuse to play along with a financially ambiguous savior complex that American consumerism features. The entire dining and commerce experience in Japan is leagues upon leagues better than in the States. At least there I don't feel like I'm being financially coerced, and the transaction becomes clear and simple for all parties involved. This is why I rarely go to restaurants whenever I'm in the States now.
No I won't, I will continue to go outside. Legally there is nothing the service renderer can do to me. I don't care how they think of me as a result. I've never been refused service before.
They give me a total price, I pay it without issue, and that's how it goes.
The moral dilemma here is that there is a societal expectation of a tip. The employee is not paid a living wage and are working for tips. You're welcome to opt out of tipping by opting out of dining at restaurants. Taking advantage of the societal norms is just taking advantage of your fellow human because it's "not illegal". It's shit. No different from driving in the shoulder because you don't feel like sitting in traffic or cutting a line and daring people to do something about it.
Sorry what's the moral dilemma? Not participating in society norms? That's immoral, you're kidding right?
As far as I understand society expects that people working hourly make a minimum wage. If they're not paid minimum wage, then it's illegal and their employer is liable for damages and punishment. What's immoral is a situation where an employer is not paying an employee the wages our laws require. There's no "social minimum wage" for tip workers. There's a market for their services. If somebody wants to do more valuable labor in some other capacity nobody is stopping them just as nobody is forcing them to work for tips.
Driving on the shoulder is justifiable in certain scenarios, like if you need to get to a hospital. It's not absolutely immoral.
I'd also add -- do people tip Walmart workers? Waitstaff can easily make more money than a Walmart worker. If the argument is that it's morally wrong to pay a sub-living wage, then whether restaurant work is more skilled is immaterial to the moral problem of unlivable wages.
But somehow it's moral not to tip a Walmart worker simply because of American norms?
Yep, I live in Japan now and it's like heaven going out to eat here. No tips, no annoying servers constantly interrupting my meal, the full price is shown right on the menu, the payment process is easy and fast and doesn't depend on the server or involve someone taking my card away so they can photograph the card number and use it for fraud, I could go on and on. I wish I never had to go back to the States.
Precisely!! And unlike 10 years ago, credit card usage increased within the past few years, so that eliminated one of the few remaining complaints I had about carrying lots of cash/coins. Most establishments accept all common cards now, so going out and living in general has become smooth all around.
I've never seen it at sit-down restaurants, and I'm not sure how they'd even do it, since frequently the cash register is someplace where customers can't even go. With fast-food, it's easy of course, since you have to stop at the cash register to pay, so the tap reader is right there.
In Japan, it's the same as American fast food (even at sit-down restaurants): you have to go to the register to pay, usually next to the door. In Europe, however, my experience has been that most restaurants have a portable payment terminal they bring to the table for you.
Strange. Almost all sit-down restaurants here have a portable POS (like you describe for Europe), they just bring it to your table and you can either chip or tap. A lot of Chinese restaurants use QR menus instead, you can pay by your table number at the website it opens.
At fast food restaurants, you just pay at the terminal you ordered your food at. At places that don't have that, like Dick's, you just pay at the terminal they have at the register.
The non-chain places usually have Stripe or Square, they all support tap or chip.
I can't remember the last time I gave my card to someone.
Weird, I've never seen this stuff in the US, this is entirely different from my experience. But I left the US a long, long time ago, so maybe things have changed. I haven't been back since 2022.
It might also be regional. The USA is large, and Seattle is very different from Miami. It was definitely like that in 2022 here, and I haven't carried cash in my wallet since I returned from china in 2016 (where, ironically, I had to use cash for everything because you needed a Chinese ID card to use WePay).
Can you bring your own drinks to restaurant as in China? Of course also no tipping in China.
Here in Europe you can get by without tipping quite easily, but I don't think they would allow you to bring your own drinks and honestly it also doesn't make sense. Why can't I drink my own drink, am I not paying enough for the meal itself that you need to rob me on drinks? Might as well not going to your place at all and eat at home, if you have problem with my own drinks.
No, I don't think you can bring your own drinks typically in Japan. I've never seen it. I haven't tried though.
However, unlike Europe, water is free and even though it's tap water, it's really good (Tokyo has excellent municipal water quality). European restaurants are terrible that way; they want to sell you ridiculously expensive bottled water that costs more than alcohol.
You can "get by without" tipping in Europe, but in some places (like Budapest) they try to guilt tourists into tipping the same way it's done in America with a place on the credit card slip while the server is watching, because they know American tourists are used to tipping a lot. Other places have a place to add a tip too. Japan is different: there is absolutely no tipping, whatsoever. It's not even allowed; they will return your money to you.
People in the first group can decide to not work for the people in the second group, if they don't like the setup. It's in the best interest of both groups to reach compromise, so people in first group can earn money and people in second group can make money.
Every time tipping comes up on HN, someone chimes in to say what a strange American custom it is, and how nobody ever tips in Europe.
Historically, tipping came to America from Europe in the 1920's and 30's. When it started, it was very divisive and considered un-American. You can see it in the background of certain old films of the era. It is a sub-plot in the Humphrey Bogart movie Petrified Forest.
Please fix your multiple typos. You have a very interesting point, and I'm worried it will be lost for some. Particularly those for whom English is not their first language. The Old World will be awake soon.
I used to be a tip supporter. Not anymore with the amount of deceptive BS that's happened in the last 10 years. I am very close to deciding not to tip, ever. I have no moral qualms with this I've decided. If everyone got onboard it would all work out. Can we just make it illegal to pay below minimum wage even for service work already?
Until then, I have a rule: I only tip when someone is working outside of regular working hours to act as my servant. That's like evening dinner service where someone is actually waiting my table. Sometimes I'll tip at lunch for pleasant service even though it breaks my rule because I'm human. And sometimes a dollar or two for coffee early in the morning or bar service at night out of habit.
I also have "tip bands" structured such that I tip at least 10% when de-facto expected. I tip $5 up to a $50 ticket, and $10 up to a $100 ticket, on the pre-tax and pre-other-fees price. My logic here is that if restaurants are supplementing wages with baked in fees, those fees should be deducted from the tip I'd otherwise have been expected to pay. So a standard 15% less a 4% surcharge post tax becomes 10% additional (tip). In any case, things average out such that I over-tip anyway, sigh.
I guess my latter point here is that I'm still made to feel guilty when tipping at least 10% because of how establishments suggest you should be considering 20%, 25% and 30% gratuities on top of all the fees they slip in at the end and taxes. It leaves me disillusioned with the entire notion.
>Can we just make it illegal to pay below minimum wage even for service work already?
Note that the sum of wage + tips must reach the minimum wage, or else the employer is required to make up the difference. It's a common misconception that tipped workers can earn less, in total, than minimum wage.
The comment I replied to said there should be a law. I pointed out that there already is. If we're talking about whether the law is sometimes violated, that's a whole different discussion.
Also, I don't see any reason why violating the law in that way should be any more common than violating it by paying non-tipped workers less than minimum wage. Either one would require the same degree, and same kind, of fraud. So tipped workers should be no worse off in practice than non-tipped workers.
What the person you replied to suggested and what you say exist are different things in reality. Tips plus the rest covered by the employer simply does not mean minimum wage. So no, there is not a law, you have no motivation for pretending there is, so why are you?
Yes, and I'm curious to learn more about how well employers comply with it by making up the difference, my gut says they probably don't comply very well.
In just a quick look, I found this:
> 5. Wage theft is particularly acute in food and drink service, and restaurants across the country have been found to be in violation of wage and hour laws. It is true that the law requires restaurants to ensure that tipped workers receive at least the regular minimum wage when their tips are included, but the reality is that huge numbers of restaurants—helped by too-weak enforcement efforts—ignore these requirements. In investigations of over 9,000 restaurants, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) found that 84 percent of investigated restaurants were in violation of wage and hour laws, including nearly 1,200 violations of the requirement to bring tipped workers’ wages up to the minimum wage. Among the restaurants that were investigated, tipped workers were cheated out of nearly $5.5 million. Workers in the food and drink service industries are more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than workers in other industries. [0]
EDIT: Apparently the DOL study was focused on 2010-12, so not sure what the newest compliance looks like [1].
> Note that the sum of wage + tips must reach the minimum wage, or else the employer is required to make up the difference.
But tips are also often used as a performance evaluation metric, and falling low enough that the employer has to make it up often leads to termination, so, where this is possible (as it most obviously is where cash tips are involved) its not uncommon for employees to be incentivized to artificially inflate tips.
Eliminating the lower tipped based minimum wage (which, when followed, means that tips actually go to the employer, not the tipped employee, to a point) means that, even where this practice and pressure exists, it doesn’t leas to suppressing wages below the general mininum.
I don't understand this logic: you know that waitstaff in restaurants are paid less than minimum wage because they make it up in tips, so you choose not to tip them which actively contributes to them making less than minimum wage? The system is shitty but you're okay with screwing over the individuals who are forced to participate in the system with "no moral qualms"?
That's the social contract -- you go to a full service restaurant, you tip 20% of the bill.
I can understand for things like even retail and other non-traditional PoS stuff but for full service dining, this isn't new.
If you want to opt out of participating in the whole tip structure there, then you probably should opt out of participating in full service dining as well.
When I was raised and educated on these matters, it was 15%. 20% is reserved for exceptional service.
I've actually decided the real problem is clueless people like you trying to tip police others over immaterial minutia like exact tip percentage. Do my napkin FFS and see for yourself what my percentage averages out to. You're the ones manufacturing frantic guilt. It's like atheists and unknowns. Christ.
#1 reason to carry cash is so you don't have to go through the forced tipping protocol. Otherwise, I've just quit going to any place that does this. Making your own coffee and packing a thermos is no big deal.
Ideally, we should just raise the employee's wages and end the practice of tipping. For servers in high-throughflow establishments, where actual service is being provided, give them a percentage of every bill, then they're rewarded if the place is busy (which it will be if they're providing good service and the food is good). If they upsell on wine bottles or whatever, they're then essentially earning a commission, and it's baked in, not some customer whim thing.
It seems like, if you're going to write an article like this, you have to start by understanding what the norms of tipping were before POS screens made it easy to ask for tips everywhere. So: yes, I think it's a new phenomenon to suggest tipping your grocer? But tipping your mechanic is not a new thing. It didn't start with POS terminals.
Pretty much across the whole personalized service industry (ie, not mass-market retail jobs like grocery and department stores), there is a soft norm of tipping. You're not required to tip any of them the way you are with restaurants, but people have been for generations; it's a way of signaling customer loyalty and getting potentially better service.
Don't tip your grocer unless you really want to. Seriously consider tipping your mechanic if given the option, at least, if you expect to use them in the future. Probably tip the barista (a buck or so), the same way you would a bartender. Definitely tip your hotel housekeeper! And: you are required to tip at full-service American restaurants.
In the US, jobs with tips are often subject to a significant drop in minimum wage. If a company for a usually non-tip industry has started including tip options you may want to investigate whether they've started underpaying staff.
Generally, you can't simply pay employees less than the minimum wage; you can take a "tip credit" against your required wage level, but either way the employee has to "take home" at least minimum wage, whether or not the tips got them there.
The DOL has investigated this numerous times, and while you're correct in what the law generally states, the majority of employers screw their "tipped" employees over time and again.
Having worked in both fast-food and fine-dining restaurants, tips are a huge bone of contention. Tax fraud is common, mgmt skimming is common, and now these POS systems charge a percentage of the tip for "expediting" the process.
> Pretty much across the whole personalized service industry (ie, not mass-market retail jobs like grocery and department stores), there is a soft norm of tipping.
There was only a norm in tipping in restaurants where your food was delivered to your table. That was never expected in fast food. Now places like QDoba have tipping options.
So don't tip there. I mean, don't eat at Qdoba in the first place, but: ignore the tip prompt, the same way you ignore the "Donate $1 to the charity of our choice" prompt at Whole Foods or whatever.
I'm not even arguing that the POS screens aren't a genuine social phenomenon, or that it isn't off-putting for a grocery store clerk to side-eye you for not tipping at check-out (I wouldn't!). I'm just saying, this article acts like tipping a mechanic is a shocking new intrusion, and what's actually the case is that the author just isn't familiar with the pre-existing norms of tipping.
I used to strongly agree with you on this topic (and would have written the exact comment you wrote) until recently. I think I've realized a few things, though.
First is that the quality of service does not change based on the presence of a tip or not, largely because tips happen after the service has completed. If it did I would tip.
Instead I expect people to quote me a fair price for their labour and do their job with pride. If they don't I'll give them feedback and find another provider if necessary.
Second, these days you rarely even interact with the service worker, sadly. I totally understand the history, but we don't live in that world anymore where I have one driver or one doorman or one mechanic who I need to continually show appreciation. If I did I would tip.
Instead I say please and thank you and if I do have an ongoing relationship I reward them with loyalty and perhaps occasionally a gift because they've become a friend.
Third, with the amount of fees restaurants have added and the shift to showing you post-tax tip suggestions on receipts, I no longer feel like the social contract is balanced and I'm disillusioned from participating. On top of that, since it's an implicit requirement to tip in these scenarios, I don't feel like it's even meaningful to tip more or less depending on the quality of service you receive. So you can't even use that as a feedback mechanism since it all comes out average in the wash. I still tip at full service restaurants because I'm not a completely ignorant dickwad, but I'm really close to becoming one.
Instead I'd vote to remove the loophole that allows restaurants to pay staff $2/hr plus tips so that we could go back to employees being paid fairly and then tips being totally extra/earned. Tell me the fair price of food such that you can pay your staff a living wage. I'll pay it.
I'm making a positive argument, not a normative one. You can say whatever you will about tipping; I've been on HN long enough to know what the general shape of a tipping thread looks like.
I'm making a much narrower point, which is that if you're going to write a trend story like this for a mass media outlet, you should do your homework first. The author of this story didn't even bother to Google whether tipping mechanics was normal, let alone actually ask a mechanic.
I understand your point more clearly, thank you. I've actually had similar experiences/frustrations with people who aren't natively from America and people who didn't grow up in a context where they were educated on tipping culture (mid-to-upper class) even in America. And I've gotten in quite heated arguments because they just didn't understand the social norms. I wonder what this says about the expectations that people should innately understand tipping culture /shrug.
I have never known anyone to tip their mechanic. The only places tipping was the norm growing up was waitstaff/bartenders, doormen, and haircutters/stylists.
Maybe this is a West Coast or Midwest thing, but the idea of tipping my mechanic is a non-starter.
Last month I tipped the garage (80%) who sold me a slip yoke for my 61. The cost was a small fraction of the market price, far below what I expected to pay. I really want this business to prosper.
I have never, ever ever heard of someone tipping a mechanic. I know several mechanics, and grew up around car dealerships / garages and have never seen someone get a tip.
I assure you that it is a thing. I had a hole-in-the-wall Volvo mechanic for like 10 years that I tipped religiously. But, like, at a dealership service center? Never. You can Google to instantly find people talking about this.
Again, there is a soft norm of tipping in pretty much all blue-collar personalized services. Meaning: you don't have to tip, you're not going to get side-eye if you don't tip, but it's worth knowing that some people do tip.
Tipping is great but for it to be effective it needs to be before any services are rendered. It’s more of a down payment on a bribe.
Tipping after the fact, especially to a heartless POS machine, is utterly pointless. You’ve already received the goods or services. They’re just preying on your perceived social contract and fear of confrontation (especially when there no “$0.00” button).
Actually, this runs counter to the theory that tipping addresses the principal-agent problem wherein an owner cannot observe the behavior of all employees, but the person being served can. According to this theory, the tip is supposed to reflect the quality of service, and therefore must be paid after service is rendered.
I know that it is irrational, but I have this fear that if I refuse to tip when paying for food in advance (fast food, or food carts, etc), that it might be reflected in the quality or quantity of food in my meal. So I pay the damn tip.
A nefarious use of these systems is reclassifying normal wage earners as lower paid tipped wage earners.
There is a popular brewery in Boston called Trillium brewing that collects tips with these systems for people buying canned beer from behind the register. It’s crazy because you order a case of beer for about $100 and then they default to 20% tip for what is basically a retail transaction, and a lot of people refused to tip.
Turns out they started paying people like $5/hr, below normal minimum wage for Boston, because they were classified as tipped staff.
I'm not totally sure I understand the scam here. An employee in Boston must be paid $15/hr in some combination of tips and wages. If tips don't get them there, the employer is obligated to. (You also generally can't use the tipped wage for work that isn't tipped; like, if you have these employees do back-of-the-house work, or cleanup, you can't pay them the tipped wage for those hours --- but I didn't verify that this was the rule in Massachusetts like it is elsewhere).
Like: I see what's egregious about this: it would be better for employees to take home $15/hr plus tips, rather than $15/hr and no tips, even though customers tipped. It's a scummy move. But I don't think it could have meant that employees took home $5/hr, right?
> An employee in Boston must be paid $15/hr in some combination of tips and wages.
Now that, I have a huge problem with. The tips should not be counted toward satisfying the minimum wage. That turns what should be an expression of appreciation for the employee into me just subsidizing the employer's business. If the employer needs more money from me, they should be honest about it and raise their prices.
The dishonesty is not in the fact that revenue became wages. That would be the case no matter what. The dishonesty is in the posted price which appears low but doesn't include a culturally expected fee.
The problem with the tip minimum compensation is it's usually calculated over the whole pay period, not each shift. So you could have one shift where you're making an equivalent of $25/hr, and then another where you're only making $5/hr, and if it all averages out, you don't get bumped up on the "slow" shift.
The way to fight this is to devise some kind of certification for service businesses that says, “This establishment pays livable wages, provides excellent service, and does not accept tips.“.
As a reminder: tips belong to the workers, not the business. It's a crime for an employer to withold any portion of a tip from the employees, or redistribute it to non-server/wait staff (the inability to pass tips on to bos folk is frequently pointed to as a problem with tips so restaurants, etc created "surcharges", except those aren't tips so can be retained by the business).
Seriously: if you have boss/manager/employer who is taking tips ("fees", "penalties", excuse less theft), you should talk to an employment lawyer. If you complain about anything like this to your boss, do it in writing/email/text messages (saving everything and/or screenshotting) - while most of the US is "at will" employment there are plenty of illegal reasons to be fired, and retaliation when complaining about wage theft is likely to be. Again: talk to an employment lawyer. Similar for protected medical leave, maternity leave, etc - ensure all communication is in writing. I've said elsewhere: your employer is not your friend, and it's not your family, and you cannot ever assume it is - even if your manager is on your side, their's may not be, and HR is not.
> It's a crime for an employer to withold any portion of a tip from the employees
> if you have boss/manager/employer who is taking tips ("fees", "penalties", excuse less theft), you should talk to an employment lawyer.
Can you spell out the common scenario where it's fairly trivial for an employee to right this wrong? A good place to start might be the employment lawyer who works on contingency for the most common tip-withholding scenarios.
My rules for tipping are locked in 1995. You tip servers, bartenders, cab drivers, pizza deivery, and a few other select people. No fast food workers. No baristas.
I find it bizarre the mental gymnastics people will do to draw arbitrary lines on when to tip.
All the reasons for tipping in restaurants apply to tipping in every other situation they're being asked for now. It was never about fair market value. It's entirely social convention and nonsense like how attractive the server is.
In 50 years, there's a good chance that tipping for everyday interactions will be the norm simply because a generation will grow up with.
Everyone has these toast wireless tap to pay things with the default 18% tip on them. They are super annoying. I want the paper receipt and pen to work out the tip on the pretax amount. I actually refuse to go to restaurants that use this system now.
The other crazy thing is default living wage charges and all of that malarkey.
It’s just the same as Fees more fees and bogus charges.
Bringing the discussion more in line with the “tech” angles, the article has a quote claiming they aren’t “dark patterns” on the tip screen. But I’ve seen the “20%” suggested based on total + tax + addional restaurant fee. At Chili’s I’ve never gotten the dollar amount and percent listed to make sense.
As a consumer who dislikes tipping, here are your ways to deal with it:
1. Find, frequent, and favorably review establishments that do not accept tips.
2. Express desire for policy at local, state, and federal levels. (Listed in decreasing order of ROI.)
There is no option 3. You cannot refuse to tip on a moral basis. You are just punishing the victim. No one will join you in your revolution and nothing will get done.
When tech bro capitalists pit customer vs. worker in order to artificially increase their profits, we're all the victims. The only moral option is to tip 0% on iPad counter screens, all the time.
If we live in a world where we allow victims to be punished regularly by other members of our society, often times inadvertently, and I behave in a way that perpetuates such a norm, is that also moral? If I disobey and stop tipping, and society cannot tolerate my actions, shouldn't I be punished? Two sides of the same coin. Serious questions.
I am made highly uncomfortable being put in a position where I can victimize someone and punish them by not tipping... I have trouble understanding why any society would find it morally acceptable to have this power dynamic become possible at all during a financial transaction, so my only genuine guess is that the real underlying purpose is to financially exploit customers by preying upon an ambiguous notion of social normality that is ever-so shifting all the time and not at all clear...
Just don't tip, simple as that, unless you are big supporter of tax evasion, low pensions and unfair salaries.
Btw. I just finished rewatching X-Files and I strongly recommend everyone here (especially to people who like Black Mirror) to watch episode S11E07 from X-Files reboot called Rm9sbG93ZXJz , which is about what happens if you refuse to tip machine/AI.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadI don’t want to misrepresent you, but I’m grasping for more charitable interpretations than that.
At some point small businesses, food carts, etc, realized that if you just put a tip jar on the counter, many people will throw money in it just because it's there. It's culturally expected now. I find it slightly infuriating.
I think the day is not far where there will be tip for paying tip because tips cause extra calculation for businesses hence they need to be tipped for processing tips for you.
Overall what I noticed is that tipping is a sub-strategy among others in the American shopping experience where companies try as long as possible to hide the total price charged to a customer. You can see it everywhere from various fees, taxations, and tipping. I am shocked that it is so difficult to know the final cost of things until the very last second. Tipping is just one strategy in the toolkit, but tech companies are deploying it everywhere now, it's hard to escape.
As you should. It's illegal to pay below minimum wage. If they don't get tipped enough to make minimum wage, the employer has to make up the difference. Of course minimum wage needs to be increased but that's another topic.
This is not true for DoorDash - they can see the tip amount before accepting the order. I think that such a "tip" should not be treated as a tip for tax passthrough purposes - it's a bid for service.
Please lower that number to zero if you refuse to tip.
They give me a total price, I pay it without issue, and that's how it goes.
As far as I understand society expects that people working hourly make a minimum wage. If they're not paid minimum wage, then it's illegal and their employer is liable for damages and punishment. What's immoral is a situation where an employer is not paying an employee the wages our laws require. There's no "social minimum wage" for tip workers. There's a market for their services. If somebody wants to do more valuable labor in some other capacity nobody is stopping them just as nobody is forcing them to work for tips.
Driving on the shoulder is justifiable in certain scenarios, like if you need to get to a hospital. It's not absolutely immoral.
But somehow it's moral not to tip a Walmart worker simply because of American norms?
In Japan, it's the same as American fast food (even at sit-down restaurants): you have to go to the register to pay, usually next to the door. In Europe, however, my experience has been that most restaurants have a portable payment terminal they bring to the table for you.
At fast food restaurants, you just pay at the terminal you ordered your food at. At places that don't have that, like Dick's, you just pay at the terminal they have at the register.
The non-chain places usually have Stripe or Square, they all support tap or chip.
I can't remember the last time I gave my card to someone.
Here in Europe you can get by without tipping quite easily, but I don't think they would allow you to bring your own drinks and honestly it also doesn't make sense. Why can't I drink my own drink, am I not paying enough for the meal itself that you need to rob me on drinks? Might as well not going to your place at all and eat at home, if you have problem with my own drinks.
However, unlike Europe, water is free and even though it's tap water, it's really good (Tokyo has excellent municipal water quality). European restaurants are terrible that way; they want to sell you ridiculously expensive bottled water that costs more than alcohol.
You can "get by without" tipping in Europe, but in some places (like Budapest) they try to guilt tourists into tipping the same way it's done in America with a place on the credit card slip while the server is watching, because they know American tourists are used to tipping a lot. Other places have a place to add a tip too. Japan is different: there is absolutely no tipping, whatsoever. It's not even allowed; they will return your money to you.
Historically, tipping came to America from Europe in the 1920's and 30's. When it started, it was very divisive and considered un-American. You can see it in the background of certain old films of the era. It is a sub-plot in the Humphrey Bogart movie Petrified Forest.
Until then, I have a rule: I only tip when someone is working outside of regular working hours to act as my servant. That's like evening dinner service where someone is actually waiting my table. Sometimes I'll tip at lunch for pleasant service even though it breaks my rule because I'm human. And sometimes a dollar or two for coffee early in the morning or bar service at night out of habit.
I also have "tip bands" structured such that I tip at least 10% when de-facto expected. I tip $5 up to a $50 ticket, and $10 up to a $100 ticket, on the pre-tax and pre-other-fees price. My logic here is that if restaurants are supplementing wages with baked in fees, those fees should be deducted from the tip I'd otherwise have been expected to pay. So a standard 15% less a 4% surcharge post tax becomes 10% additional (tip). In any case, things average out such that I over-tip anyway, sigh.
I guess my latter point here is that I'm still made to feel guilty when tipping at least 10% because of how establishments suggest you should be considering 20%, 25% and 30% gratuities on top of all the fees they slip in at the end and taxes. It leaves me disillusioned with the entire notion.
Note that the sum of wage + tips must reach the minimum wage, or else the employer is required to make up the difference. It's a common misconception that tipped workers can earn less, in total, than minimum wage.
Also, I don't see any reason why violating the law in that way should be any more common than violating it by paying non-tipped workers less than minimum wage. Either one would require the same degree, and same kind, of fraud. So tipped workers should be no worse off in practice than non-tipped workers.
In just a quick look, I found this:
> 5. Wage theft is particularly acute in food and drink service, and restaurants across the country have been found to be in violation of wage and hour laws. It is true that the law requires restaurants to ensure that tipped workers receive at least the regular minimum wage when their tips are included, but the reality is that huge numbers of restaurants—helped by too-weak enforcement efforts—ignore these requirements. In investigations of over 9,000 restaurants, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) found that 84 percent of investigated restaurants were in violation of wage and hour laws, including nearly 1,200 violations of the requirement to bring tipped workers’ wages up to the minimum wage. Among the restaurants that were investigated, tipped workers were cheated out of nearly $5.5 million. Workers in the food and drink service industries are more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than workers in other industries. [0]
EDIT: Apparently the DOL study was focused on 2010-12, so not sure what the newest compliance looks like [1].
[0]: https://www.epi.org/blog/seven-facts-about-tipped-workers-an...
[1]: https://files.epi.org/2014/EPI-CWED-BP379.pdf
But tips are also often used as a performance evaluation metric, and falling low enough that the employer has to make it up often leads to termination, so, where this is possible (as it most obviously is where cash tips are involved) its not uncommon for employees to be incentivized to artificially inflate tips.
Eliminating the lower tipped based minimum wage (which, when followed, means that tips actually go to the employer, not the tipped employee, to a point) means that, even where this practice and pressure exists, it doesn’t leas to suppressing wages below the general mininum.
That's still kind of a dick move, man...
That's the social contract -- you go to a full service restaurant, you tip 20% of the bill.
I can understand for things like even retail and other non-traditional PoS stuff but for full service dining, this isn't new.
If you want to opt out of participating in the whole tip structure there, then you probably should opt out of participating in full service dining as well.
When did it go from 15% to 20%? Is it because people don't tip in cash anymore, making it more difficult for service staff to evade taxes?
I've actually decided the real problem is clueless people like you trying to tip police others over immaterial minutia like exact tip percentage. Do my napkin FFS and see for yourself what my percentage averages out to. You're the ones manufacturing frantic guilt. It's like atheists and unknowns. Christ.
Isn’t the idea that servers knowingly make a gamble that they can generate more from tips (performance) than less than minimum wage?
So if you order a drink that costs $1000, the server should get $200 for that?
> It leaves me disillusioned with the entire notion.
Ideally, we should just raise the employee's wages and end the practice of tipping. For servers in high-throughflow establishments, where actual service is being provided, give them a percentage of every bill, then they're rewarded if the place is busy (which it will be if they're providing good service and the food is good). If they upsell on wine bottles or whatever, they're then essentially earning a commission, and it's baked in, not some customer whim thing.
Pretty much across the whole personalized service industry (ie, not mass-market retail jobs like grocery and department stores), there is a soft norm of tipping. You're not required to tip any of them the way you are with restaurants, but people have been for generations; it's a way of signaling customer loyalty and getting potentially better service.
Don't tip your grocer unless you really want to. Seriously consider tipping your mechanic if given the option, at least, if you expect to use them in the future. Probably tip the barista (a buck or so), the same way you would a bartender. Definitely tip your hotel housekeeper! And: you are required to tip at full-service American restaurants.
This is American nonsense that needs to stay in that god-forsaken country.
Having worked in both fast-food and fine-dining restaurants, tips are a huge bone of contention. Tax fraud is common, mgmt skimming is common, and now these POS systems charge a percentage of the tip for "expediting" the process.
Screw that.
There was only a norm in tipping in restaurants where your food was delivered to your table. That was never expected in fast food. Now places like QDoba have tipping options.
I'm not even arguing that the POS screens aren't a genuine social phenomenon, or that it isn't off-putting for a grocery store clerk to side-eye you for not tipping at check-out (I wouldn't!). I'm just saying, this article acts like tipping a mechanic is a shocking new intrusion, and what's actually the case is that the author just isn't familiar with the pre-existing norms of tipping.
First is that the quality of service does not change based on the presence of a tip or not, largely because tips happen after the service has completed. If it did I would tip.
Instead I expect people to quote me a fair price for their labour and do their job with pride. If they don't I'll give them feedback and find another provider if necessary.
Second, these days you rarely even interact with the service worker, sadly. I totally understand the history, but we don't live in that world anymore where I have one driver or one doorman or one mechanic who I need to continually show appreciation. If I did I would tip.
Instead I say please and thank you and if I do have an ongoing relationship I reward them with loyalty and perhaps occasionally a gift because they've become a friend.
Third, with the amount of fees restaurants have added and the shift to showing you post-tax tip suggestions on receipts, I no longer feel like the social contract is balanced and I'm disillusioned from participating. On top of that, since it's an implicit requirement to tip in these scenarios, I don't feel like it's even meaningful to tip more or less depending on the quality of service you receive. So you can't even use that as a feedback mechanism since it all comes out average in the wash. I still tip at full service restaurants because I'm not a completely ignorant dickwad, but I'm really close to becoming one.
Instead I'd vote to remove the loophole that allows restaurants to pay staff $2/hr plus tips so that we could go back to employees being paid fairly and then tips being totally extra/earned. Tell me the fair price of food such that you can pay your staff a living wage. I'll pay it.
I'm making a much narrower point, which is that if you're going to write a trend story like this for a mass media outlet, you should do your homework first. The author of this story didn't even bother to Google whether tipping mechanics was normal, let alone actually ask a mechanic.
Maybe this is a West Coast or Midwest thing, but the idea of tipping my mechanic is a non-starter.
Again, there is a soft norm of tipping in pretty much all blue-collar personalized services. Meaning: you don't have to tip, you're not going to get side-eye if you don't tip, but it's worth knowing that some people do tip.
Tipping after the fact, especially to a heartless POS machine, is utterly pointless. You’ve already received the goods or services. They’re just preying on your perceived social contract and fear of confrontation (especially when there no “$0.00” button).
There is a popular brewery in Boston called Trillium brewing that collects tips with these systems for people buying canned beer from behind the register. It’s crazy because you order a case of beer for about $100 and then they default to 20% tip for what is basically a retail transaction, and a lot of people refused to tip.
Turns out they started paying people like $5/hr, below normal minimum wage for Boston, because they were classified as tipped staff.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2018/11/21/trouble-bre...
Like: I see what's egregious about this: it would be better for employees to take home $15/hr plus tips, rather than $15/hr and no tips, even though customers tipped. It's a scummy move. But I don't think it could have meant that employees took home $5/hr, right?
That doesn’t speak to this issue or mass laws, but it’s something that’s new Germaine to the general conversation
Now that, I have a huge problem with. The tips should not be counted toward satisfying the minimum wage. That turns what should be an expression of appreciation for the employee into me just subsidizing the employer's business. If the employer needs more money from me, they should be honest about it and raise their prices.
Seriously: if you have boss/manager/employer who is taking tips ("fees", "penalties", excuse less theft), you should talk to an employment lawyer. If you complain about anything like this to your boss, do it in writing/email/text messages (saving everything and/or screenshotting) - while most of the US is "at will" employment there are plenty of illegal reasons to be fired, and retaliation when complaining about wage theft is likely to be. Again: talk to an employment lawyer. Similar for protected medical leave, maternity leave, etc - ensure all communication is in writing. I've said elsewhere: your employer is not your friend, and it's not your family, and you cannot ever assume it is - even if your manager is on your side, their's may not be, and HR is not.
> if you have boss/manager/employer who is taking tips ("fees", "penalties", excuse less theft), you should talk to an employment lawyer.
Can you spell out the common scenario where it's fairly trivial for an employee to right this wrong? A good place to start might be the employment lawyer who works on contingency for the most common tip-withholding scenarios.
All the reasons for tipping in restaurants apply to tipping in every other situation they're being asked for now. It was never about fair market value. It's entirely social convention and nonsense like how attractive the server is.
In 50 years, there's a good chance that tipping for everyday interactions will be the norm simply because a generation will grow up with.
The other crazy thing is default living wage charges and all of that malarkey.
It’s just the same as Fees more fees and bogus charges.
1. Find, frequent, and favorably review establishments that do not accept tips.
2. Express desire for policy at local, state, and federal levels. (Listed in decreasing order of ROI.)
There is no option 3. You cannot refuse to tip on a moral basis. You are just punishing the victim. No one will join you in your revolution and nothing will get done.
Btw. I just finished rewatching X-Files and I strongly recommend everyone here (especially to people who like Black Mirror) to watch episode S11E07 from X-Files reboot called Rm9sbG93ZXJz , which is about what happens if you refuse to tip machine/AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2GuGMn7n04
And btw. in China you don't tip and you can even bring your own drinks to restaurant, why not, you are paying for the meal after all.