Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes
apnews.comI've just opened a coffee shop in Los Angeles last month, and we don't take tips. We only use self-ordering iPads (I've custom coded an iOS app w/ Stripe Terminal for it), and we don't accept cash either.
We've had a few customers baffled by the no-tipping policy, and still insisting that they leave a tip. Some even left cash on the counter or on the table. We had to chase a few of them down to return their money. Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.
While it has been strange to see some customer's determination to leave a tip, I think overall it was well received by the great majority of people that just didn't say anything about it and made a mental note that the prices they see on the menu is what they'll actually end up paying.
We will probably need to highlight that we pay a higher wage for baristas & cooks to account for the lack of tips, and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
You should write a longer piece about your coffee shop! and the process behind it. If you do, you should submit it to HN - and if you do that you should email us (hn@ycombinator.com) because we might put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
Will do.
If anyone is in the LA area and wants to check it out, it's Awakening Coffee in Inglewood. I'm there most days since we've just opened and there are many things to be sorted out. Come say hi.
Add some “we don’t accept cash” signs too to be nice to your customers, I’ve seen multiple instances of flustered people getting caught by no cash policies in the last year.
It’s the worst once someone has gone all the way through a tablet/GUI menu and made all their purchase decisions only to be awkwardly thwarted at the payment step. Negative bonus points if there is a line of customers behind the pour soul attempting to use cash
We're waiting on some decals for the front door that say just that.
That's a good option, because if there's a shop next door that takes cash I will definitely go there and tip in cash.
And I'd go the other way. We both get to do things the way we want without getting in each others way. The system works!
[UK here, where I feel we are slipping slowly but relentlessly towards the worst parts of the American Way in many areas including this one]
I typically use a credit card but on principle, I avoid places that don't accept cash.
There are many less fortunate people that can't get a credit or debit card and I don't want to support practices that hurt them even more.
Capital one has free checking. So that's no problem.
Cash costs money too. We always talk about the cost of credit cards but always forget the cost of dealing with cash.
I'm super happy with all this modernization. I only need to carry an Apple Watch, not even my phone. I love it.
> people that can't get a credit or debit card
Why is that?
No fixed address.
Not enough spare money to maintain a bank account.
No desire for a high-fee credit card, no access to a low-fee credit card.
No acceptable documentation.
Interesting. The second one strikes me as odd. I have never paid any fees for a current account unless it went into the red, not in the UK nor in Norway. And a debit card is free in Norway and the UK.
They meant that the person doesn’t have enough to maintain the minimum balance in the account.
This just seems like an unnecessarily unkind response that you could have kept to yourself.
Guessing it's this: https://awakening.bar/
Yep. Didn't want to share it because it's embarrassing how taped together that page is, but I had to put something up in an afternoon, because in the absence of a website people were taking photos of the menu on the iPads to take home.
Dude. You have NOTHING to be embarrassed about.
It's a breath of fresh air to have such a nice clean site that loads fast and has nice photos, clear description and price.
I wish more sites were like this.
(only issue I can see is some descriptions are truncated despite space being available for the rest of the text on my desktop)
> site that loads fast
What are you talking about. It takes over a second to load everything and the content jumps once or twice as it is loading. If this was a static website, not a 'web app', it would load faster without jumping around.
Now don't get me wrong, the design is amazing for a coffee shop, but it certainly isn't fast.
On first load from Germany it was there, almost instantly. Certainly under 0.5secs. And no content jumps either. Desktop, Linux, FF, µBo.
Interesting. I clicked on the link and it showed up almost instantly. And as I scrolled nothing loaded in or jumped around. So in assumed it was a static site with optimised images.
The jumping around happens on initial load. First the description loads, then the logo on top, which pushes the description down, and finally the menu items, which push the footer down. After that, the site is smooth.
It's not a static site.
It doesn't work without javascript.
@jacktribe - All the best.
I looked at the website, and I understand it is WIP. Is this a mistake that needs fixing? "Americano - Espresso with hot water. $4.50 (Medium) $4.50 (Large) "
Oops that’s indeed an error on our part. The medium has 2 shots, the large has 3 shots, so there should be a slight price difference. Will correct in the AM. Thanks!
I wonder — hot water is pretty cheap. Maybe size and number of espresso shots are independent… only the latter should matter for cost I guess.
It’s disingenuous to charge 50¢ more for a few oz of water.
Are you under the impression that coffee shops employ a cost-plus business model?
Everything looks delicious. You could polish up the design if you want, but I think it's getting the job done. I'd definitely go if I was nearby after seeing the menu :)
Fwiw I really like the current design. If you hadn’t said it was taped together I had assumed that it was purposefully designed like that. It not really brutalist, but adjacent, somehow? That seems fitting for an unconventional coffee shop IMO.
I think the site looks grand. One suggestion would be to make your card background white rather than yellow. I think it would help with contrast against the background of the site and make the text easier to read. Other than that you have your opening times, your menu and your location, and it's all front and centre. The only thing I'd add is a map to make your location easier to find but that's not a huge deal.
No. White would be bad. But the yellow could go more mellow ;-) Somewhere into the direction of 'Manila', or so. Would be more fitting to the whole coffee thing, anyways.
Looks great!
I'd just remove the sticky header with the blur effect and those shadows below the cards. Maybe make the menu categories collapsible. This is going in a modern minimalist direction which I prefer in such cases. If you need any design tips, feel free to ping!
This is such a great example of how iterative design works.
Built it an afternoon—the fit and finish looks fantastic and 100% complete. It perfectly solves the problem that you described so simply and well.
Man I think you need to raise prices.
Not that you asked ;)
Hot Turmeric Latte!
Holy shit, I just got here (El Segundo) from DC. I may forgo The Boy and the Bear tomorrow morning for Awakening Coffee.
If you do, I'll probably make your coffee tomorrow :)
I ended up not having time :(
Wow this takes me back. I went to the Boy and Bear in Culver all the time back when it opened. Eventually my tastes grew beyond their coffee quality, but still some good memories there.
What have you graduated/ascended to?
Hah mostly just make coffee at home since the pandemic. Mostly I buy coffee from Onyx in Arkansas. I also get cold brew from Go Get Em Tiger, which is solid.
Tbh not sure if my issue with Boy and the Bear is the quality or just that I don't tend to like south/central american beans all that much. I go for Rwanda when possible.
I wonder if all these laid off engineers will end up opening small businesses and using their skill to cut one or two employees. Maybe we'll finally get a push toward real automation.
Because then those engineers will no longer be out of a job, but some other people with a smaller skillset will be! And all will be good, because we finally had a push towards real automation!
I'm sympathetic to this argument because people can't retrain for a different job instantly, and there's mostly no safety net that allows people to take the time to retrain and still be able to provide for themselves and family while they do it.
But in the grand scheme of things, low-skill jobs should be automated to the greatest degree possible, freeing up people to work on more worthwhile things. And as automation gets better and better, even medium-skill and eventually high-skill jobs should also be automated.
In my version of utopia, people won't even have to work if they don't want to, but, due the to abundance afforded by all this automation, will still be able to live a very comfortable life. I suspect humanity will destroy itself before we get there, though.
(Of course, that utopia will be fragile if enough people don't know how to maintain the automation.)
The OP is running a distinctive coffee shop. Interacting with human staff is a feature. If I literally just want to drink a coffee then coffee vending machines already exist.
Sure, and people should certainly be allowed to run businesses like that. But a barista job shouldn't be one that someone has to take in order to make ends meet.
You should read Mana if you haven't already.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...
The notion of retraining implies a waiting pool of unfilled jobs. The only industries in the US that are chronically understaffed and desperate for talent are construction and unskilled agricultural labor, neither of which (separately or together) are prepared to absorb the roughly 22 million individuals who work in the service industry in the US. You want automation, you then also have to choose between luxury space communism or open air refugee camps and massive civil unrest.
Well on the bright side we’d have to be incredibly stupid to pick the latter, right?
It says quite a bit about the world we find ourselves in that I can't tell if this is a masterwork of sarcasm or if you're being earnest.
I don’t even know if I was being sarcastic, hahaha. I mean I was playing with the fact that obviously the latter is a terrible pick, but I’m really worried that we won’t so much pick it as default into it.
Thankfully, life is not a zero-sum game (I mean it is, but we are just converting energy into complexity).
Some of these engineers will open other types of businesses and employ these people. Or maybe these people will go back to trades, because you know, these are much needed skills.
Based on your logic, we should still be using horses.
What isn't a zero sum game? Someone really needs to go take a look at a graph of household buying power charted against GDP for the last 60 years. Anyway, your ability to concoct pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals in the face of real-world consequences notwithstanding, historically folks that are pushed out of their industry (with outliers) have a tendency to slide into poverty and then stay there.
This, but unironically
> Maybe we'll finally get a push toward real automation.
That's not at all what I'm looking for going to a coffee shop. I like the personal connection to the persons behind the counter. A short chat, sittinf down with friends, watching the barista clean the machine and make a coffee. It's the last place where I want to see automation and already touch screens that I as a customer need to operate to order are mildly off-putting and counter to a cozy feel. For me at least.
We only did it because the pandemic travel restrictions completely wiped off our previous (Bay Area-based) startup in just a few weeks, so I can see it happening.
Nice. Unlike the dev world where you can open github and find an infinity of open source projects, the rest of the world is much more opaque. It’ll be great if you open source the stacks you are building, write article how you are doing it, etc… I wonder if that will attract more people/devs into it and an open source energy develops around a bunch of these sectors.
For what it's worth, that's what I've done. Pays much, much better than SWE ever did.
interesting view
Just wanted to say, please include some technical information if possible.
I've spent time with and looked into developing for Clover and set up other POS systems. I've also tutored people pursuing their CS degree while bartending that want to make their own system. I'm very interested in this space since it seems impenetrable. Small businesses can't take too many risks and trying to sell a tailor-made POS seems impossible. Obviously the situation is different, though.
We've had a few customers that have shown real interest in the POS system because they are small business owners too, and split their time between the register and everything else they have to do behind the counter.
I've started coding it only 5 days before opening, and it's paired with a kitchen app that shows & prints the orders, recipes, etc. They're both very raw and I'm working on v2 right now.
Definitely a space worth exploring. I understand the needs of bartenders, baristas, etc. a lot better now that I'm behind the counter.
Really cool! Would love to hear more because I'm working on a few concepts in this space.
I'm trying to find the core value proposition and looking for people to collaborate with.
Here are two proof of concepts I'm building:
https://botto-app.vercel.app/merchant/sattvic_vegan
https://q-link.xyz/q/cld1u6ihc0001mq08j15yhog9
If this sounds interesting, please email me at my username @ gmail.com!
As a consumer of both Square and Clover, I wonder if I am alone in finding the latter ridiculously clunky. I want to pay quickly, get a receipt texted or emailed or printed and move on. After I enter my details (eg phone number) once, I should not need to do it again at another merchant.
Square gets this. Clover seems not to, and is forever trying to get me to install its dumpy little app to harvest my data in exchange for coupons. Its like the evil stepchild of Foursquare and Facebook. Go away Clover! I actively avoid some takeout joints that use it now, I just dontnhave the mental energy to deal with the excessive contact Clover wants.
yah square is good, clover not so smooth. Sometimes I wonder if the clover payment systems are even online at times or if they just batch a bunch of orders in infrequent intervals. Not sure really.
How do you expect it to remember anything without “harvesting” data?
I wasnt very clear, sorry. I expect the payment terminal backend to match my credit card ID to the phone number I input at the terminal when I elect to have the receipt texted to me. After that, I do not expect to have to supply any more data (eg at a second merchant using Square).
Clover seems to have trouble with this, and their solution appears to be to lean on me to install their app and use it to check in at stores to get some discount, in exchange for knowing data like my date of birth.
Seconded. Opening a coffee shop anywhere is an act of bravery, but in L.A., well… Godspeed, my friend.
A business model where if you get it just right, you could earn as much as a wagie!
i knew about this, but I wonder how many spam tentatives you get to this address
What's a spam tentative?
people asking for a boost :)
Too many. I prefer it when people find submissions that they didn't post, and just think are good.
I love how one person opened a coffee shop which basically operates like every single coffee shop in the world apart from the US, and you guys need a detailed write up, charts, flow charts, tips for the secret sauce :)
The point is, that isn't how coffee shops typically operate in the United States, which is what makes it interesting. Operating a coffee shop without tips has special and unique considerations in the United States - chiefly, how to retain talent and employees when conventional wisdom would say it is better paying to get a job at a traditional tip-based coffee shop, which again, are plentiful in the United States. I would say managing employees is the #1 issue when running a small business like this, so the concern is especially relevant (and unique) to the United States market.
It is kind of like how, if a company was trying to tackle health care in the United States, they might attempt to build a system which reconciles many different hospital systems across the country. In other countries, with Universal Single Payer healthcare, this might not be interesting, but in the context of the United States, a system like this could have huge implications.
The market itself is inseparable from what makes a venture like this interesting. It is interesting precisely because of where it is located.
Former American here...grew up in Ohio but haven't lived in the country for a while (2007).
When did coffee shops in the US start asking for tips? It must be a relatively new thing. Never saw tips asked for at coffee shops when visiting until the ipad checkout thing (square?) appeared. Is it a nationwide thing now or just confined to certain regions (coastal metro areas?)?
I'm from Ontario, Canada, which has a similar but maybe not exact tipping culture.
Tipping at nicer coffee places (i.e. where they offer espresso-based drinks to order) has been a thing for a very, very long time. I can't recall ever not seeing a tip jar and have been going to places like that for probably 25 years, although if you told me the expectation was stronger nowadays that wouldn't surprise me.
The low end places (Tim Horton's up here, I guess Dunkin Donuts would be the comparison), don't expect tips or put out jars / enable them on their terminals, but Tim Horton's has always had a charity jar at the counter anyway so I would think most people would prefer that one.
Yes it started with the upgrade to smart payment terminals, where you insert your card and interact with the screen. It's nationwide now. It got a lot worse during COVID, at which point it became normalized to pay the usual tips even for takeout.
I saw it in Minnesota, Oregon, and DC in 2000-2003… so quite some time. This is barista made drinks, not your Dunkin’ Donuts brewed coffee.
It took the form of a tip jar. It was my main source of gas money when a barista.
I'm living in Ohio and visit two coffee shops on the regular with electronic iPad checkout. One has a tip in the checkout process while the other does not. In the tip included location I've seen people in front of me tip 20 to 30% on a regular basis for everything from drip coffee to the coffee milkshakes that everyone seems to be overindulging on these days. So people are willingly paying $8 to $10 of Ohio money for a coffee milkshake, or $5 for drip!
The Pulp Fiction shake quote always comes to mind for me:
Vincent: "I gotta know what a five dollar shake tastes like"
Totally off topic but my buddy ran a coffeeshop for a number of years so I'd go in there when he opened to hang out and start my day. It always blew my mind how many people ordered the 24oz "wake-n-shake" at 7am! The drink is just a vanilla shake with a strizzle of chocolate around the cup and a few shots of espresso in it. Sometimes even with whipped cream on top!
Yes... The US and especially Ohio is unhealthy for a reason. Our access to unhealthy choices seems unlimited.
Caffe Nero is a chain in the Boston area (and elsewhere) which has no tipping when using a credit card. Most locations have a tip jar for cash, bud no option to tip. It certainly helps me think that they’re getting paid a decent wage since they’re not prompting me to tip automatically. And the employees generally seem happy, and payment goes faster since there’s no stuttering and thinking over the tip step.
The same simple credit card machines are used at Qdoba, but there they ask for a tip, even when coming in to get a bowl and doing takeout. Not unreasonable, but the difference in experience and expectation is pretty wild: coffee sometimes takes as long as it does to put a burrito bowl together, yet one expects a tip and one does not.
Cafe Nero is a European chain, centered in London [1].
Are tips tax favourable? Because if not then replace $4 coffee and $1 tip with $5 coffee and just pay the staff more.
But again, it's not that simple, because everyone coming into your coffee shop is going to be expecting to have to tip, so you need to properly manage those expectations. How the owner is planning to do that, and the results of those efforts, is interesting.
Edit: and while per the other replies many people don't claim (all of) their cash tips, you are supposed to claim them as income.
Customers will tend to be price sensitive more to the listed price than the actual price they pay, particularly when it comes to tips since they're "choosing" to give the tip.
This would earn you the reputation of being especially expensive, even if customers aren't actually paying you more.
Very much so, if you take them in cash and don't report them on your tax return.
Which is tax evasion, unless your tips are less than $20 per month.
Way back when I was in college, none of my peers reported tips. Has that situation changed?
It is tax evasion, but it was commonplace.
It always was illegal, but hard for the IRS to prove so most got away with tax evasion. These days most people pay with a credit card which means there is an electronic record that the IRS can demand of the employer. With cash tips the waitress was collecting the cash themself and the manager didn't have a good way to get the correct number. If you report zero tips in the cash system someone will notice, but if you report everyone only gave you half what they really did there is no way to know.
Yet this practice is nearly ubiquitous with cash tip jobs.
They are untaxed in practice, so yes, the most favourable.
Cash tips were, for sure, but were also something you were supposed to report.
But now, tips are given with cards, and a record is kept of how much, and where it goes, and it is recorded!
So be wary, because you can be 100% sure they are taxable, and if you get audited...
This is exactly how Dunkin, McDonalds, and Starbucks operates now that they all have apps. So, the vast majority of coffee places in the US.
Order, pay, pickup, done. No tip expected (though nobody stops you).
I grew up in New England where Dunkin Donuts is almost a religion, right up there with the New England Patriots. I wasn't excited about Krispy Kreme at all because I grew up with good donuts.
One of the first things I remember as a kid in the 1970s was reading the "no tipping" sign at Dunkin's and asking my parents about it. So it has been a policy there for a long, long time.
(Funny they put a Dunkin's in on my side of town a few years ago, I don't know how many people know the supermarket across the street makes better donuts, which is truly unusual.)
We had a Starbucks in Collegetown which went to only taking mobile orders during the pandemic which meant I pretty much quit drinking coffee there. Not long after Starbucks closed the location to bust the union that was forming there. In my mind that area is a "coffee desert", I mean you can get coffee but so far as I can tell the best coffee is at 7-11 and everything else is much worse.
DD in the midwest discontinues any donuts with allergens. Bye-bye peanut, coconut, and butternut (my favorite). Their donuts are pretty bad now.
Ouch!
Context matters. The dynamics of the business are fundamentally different because many employees prefer tips to the alternative, and they have have many options where to work. Employees have a lot of leverage due to a chronic labor shortage.
This dynamic has played out time and again in Seattle, where business owners tried to switch to a "no tipping" model with a 20% mandatory service charge but ultimately had to relent because employees were not keen on earning less money.
> tried to switch to a "no tipping" model with a 20% mandatory service charge
Sounds like a false dichotomy. Why is the only other option still an imposed cost on the customer? Wouldn't it be nice if the bad servers just got fired like any other profession and the good servers got a bonus or something from the business owner?
Maybe people shouldn't "aspire" to be cafe baristas and chain restaurant wait staff. There are plenty of students and elderly that could handle the job and also handle the minimum wage. There's no reason those jobs should be lucrative, unless the business owners (rightly) realize those staff are the face of their operations, but in that case, again, the business owner should "invest" in their higher salaries to hopefully bring in business. None of this should be imposed on customers. Just my opinion.
There is no revenue/wage neutral way of restructuring how the costs are presented. A 20% service charge generates less income for waiters than tipping. Adding 20% to menu items generates less income for waiters than adding a 20% service charge. This effect isn't due to redistribution but a reduction in bill + tip revenue. No one has to like it but there is a lot of empirical evidence for this effect (and there are good theories as to why it happens).
By trying to eliminate tipping, you are working against the interest of waiters since they naturally want to maximize their income. You may not like tipping but it is economically optimal in many contexts. Businesses need to compete for employees and tipping maximizes employee income relative to revenue.
Where I live, most of the bartenders and waiters I know personally earn on the order of $80k/year if they do it full-time, and not at high-end establishments. Not an ostentatious lifestyle but definitely middle class.
You're ignoring the part that it should not be the customers burden. Sales and marketing people have high ceilings too, I can respect the hustle, BUT they don't get tips. They get a normal wage/salary and their company is on the hook for providing bonuses/commissions. It's not consumers "working against" the workers, it never should have been positioned that way in the first place. If business owners want to incentivize hustle, they should do it on their own dime.
It's a grey pattern to offer your product at 1 rate but implicitly you impose an additional 12-20% . Just pay them more, and charge more for the product, the end result is the same from the consumer. If the workers are no longer satisfied, there are other sales and marketing jobs that offer real salaries plus bonuses/commissions as mentioned above.
You can definitely go higher in certain contexts (bartenders at busy nightclubs, fine dining as you mention). There's also a lower end like diners, but even then it's a unique case of an easy to enter job that can pay a fairly liveable wage.
There are plenty of students and elderly that could handle the job and also handle the minimum wage.
It is my understanding that in the US, you're not paid minimum wage. Waiters are paid mostly by tips.
Some may have no wage! Tips only.
Where I live, this is illegal, and I suspect in Europe too, and this is where the lack of understanding comes from.
Now, coffee shops? People behind counters are not waiters, so I am unsure of wage issues, in the US.
Some places still have a lower tipped wage, but your hourly pay + tips has to at least equal the federal minimum wage, otherwise the employer has to make up the difference. Of course, the federal minimum wage is criminally low, and many employers aren't exactly ethical/operating legally.
> There are plenty of students and elderly that could handle the job
There is not an infinite supply of students who have the time to do that job. Our son worked at a coffee shop. Until the manager started pressuring him to work more hours than he had time for.
Some people think other people's jobs are bullshit. And then you end up with a shortage of competent workers. Every job should be lucrative.
I don't like the proliferation of tipping everywhere.
But I know many sit-down restaurants have tried to institute a no-tip policy, but both employees and customers hate it. I would hate it. I like giving tips. I wouldn't go to a restaurant where tipping was not allowed.
Plus, the restaurant has to raise their prices up by 20% anyways, because they now have to pay their wait staff more. The customer pays anyways. So it's a stupid thing not to have tipping. You're not going to save any money at all as the customer. It's impossible to save money.
Furthermore, I know waitstaff that make a considerable amount of money from tips. Like, $300-$400 per shift and more. That's about $80,000 to $105,000 per year. So the food prices are going to have to go up substantially to cover what that person made with tips. The reason that many wait staff make so much is that they have "regulars" who tip them well because they develop a relationship and a repore that goes beyond just simple waiting on a random customer.
People say they want the price that's on the menu, but come on - you know there's going to be a tip, if the menu says it is $20, then it is $23, you can do this in your head or on your mobile phone. You know exactly what the price will be unless you failed 2nd grade math. Why on earth would anyone care if the price said $20 or $23 on the menu, if in either case you pay $23? It's ridiculous in the extreme. Unless someone is an extreme pedantic martinet.
I see it completely different. Coming from the EU, I hate going to restaurants in the US because of the tipping culture. I dont mind leaving something if the service has been amazing, but then it might be 5e when the family have had a full meal etc. Being forced to pay part of the staff salary directly, with staff getting angry / annoyed when you dont leave enough is backwards to me. Its not that the math is hard, its about having to decide what your income is going to be based on how you work. Thats not my business to deal with, thats the management / workers business. I almost feel like it creates a culture of entitled people (Karen Generators), who believe they can do what they want.
Im also assuming that a lot of waiters dont pay taxes on the tips (at least when they are paid in cash), which would probably account for some of the difference in income between salary and tips. Here in the EU (most of the countries) at least we have good healthcare and education that is payed from those taxes, so you dont need to pay a 1k private insurance on a waiters salary.
Also, if I see something advertised as 5€ I expect to pay 5€. Having to pay more then the advertised price feels like I've been tricked.
I've never been in the US, but just thinking about having to pay more then what was written and knowing that due to not having a lot of money, I could get in trouble, gives me anxiety...
You would not get in "trouble" - I was a waiter at a restaurant in New York where the waiters make $0 per hour, only tips, and often we had customers from France or Germany who would sit and drink coffee for 3 or 4 hours, pay for the coffee and leave no tip. We waiters were upset about it because they did not understand that we are only paid by the customers, not the restaurant. But no one ever got in trouble.
When I lived in France and spent time in Germany, I always tipped a lot just to make a statement... but I understand that the waiters there are actually paid by the restaurants, so it's not necessary.
> I was a waiter at a restaurant in New York where the waiters make $0 per hour, only tips
Not a legal expert, but that looks very much illegal.
That's how it is. At the end of the year, they ask you how much you made in tips, calculate the tax off that and then "pay" you the exact amount of your taxes by giving it to the government.
It's the same as strippers. Better, because strippers often have to pay to dance.
I think that very much depends on the establshment. I'm from the EU and the server chased me down in the car park in upstate NY because I didn't tip.
First, I don't believe you one tiny little bit.
Second, even if it DID happen, that is the fantastically rare situation, that is extremely bizzare. You can read here and everywhere that this is not how it is done, so you don't make a judgement based on one single time, especially when no one else ever has had that experience.
I've left restaurants many times without paying a tip because of exceptionally poor service, it's never happened to me. I've never heard it happening to anyone.
Yeah, totally 100% do not believe you. Sorry, man. I just don't. Again, unless that server was actually and really truly mentally ill, and not using the term colloquially.
I don't think they meant "trouble" as in "they'll be in trouble with the restaurant for not tipping." I read it as "I'll be in (financial) trouble because I'll run out of money sooner than I expected" which would be a concern of mine as well in their shoes.
Right. But you KNOW that tips are used in the USA. So if you KNOW that tips are 15%, what is the big deal? You just add 15% to your $100 meal and you pay your $115. Who cares about the advertised price? Why is that such a holy of holies to genuflect in front of? You are not tricked. You know that it is custom to pay 15%. How are you tricked? You aren't.
The thing is, you DON'T have to tip. I have walked out of restaurants before without tipping when I got super shitty service. You can pay 5% or 10% or 15% or 20% or 25%.
And the thing is that here in the USA, everyone LOVES tipping. Customers, good nice customers, love tipping. Usually it is the whiny bitchy horrible customers that don't like tipping, and if there was not tipping, they would be whiny bitchy horrible customers anyways. This much I know to be true.
If you don't have a lot of money, just go and be honest and tell the wait staff that. Be honest. I mean, don't be going and ordering $800 worth of food and say you don't have a lot of money because that would be horrible thing. But if you have a very little money, just apologize and say you'd love to but can't.
Also, these days you can go online and see exactly how much the food is, and add on the tip. Just see what you want, add 15%, and you know. This is not difficult. It won't get you in trouble if you take an extra 30 seconds to look up the menu on line, right? And ffs, if you order $30 dinner, and the tip is $4.50 and you don't have enough money to cover it, why on earth would you go out to a restaurant in the first place? Stay at home and make a nice pasta dinner that is just as good as a restaurant and pay $1 or $1.50. Or euros, I think the exchange rate is pretty close to one-to-one. If you go out to a restaurant and go broke over $4.50, your issues are a lot deeper and worse than not having $4.50 tip. Like, you should see a professional therapist about why you would blow the tiny bit of money that you do have on a $30 meal when you can spend $1 and eat at home.
Tbf there are still examples of this in the EU. At least here in the Netherlands, if you purchase any drinks in recyclable bottles, you pay a surcharge at the register which can then be reimbursed when you bring the bottle back. It's not a large discrepancy (25¢ I think?) but it bit me once when I first arrived and I was paying for everything with cash. I had enough money for everything except the bottle surcharge.
You get the money back, so it's a deposit, not a surcharge.
But I still have to pay for it upfront. And if I'm out and about in the city and stop into AH to buy a drink to carry with me, then I either need to carry the bottle with me the rest of the day or throw it away and lose my "deposit".
The point is that it's not included on the label as the price I pay at the register.
Right, it's still a deposit, and not a surcharge. The whole point is that you don't throw it away. That's exactly what makes a 'surcharge' into a 'deposit'.
Most places in the US don’t even include all taxes in the prices they display so you will have to do some calculation anyway. It’s weird coming from Europe but you kind of get used to it, at least I hope.
You definitely get used to it. Having lived in both places, it's not really a big deal.
For me, living in Texas, I would assume the final price is 10% more than the sticker price calculation. When I was buying groceries, this generally meant I was always "under" my estimate because most food isn't taxable in Texas. But I was never surprised by the final total at the register. At restaurants I assumed 20-25% depending on what the numbers were.
Now that I live in Europe, I don't even notice. They tell me the total, I pay. End of story.
There is also what comes across as fake friendliness when going to a restaurant in the US.
> Hi, my name is Bobby, I am gonna be your server today. Blah blah blah blah...
It always comes across as angling for tip money. Waiters here don't usually introduce themselves by name and you generally have less interaction unless of course you start conversing. I prefer the lack of expectation if the and waiter does a good job, then I am more than happy to tip a little. I am in Catalonia where tipping isn't a big thing. Not sure if it's because of the Catalan reputation for being tight with money, or having read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia", it is related to when tipping was banned and the city was run by anarchists.
What do you call your waiter when you need to get their attention?
In America we like to call people by their name, not their title, especially for a service role. Otherwise it comes off as very classist and elitist. Someone calling out "Waiter!" would come off as a bit of an asshole, to be honest.
I can’t think of a time I called my waiter. I usually just make eye contact and raise my finger in what seems like a universal “I have a question” posture.
I’m terrible with names, though.
Right, 100%.
But if they are busy, then I'll do an "Excuse me" really nicely and just loud enough so they can hear - not too loudly, and they will nod and that usually is it, and I know it to mean that they will get to me as soon as they can, they acknowledged me. And if it is super busy, I'm cool if it takes a little longer than usual. It happens. If I'm in a hurry, I'd go to McDonalds. Not really, I hate it, but that's the idea.
In America I always call them "excuse me?"
In Argentina I revert to "chico"/"chica" but ...is that offensive? Hah.
It would be in America, yeah.
I mean ... practically anything is grounds for taking offense in America. Americans are like people who were suddenly told they're allowed to be offended, and now they're on a binge of being offended by everything. I probably wouldn't yell "hey kid" to my waiter at the Waffle House (or maybe I would, if I felt like I liked the kid). But "chico" is a term of endearment. I've never heard it said without some sweetness and tenderness... it doesn't sound the same as "hey kid" delivered in a derogatory way.
Nah. This is like it is in political discussions or online discussions, but in real life, in real time, it is not this way.
You want to use standard and customary forms of communcation, though. You can be a little friendlier, or a little more formal, but it's never good to stray too far if meeting or talking to a person the first time.
However, if you get a bead on the person and their personality, you can adjust your style to theirs is best.
Much of the western world is being trained to take offense to as much as possible.
I assumed you meant the direct translation of “girl”/“boy”. That would be a no-no.
Mae eye contact, or raise your hand.
This is corporate / chain restaurant America, and you will probably find the same in a chain restaurant in Spain. Typical mozos in Spain are just chill waiters like good waiters at normal restaurants in America. Anyone who goes "My name is Bobby..." is being forced to up-sell and act like a real estate agent by the restaurant company they work for, rather than be themselves. A good waiter anywhere in the world simply listens, responds, makes a joke, and serves your food. That is as true in America as it is in Barcelona.
This is a red herring.
Everyone in business is "fake." Your auto repair person, the person at Best Buy, people at the clothing store. Of course people are "fake."
However, they are people, too. I am always SUPER SUPER nice to people who are "fake" to me in restaurants or clothing stores or wherever, and they so much appreciate it that 95% of them actually are NOT fake nice to me anymore. As I wrote elsewhere, many times I got a desserts "on the house" at restaurants when I go out in groups, because I make it so enjoyable for the wait staff.
Of COURSE it is angling for tip money. I have walked out without paying a tip for crappy service. I paid zero.
I know wait staff is "fake" nice because they want tips, but if I'm genuinely nice to them then they are "real" nice. And if you are a regular at a restaurant, and tip well, everyone will know you and you will be treated as royalty. And you usually get the same server, who knows your kids names, where you work, and actually they care about you, but yeah, the customer knows the waiter or waitress does not work for free, of course. Neither does the customer.
And, we are all fake to people who give us money. We are ALL fake to our bosses. Nobody will go to their boss and be all, "Hey you fucking moron, another stupid fucking idea you have." Even if that is what one truly thinks. We all have different masks for different occasions.
In Europe, and Catalonia maybe, tipping is not expected, so it is not the culture. If I was there, I would not tip.
But again, the whole argument is ridiculous. If the meal is $30 (or euros), and a 15% tip is $4.50, then you pay $35 (I round up). If no tipping was allowed, the restaurant raises the price to $35. It's the same exact thing. Except if you get a REAL bad waitstaff, you pay $30, because that is what the tip is for. And bad service is if they are jerks, not if they spill a glass of wine on you, which sucks but is an honest mistake that can happen to any of us. I know a waitress who did that and she knew the customer well and bought him a nice shirt for the next time he came back.
But again, you pay the exact same price either way. So not sure why people have so much vitriole against it. And, so many Americans LOVE the custom of tipping. A lot of people go back to the same restaurants and love supporting a waiter or waitress that treat them well. I love paying tips, I usually don't pay less than 25%.
Right, I understand what you are saying. Many say the same exact thing.
However, while you don't like it, a vast majority of Americans DO like it. I like it. The staff like it. Management likes it.
I guess the solution is that if someone doesn't like tipping, they should never ever go out to restaurants here in the USA. That would take care of it instantly for you.
But again, as I said, you will pay the exact same or more if tipping is included in the price! The exact same or more.
The thing is that if you don't want to leave a tip, don't. It's so easy. Just don't. Most wait staff would rather a dinner party leave without paying the tip rather than have whining - who wouldn't?
I've never had staff get angry with me and I've been going to restaurants probably longer than you've been alive. So I don't know where you're getting this from, unless you are lying for effect, to falsely bolster your case.
I've never had entitle person ever. I've always had fantastic relationships with the wait staff. Because THEY WANT to give you a great experience so that they can get a nice juicy tip. It's not fake on their side, any more than a Disney worker or auto repair shop owner is nice to their customers.
I've had such a good time with some wait staff, that they give me free desserts. I remember once my reputation for getting free desserts got around to a group of friends I occasionally hung out with. We were at the restaurant and said that it was bullshit and to do it right at that restaurant. I did. The waiter gave me a free dessert. Which are restaurants' main money makers.
Waiters are required to pay taxes on tips, but you are right, if they are in cash, well, they can break the law, but that's the same exact thing as if someone doesn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Anyone can break the law.
And as I also said, a LOT of restaurants, even high-end restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco have tried no tips. But it was a disaster in almost all cases. Their wait staff would quit all the time, because a good wait staff person can make fantastically more money in tips. If a restaurant pays $25/hour (good luck on that) the wait staff would be paid $50K/year, but a good waiter can make $100K+ on tips. So the wait staff quit the no-tipping restaurants and move to a better, for them, restaurant.
But really, you are paying the exact same, or more, if it is all included in one bill with no break out. And by breaking out healthcare costs, you will actually pay less money for the meal than all included.
As far as healthcare and education being free in EU, that is irrelevant.
> You know exactly what the price will be unless you failed 2nd grade math.
As a tourist to the US, it just seemed silly. The random sales tax percentage, the tip or no tip (calculated pre or post sales tax?) situation.
And due to the tipping thing, I had to carry cash, which I hadn’t done in 20+ years.
It felt like going back in time a very long way.
Ask for what you want, I’ll decide if I’ll pay it and I’ll come back if I liked the service.
There are actual rational reasons, though. You, and even most Americans, don't know what they are, is all.
Random sales tax on stuff for example is separate. This is not the fault of the business. The way USA government works is that sales tax is set by the county. There are 3,142 counties and county equivalents. Each charging their own tax amount.
Let's say you are a big store like Target with stores across the USA. They want to charge $25 for a pair of shoes. How do they advertise? They take out advertising all across the USA, and charge $25 for the shoes. Well, how do you put in the correct amount on the newspaper or website advertisement? You put it in the newspaper for $27.50 because one county charges 10% sales tax. But the next county over has a 7% sales tax. The correct price is $26.75. But that newspaper is delivered into multiple counties, in the same exact newspaper, so there is no possible way for target to put the correct price. It's literally impossible. So what they do is say the shoes are $25, and you pay the difference to the county as an extra. Because the business can do fuck all about it. In European countries, they probably have the same exact sales tax everywhere, so it is ok to do it that way. But Target isn't going to get the entire USA to change the tax code of 3,142 different tax jurisdictions. Good luck on that one.
For tipping, you don't have to carry cash at all. I never do. They have an extra line on the receipt to add the tip. I just round it and don't do it exactly, because it is easier and faster that way.
You want me to ask for what I want? Ok. I want to tell you the price of the meal and you pay a 15% tip. That is what I want. And I don't want anyone whining about it. If one wants to whine, just stay at home and cook a home-cooked meal. Everyone wins.
And, as I stated elsewhere, it is usually the people that are most vocal against tips that are the most pain in the butt customers anyways; even if there were not tips, they would still be the worst customers. Maybe not you, but most like that always have something more to complain about.
> And due to the tipping thing, I had to carry cash, which I hadn’t done in 20+ years.
> It felt like going back in time a very long way.
I live in North America and tip for alot of things. Never paid cash. Not sure why you felt like you had to but can always tip on visa the rest of us do.
Fwiw you can tip with credit cards everywhere now. I don't think tip receivers like it, but tipping sucks, they can deal with it. I don't carry cash anymore.
How does that work with things like the porter who takes bags to the hotel room? Or the person who cleans the room?
Maybe they aren’t supposed to be tipped, as we never got the hang of it and blundered about trying to avoid causing offended.
In a case like this, you should bring cash with you anyways. It is a different situation than going to a restaurant. When you travel one should always have cash, even if one normally doesn't. It's common sense.
Personally, I just stopped doing that.the tips were small to begin with.
I think people also know non Americans aren't going to get it right. If they're the type of person to get offended over that, I wouldn't spend my time worrying about their opinion of me
Even credit cards seem super backwards in the US with them actually taking your credit card and giving it back to you (and your tip being just written down on a slip of paper).
To explain my down-vote. Firstly, many people, even smart ones are bad at mental math. The idea extra charges are added at the end is literally a dark-patterns used to trick people into spending more money because they are bad at doing this.
Next, why do _some_ waitstaff make a lot of tips, and not others. You don't acknowledge how in almost every biased way possible tipping promotes some people, and punishes others.
Lastly, I personally find tipping and therefore your slightly aggressive defense of it, kinda gross? It's a power-trip at the end of the day to control someone else's actions with your money. Sure, that's life, but with tipping it's so blunt.
>Firstly, many people, even smart ones are bad at mental math. The idea extra charges are added at the end is literally a dark-patterns used to trick people into spending more money because they are bad at doing this.
You are making a fair point that most people can't math.
On the other hand, people who can't do very simple math have bigger problems to worry about than tips.
>Next, why do _some_ waitstaff make a lot of tips, and not others. You don't acknowledge how in almost every biased way possible tipping promotes some people, and punishes others.
At least in theory, the point of tipping is to reward good staff and punish bad staff. The whole point of tipping is to create an income gap, with the hope that staff will be incentivized to be "good" staff so they make more money and be on the better side of the gap.
It's not unlike good employees getting paid better than bad employees, the only difference is that the incentives come from your customers rather than your employer.
>Lastly, I personally find tipping and therefore your slightly aggressive defense of it, kinda gross? It's a power-trip at the end of the day to control someone else's actions with your money. Sure, that's life, but with tipping it's so blunt.
Even without tips we are all going to engage in "controlling someone else's actions with money". That fancy restaurant that just billed you 3 or maybe even 4-digits? That money is so the staff are incentivized to treat you like nobility, among other luxuries you just enjoyed.
>> It's not unlike good employees getting paid better than bad employees
It's actually exactly like that. In the feral world of New York City wait staff, where people only live on tips and there is no base income, the income gap is extraordinary in the same shift in the same restaurant. And it's only slightly based on looks, or how "cute" someone is. It's almost entirely based on their skill and ability to serve the customer well. I could walk out with $250 a night and another waiter would walk with $350. He was simply faster, more clever and better at serving and charming the customers. I was a bad waiter. Of course, the prettiest women among us might walk out with $450, so I guess if someone really wants to complain about life being unfair, they could. But those girls needed to stockpile cash then while they were young. As an old man, a waiter can still make the same.
You're just plain wrong, please stop. New York City has a $15/hour minimum wage, with a $5/hour "tip credit" for food service employees - that is, as long as the employees are making more than $5/hour in tips, the employer only has to pay them $10/hour. Any employer that doesn't pay a base wage is operating illegally and is guilty of wage theft, no matter how many tips the employee makes.
And yes, I can back this up: https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/01/p717_12-22...
Well, that wasn't the case in 2002. The minimum wage for waiters in New York was $0.
$15/hr ain't exactly a living wage either, nor does it justify losing a table for an hour on four people who don't leave a tip. The difference between $15/hr in New York City now and $0/hr in 2002 is basically nil.
Waiters make their money from tips. If you ever work in the service industry in America, and serve them their breakfast, you'll understand why.
> Well, that wasn't the case in 2002. The minimum wage for waiters in New York was $0.
I have trouble finding the information on my phone but I'm pretty sure this was illegal federally since at least the '90s.
I'm not saying you're wrong.
That person's main point is still true. The main point is that a better waiter/waitress makes more money in the same shift, even if they hypothetically waited on the exact same people.
There is skill and talent involved. We have all had shitty waitstaff wait on us, and great people, too. The great people get a better tip, even if they are uglier, or walk with a limp and have a hunch back like Quisimoto. In another post, I listed dozens of ways that one staff person can make more than another by using different techniques.
Everyone carries a mobile with them. We didn't use to and had to figure it out. But it is so simple. All you have to do is take 10%, then take 1/2 of that and add them together.
So if a meal is $48.75, then 10% is $4.88. Round it up to $5. Half of $5 is $2.50. $5 plus $2.50 is $7.50 tip. then add that onto the total of the $48.75 but I round the $7.50 up to $8 and so $48.75 and $8 is $56.75. Super easy to do in one's head in less than 30 seconds.
If lunch is $38.64, then 10% is $3.86. Round it up to $4. Half of $4 is $2, so $4 + $2 is $6 tip. Total is $38.64 + $6 or $44.64. Thirty seconds to calculate it.
You do rounding to make it easy - you don't do all the decimal points exactly, that sucks to do it that way. Rounding is close enough, and you round up.
.
Some waitstaff are better than others. They are more social. They develop regulars. That's where the real money is made. You get regulars. There are other tricks, too. Not all of them work every time for every person, but it is a statistics game.
Like if a waitress wears a flower in her hair, can make up to 17% more tips. Some people know how to upsell for a higher total bill and make more tips because of the percentage. If you draw a smily face on the bill, you will get a bigger tip. Studies have shown if you can entertain people when appropriate (unobrusively - you have to guage the situation), that can increase tips by 7%. If you have regulars, give them freebies - fucking EVERYONE loves a freebie. A study showed that if you give a weather forecast on the bill, the tip is an average of 22.2% vs 18% if they didn't - so when giving the bill you write "The weather is supposed to be great tomorrow, have a great day!" If you use your customer's name, you will get a bigger tip. Giving a gift increases tips - even giving a candy cane during christmas or candy corn during halloween, etc. Other ways: Squat down to talk to customers, smile a lot, write "thank you" on the bill. Read your customers. Learn what your boss wants so you get the better shifts more often. Get better customers and get them to come back to you and ask for you. Basically create an environment that predisposes customers to be generous.
Did this answer your question about why some make better tips?
>Lastly, I personally find tipping and therefore your slightly aggressive defense of it, kinda gross?
That's ok. None of us can please everyone. I'm positive someone finds things that you think or want as gross, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I very much am strongly supporting tipping, I think it is great.
>It's a power-trip at the end of the day to control someone else's actions with your money. Sure, that's life, but with tipping it's so blunt.
Eh. It's blunt everywhere. We all knuckle under to our stupid bosses we've all had in life because of money. And the thing is, that multiple studies have been made for waitstaff and they all WANT to be controlled if they make more money. Wait staff in the USA love tips, and they love the thought that if they give great service, that their tips can be larger - it gives them motivation. This is not me saying this, it's what the wait staff wants. They love it. Not every single waiter/waitress. People who suck at interpersonal communication probably hate it, of course. That would be logical. But it is a personal job, so they should find another job, quite frankly. And in general, customers don't look at it as a power trip, at all. Some do, but the vast majority do not. I don't. I'm not imperious, snapping my fingers for service, and ordering people around. That is just bad manners and an ill-mannered person who would do this even if there was no tipping. Because that is how people are.
> to go up substantially to cover what that person made with tips
more realistically, unless they are capable of finding another job that will pay as much they’ll just end up earning less without tips.
Sure. Of course.
But what they found in restaurants that had the no-tip policy is that all of their really great staff found better paying jobs easily, and the shitty employees, or new employees, would be the ones that stayed. And the new employees would leave as soon as they were trained up, so all that was left at the no-tip restaurants were the shittiest of the shitty employees. This is what I read from a study on this exact situation of no-tip restaurants and the effect it had.
Legal minimum wages which are a living wage seems like something that should be a bare minimum.
How do you fell about internships? I generally think those are a good thing. Those are often below minimum wage jobs.
Then again, I am not in favor of say Amazon workers being exploited with very poorly paid jobs and conditions for their source of income over the long term. (Thomas Sowell gives some good arguments against minimum wage - I am on the fence and it boils down to "it depends").
>>How do you fell about internships? I generally think those are a good thing.
Massively against them if they aren't paid like any normal job. If the intern is doing actual productive work(and let's not kid ourselves - they are most of the time), then they should be paid like any other employee.
The only exception I can see is companies that have training programmes with vocational schools, where you go and work somewhere for say 2 years training to be a carpenter or a plumber or electrician or whatever - then it's no different than being at school and learning. But I'd wager than 99% of internships are not like that, they are just a very cheap way to get unpaid(or poorly paid) labour under the pretense of "giving young people work experience". It's nonsense.
An intern can only be unpaid if they are not doing productive work and you have a trainer with them. Most unpaid internships are illegal already, but the interns don't know they can/should report it.
If you are an intern in a railroad you can move cars around the yard all day: you can move them to a loading dock, or to make up a larger set for a train, but at the end of the day you must move them back. However if any of those cars are moved to the dock are loaded/unloaded, or the larger train they just made leaves the yard, then they did useful work and must be paid for that.
>>An intern can only be unpaid if they are not doing productive work and you have a trainer with them.
I mean yes, but like you yourself acknowledged - that's a completely meaningless law. No intern is going to report this, because young people are just happy to have a job, no one wants to destroy their career right at the start. I myself was in that exact same position when I started - as an intern, my contract specifically said I can't be doing any productive work. Of course I did anyway. And I'm sure it still happens in every industry, because.....why wouldn't it. That's why I think unpaid internships just shouldn't be a thing at all, anywhere, unless linked to vocational schools that oversee them as a training programme.
The more important thing is you can get the reference at the end of summer, and then turn them in when it is too late.
All unpaid internships should have regular independent auditors because, as you say, interns are unlikely to report abuse of the law.
I graduated during the dotcom bust, and the best thing I did was taking a temporary job at pretty much minimal wage. As soon as I had some experience on my CV, I got a lot more interviews afterwards.
I am in agreement that apprenticeships seem to be a good thing that we should reintroduce. Working in IT, real world experience seems to count at least as much as anything I learned on university. The only times I have needed to implement a sort algorithm is for interviews.
>> I did was taking a temporary job at pretty much minimal wage.
That's fine then. I specifically mean internships which either don't pay anything or which pay some token amount like $100 a week for fuel expenses. If they pay a minimum wage then well, they are basic level entry jobs, that's fine.
As i mentioned above, do they pay taxes on those tips? Are they logged so the IRS are aware of them? Could this be accounting for some of the difference?
Yes, and waiters are lightning rods for audits.
> like every single coffee shop in the world apart from the US
I very much appreciate being able to amble into a coffee shop, order a coffee from a human being (perhaps doing my best in a foreign language I'm not all that proficient in), and paying cash should I so desire. Like you can in most coffee shops around the world.
Order coffee in a coffee shop? That's not what ours are for. (Dutch here.)
I mean... a blunt and coffee in the morning hits the spot
There are other tipping cultures outside the USA, you know? Tipping is very common in the Balkans and other countries that were influenced by Ottoman culture, for example. While it is not expected, many coffee shops all around Europe also have tipping jars.
It's really not common in much of Europe at least for people to actually discourage tipping (though they may seek to refuse what they perceive as exorbitant tips).
I have lived in Istanbul for a decade now and while many of us do tip, and tipping is rarely expected. The expectation is higher than foreigners, but if you live here, you end up eating at the same places over and over, and that expectation goes away fairly quickly. When I first moved here I realized I was tipping 3-5x what a local would, because I was tipping American standard.
Tipping is mostly expected when there is a lot of service involved in the meal. This means either fine-dining, or Meyhanes where you spend 3-5 hours drinking heavily (Raki/Ouzo) and eating mezes & fish.
I think the tipping culture you're talking about is "Bakshish" which is really more of a bribe than a tip. It doesn't exist much in Turkiye anymore (unless you're an Arab or Syrian refugee, their experience is far different than others). Bakshish is still very prevalent throughout the lower Balkans, Serbia and most Islamic nations I've visited and worked in, except for KSA and UAE (they'll kill you for that shit.)
I haven't been to Turkey, so I don't know how the culture evolved there. However, in former Ottoman-controlled states that I've been to (and especially in Romania, where I was born and live), tipping (as well as small bribes, which are both called bacșiș here, same word as bakshish, though that is changing somewhat recently) is quite prevalent and expected in many settings. At the very least, in any setting where you are served by someone while sitting down, even if it's just drinks at a bar, you are expected to tip (typically 10% being seen as a tip for cases where you were happy with the service).
Tip jars are perhaps a more recent phenomenon, but they are now almost ubiquitous in all places that serve anything, event at a counter or to go - including club bars, coffee shops, even many fast food places.
> Bakshish
Definitely more of a bribe, and common in a lot of the world, in the countries mentioned but plenty of others, esp. the African ones I worked in; different names but same idea.
A "cost of doing business, and we appreciate the opportunity" gesture. Prove that you're serious, and that you want an actual result.
There are a lot of business dark patterns, and when they are prevalent in that society, that society is always poor and corrupt.
An Egyptian friend, once warned his friends about me: "Now he's American. When he says 2pm he means 2pm, and when he says we have to leave at 8, that means we have to leave at 8. This is why Americans are rich. They respect schedules, and care more abut business than friends or family."
I was just going to say - from Croatia - in most of my circles if you don't leave a 10% tip you're either poor or a miser. Frankly even if you're poor, you likely won't go rather than count cents - only relatives in retirement don't leave tips when they insist on paying.
> While it is not expected,
That's the key point.
You're not legally obliged to give it - but it's very much expected and you can see the awkwardness when you skip it.
Like just the other month I was in this resort with my family and first night we checked in we went for diner - waiter was very polite, entertained my one year old and gave us tips about the area. We didn't have cash on us so we put it on the room and signed the receipt. Next day he was still professional but not as much effort - then I left a tip for both dinners and suddenly it's back to chat mode, how was your stay, parting drink on the house, please do come back, etc.
In coffee shops you can see the looks you get when you wait for small change.
The problem with US is that it's so culturaly ingrained that it's really not optional anymore, even if it technically is and no one will call the police on you for not doing it.
As a personal anecdote - when I visited America on a business trip we went to a restaurant where the staff was literally rude to us, the food order was not what we ordered and massively late, and yet our hosts insisted on leaving a 10% tip because
1) low tip will show them they have done a poor job(?!?!?!?!?!)
2) we would look like jerks for not tipping(their explanation).
So basically my takeaway is - if you have to tip even when your experience is poor, or you risk "looking like a jerk", then it's not really optional.
But that's what tipping is here too - it's basically signaling you're not a miser. Sure it's supposed to encourage better service but that's secondary. Just like buying rounds, etc.
> gave us tips
the irony!
Sure, but the OP's cafe literally doesn't allow tipping, it's not that they don't expect them. That's what's bizarre/noteworthy on this front - and it's definitely not how every coffeeshop in the rest of the world operates.
> like every single coffee shop in the world apart from the US
Well, context is important. Right? If someone opened a "tips required" coffee shop in Japan, it could be something to watch and learn from.
I don't generally have a problem with tipping. Still, I would much rather people get paid well, with whatever that cost might be reflected in the price of what you are buying. If, on the other hand, tipping is on the ticket and it is used as an evaluation of the service being provided, the field should be blank by default.
I have tipped way over 15% lots of times. Every time a device tries to force a higher percentage on me, I reduce it because the pattern annoys me.
It is always interesting to travel to places like Japan, where tipping at a restaurant can be offensive.
> If someone opened a "tips required" coffee shop in Japan, it could be something to watch and learn from.
Not for a long time. It would likely fold within weeks.
It made me think of the south park episode with the donation.
It could work if it's a novelty bar with only foreign staff that advertises itself as American and insist on replicating the US culture.
Thanks for sanity.
I do understand the specific of the US situation, I’ve leave there since the last decade. In a very touristy city to boot, so a large part of my social network rely on tips.
But the lack of awareness from our US friends to understand that they are the exception, not the norm in that particular regard is a bit disconcerting.
Tipping is an evolved system. If you go to most countries outside the US, you are not expected to leave a tip. But if you do leave a tip, here is what you get:
. You are the first person served, every time you walk in, no matter how crowded the bar is.
. You are poured the extra liquor that a bartender is allowed to "spill"
. When you bring your date to the restaurant next time, you are treated very well.
It is true that in America, these things are lost because everyone is expected to tip. But this is the true point of tipping a good waiter or bartender, to show your appreciation and also to be remembered.
Where did you travel ?
I had the chance to move around a lot and my social alcoholism made my spend lot of time in seedy places where someone pour out booze.
In all those places, paying more money is just bad taste.
A way to get what you describe is ( in my personal experience )
- smile
- be young and / or attractive
- being visibly in distress
- being polite and patient in the face of another rude customer
- make some jokes, not in English but in the language people speak where you are
- have a dog / a kid
- show that you have some humors and are not an asshole.
With all due respect, paying more and displaying extra wealth is a good way to be classified in the easy to dupe category. In some language due to post WW2 wealth, some folks say “an American” like “do you think I’m American or what ?”
mmmm... it depends on the country, and the style, so all of the things you say are true. Simply leaving a big tip means nothing. And being an asshole overrides everything - never a good idea. I am also a social alcoholic! Hi!
But if you have established communication with your waiter / bartender / blackjack dealer, and you leave them some extra, it is much more appreciated outside the US. Especially if they see you more than a couple times. Whether you are young and attractive or not, although of course that helps.
Does losing $5,000 alone on a blackjack table in Prague because you're depressed, and then smiling and tipping your dealer constitute visible distress? I can't say it's always a financially wise strategy.
Hi, I’m sure you would constitute a great bar neighbor :)
I just spend a few minute refining my thoughts on tipping outside the US : I would say it has to do with a relationship with money and the power emanating from it.
Tipping is not expected in most places; and doing it anyway clearly signal that you have some disposable wealth. You can afford to pay even more than the agreed upon price.
There is some “bling” and nouveau-riche aspect to it that will leave people a weird feeling.
For instance : Are you trying to bribe them? Do you think they are too poor to function without your patronage? Are the price/money here just a joke to you?
And then, it become your edge. You are the guy or gal that pay extra. As opposed to be the funny/sexy/mysterious/resourceful person. AKA : El gringo, l’américain, l’americano. ( I’m one of you now, so I can say it :p )
Being seen that way might be a way to attract the wrong kind of company.
I don’t know about casino and hazard games, my passion always has been the dives and the likes.
But you do say something important about establishing contact first.
That’s a great difference in my book.
I still maintain that waving money around FIRST won’t help on the long run. Establishing rapport and discretely paying extra might, sometime, with some people. But being nice and aware of your environment might do just the same.
Hah. I definitely would buy you a drink. Please see my post below (next to yours).
I'm 42. I've lived in a lot of countries. I freaked out and fled America for twelve years after I wrote a novel about a rock band assassinating Dick Cheney during the start of the second Iraq war, and had my server attacked by military sites and my apartment broken into and police going through my trash can. In other countries, I probably, once in awhile, was mistaken for someone who tried to be nouveau-riche because I tipped too much...but I'm basically a working-class guy and I don't think most people thought of me that way if they got to know me. Maybe I am guilty of carrying over the American service industry mentality -- usually people who work/worked as waiters, bartenders or taxi drivers in America tip much more than other people, because we understand how difficult the job is. But of course, you are not trying to buy love with money ... you only show respect. If it is a situation where I feel that someone won't understand it (for example, in some place I've never been before in Vietnam), just the amount of tip that shows the right respect is better than some crazy American-size tip. Hopefully this makes sense. I should stop drinking and go eat. It's been a pleasure to talk ;)
[edit] PS: I really enjoyed this term "social alcoholism". Did you ever go to Granada?
And I would reciprocate on that drink!
I live in New Orleans those days, social alcoholism is a lifestyle there! I haven't been in Spain in a solid decade. I miss traveling and living in europe. It's so pleasant.
To get back to the subject at hand, I think you gave enough context so I can understand your point. Thanks! It looks that the key is being ex-service industry, and now that you stated it... I do see that behavior of "service-industry hardcore solidarity thought tips" in friends here.
> usually people who work/worked as waiters, bartenders or taxi drivers in America tip much more than other people, because we understand how difficult the job is. But of course, you are not trying to buy love with money.
And I can sense the likability oozing out your messages.
Good on you for moving to NOLA! It was my dream. Actually I still would love to live there. I think it's the only really European city in America. Scary, a little. (I live in Portland. it's hip, it's gentrified, it's terrible). So you know the service industry solidarity.
I quit my waiting job in New York around 2004-5, took a train to New Orleans, started playing piano with a band, got a job as a busboy at Brennan's for a solid 2 weeks before losing all my money on poker and drinking myself almost to death... I found myself on Canal Street one morning at 5am, broke, and called my sister from a payphone to buy me a bus ticket to LA. Six months later the house I'd been staying in was destroyed by Katrina...
Is it time to try again? I've always loved that city. I don't think I have the self-control.
> But if you do leave a tip, here is what you get
I can assure you that an American tip here will give you a weird look and get you to be treated like a tourist which is not something you wish.
Where is "here"? (And what is an acceptable tip?)
Here is France. Rounding up to the euro or nearest bill if it’s a large sum is considered a nice gesture but is not usual nor expected. If you tip 15%, people will wonder what’s wrong with you and don’t understand why you flaunt your money (or assume you are American).
France is unusual both in its service culture and its attitude toward non-assimilated Americans.
You'll get that in some places, sure, but not everywhere. In Norway if people see waiters/bartenders/servers treating other people better, they'll stop going there because the idea is that everyone should be treated equally. And bars are highly regulated - pouring stronger drinks than allowed is a quick way to get your liquor license revoked.
Maybe if it is regulated to such a tight degree; in American bars it's understood there will be "spillage" and bartenders are even encouraged to keep good customers coming back. Generally speaking, if you tip consistently well in most cities in America, and know your bartender, they will make 1 out of 4 drinks free for you or they will otherwise find a way to pour you strong drinks. They know how much they have to spill and they can justify it for a good customer. Only in Las Vegas casinos is this ineffectual, because the liquor bottles are all measured out electronically.
> pouring stronger drinks than allowed is a quick way to get your liquor license revoked.
How is this detected by the state?
You still get that in America if you tip more than others.
That too. Although now it's like 35% to get that kind of consideration.
@courgette, I can't reply directly but I'd say (as a longtime service industry worker) it has to go along with genuine respect from the customer, and you have to like them. It has to be a true gesture. It's not as transactional as I'm making it sound when I'm trying to explain it to people who don't tip, never tipped, and don't come from cultures where tipping is normal. Tipping is part of the respect you pay to the person who's serving you. Equally important is looking them in the eye, thanking them, being a polite guest. You'll get no argument from me that simply tipping is not enough to buy someone special treatment.
[edit] also, although I'm not service industry anymore, many of my friends are; so it's pretty understood that no one likes an asshole who just thinks they can "buy" someone with tips. That wasn't the point. Tips are necessary because I really do appreciate what servers are doing.
Yep, I got your point and I think you drove it home. I mistaken you for something else.
Thanks, and cheers - to social alcoholism ;)
Hi, I’m your neighbor from the other thread. Just above.
I think the issue in your approach is the transactional aspect of it.
“I payed more, now be more nice to me”
At their core, people don’t want to be owned this way.
I’d check out a detailed write up of any of those other coffee shops in the world too. The detailed write up is the thing that’s rare and interesting.
Next time you are on holiday, grab a coffee sit down and watch the miracle unfold before your eyes.
Beautifully put.
Tipping in a coffee shop is just yet another way to obfuscate real pricing.
Instead of asking $5 for a coffee they ask for $4. Then you have to pay tax, which for absolutely ZERO reason is not included in the price. You're at about $4.40. Then you tip and end up at anywhere between $5 and $5.50 in actual money you spent on your "$4" coffee.
How many of those cafe owners are HNers willing to do a write up to give us insight into the experience though?
Sorry, I've lived my whole life in Europe in three different countries and have never been to a café where you can't pay in cash and don't tip. Tipping works differently, e.g. in my current country of residence you leave cash on the table, but unless your bill is very low (say, below 5 EUR) not tipping is still a bit rude. There used to be no tipping at all but with the increase in tourism that's no longer the norm.
> There used to be no tipping at all but with the increase in tourism that's no longer the norm.
I take this as local employees stating their entitlement to nickel and dime tourists as much as possible.
:(
What? No, not at all! The tourists insist on tipping, not the employees.
That's how we roll in the states. It doesn't matter that every other country on earth has been doing it a certain way for over a hundred years without issue, because we don't do it that way it is clearly a dangerously unproven method.
Could be the next YC funded coffee shop reimagined.
it's almost like that coffee shop will need to compete against other coffee shops in the US that operate differently and might be seen as having an advantage, comply with US laws, and - as they discussed here - communicate to customers their salient differences - and that HN is the kind of place that might be interested in such things.
Well, put aside the tips aspect, a coffee shop that provides self-ordering iPads and doesn't accept cash is not so common.
I think it would be extremely unusual for someone to chase me down over a tip I've left in Europe.
It happens in other regions where tips never happen, e.g. Japan.
I think this is a great example of “Don’t you know who I am?”.
dang being super chill by letting it be.
The path to the contrarian is more interesting, who knew
You don't tip at Tim Horton's.
ikr - someone also posting about how crypto could be the answer too - peak HN!
But it has iPads! ;p
Maybe if you don’t understand curiosity, this isn’t the kind of place you’ll enjoy too much. 4chan, maybe? Pornhub?
> and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
Please no. That's how it usually starts. It was with small change but now McDonalds harasses you every time you make an order to round up for some charity I never heard about. I'd donate to charities on my own.
Needless to say I avoid these places like the plague.
I know what you mean. When the cashier at Whole Foods asks you, it does feel somewhat petty to say no. I think there was a South Park episode on that.
But if the POS asks you, it doesn't feel as personal to turn down the option to donate, don't you think?
Anyway, not married to the idea, but I think there are some people that enjoy the endorphins that result from contributing to a charitable cause (especially when discretionary spending, like on a latte).
I think of it differently. Ads pervade your experience. You cannot pump gas without since video blasting in your face. You cannot buy groceries without hearing about the poor, pathetic children who this billion dollar company decided to collect money for. Hell, I was sitting on the ski lift the other day and the bar across your lap someone has added little advertising signs saying which is the best pro shop.
My point is, we are surrounded by useless requests for more of our time and money. I go to the coffee shop almost exclusively as a place to relax. There should be less intrusion into my headspace there, not more.
I think there is a distinction between a charitable donation pop-up that forces the user to round up, donate, or actively select 'no donation' is a dark pattern.
Whereas having the option to select a charitable donation, or passively ignore it, as a part of the normal checking out is fine.
Yeah, if these donations where accessible via a different menu (ie: you have cafes, cake, juices, donations) then I'd be fine with it. I'd go to the donation individually if I want to.
The problem is when you put the donation at checkout to "improve" conversion.
Related South Park reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsPHa8RG1pI
Nag-screens are awful but they do also need to explain their tipping because it creates customer confusion. They could simply put up a sign up that says "We pay our employees a living wage. We don't accept tips, but you can donate to our staff's preferred charity XYZ at URL."
> It was with small change but now McDonalds harasses you every time you make an order to round up for some charity I never heard about.
To be fair, the McDonalds charity is actually totally legit and really awesome and you should donate to it. It's one of the few exceptions to the general rule that these charity promotions are usually suspect tax laundering schemes.
You've never heard of the Ronald McDonald House?
At least McDonalds covers all the overhead and gives 100% of money donated to Ronald McDonald house.
> I'd donate to charities on my own.
But lots of people won't think to do so, and it can raise awareness too. And in terms of payment processing fees it is probably much more efficient to include a small amount extra in a larger preexisting transaction and pool it up across customers than if everyone were to go out and donate $0.50 or whatever on their own.
The problem is the store charaties are always awful. I donate to local charities that actually do good work with it (Non-affiliated-beyond-being-donor plug: https://www.nuci.org/), not to bloated “awareness” charaties like Komen.
I assume the main point of asking for charities at the POS system is to, in no order, a) give to that charity, and/or b) to get the tax deduction as if the company gave that charity. Ex: $1 charity = some $0.35 discount on company taxes.
And "awareness" is a big part of some cultures [0] as it allows for the distribution of the idea of caring without devoting some of one's life to the cause.
[0] https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/23/18-awareness/
I don't think you get a tax deduction by processing someone else's donations. Even if you did, wouldn't you have to first treat it as income, so it cancels out?
People are downvoting you, but you are correct.
People believe all sorts of weird thing about tax deductions (almost always _income_ deductions).
Income $1 and then give away that $1 is a net negative, so I assume it's more like: I give you, the company, $1 as a "gift", which I'm allowed to gift you some hundreds of dollars per year without an extra tax form. You take that "gift" and donate it, thereby netting you the 35 cents.
Interested to hear specifics if anyone knows!
Why wouldn’t $1 that just be counted as regular income?
Upon some light internet diving (backstroking), it appears that the company cannot deduct the customer's donation, according to a couple random websites.
There's a beer here in the SF Bay Area that words its charitable claim like "up to 8% to local causes", which can mean anything from doing nothing at all to earmarking 8% of the revenue for their new yacht which is parked locally.
> to get the tax deduction as if the company gave that charity
This should be illegal.
I am pretty sure it is illegal. It is the donor that may claim the tax deduction, if any. The retailer may not claim it merely by being a conduit for donated funds.
Really, St Jude Children's hospital is awful? Would you like to give some sources for that? That's the only charity I get asked about often enough to remember and I'm happy to see companies going to bat for them (at least unless someone such as yourself manages to convince me of how awful they are).
The review feedback program sounds like over engineered nonsense. You get metrics which you think represents customer experience which you can use to evaluate and motivate your employees to act a certain in this coffee fueled skinner box designed to train baristas. But the data won't represent that, the interaction with a barista is only a small fraction of what makes a coffee shop good (first should be good coffee, second probably a nice place to sit). And the obvious conclusion is that the barista tells the customer, "if you want to leave a tip please give me a 5 star rating, my salary is based on ratings." So now you just have tipping with extra steps.
If all you care about is rewarding employees who are good, Why not just do profit sharing for employees who been around longer then x months?
While profit sharing may work as an incentive for shift managers or store managers, in the absence of tips most baristas will expect some other immediate bonus pay, preferably based on a measurable metric that doesn't depend on factors beyond the barista's control, such as cost of goods sold, supply chain constraints, rent hikes, recessions, etc.
If you occasionally ask the customer in-app "how was your service today?" with a simple thumbs up/down option, and you associate the order's rating with the barista behind the counter, you can get a good metric on their interaction with customers. You'd probably want to use the median and not the mean in order to remove any outliers.
Wouldn’t you be measuring the interaction with the ordering device? How can I rate the experience if I didn’t interact with the Barista yet?
One of my general problems with tipping is that I have to tip before someone makes the drink. Then end up with burned coffee I tipped for. This feels the same.
The feedback option would be shown on the customer’s phone the next time they open the app, in regards to their previous visit.
If the customer ordered via the POS, it will be shown on the next visit, if they sign in with their phone number (which is used to save your order history for easy reordering).
I don't want to give feedback for such minor transactions. I just want a coffee. Why do you want to make me do actual work? Giving feedback, especially if it's supposed to be taken seriously, is work, and worse, it feels so utterly pointless. It's such a simple transaction, and this way overcomplicates it.
I had a shop too once (print, Germany, sold it after a few years) and know people owning restaurants. As far as I'm concerned, you are supposed to get your feedback from the "meta data" of your business, not involve the individual customers my making them work. Which is very unlikely to give you true and/or good data anyway. It's like asking people for what they want as "market research", which just shows a lack of understanding of how brains work and way too much believe in the rational mind theory.
It's like you have never been in a coffee shop. A coffee shop needs good vibes, a good coffee supplier, and a cash register. It doesn't even need an espresso machine. The best coffee shop in Oslo only uses aeropress. But it also needs baristas who like coffee and appreciate the chemistry of it.
You seem to have created the anti-human coffee shop.
You don't need my number to sell me coffee. Asking for it is an invasion of my privacy. If you insist on an awards program of some kind, it already exists in it's ultimate form, the stamp card.
Customers should not be tasked with evaluating employees. They have no expertise in the matter.
Employees should not have wages effectively stolen from them under the auspices that "good work is rewarded". You know how you reward good work? Raises, profit sharing, more responsibility, benefits programs, you know typical things employers do for employees in a worker centered environment.
All this also assumes anyone uses these systems as intended. I doubt customers will select ratings in any meaningful way and you will have no way to ground truth if they do or not. Nobody will ever care enough to sit through customer interviews to evaluate whether your one question survey is valid or not. Certainly not for a cup of coffee.
Actually what you've done is devised a system for you to steal you staff's tips.
Instead of customers having the option to pay extra in the form of tips, you're charging more. By having a review/bonus system, you're still absolving yourself of the responsibility for fairly compensating your staff. You're shifting the burden of evaluating employee performance onto your customer. And you're incentivizing yourself to limit bonuses because that money goes into your pocket.
I don't feel like you responded to my comment. If you are paying a reasonable wage, profit sharing is a bonus. You are creating tipping with extra steps.
Profit sharing only works if you stick around long enough.
In the service industry, and especially amongst young people, it's common to pick up a job like this for a few months and make some money, then move on to something else. And that's okay, not everyone wants to make a career out of making coffee. It's still a good formative experience to have, while earning some money, and there's no reason why you shouldn't do it right and get rewarded for it.
But profit sharing won't work for someone that is around for a summer. For instance that person could benefit from any upswing caused by previous employees, but if they don't add a positive contribution to the customer experience themselves, they won't be around for the long-term impact. And if you don't give them an incentive at all for the first few months, then you're back to square one. Or even worse: they could negatively impact the profit sharing of employees that have been around for the long run.
Ultimately, money is a motivator and pretending like it's not does not make tipping go away. The problem with tipping as I see it, is that it masquerades the real cost of doing business.
Then you are hiring the wrong people for the kind of coffee shop you claim to desire running. There are plenty of people who enjoy coffee enough to make a career out of it even if it's for a few years. You are pitching this evolved, pay every one a fair wage, this is a real place to work that's super cool, and then treating them like it's some chain. It's transparent. You don't expect them to work with you longer then a couple months. You want customers to track whether employees are doing good or not trying to create some BS KPIs or whatever and then use that to incentivize your employees. Everything you write in every one of your posts demonstrates that you seem to miss the entire point of a coffee shop. It should be a cool place to relax and read or work or meet friends while drinking coffee.
> In the service industry, and especially amongst young people, it's common to pick up a job like this for a few months and make some money, then move on to something else.
By making that assertion you're absolving yourself of responsibility and shifting the retention issue entirely to the employee. You're completely dismissing the possibility that your retention issue is due to a customer culture you fostered or created, a poor work environment due to a manager or toxic employee, the demands of the job vs compensation, or any other factor.
> Ultimately, money is a motivator and pretending like it's not does not make tipping go away.
Money is a motivator but not necessarily for the right reasons and it has diminishing returns. Tipping culture has evolved from a mechanism for customers to thank staff into a means for staff to make up for insufficient wages. They're effectively panhandlers.
If an employee relies upon a tip to makeup for wages, they aren't paid enough and are being exploited and abused.
Today, not tipping is a punitive measure that allows customers to diminish an employee or staff's wage at the customer's discretion and without any insight or feedback provided to the employer. People feel compelled to tip because they thing employees aren't paid enough, not because service was above expectations.
> People feel compelled to tip because they thing employees aren't paid enough, not because service was above expectations.
You had me until this point. No, this is some people’s belief, but not all. I certainly don’t think people are underpaid when I tip, it’s entirely based off service.
It's unfortunate that you're willing to dismiss everything I said because of a generalization that spoke in absolutes.
There will always be people who disagree, but if you're in the United States and believe that service workers are not underpaid then you either only patronize high end restaurants or are completely out of touch with the average American.
And yet you dismiss what I said and gave an option as to why it’s acceptable.
If you believe that a majority of food workers are underpaid, then I, as well as market research, disagree with you.
I didn't dismiss you and you didn't present any reason why it's acceptable. You simply stated that it was.
> ...then I, as well as market research...
Any what market research is that?
If you spend any, and I mean any, amount of time researching tipping you’ll find the market research. It’s proof you’ve done no research yourself just spouting personal beliefs as if everybody feels the same (this day and age of all).
Here you go: https://www.eater.com/21398973/restaurant-no-tipping-movemen...
If it’s thumbs up/down there’s not going to be a difference between the median and (mean > 0.5).
I tried this when I started my popup restaurant. I rolled taxes into my prices, and didn’t ask for tip when collecting with Square. I did this because I love the simplicity of dining in Europe, where you pay exactly the price you see, and don’t get guilt tripped at the register.
My customers complained that my prices were too high. So, I lowered my prices, added tax, then asked for a tip. About 50% of people tip, so my profits have actually gone up on average after this adjustment. People seem to be buying more, too.
I hate it, but this model seems to work better from a business perspective, despite it being a worse customer experience (subjective, I know).
How do you train your customers not to have sticker shock? Do I need to hang a banner that says “TAX AND TIP INCLUDED IN ALL PRICES” in comic sans?
It would be simple for me. I would refuse to go to your restaurant because dealing with multiple systems is too much work for my feeble mind. And my wife tells me I'm better with math than the common person.
Your system is better. But it's special. Special is bad because I don't like having to do things X different ways for X different restaraunts. I would rather pay a little more and not have to remember the quarks of your restaurant. I am also just trained to tip so I will feel icky leaving your restaurant no matter if you are paying them a fair amount already.
So if you charge more money to include the tip I will still feel obliged to tip anyway and I will leave with the experience your restaurant is too expensive and not come back. In short I think you've done the right thing. Don't fight the mob, embrace it.
> we don't accept cash either.
Not accepting tips is one thing. But not accepting cash means you will never have me as a customer.
Edit: I've already walked away from a dozen different food places in airports because of this kind of trash: please install this app, can't pay in cash, can't see a menu without scanning a QR code, use an iPad with shitty touchscreen that I can barely see or use...
I just wanted to order some food and pay with legal tender.
Mandatory digital ordering and refusing cash just radiates customer hostility to me. It's the opposite of hospitality.
Decisions made for the convenience of the owner, not the customers nor the employees.
It's also illegal if they give you the item before you pay. Cash is "legal for all debts.' So if they let you establish a debt (by, for example, drinking some coffee), they must let you settle it in cash,
"Contrary to common misconception, there is no federal law stating that a private business, a person, or a government organization must accept currency or coins for payment. Private businesses are free to create their own policies on whether they accept cash, unless there is a specific state law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in cents or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores, and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency as a matter of policy or safety."
"The principal purpose of [the Coinage Act of 1965] is to ensure the nationwide acceptance of U.S. currency, consistent with constitutional language that reserves to Congress the power to create a uniform currency that holds the same value throughout the United States. While the statute provides that U.S. money is legal tender that may be accepted for the payment of debts, it does not require acceptance of cash payments, nor does it provide that restrictions cannot be imposed upon the acceptance of cash."
You're missing an important distinction: Cash is legal for all DEBTS. Nothing says the store can't refuse to take cash, as long as they also prevent you from establishing a debt. For example, a restaurant that doesn't want to take cash must force you to pay before you eat.
Cash is legal for all debts but I don't believe cash is required to be accepted. I'm no lawyer though...
No cash means no homeless as well, it’s a fraught issue…
Yea, basically this is a data collection front end. I too hate where you can't pay without cash though I'll bend if no other alternatives are avaialble.
Somewhat of a meta-comment but I’m shocked at how many people are complaining about you not taking cash.
Has anyone ever walked out of your coffee shop because they only had cash on them? I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything.
Cities are making it illegal, as they should. It's not always meant in bad faith, but it's also a form of gentrification that hurts the poor and unbanked by removing yet another service from them.
https://www.nssh.com/2020/04/philadelphias-ban-on-cashless-s...
I personally never use anything but cards since I have many of the high reward credit cards. But I've also had family members with tax liens or other problems that didn't allow them to get a bank account, that relied on family to pay bills, order things online for them, etc.
I saw one of those “mind blown!” sorts of posts on Facebook the other day that I haven’t been able to really reconcile in my head because it both makes sense and doesn’t make sense.
The gist was that if everybody is paying with credit cards, $50 will eventually whittle down to $0 because AmEx, et. Al. got $50 worth of fees after so many transactions (accountant pays grocer who pays dentist who pays hygienist who pays daycare, etc.). On one hand, what a huge waste of money. On the other hand, I as the consumer typically don’t get a discount for paying with cash, so why shouldn’t I take advantage of the “free” and secure payment option available to me?
This feels plausible but I think it is really nonsense.
Processing fees are not unique to cash. Banks charge cash processing fees to businesses too, and have for ever. Most shops will deposit all the cash received at the end of the day - perhaps every few days - with a bank.
That's true- everyone with a checking account pays a "fee", even if that's in the form of "allowing the bank to loan your money out to make more money"... except for maybe USAA. Their checking accounts are free, no account minimums, and they even pay a little bit in interest. Not just anyone can get a USAA checking account though so I guess that doesn't really count.
So long as you don't use a brick and mortar bank, most banks have interest providing checking accounts, although rates vary wildly.
Savings accounts in particular are egregiously terrible at brick and mortar banks. I made more in interest payments in my first month at Ally than I did in the ten years I had my child hood savings account at Bank of America.
Ally is a special case and you’ll find most other virtual banks don’t match their rates. They’re fighting for customers.
TMobile Money was fighting Ally pretty hard when rates were rising and had me switching money back and forth for a little while. Goldman Sachs traditionally fought with Ally. Doctor of Credit has large lists of smaller banks with favorable rates. It's just the traditional large brick and mortar banks rip off customers who just assume having money in a savings account is a good thing to do.
I wasn’t aware T-mobile had a bank. You’re absolutely right about savings accounts, it took me a while to explain to my wife how you lose money using the traditional ones.
Those cash processing fees would only apply if the cash was repeatedly deposited and withdrawn, and probably only by businesses. The hygienist can probably deposit cash for free, I don't think I've ever paid a fee into a consumer bank account.
Taxes will do the same, though. Employers have to payroll taxes, employees have to pay income taxes. The $50 will eventually all bleed back to the government.
Yep, dealing with cash comes with significant costs too. It's a hassle to handle much of it
The $50 in fee is paid to the employee at AmEx (99%+ of it), then the last % is paid into dividends and such, which people will use to buy grocery etc. In that way, the loop closes and why the point doesn’t make sense.
The fees get distributed elsewhere geographically, and never make it back into the local economy. Sure, the money doesn't disappear, but the locals are worse off for it.
This is the crux here. And this is what I tell people who are so insistent on highways and cars too - the productivity of your local economy is siphoned off because local coffee shops can’t afford to compete with Starbucks drive throughs so the capital leaves your local economy.
Where I live a Starbucks was opened across the street from a local coffee shop and the Starbucks closed because it couldn’t compete. This is in a walkable neighborhood. Once you get to the ‘burbs and highways it’s all Starbucks.
Those transactions are usually taxed too. And in my experience cash discounts come from off the books transactions, ie tax evasion. Handling cash in business has a non zero cost too.
Because of privacy.
credit cards are pure evil. And yet I have 2. What's worse is that they raise the cost at stores, payed for by people who don't pay them off on time. I'm no socialist, but that's certainly not progressive.
It’s about getting robbed for drug money. The irony being that our huge population of visibly unhoused in our neighborhood (unlikely to have bank accounts) also correlates to the problem of being robbed for cash..leading to businesses not taking cash anymore for safety reasons.
> that didn't allow them to get a bank account
This sounds like the real problem to solve. It's unacceptable for people to be unable to get a bank account and whatever cards to pay cashless
In civilized countries they solved this decades ago by allowing the postal service to offer simple bank accounts.
It's totally a fake problem that untrustworthy people can't be trusted in modern times with bank accounts. The risk is check bouncing. People don't "need" checks anymore though to function in the cashless world.
We already have prepaid card accounts that don't allow you to spend money you don't have. The only catch is that they're run as profiteering machines which extract fees at every turn.
I guess what I'm saying is, let USPS run an operation (like Green Dot, Vanilla, etc.) but with a fee structure based on the true cost of the service only. And the government should give Visa and Mastercard the choice of:
1. antitrust suit to break them up.
2. the USPS cards will be a V/MC, and V/MC will give them very deeply discounted interchange rates
3. a new independent USPS card network with low fees will be built AND commercialized for any issuer to use, and a regulation that anyone who accepts V/MC must also accept that network.
> The risk is check bouncing.
Checks aren't a thing in most of the world. Opening a bank account is hard because of know-your-customer laws.
The civilised solution to this is very simple: cash! Until you get you bearings and have a bank account opened, just use cash.
Tourist in a country where your debit or credit cards don't reliably work or come with extra fees? Cash!
Buying a second-hand piece of furniture from someone else, and don't feel the need to expose more information than necessary? Cash!
Electronic payment system goes down while you are in the queue at the supermarket? No problem, because you always carry a little cash for backup. (I've had this happen to me several times.)
Cash is the ultimate fallback in civilized society, and worth protecting.
It’s very hard to get denied a checking account, even with walking away from multiple accounts with negative balances. I’d bet they didn’t try hard enough or this is a lie.
In Germany a free account is a right, but recent immigrants often struggle because banks require a registered address, a residence permit, or a biometric passport.
A recent immigrant from countries that don't issue biometric passports (like India) might struggle to open a bank account. I had to devote a lot of time to finding loopholes for my readers.
America has a substantial underclass of undocumented migrants who would presumably not be interested in getting their KYC info and employment details put in a big database.
The status of such migrants is (AIUI) a fraught issue politically, and I'm not sure you can resolve the issues of the unbanked without resolving it.
OK but it is an issue. How about solve that decades old problem before turning people away and insisting that whatever payment processor take some 2-5% of your purchase. It's a complete digression of technology.
This. I am a legal immigrant and have the papers and job to open an account. Some of my relatives aren't so fortunate so I have opened accounts in my name which they use as theirs. It get convoluted and I would rather I didn't have to do this but you are right it is a form of gentrification.
Even legal immigrants struggle with this. It's hard to open a bank account during your first few months in a country, as you might not fulfill the basic requirements set by banks.
At least it's a serious issue in Germany, especially for Indians whose passport is not accepted by many authentication services.
> hurts the poor and unbanked by removing yet another service from them.
There are plenty of much poorer countries where cash has pretty much died out.
Imagine driving along in some mountainous, rural area in China. You stop at a little roadside shop in the middle of nowhere. You pull out your paper Renminbi bills to pay, and the shopkeeper looks at you like you're crazy. Everyone uses their smartphone to pay for everything, and yes, everyone has a smartphone.
If it's possible to transition entirely to digital payment in a country that was part of the Third World just one generation ago, it should be possible in the US.
Let’s not for a split second pretend that many if any of the people complaining in this thread are doing so for this reason. At best their reasoning is verging on a conspiracy theory, at worst it’s just a typical old American man aversion to not using cash.
I agree with you that businesses should accept cash for the reason that you’ve noted. The underlying problem is fuelled by the almost unique dysfunction of American bureaucracies. This is in cases where the systems aren’t maliciously designed to lock people out.
So I've started carrying cash because in NYC, most places now have 3-5% "Cash Discount which is already applied to the price" which means a 5% fee for using your card.
I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card).
To play devil's advocate, credit cards are another way to get tracked, a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy, a way to be analyzed by the merchant, a way to get more explicitly prompted to pay a 20% tip, and more hassle than handing a $5 for a $4.73 coffee and walking off.
"Imagine these magical tokens with monetary value that I could instantly transfer to a merchant without waiting for my bill to come back!"
Going cashless only benefits the owner for not having to deal with counting cash, with potential worker theft, and (slim concern) robbery - things that, depending on the area and the market, are theoretical.
At the same time, I think it's neat that street performers and buskers have QR codes to Venmo. I think everyone should accept everything.
In defense of cashless, there is so much you don’t have to worry about as the business owner; yes the credit companies take a somewhat exhorbitant percentage but you don’t have to worry about having thousands of dollars in cash at the end of the day, don’t have to worry about employees skimming or making mistakes like coming in short. It also automates a ton of the accounting. So there are some benefits.
On the other hand, you have to worry about disputes and chargebacks, of which you can only accumulate so many with your processor, and which also tend to have unfavorable outcomes for merchants.
The pros may still outweigh the cons, but it’s not all roses with cards.
Disputes and chargebacks for in person payments especially for food/drinks immediately consumed would be rather rare.
I can’t put any numbers to this, but yes, it’s probably the case that as the ATV increases the dispute rate also increases, and probably particularly rare in the food service industry.
In my experience it can be rare even with an ATV in the thousands of dollars, but it’s still (unfortunately) a non-zero risk.
It’s the card present/card not present (ie online, phone, etc) distinction right?
Yes - it's hard to automate because it's offline, it's higher risk because you have to show your face, it's usually low value products, and if there's any issues people usually go back to the cashier and then void the transaction - removing a large part of refund costs.
> and (slim concern) robbery - things that, depending on the area and the market, are theoretical.
If your bar is being hit every week for robbery, the chance is no longer theoretical or a slim concern. Not sure about that bar, but marijuana dispensaries here get hit weekly because they are a cash only business. If the feds allowed it, they would go card-only very quickly.
>I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card).
I wouldn't patronize such a place because I'm not comfortable surrendering my credit card for an indeterminate amount of time, nor having any idea of how much money I've spent until I'm about to leave.
> a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy
I mean by all means use your card everywhere but I think we should make a concerted effort to keep our options open.
I am a user that is drawn in by the convenience of paying with card or tap or phone. But I am not advocating to abandon cash or the cashless society.
> I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card).
And I see the same issue when I go to places that only take cash: people have to leave because they only have a credit card. Or they pony up some ridiculous fee to take cash from the ATM in the bar.
> credit cards are another way to get tracked
I personally don't care too much about this, but I can understand why some might.
> a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy
Put another way: a way for a duopoly of companies to get paid for providing a useful service to both businesses and customers. Now, you can argue that if there was more competition, fees would be lower, and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that the card networks are just taking and not providing any value.
> a way to be analyzed by the merchant
Basically the same as your tracking argument. Some care, some don't.
> a way to get more explicitly prompted to pay a 20% tip
Shrug? That's life? I feel pressured to tip regardless of how I pay. At least with the POS terminal I don't have to do math.
> and more hassle than handing a $5 for a $4.73 coffee and walking off.
It's pretty rare that I see a bill for an even amount of money. It's way more hassle to have to dig through my pockets for exact change, which I never have, so in reality I'm passing over a larger amount and waiting for the cashier to make change for me. And then I have to decide how much of that I want to leave as a tip. That's certainly more hassle than just tapping a card and a tip amount, and walking off.
Your argument boils down to, I don't care about your problems, and they don't bother me, so they are wrong.
Interesting that you left off the past line of my post in your otherwise thorough reply.
If a place doesn't accept cash, I leave. Cash is one of our last remaining bastions of freedom. I would gladly pay by card, if those cards were anonymous, refillable with cash. But these do not exist anymore, even for small amounts. They insist they must know your every last $0.50 transaction.
If a place doesn’t accept credit cards, I leave also. I just don’t carry cash anymore. To each their own.
They mostly do it for safety reasons. Being a target for being robbed for drug money just gets annoying after awhile. Getting rid of cash gets rid of that risk. They might lose some customers, but losing workers to stress about being robbed is a bigger problem these days.
It also costs money to handle cash. You have to count it at the end of the shift. And store it. And transport it to a bank to deposit it, which takes time ($$) and resources (gas, etc)
I also expect banks charge larger businesses that deal with a lot of cash for the privilege of getting the bank to handle that cash for them.
I get your point, and I do think it's great for many people that we don't lose this outright, but I will offer an alternative view - Where I live, there always were a lot of people who don't report their income fully, which means they mostly transact in cash. We have fairly high and progressive taxes, which means that by transacting in cash, some medium to high earners can lower their tax payments significantly. After trying basically everything over many decades, the clear plan by to government is to make cash transactions obsolete as soon as possible. They've been slowly reducing the maximum legal cash transaction size for a while now, but the goal is clearly to get rid of cash.
While I worry about people without access to banking (mostly people without documentation, but also the poor), I think they're on a course to resolve that too, and I for one would be very happy to not have to pay that much in taxes while seeing others cheat the system and reap the benefits...
I prefer paying cash. It is also elitist to not accept cash because it means I need a credit card or an expensive phone, neither of which I have on me while jogging.
I also don't jog, but you get the point. At my gym I had a keychain bar code that worked great. Now I need my phone, phone charged, brightness up, their stupid app, signed in, open it up, click check-in. It turned a 2 second 1 gram device in to this whole thing. Why?? What a waste of technology and time.
> I also don't jog, but you get the point
No, I don't. Carrying a card is way easier than carrying cash while jogging. Thin, smaller, more lightweight.
I see one benefit of cash: the privacy.
I frequent taco trucks and places that prefer cash and almost no places that don't so I have ~$40 in my gym bag and neither of my 2 heavily used credit cards.
I will have maids coming over tomorrow for the first time in a millennia and I will pay them however they prefer and I'm assuming that's cash. Card is amazing, but cash has its place it bothers me to see it sidelined.
> It is also elitist to not accept cash
I think you're ascribing malice to something that is largely a function of cost, safety, and hassle.
Yes, credit card fees are not free, but:
1. Managing cash is not free either. At the end of the shift / end of the day, you need employees to count cash and reconcile the amounts with receipts. Cash in excess of what the business wants to keep on hand needs to be transported to the bank and deposited, which costs employee (or manager/owner) time.
2. Businesses that accept cash are bigger targets for (possibly violent) theft. Your minimum wage barista might appreciate not having to worry about someone coming in with a gun and ordering them to empty the register into a bag, if there is nothing to empty into said bag. Transporting cash to the bank is another point where you can get robbed.
3. Related, there's also the risk of being paid with counterfeit bills. Granted, there's also the risk of stolen credit cards being used, and the business is usually forced to eat the cost of that. So this might turn out to be a wash (or perhaps, I suspect, this is actually worse with credit cards).
Certainly, from the customer's perspective, credit cards are a privacy leak, and require a good credit score or at least a bank with debit cards, and some people don't have access to either. But I think the solution to the latter is to make banking more accessible to people (I think allowing the post office to be a bank to anyone who needs it is a great way to make that happen). Not sure how to solve the privacy leak, though. Even with (unlikely) strong legislation against data collection and sharing/selling, there's always going to be a purchase trail.
And your point about jogging (or not-jogging) just doesn't make sense; it's far more convenient to carry a credit card when jogging than to carry cash.
> Related, there's also the risk of being paid with counterfeit bills. Granted, there's also the risk of stolen credit cards being used, and the business is usually forced to eat the cost of that. So this might turn out to be a wash (or perhaps, I suspect, this is actually worse with credit cards).
I'm curious if credit cards actually are worse. I haven't had anyone ask for my ID to use a credit card in a long while. My hypothesis is that stolen credit cards are used online frequently, but rarely in person. Likely because it's easier to steal 10,000 credit card numbers online than in person, and because people are more likely to notice and report a card stolen if it's physically missing.
Letting people in to your store means they can steal stuff. Things that you sell can break. Windows are a hazard in your saloon. I have seen 1 single counterfeit USD in my life and i've worked plenty a register. I have seen innumerable amount of credit card fraud. There's pros and cons to all forms of currency, and not accepting cash does eliminate some of those cons but also its pros.
> I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything
For as long as not everyone has access to a bank account or credit card I'll be concerned about fueling divisions in society.
I'm not from the US, unlike the origins of this discussion, but also hear this statement and have no reason to doubt it is true. But if you step out of the wealthy areas or even just look a little closer then the users of cash are visible.
Remember: this is HN, where the bubble effect is strong. On Hacker News, everybody "knows" that Google Search is useless these days and that Amazon results are all counterfeit junk, even though in the real world I have never heard anyone bring this up and these services are still incredibly popular. It's the same thing with cash: I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards.
> I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards.
I'm not sure where you live. I work in a fast-food place on a college campus. While the students generally use their meal-plans to buy food, the moment we have a "parents' weekend" or similar event, we do a lot of cash.
It is generally poorer people (who don't have access to banks) who have to use cash (or resort to alternative banking systems that charge exorbitant fees).
A few companies around town here in SF Bay Area started doing cashless and the community saw it as a red flag as it clearly disadvantages certain groups in our community. A couple of those places I frequented took back cashless from said pushback.
According to this [0], it's illegal for retail businesses to not accept cash in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City and the states of Massachusetts and New Jersey.
[0] https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/right-pay-cash-now-protecte...
Remember that this is also an American bubble at times. In Germany, cash is still king. You can't go long without 10€ in your wallet.
Tangential: I'm surprised that no one complains about these things. Google Search has become unbearable and Amazon is obviously bad these days. There's no way people aren't getting annoyed by the tech they use every day, yet you're right, no complaints.
Germany's certainly a contrast. As a counterpoint from another end of the scale, I'm in Sweden and it's so cashless that the US seemed cash-heavy to me on a visit a year ago. I saw people pay cash in a restaurant and I even saw a public transport machine that accepts bills, things that would be a very unusual sight in Sweden. Here, the bills were changed five years ago and I'm not even sure what they look like.
> this is also an American bubble at times
It's almost always a silicon valley bubble
> In Germany, cash is still king
In Australia I haven't bothered to take any cash out in about a year, many businesses don't accept cash, and everything still seems to function just fine.
Many stores I go to in rural america ONLY accept cash or check. The areas are so poor they refuse to pay the credit card fee. That and I suspect there's a lot of tax evasion going on.
From what I've observed, a tiny fraction have left because of the no-cash policy, probably under 1%. We were expecting 5% to 10% in the first weeks, since customers that walked in for the very first time wouldn't have known of the policy.
From the ones that left, most said they didn't have a card on them at the time and they'd return another time, but we did get a couple of people that did leave because they didn't agree to the policy.
Interesting. Cash handling costs are 5% to 15% https://www.ihlservices.com/product/costofcash/
This makes going cash free a pretty smart choice.
I sometimes did the opposite, when living in Germany. I'm not gonna bother hunting for ATM (and usually pay commission with that) just to have a privilege of spending money at your business.
I wish you would take cash. Every other method of payment gets tracked and is used to profile people
That is a pretty fringe worry of tracking that places a major burden on the business. While I am no fan of the amount of tracking going on, I'd say this is pretty far down the list. You're still tracked when you pull out cash. Credit cards have quite a bit of protection on them.
Is it really a major burden to accept cash?
Am I really tracked when I pay in cash?
Should this really be far down the list of privacy concerns? My debit cards record every single transaction I make with them. Anybody motivated enough could find out exactly where, when, and what I buy. Seems like a pretty major privacy concern.
> Is it really a major burden to accept cash?
It means somebody has to go to the bank each day to drop off the cash and collect change.
So it's inconvenient, and an unnecessary security risk to whichever staff member is required to do that.
Compared to not accepting cash and not having to deal with any of that, then yes it's a major burden.
> It means somebody has to go to the bank each day to drop off the cash and collect change.
So... just like the past few hundreds years then.
> So it's inconvenient
So is taking out the trash. But are you going to complain about the janitor who gets paid to do it?
> and an unnecessary security risk to whichever staff member is required to do that.
Is it really so unnecessary? Moreover, is dealing with money ever not considered a security risk?
> Compared to not accepting cash and not having to deal with any of that, then yes it's a major burden.
Even not accepting cash is a security risk. Do you deal with your computer infrastructure? Card skimmers? What about cameras that take pictures of card information while being slid across the scanner? How do you deal with the security audits of the backend software? What about the background checks of the people who wrote the backend software?
You're falsely painting a rose garden. It's just a different garden, that's all.
> So is taking out the trash. But are you going to complain about the janitor who gets paid to do it?
If you have the option not to, wouldn't you opt out?
> Even not accepting cash is a security risk. Do you deal with your computer infrastructure? Card skimmers?
Those are risks of accepting cards, not risks of "not accepting cash"
> If you have the option not to, wouldn't you opt out?
I have the "option" to opt-out of things that I never opted into in the first place. It's ludicrous that I have to do "opt out" of something I didn't have a choice of being opted-into in the first place.
> Those are risks of accepting cards, not risks of "not accepting cash"
Yes absolutely. And those risks (of accepting cards) mean that I disagree with the implied statement that not accepting cash removes burdens. It simply shifted the burden elsewhere (onto the customer).
> I have the "option" to opt-out of things that I never opted into in the first place. It's ludicrous that I have to do "opt out" of something I didn't have a choice of being opted-into in the first place.
What are you even talking about? The context is that cash is inconvenient and costly to deal with. You said "So is taking out the trash. But are you going to complain about the janitor who gets paid to do it?"
To which I basically responded yes - wouldn't you opt out of paying the janitor if you didn't have to? i.e. reduce the cost of doing business - if we're not making trash we don't need to pay someone to take it out. Hey, let's not make trash!
Your response doesn't make any sense in that context.
> those risks (of accepting cards) mean that I disagree with the implied statement that not accepting cash removes burdens
It's not implied, it's flat-out stated. Taking cash involves a variety of extra costs, risks and infrastructure. If you don't take cash you don't need a cash till, you probably don't need a safe, you don't need to pay staff to count and reconcile it, you don't need to get it to the bank safely, or pay banking fees.
If you're going to take cards all you really need these days is a smartphone and a reader.
> It simply shifted the burden elsewhere (onto the customer).
So? We're talking about burdens on the business. If you feel that having to use a card in an unacceptable burden, then perhaps you don't use that business.
By the sounds of it, not many people feel this way. And it's quite funny in itself - given that it's far easier not to bother with cash as an individual too.
> What are you even talking about? The context is that cash is inconvenient and costly to deal with.
You replied with a non-sequitur so I replied in kind.
Asking about opting-out of paying someone? No, that's immoral. Only scumbags would consider asking that let alone actually do it.
Asking about opting-out of using cash? No, that doesn't make sense given that I've clearly stated that I won't be a customer of businesses who have.
Asking about opting-out of taking out the trash? Nobody likes trash to pile up and I have a lot of respect to people who deal with it.
Asking about opting-out of being a janitor? I was a janitor for a long time. How does that make sense in the conversation though?
> To which I basically responded...
Your new reply doesn't include what you originally replied with. There's new context here and it changes what your first message meant to me. Here, have a new reply:
No, I am not a scumbag. People deserve to be paid fairly.
Further: janitors do real work that robots simply cannot do. I cannot ask a robot how their day was, how long they've worked there, what their hobbies are, or where to find the competing store. I can ask a janitor that though and perhaps even build a friendship.
> Taking cash involves a variety of extra costs, risks and infrastructure. If you don't take cash you don't need a cash till, you probably don't need a safe, you don't need to pay staff to count and reconcile it, you don't need to get it to the bank safely, or pay banking fees.
Taking cards involves a variety of extra costs, risks and infrastructure. If you don't take cards you don't need a card reader, you probably don't need internet, or have IT staff to manage all of that, you don't need to pay staff to count and reconcile sales, or pay processing fees...
Do you want me to go on? The risks aren't gone. They're just moved.
> If you feel that having to use a card in an unacceptable burden, then perhaps you don't use that business.
Indeed, I have stated exactly that in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34499522
> it's far easier not to bother with cash as an individual too
It's easier until you have a problem. When you have a problem it takes a hell of a lot more time to resolve.
If you have a problem with cash... well usually there _isn't_ a resolution so why bother trying? Time saved and that's far easier to deal with.
> You replied with a non-sequitur so I replied in kind.
No, I didn't, saying "If you have the option not to, wouldn't you opt out?" in reponse to your comment "are you going to complain about the janitor who gets paid to do it?" is absolutely not a non-sequitur.
If there is a business cost you don't have to pay, if you have that option, why would you not take it?
> Asking about ...
You missed an option there - not generating the trash in the first place, so you don't need to pay a janitor. That's the analogy with not taking cash - deciding not to create the issue in the first place that requires the costs and hassle.
> Taking cards involves a variety of extra costs, risks and infrastructure. If you don't take cards you don't need a card reader, you probably don't need internet, or have IT staff to manage all of that, you don't need to pay staff to count and reconcile sales, or pay processing fees..
As a small business you also don't need all of that, just a tablet and a reader. Everything else is already done.
We're also not talking about taking cash or taking cards, we're talking about the difference between taking both, or taking cards only, and whether that constitutes a reduction in hassle and risk.
Also this is not the same argument you were making before, which was that the burden was transferred to you the potential customer.
> The risks aren't gone. They're just moved.
The risks of taking cash are gone if you don't take cash. If you're taking cards anyway, deciding not to take cash is an absolute reduction in risk and hassle.
> If you have a problem with cash... well usually there _isn't_ a resolution so why bother trying?
By this logic it's better to die than break a limb. Dead is dead but getting something fixed is a huge hassle. More nonsense I'm afraid!
> saying "If you have the option not to, wouldn't you opt out?" in reponse to your comment "are you going to complain about the janitor who gets paid to do it?" is absolutely not a non-sequitur.
Sure it is.
> If there is a business cost you don't have to pay, if you have that option, why would you not take it?
You are implying that a business could opt-out of paying janitors. No, that is not an acceptable business practice. Janitors cannot work for free, they are not slaves. And we cannot allow trash to pile up and things to go uncleaned.
> You missed an option there - not generating the trash in the first place, so you don't need to pay a janitor.
There is no situation wherein trash will not be generated. Likewise there is no situation where cash shouldn't be accepted.
> As a small business you also don't need all of that, just a tablet and a reader. Everything else is already done.
Sure, everything else is already done if your shitty small business offloads all of the work to the customer instead.
> The risks of taking cash are gone if you don't take cash. If you're taking cards anyway, deciding not to take cash is an absolute reduction in risk and hassle.
No, it's not a reduction in risk at all. It's offloading the risk to someone else.
> By this logic it's better to die than break a limb.
In the United States with the current state of healthcare, this logic is practically true.
Look, our discussion clearly shows that you might do well at increasing business profits. But your arguments are unable to reconcile basic compassion to your fellow humans. That's unfortunately common in modern businesses.
>That is a pretty fringe worry of tracking that places a major burden on the business.
Taking cash? It's illegal in NYC not to... Not sure how fringe that is.
It's not illegal because of tracking worries, it's illegal because cashless businesses discriminate against the large population of under- and un-banked people who live in NYC.
And?
> Credit cards have quite a bit of protection on them.
"Quite a bit" is not the same as "to my satisfaction when traveling"
"Quite a bit" is a lot better than "it's gone forever without any recourse", which is the "protection level" of cash.
It's even worse: I've spent time on the phone with banks trying to get my money back without any effect. I wouldn't have spent that time if I'd spent cash in the first place.
"It's gone forever without any recourse" certainly isn't exclusive to cash. And it can be expensive to even try.
> You're still tracked when you pull out cash.
How?
Your cellphone is doing far, far more to profile you than any $5 spend at a local coffee shop would.
All a CC company would know is you like expensive lattes; your cellphone would know how long you stayed there, where you say in the joint, and how many memes you looked at before you left. And might overhear everything you say, including your order.
If you're using any sort of digital payment or points app on your phone it'll probably know your order, too.
Listen, most places should take cash, but this is silly.
You can buy a gift credit/debit card with cash and use that. Those normally work.
Those are tracked, too, and can't be obtained without strong identity.
Disposable gift cards are widely available in the US that will run as debit/credit without any need for identity verification. They are disposable, though, and as the other comment mentions aren't very economical (~1% outright in fees if you buy in $500 increments).
Amex has gift cards with no expiry and no processing fees after purchase. The price on a $3000 card is $5.95. Which is about 0.2%.
Is this only through a web portal that is tied directly to your bank account? Do you have a link?
Such a card, if it exist, would quickly be the most popular card on all churning and credit card reward forums.
Also if it exist but requires a bank account or Amex credit card to purchase, it goes back again to being pointless for the people who can't get banking services and rely on cash.
...and often have expiry dates and huge service fees
There are only 39.8 billion US banknotes in circulation, it can easily tracked in a Postgres database, banknote numbers when it exits the ATM, banknote numbers when they are redeemed by the baker, or by your drug dealer of choice, banknotes are only in circulation for one or two exchanges before coming back to a bank, it’s very possible that they are tracked to identify curious loops in circulation.
In fact, if they weren’t, that would be unprofessional from the FBI.
Easily? Tracking a credit card transaction is probably by far the easiest way to track money. And cash being the most difficult. And crypto being both easy and difficult depending on how it's used.
Sure, credit card tracking is much easier, but I wouldn't call the "most difficult" nature of cash to be all that difficult, certainly not for a state actor that heavily regulates its banks.
Please correct me if I’m missing something. You’re describing a map where the key is a note and the value is, a linked list of banks? I’m not clear what the point is that you’re trying to make.
I believe what they're saying is - we have the capability to track every physical banknote as it leaves/enters the bank and attach it to the person who deposits/withdraws it.
There may be extra steps in between, but if you're tracking a transaction / relationship type which happens twice or more, you can expect that the person on the record is the person you're after or can point you at them.
But I don't know why they expect FBI to actually have it implemented. The system would have to be so widespread/common that we'd know if it existed. I mean, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_bill_tracking but that's for hobbyists. Otherwise banks may check for duplicate numbers... but I can't find any mention of more widespread tracking.
It also assumes that money doesn't change hands multiple times before going back into another bank.
The person who made this point addressed this already:
> banknotes are only in circulation for one or two exchanges before coming back to a bank
No, you don't get the 100% whole picture, but you can mine a ton out of data points like "note 38573204 was given to John Doe via ATM on 2023-01-10, and returned to bank by Jane Smith (owner of ABC Widgets) on 2023-01-14".
Not really. Coincidentally, there is no database of that. Hmm, wonder why!
You could probably infer a lot without knowing who traded it to who.
If say
* person A gets 100 banknotes from the bank, gives 50 to person B,
* person B pays 25 to person C and 5 back to bank (say, taxes)
* person C pays 5 of them to the bank
You can infer with some probability who traded what to who.
Not really. A billion other things also could have happened, they just didn't. Also, when was the last time you deposited cash?
Many people don't, but businesses deposit excess cash daily.
Certainly, though, those same businesses keep a lot of cash in order to give change to other customers. But that cash will still likely end up back at a bank before too long.
If it only goes to banks when businesses deposit it, you can't tell anything about the intermediary users
Just because you can't imagine way of tracking it doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Offer one...
Definitely need higher denomination coins. For now, coins of 1 and .50 work well for coffee shops.
Is this where cryptocurrencies come in? The convenience of a cashless transaction without the tracking.
If any of them worked sensibly as currency, maybe. But end result would probably be "the crypto transaction processor" most companies taking crypto use getting all the info needed to link person with their money anyway.
Uh? I got bad news for you. Crypto is by far the LEAST private method.
But it's not a monopoly skimming off my purchases either.
And? Not relevant to the discussion
true, it's a vast decentralized system skimming off your purchases.
Cryptocurrency exposed thousands of pedophiles a few years ago. It stores a record of every transaction. They just had to connect the dots starting from the wallet of the CSAM website.
Blockchain sleuthing had become much more commonplace since then.
If you have a public ledger, you don't need names to identify people's wallets.
I use Bitpay for some small-ish things. For small transactions, though, cash or credit card works best.
Lol the simple mention, and not even favourably, of crypto in an extremely relevant context gets a DVote. It's like mentioning Joe Rogan.
Crypto is a permanent distributed transaction list. I’ve never understood how that was marketed as private
Japan has been doing it like this for years. And it's much better. Pay people properly, and encourage them to be the best they can be (even for jobs that are so-called "unskilled") and then everyone's a winner.
Not just Japan.
Basically most of the world except Noth America pay their waiters wages that don't depend on tips. Sure some places allow additional tipping, but it's not a mandatory fee and the workers don't have to get it to make a living.
The mandatory minimum wage where I live is $18.69/hr, which is higher than the median wage in many European countries. Any tips or mandatory service charges are always in addition to this and many waiters make more than the minimum wage.
Replacing tipping with a 20% mandatory service charge -- tried many times here -- results in the employees earning less money, empirically. Eliminating tipping is unpopular with employees since it is effectively a pay cut.
Proponents of "no tipping" policies in the US are not going to be successful until they address the elephant in the room of reduced pay for employees. Unlike in Europe, US employees know how much money they earn with tipping.
> The mandatory minimum wage where I live is $18.69/hr, which is higher than the median wage in many European countries. Any tips or mandatory service charges are always in addition to this and many waiters make more than the minimum wage.
It's about the social safety net, not just about raw cash.
The same waiter in most European countries would have health insurance even after being fired, for example.
Generally, minimum wages are lower for tipped professions than non-tipped for this reason. Assuming you're talking about Seattle, which is the only place I could find with an $18.69/hr minimum wage, tipped employees make $16.50 in comparison [0].
[0]: https://www.seattle.gov/laborstandards/ordinances/minimum-wa...
In Seattle, waiters at many local restaurants and bars anecdotally seem to clear about ~$80k/year, so the minimum wage is kind of moot for most of them. I have several friends that work in the industry who have strong opinions on the matter.
The tipping issue in Seattle isn't about a living wage, they already have that, it is about maximizing their income. After all, who doesn't want to maximize their income? The economic structure and dynamics of it are fascinating. What proponents of "no tipping" schemes fail to recognize is that it is against the interest of employees in many cases, even if it is often positioned otherwise.
what about the entire state of California which has a higher population than most European countries?
>The mandatory minimum wage where I live is $18.69/hr, which is higher than the median wage in many European countries.
That may true in raw numbers but is it still true when you consider that a European worker will have coverage for health, retirement, paid annual leave, paid medical leave, will have access to unemployment benefits, will get subsidised lunches (in some countries) and will be protected by laws that enforce overtime pay and their rights to not be fired without justifiable cause.
Raw numbers are not the full picture.
As someone who was in a service role and subject to an opt in post interaction survey, I don't believe systems like this are effective. They select for Karens with unreasonable demands. They use the survey to retaliate against the employee by leaving bad scores.
Yeah, I think the ridiculousness of the Uber/Lyft rating system (anything but a 5 means the driver should be fired) tells us that customer feedback of this sort is less than useless.
I find forced (or even strongly encouraged) rating even worse than tipping, especially given the inevitable anything less than 5 stars might as well be zero attitude.
Seriously. It's like if you had an insecure partner who incessantly asks you 10x a day "How do I look?" and if you say ANYTHING other than "FANTASTIC!" you know they're going to react really bad.
Except it's worse since if you ever give an honest answer it's not you they'll berate, the bosses will just flagellate their underlings who might not even be truly responsible for the "low" rating.
Agreed. These customer satisfaction surveys where anything less than 5 stars or 10/10 is a fail is just as dystopian as tipping culture.
I try to almost always tip in cash which means I mark 0% tip, and I never give star reviews. One exception for a review is the smiley face vs sad face at airport restrooms. I've never marked sad face yet but if there was an issue I would gladly and that will simply let staff know there is something amiss in that spot.
Always rate negatively, and if possible supply that you are doing so because rudely getting asked to rate them at an inopportune moment sours your experience however great it may have been.
Review / feedback programs are terrible (5/5: would f*ck over soulless management again).
If the whole point of eliminating tips is to treat the workers fairly, why not institute some sort of profit share, or monthly bonus based on YoY revenue growth?
Either way, you should accept cash.
I think profit share is not a bad idea, but to make it fair, it should also involve some degree of risk sharing. Counting up the costs of opening a coffee establishment (is it a roaster as well?), it's not as high as some other businesses but there's rent, equipment, seats and tables, etc. If every employee and the owner was a member of something like a LLC, what would the buy-in be? I have no idea, maybe $10K each or something like that? Most of that would be lost if the business failed, so it would provide a nice incentive, and once cleared, a steady stream of income.
Of course a short-term employee (summer, tourist season, etc.) would probably not be interested in that arrangement, and would prefer a good steady wage.
Employees spend half their waking hours at work. That's a huge opportunity cost. I don't get where the idea comes from that they take no risk!
Profit sharing can be things such as giving a bonus when sales are good. No need to make things as complicated as possible. Lots of other sectors give bonuses, restaurants/hospitality almost never.
Please accept cash. We don't need to encourage credit card companies to track our purchases and give them the tools to control who can and cannot do business.
I'm a big fan of card payments myself, but I agree that cash should be accepted universally, until unbanking/underbanking is completely solved and there is a cash-analogous private way to pay.
Besides the accessibility issue, not nearly all activities or situations making somebody want to transact anonymously are illegal (just consider e.g. people in unsafe domestic situations trying to get help/away but not having their own card).
I believe we could strike a pretty good balance with some research, engineering, and product development, avoiding both possibilities for tax evasion and financial crimes on one extreme, and creating a complete financial panopticon on the other.
Why would a credit card company do that?
Because they can, and people with influence know they can. Then people with influence force the credit card companies to do it. Not hypothetical, in actuality
We can only speculate as to their internal motivations. But why doesn't really matter when we can watch them actively do it.
Are you actually concerned with their motivations, or just unaware that this is a common practice already?
For profit and compliance with authoritarian government.
I really don't know. But they must have reasons I don't know about.
I am really of two minds about this. On one hand, yes, the suggestion that I leave a tip and the amount suggested has ballooned to a ridiculous level in some businesses.
On the other hand, I recognize that there are plenty of businesses that still don't offer a way to tip at all (Starbucks until very recently), and more importantly, that none of these employees make anywhere near a living wage. Having worked service industry jobs and found my way out, I can't help but thinking that most of these jobs are merely dark patterns that take advantage of people who can't or won't demand what they actually should be paid.
The unfortunate conclusion I've arrived at is that US consumers simply aren't willing to pay the true price for many of the things they enjoy on a day to day basis. Just one example is that their daily coffee is subsidized through the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
You say you pay a "higher wage" - what does that actually equate to for someone working 40 hours a week?
> none of these employees make anywhere near a living wage
> the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
i don't know, TONS of people make way less than baristas and other counter-service workers. Lots of the customers of those baristas make similar wages as they do. Why does the barista deserve that money more? The maids at a hotel make less than a Starbucks barista, and there's no way they get significant tips especially at the cheaper places.
Tipping baristas and other counter-service workers who are NOT paid below minimum wage might make some progressives feel generous and virtuous, but it isn't solving any problems in a fair and equitable way. It's raising people's expectations -- in CERTAIN occupations only -- that they deserve $2 per customer for setting a cup on a counter and hollering your number.
I am sure every single person would rather be paid a consistent wage.
isn't the whole problem with tipping is that every role with tipping will lower the base pay in consideration of that? I would find it very hard to believe anyone receiving tips prefering that to just a stable matching income (except for some exceptional cases...)
And yeah, it turns out that people want to be paid more than minimum wage to be on their feet and dealing with customer orders all day long. I don't see why service people shouldn't be paid more than minimum wage!
> isn’t the whole problem with tipping is that every role with tipping will lower the base pay in consideration of that?
That’s a problem.
Another problem is that it is demonstrated to be a loophole through which unequal compensation on bases that would otherwise be unlawful for an employer are achieved.
> I am sure every single person would rather be paid a consistent wage
I’m certain that is not the case for many/most (depending on the area and establishment) tipped workers. Most waiters, baristas & bartenders certainly wouldn’t want to earn only slightly more than fast food workers even if the average wage goes up.
> will lower the base pay
Not in California and some other places (applies to at least 10-15% of the US population)
> Most waiters, baristas & bartenders certainly wouldn’t want to earn only slightly more than fast food workers even if the average wage goes up.
I don’t understand this argument. What I’m saying is to just take what the earnings were with wage + tips, and make it just wage. Literally not changing the total take home pay (I guess people don’t report tips though?)
Unfortunately I doubt this would be a steady state solution. If restaurants were to implement this suggestion, they'd probably undercut each other's prices by significantly lowering the wage of their staff.
Business owners who don't pay their workers satisfactory wages will find nobody to work for them, lose customers and have to close. It's happening rapidly, worldwide, right now.
Certainly there's a lower bound at which a business owner won't be able to staff their restaurant, but that lower bound isn't one penny less than the status quo. Rather, there's some shitty middle region, where employees are generally dissatisfied with their wages but not desperate enough to leave.
The world is changing more rapidly than ever and the attitudes of young workers (typically found in the hospitality industry) is completely different than just 10 years ago. Even the concept "desperate enough to leave" is alien: If a better opportunity shows up you switch, there is no question about it. Just like you yourself will pump gas at a station with a better price than the one you pumped gas in yesterday.
There is absolutely no reward for sticking with an employer in this industry, if another employer has a better offer it's goodbye.
> Why does the barista deserve that money more?
I think you're conflating deserving that money more with deserving more money. Obviously the ideal solution would be to pay everyone better, but individuals are limited in their capacity to effect change. Eliminating tipping, absent a replacement, isn't fair either (except in the sense that all service workers would become equally poor).
Wow. this attitude is awful and sadly not that uncommon. I have a friend whose household income is around 400k, is an effective alturist, and tips 10% at restaurants because he thinks tipping is unfair. The only place you're really expected to tip is a restaurant - 15-20%. everything else is optional, but when you make a ton of money and have taken care of your own, you tip people well for the hard work they do for you. Seriously, most of on this site, if we've been working 10+ years should be giving a 20 to the handyman, or leaving $10 on the bed at the hotel.
Why should you have to give your extra money to people in specific professions rather than give it to a family in Guatemala where it will go further?
Do you tip everyone you interact with? How do you know who to tip? That sounds exhausting.
What is awful about it?
> make some progressives feel generous and virtuous
What evidence you have to back up this claim?
> Just one example is that their daily coffee is subsidized through the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
Your everything is "subsidized" by low wages of people living in third world countries. US coffee shop employees aren't quite near the bottom of that hierarchy.
100% true but doesn’t invalidate their situation. If we follow that logic to its end, there’s always someone in worse shape who is also further removed from those who have the ability to make a difference.
Do you think you have no ability to make a difference for them?
I don’t disagree, but are you suggesting that we shouldn’t act to solve a problem just because it isn’t the worst possible problem? Feels like a convenient out.
If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift.
As a customer, please just leave well enough alone. I'd really prefer to just leave a tip if I'm going to be gently shamed into leaving reviews to make sure your employees somehow get the wages they were led to believe they would earn.
I would go a bit out of my way to frequent any non-tipping coffee shop/restaurant. And I'm quite happy to pay a higher price in the menu items to reflect the fact that the business isn't shifting some of their payroll burden to me in lieu of realistic pricing.
But with his system, he gets to charge you extra and can deny staff bonuses. It's like stealing tips but more legal.
There isn't any tip in New Zealand and Australia. Everybody get proper salary. The service is always exceptional. How is that possible?
I'm Australian, living in Canada for 10 years, just went back to Australia for 18 months, now back in Canada. I have some experience here.
I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada.
In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum.
In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious.
So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.
I had to read this a few times to make sure that, yes, you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great.
I've lived here all of my life, but traveled very extensively. I would give the typical Canadian service interaction a neutral pass; they aren't openly rude, nor are they offering to wash my car.
Where are you going to eat that someone taking your order, bringing it to you and checking in to make sure that it doesn't taste like burnt plastic could be described as "bare minimum"? That sounds an awful lot like "pretty standard" to me.
Even in fancier places, there is a real art to achieving the perfect balance between attentive and annoying in service. Having someone notice that I need more water leaves me feeling cared for; having someone stop by on a 7 minute schedule to ask if we're "still okay" leaves me feeling violent.
> you are actually implying that service in Canada is somehow particularly great.
I was saying that service in Canada is noticeably "better" than service in Australia.
So what I'm actually implying, is that service in Australia is quite "lacking". By lacking I mean nobody "waits" on you. You often order at the bar, pickup your own food and cutlery, re-fil your own water and walk to the bar to buy yourself a drink.
Even a "sit down" restaurant will really only take your order and bring your food, nothing more. Fancier is different, but then you're paying more for the food.
As I said, I'm perfectly happy with that level of "service" because it means no tipping.
Of course, minimum wage in Australia is $21.38 with benefits, leave, healthcare, etc. etc. For everyone.
I waited tables for years in the Southern U.S., now I live in Canada.
I find that service is highly regional even in the U.S., but as a whole, better than service in Canada.
I also think that Canadians making at least minimum wage with tips on top plays into that. In the U.S. you'd have to provide great service or you risked not making any money (technically I know your employers are supposed to top you up to minimum wage, but they do it for the pay period rather than an individual shift)
I find the service in Victoria to be top notch. And tons of gorgeous waitresses, not that I care because I’m a highly evolved man ;)
Downvoted, appropriately
you haven´t lived here all of your life, yet....
:)
I am an American who has been living in Sydney for years and who stopped tipping here after getting used to it not being expected - but it has gotten a little weird/muddied of late. First it was Uber and the food delivery apps - and I did tip there because the app asked and I knew that in the gig economy the workers were not paid well (unlike others in Australia).
Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in).
I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?".
So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?
You're correct, it's creeping in mostly due to cookie cutter POS machines setup for US market (I assume), and Doordash/Uber/etc apps and websites baking it in. I'd guess the payment machines can be setup to hide it, but management figures we have a "choice" (under light duress) to not tip so that's good enough. There are also a lot of international people working in hospitality so I guess they wouldn't be as against it as a lot of locals and just assume it's normal.
There are pretty much weekly hate threads on r/australia and similar places on Reddit about this as you'd expect.
One other thing I did notice - when travelling the US and reading reviews, a lot of people talk about the service. It's rarely mentioned in reviews over here in comparison unless it's an outlier. I personally found the fawning attention quite cloying in the US, but it's a different culture I guess. Wondering if that'll change if tips gain a foothold.
Would you be comfortable as an Aussie just always zeroing it out when you see it here then?
If there's a presumptive pre-filled tip amount that I have to zero out that would annoy me a lot.
In most cases there is a tip button that I just don't press or I answer 'No' to the question on it. Sometimes the staff do it when handing it over. That doesn't annoy me as much and I don't usually feel much pressure since I've got a whole life behind me not tipping I guess. I do feel a bit awkward sometimes so I'd rather they not put me in the situation but I get over it.
In Denmark, half the time the waiters are embarrassed that their boss set up the machine to prompt for tips, and press 0 for you.
It's not Square doing this, it's the restaurant owner.
People do tip in Australia, it's just not expected. Tipping a genuine act of generosity to reciprocate exceptional service.
The correlation between service quality and tipping is an interesting one, why does anyone do a good job in any role without some kind of incremental reward for effort. Do office workers always revert to 'just enough to not get fired' or are they playing a longer game for promotions and bonuses?
What is this "exceptional service" people are talking about? Take the order without forgetting stuff and then bring dishes from the kitchen? Isn't that just a normal baseline for this profession? Or does it mean not spitting in the food (I'm joking)? I sometimes leave tips, but not once have I understood why, because there is no such thing as "exceptional" in the waiting service imho. I only do it due to the social pressure, like a monkey in the story about water hose and a ladder.
I absolutely think that exceptional service is possible - for example, when I visit a restaurant with my elderly grandparents who have some extremely particular dietary restrictions, and the wait staff patiently discuss our options, help them create a meal that satisfies their preferences and remains interesting, I find that exceptional. I've had wait staff give us genuine recommendations on the menu, with honesty, indicating the dishes they don't like (much more rare) as well as those they do resulting in a good meal - I enjoy that candor and am happy to tip for the recommendation. I've also had staff stay late and keep a restaurant open because we were on the last train into a station with nowhere else to go and eat and didn't speak the local language - I found that exceptional as well.
Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.
No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness.
It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode.
If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some change in a tip jar if we only ordered drinks.
Traveling to the US as a Brit is an affront when you first experience "service culture". You become desensitised to it after a while (and can even have some fun with it) but initially it's a genuinely uncomfortable experience and it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).
> it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
Is that really true, though? The US is such a mix of cultures at this point (and even the more dominant cultures have diverged so much), that I'm not sure it's accurate to say that Brits and Americans generally share all that much culture. History is there, yes, but it's been over 200 years, and history fades.
We share a huge amount of culture.
There's a significant asymmetry, though. Brits consume far more US culture than Americans British culture.
> The service industry is what you do in high school or college
most people working in the service industry are not teenagers and college kids. For restaurants and fast food joints adult workers are more common.
https://datausa.io/profile/soc/fast-food-and-counter-workers
https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percen...
The average retail worker is over 40.
These aren't "summer jobs" for pocket money or children's first steps into the workforce, they're the jobs adults depend on to keep their rent/utilities paid and their families fed.
Someone 25 years of age and older can deliver exceptional service, they just aren't paid enough to care to.
The GP poster was referring to the age of service workers in the UK, not the US. No idea if they're accurate for the UK, but I don't think US data can be used to refute what they're saying.
The service is not always exceptional - what are you talking about? It's sometimes good, sometimes bad, the same as anywhere else on earth.
culture/demographic
It's difficult to explain the cause. You can't really account for it by a simple tipping/no tipping divide. In other countries that don't do tipping, you'll end up wishing they did because the service is so abysmal. You can't get decent service or expect a good waiter or waitress, because nobody is motivated to do the job well.
You must have not been to Japan.
I've been to Japan many times. Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya. Japanese culture is exceptional in many ways—you can't pretend that their culture is normative when applied to the west. My point still stands. You can't pay service staff minimum wage or slave wages and expect good service. This is why the tipping system developed.
He's never been outside the US.
Ah, that's bullshit. I've been all over the world and I'm guessing by your comment I'm more travelled than you. Currently, I'm in the Philippines, where there's no tipping. Go ahead, come down here on a trip and see what happens. No tipping. And the service is abysmal because nobody has any incentive to be an excellent waiter or waitress.
What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing in order to reward good service and provide a decent income to service workers. It's not perfect, but it's there for a reason.
Obviously, you've never been to Japan or Europe if you think no tipping = bad service.
What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing because racist Americans didn't want to pay newly-freed black people properly.
I just finished saying that I've been all over Japan. And you missed where I said that Japanese culture is in many ways exceptional and not like other cultures. It's not like the rest of SE Asia, for instance, where there's no tipping and you have to wait for a half hour to get your cheque.
About 5.5% of Americans don't have bank accounts and pay primarily with cash. Most of these people are impoverished minorities, specifically blacks and Latinos. Not accepting cash is a pretty discriminatory practice.
Handling cash is a hassle. It carries risk in terms of losing it, and it takes time to count it and transport/deposit it into a bank. All things that eat into your profit margin, in an industry that has crazy low margin.
You a hater.
How much money you lose by counting money and depositing it into a bank?
That depends on many factors of course, but I've seen it ballparked around 2-4%. You need safes, cash registers, insurance, etc.
But credit cards in the US are also like 3% and come with additional risks.
It takes time to do those things. Time is money. It takes time to reconcile in a double entry accounting system the cash you received in business operations. Software does it automatically.
Where I live there is also a bank fee for dealing with large amounts of cash.
> We will probably need to highlight that we pay a higher wage for baristas & cooks to account for the lack of tips, and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
Yes, after the total confirmation (including tax if you can), where you'd normally be asked to tip, you should see if it's possible to display the no tip policy and higher wage explanation.
You could also tell customers that your business is donating to certain cause at this point. Just don't pass on the burden of deciding whether or not to donate to your customers. Another option is to dedicate certain profits from a specific product to a cause and note that on your menu.
> I've just opened a coffee shop in Los Angeles last month
You are brave. A friend opened a coffee shop elsewhere in LA County a few years ago. The LA County permit and inspection process was nothing less than a utopian nightmare. I have done lots of construction projects myself and have learned to absolutely detest that part of the experience (going to the DMV is actually better). The usual outcome is that projects end-up costing a ton more and take much longer to complete. The issues, in my experience, rarely have to do with actual safety concerns, etc. It's mostly about process and check-boxes. I hope your experience was better.
Think of turning things around with a simple sentence on the last screen: "We don't accept tips but gladly accept a smile."
Here I thought it's nice that an American business does not force their employees to be over the top nice all the time to the customers even if they're having a bad day by making their wage depend on it, but then I read the last part...
"Yelp" is the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail. "Review" websites are, to a large portion of the population, complaint websites.
By all means, keep an eye on what's being said about you and look for red flags, but don't be that neurotic boss that rides your employees every time a review under 5 stars comes in. The best restaurants around that have stayed for more than a few years often are the ones with 3 stars -- 5 usually just means they're new, not particularly good, and people coming in are adventurous, rather than following what someone advised.
There is one like this in Ballard, WA. They have small signage about how it works. And also little pamphlets about both Fair Trade and Fair Wage policies.
Ballard Coffee Works, corner of Leary & Market.
I think this is cool and hope your location gets the HN effect today aka real world ddos :)
Just to dump an idea: Maybe instead of using a scale based rating, you could experiment with something that has not a clear maximum value to prevent the all 5-star rating effect described by others. The only thing that directly comes to my mind would be a button, that the user has to hold until the time matches the perceived rating.
I would be concerned about any sort of individual bonus directly linked to the service just rendered. That tends to work against cooperation and creativity and problem solving. Only when you are unencumbered by incentives can you afford to experiment and learn from your mistakes and get better at what you do. (See e.g. Pink's Drive for more details on motivation.)
It's especially bad if it's based on some variant of having scores "above average" or whatever, because that ends up being a lottery. At that point it's better to just establish a lottery among the employees. If you really have to do individual bonuses, I think it's better to take a leaf from Deming and only grant it for truly (statistically verified) outperformance.
Someone else suggested collective bonuses (e.g. profit sharing). That aligns incentives nicely: it is slightly lagged, meaning you can afford to experiment and learn. It's also not individual, so it fosters collaboration. It's still something of a lottery, of course, but one decided by the customers, not by a manager.
The rest of the working world is unencumbered by incentives. They still show up.
Far from it -- many professionals, particularly in sales and finance, have bonuses tied to individual performance metrics. That's just as bad.
I'm intrigued and would got out of my way to come to this place on principle.
> and we don't accept cash either
Can I ask why not? I see the rise of CBDCs as a threat to democracy (governments able to monitor and control what you spend your money on) and cash as a vital tool in a fight against that.
Though as a European I always find American tipping culture quite insane. Nothing wrong with tipping for good service, but they way it seems expected in the US is very off putting
Unbanked people don't have bank cards.
New York City has a law preventing businesses from refusing cash because only accepting cards is discriminatory.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Continuing the geek vibe, I believe the best starting point to make sense of inner workings of incentive systems and rewards is SDT - Self-Determination Theory. It's 70+ yr old theory of motivation in psychology that originated in studies of how external rewards (i.e. tips or bonuses) crowd out intrinsic motivation.
In other words, if we want employees to act friendly to customers - should we design a system of external motivation (rewards and punishements) or design a system that boost intrinsic motivation for this behaviour. For example, SDT has many studies on how different rewards giving patterns affect motivation. As far as I remember, the least detrimental is task-noncontingent rewards (giving "reward" for just "showing up", basically). The most detrimental to motivation is competitive-contingent (give reward to those who outperform others).
It sounds insane that you need "rewards and punishments" for one human to be nice to another. Friendliness should be a natural by product of happy people in a good workplace.
I'd suggest a different tack, analyse what in the system has led to one person to be unfriendly to another, and solve it without assuming the buck stops with the individual as some type of perfectly free agent in a skinner box.
Proper pay, proper healthcare, leaders that lead by demonstration and treat colleagues with respect and a business that does not lead to angry customers by being scummy... are just table stakes for example.
There was a restaurant that opened near my old apartment (literally on my block) that started off with no tipping. It was a great fancy pizza place. Loved going there. Fast forward about 5 years, we've moved a few subway stops away so didn't go there as often (also the pandemic). We go back in 2021 and we come to find out as we pay that there is a tip line on their receipt. Never truly found out why but I wonder if it was hard to find or retain staff that can work at similar, or better, caliber restaurants and make more money via tips. From comments in their Yelp reviews it looks like they started taking tips before the pandemic so that wasn't the cause.
I hope you'll be able to continue not taking tips because I really wish we'd abolish this practice. Good luck with your cafe and I would love to try it out next time I'm in LA!
A sign that says “We pay our staff fairly, tips are not required” could be a good advertisement for your shop!
We had a no tipping restaurant we used to go to and the service was reliably terrible.
Hopefully the rating system will work but I’d say you do need some kind of system.
On the other hand Chick-fil-A is able to make their employees act friendly. I wonder how they do it.
Finally I do wish you’d accept cash just for people that want to preserve their privacy.
Cash will tie up an additional employee behind the counter. One of the reasons we are able to not accept tips and pay fair wages instead, is because we don't need a person at the register.
And while you can use that person for other tasks when there is no one in line, they do need to glove up each time they may handle a food item.
Also, in LA cash is a safety issue if you plan on staying open late when traffic is low.
To facilitate anonymous payments, we will accept crypto soon.
It seems like promoting a fairer society is a priority for you, given your focus on paying fair wages. That’s great! Please consider extending that desire to serving people who do not have credit cards or bank accounts (or crypto …) Plenty of them exist and like coffee too.
NYC had to put a stop to the cashless trend because it is unfair to only offer services to those eligible for banking.
It is unfair to lay that burden on businesses, when it should be the government’s job to operate infrastructure.
It would be trivial for the federal government to offer each individual an electronic money account that legally cannot be closed and is forever accessible to them. And as an adjacent comment wrote, the in person services infrastructure can be tacked onto USPS.
Trivial you say? How so?
Tacked onto the USPS? Why would it be a good idea to have the USPS run a bank with no experience or staff in banking, for every single person in the country, especially when the USPS CEO is more or less openly trying to dismantle and then privatize it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy
*edit to just add I read the article posted by sibling, they are proposing a “pilot program” to offer check-cashing for a fee, not depository accounts, and it adds that they’re avoiding the word “bank” to distance themselves from places where you have accounts and store money and intend to keep it that way…
> especially when the USPS CEO is more or less openly trying to dismantle and then privatize it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy
Obviously this due to one party trying to dismantle it, which ideally would not happen to our country’s infrastructure. The point is using the network and real estate and organization of an existing federal government entity that already spans the nooks and crannies of the US to get a nationwide benefit up and running.
Yeah, fair enough, the idea makes some sense. But the fact that it’s an entire party trying to dismantle USPS, a party that has a lot of power, and not just one person, is precisely the very strong reason I wouldn’t be able to trust it or buy into a plan to add accounts and depository banking to the postal service. (I already get suspicious with articles that start by framing the USPS as an unprofitable business. They might indeed be “losing” money, but it’s a branch of our tax-funded government, and we don’t expect other branches to be profitable businesses. Does it even make sense to frame the police or FBI or firefighters as “unprofitable”? The narrative of the USPS deficit seems like part of the plan to privatize it...)
On top of that, I guess it’s very, very far from trivial to spin up such a service even though it’s true the USPS has a nationwide physical presence. It might be fair to say it’s easier than starting from scratch, maybe, but the USPS has entrenched practices and infrastructure that might not easily extend to physical and digital security required to handle high volume finances at all.
Does having electronic accounts cover everyone? We seem to have a rapidly growing homeless population in the US, and many homeless people have real difficulties holding on to cell phones & documents long term, anything that would allow them to authenticate and/or use an electronic account.
If electronic accounts were the solution, I could also imagine the primary infrastructure being a phone app (maybe not entirely dissimilar from China’s WeChat). In-person cash transactions for deposits and withdrawals could perhaps be mostly handled by ATMs?
> but the USPS has entrenched practices and infrastructure that might not easily extend to physical and digital security required to handle high volume finances at all.
The USPS has handled identify verification for the federal government since many, many, many decades. If you want a US passport, you have to go to a USPS office to get your identity verified. This is the logistically difficult part, since it involves so much labor, but it’s already done!
As for electronic accounts, the hardest and most laborious part is identity verification. The electronic accounts part can be taken care of by some IT department, just like visa/Mastercard/any number of banks and financial institutions (including the federal reserve) do.
You want the government to run banks so that stores don't need cash registers?
I wrote “electronic money accounts”, and yes. It is clear that electronic money has lots of utility, and it makes sense for a society to ensure its existence as infrastructure.
The same infrastructure can also serve as an identity verification service, which is also sorely needed.
There is no reason it has to operate as a bank, which would involve becoming a lender.
The government will never never allow any kind of bank account that cannot be closed and is forever accessible.
The closest we have to that is gold buried in a hole somewhere or maybe a cold storage seed phrase in your head and the discipline not to reveal it in torture.
NYC can’t, for better or worse, dictate federal policy. Given the limited scope of its authority, requiring businesses to take the currently available form of universal currency seems not unreasonable.
This seems like one more problem of policing individual behavior instead of solving the infrastructure problem, by say, having the Post Office run a free bank for the under-banked [1].
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90683033/the-post-office-is-fina...
Plenty of places have waiters carry around hip bags with cash instead of doing it at the register. It's no less convient than carrying around a card reader.
Cash businesses tend to get robbed much more often than places that don’t take it. Cash-only businesses, like marijuana dispensaries, are notorious for being robbed here in Seattle.
how does handling crypto work, do you exchange it for USD daily in order to avoid fluctuations in the value of crypto?
This is kind of anecdata. We've all had terrible service, and some of us live in economies which are no tip or no routine tip.
At scale, I continue to believe there isn't a strong relationship between tipping and service, as much as between salary and service or service culture and service.
Transition periods are always complex. If tipping was verboten there would still be a cohort complaining about it for years, about both income side, and service quality side issues.
I always thought good service is based in good training and staff education. Which includes basics of the business that happy customers return...
I'd had bad service lately at a lot of places that require tips.
Chick-fil-a usually makes franchise owners be hands on in the Restaurant, and you cannot own like 20 of them. I think most people own one. At least where I grew up they consistently paid the highest of any fast food place and I am pretty sure they offered tuition reimbursement. The other main benefit they have is the whole closed on Sunday’s thing which makes scheduling more favorable since you know you won’t have to work on sundays.
> On the other hand Chick-fil-A is able to make their employees act friendly. I wonder how they do it.
I would assume they make them do it via management, training, treating them well, and firing for non-compliance.
I think it depends on if the server gets a percentage of the total bill (basically auto-tipping if you think of it that way). Basically everything on the menu gets raised in price 20% and that's the tip portion, ideally shared with the kitchen.
This provides a strong incentive for good service (and good cooking) as an empty restaurant (fewer return customers) means less income. Otherwise, why bother providing excellent service, if you're paid the same hourly wage if the place is packed or if it's half-full?
I actually say this virtually snark free, but I've always thought of Chick-fil-A as a Christian religious group that happens to run a chicken sandwich restaurant. I've certainly had lots of experience eating their food and talking to the employees and a few owners. I suspect that's part of the atmosphere.
There is a brewery in my town that does the same thing. They do accept cash and any "tips" (which is any amount over the total) goes to their charity of the month. On their cc entry system, its never shown to the customer so there is never that awkward tipping part you see on a lot of POS systems now. If the customer asks, they say that they don't take tips and if they'd like to leave one in cash, it will all go towards their charity that month.
By doing this, they appease the customer who wants to leave one and don't get in a back and forth with them over tips.
> Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.
Haha, I think that's totally reasonable of them. As a consumer I would appreciate a notification informing me that I couldn't tip, no matter how much I thought they deserved it.
Edit: I wanted to add that there are a lot of places we're not expected to tip at whose employees deserve it just as much as the ones working at the places we are expected to tip at. Tipping culture may be out of control, but a lot of times people deserve a tip for providing exceptional service. That's our way of validating them and saying, "you're going to make it."
Maybe a section on the payment page for adding a tip with a single radio button already selected, titled "No tip required, we pay our servers well"
It should say "no tips accepted".
You should collect feedback to determine when you are understaffed or alert you to uncleanliness, not to reward individual baristas.
Give your employees the same stress free and untransactional experience you are trying to provide to the customers.
That seems like a whole lot better system.
> I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
Might as well go full hog and add rating to food/drinks they ordered. Not to judge the person doing the service, just get a feel for what your customers enjoyed and what they didn't.
The no-tipping/fair-pay policy is good, but not accepting cash is bullshit.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this? [0] It's a post from Eric Huang - he's a chef based out of NYC and recently wrote about why his restaurant has decided to accept tips (while acknowledging that it's a bad system). It's a long read, but his point about more established hospitality groups/restaurateurs trying and failing to adopt a non-tipping model resonated with me.
The issue is that I have to trust the proprietor. In my locale it has become common for restaurants to add ‘health & wellness’ surcharges which began as charity/Covid response and of course never went away.
It is almost never the case that the restaurant provides any of this to their employees and there is no transparency involved.
I honestly see it as a scam to charge higher prices without itemizing properly on the menu.
Even if you highlight the wage disparity in signage, I would have no way of knowing whether the information is accurate or just another piece of propaganda.
If you show the full price with taxes upfront, that's an astonishing level of integrity.
One idea is to print qr codes on coffee cups: customers can scan those and leave anonymous feedback later.
> If you show the full price with taxes upfront, that's an astonishing level of integrity.
It’s funny, what you see is what you pay doesn’t require an astonishing level of integrity in much (most?) of the world, it’s just standard practice; instead, tacking on hidden fees not on the price tag would be unthinkable.
It’s really complicated in the US because we charge about 4 different kinds of sales tax (federal, state, county, city), and differing rates depending on the type of good, or even the time of year.
So like a chain store can’t include taxes in things like print ads because you could have two locations a few blocks apart that literally have different tax.
Though the stores themselves should display the final price, the one that you pay at the register.
The US levies no federal sales tax.
Not on general sales, but things that are functionally sales tax exist for things such as fuel and tobacco products.
Not just standard practice, it's mandatory, for consumer facing prices you will get shut down if you don't include tax in it (and detail how much of it is tax in the receipt)
Taxes are included.
We might do the QR for customers that did not order using the app on their phone. We're printing stickers anyway, using the Star Micronics SDK which makes QR code printing a breeze.
Gotta say, love seeing the 'hack on my own rig' mentality applied to coffee shops. Curious to know how your culture views to-go orders? Based on the YouTube short (place looks awesome btw), I don't think the vibe is grab and go - but if it is, how are you handling the tickets? Just a separate Star for the togos? Nice getting that working, too - I'm stuck in a regional rep loop trying to get access to ours.
Roughly half of the customers do head out as soon as the order is ready, especially in the morning.
We print stickers regardless of to-stay or to-go because it helps us keep track of fulfilled items, and you can easily pass a sticker to a colleague if you need help with an order.
Why don't you set the default to be $0 tip, and make anything else optional?
This seems to go out of the way to fight tipping culture and seems to cause more confusion than necessary.
> the prices they see on the menu is what they'll actually end up paying
Is the sales tax included in the listed price?
One of my pet peeves is how "tax and tip" are not included in the displayed prices in Ontario, Canada. I hate having to do arithmetic on every purchase I make.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia where what you see is what you pay - tax incl. Tipping is generally not part of the culture because the minimum wage is a livable wage (in most areas).
I am blind. Would I be able to use your iPad setup to order something in your shop, or is the "lets make everything fancy" setup maybe exclusionary?
We have 2 recurring customers that are vision impaired (there’s an apartment building for people with disabilities nearby). We help place their orders, as we would with any customer that needs help using the iPads for other reasons.
Vision impaired people require the same help reading the menu at any other coffee shop, so it’s not any different. In fact it might make it easier on them because they don’t feel like they’re holding up the line. If one of us guides them through the menu on one iPad, other customers can still use the other iPads to order.
On a related note, I did notice that our visually impaired customers have a phone app that I believe scans and reads the text from the screen out to them. Perhaps we should have our own text to speech option in some future version.
iOS has VoiceOver built-in. If you coded your app correctly, the customer should be able to activate VoiceOver with a tripple-click on the home-button (or the quivalent on a device without home button).
iPadOS comes with VoiceOver and you should be able to enable it as an accessibility shortcut (Settings -> Accessibility) that works in kiosk mode as well.
Depending how your views are laid out the app might need some polish to improve navigation, but overall it should work from the get go.
Concerns I see are that (1) only Apple users will know how to trigger it and (2) the vision impaired customer might leave VoiceOver on, which will confuse the next customer who uses the kiosk.
I think both of this comment is needlessly hostile.
Like, starting the conversation with an accusatory comment of "hey, btw, did you think of this very super rare situation, or are you the evil exclusionary guy?" is kind of an asshole thing to do. Most people with sight don't encounter blindness often, so making someone feel attacked for not thinking about is just a way to generate hostility.
Having said that, I actually appreciate the content (if not the form) of this comment – it's pretty easy to accidentally block people from using your software, and accessibility reminders are an important thing. Though in this case human solution (have the waiter come and help) is probably better than software one.
Calling a disabled person an asshole because they are trying to raise awareness for a rare and not well known issue is totally the HN thing to do. Thanks for drilling it in. You must be a very nice person to talk to.
dang, if you read this, please delete my account (or blockit, whatever). I no longer want to be part of this community, nor do I want to accidentally fall for it in the future. kthxbye
Compared to US tipped-staff service, non-tipped staff in Japan seem a lot more genuine in their desire to help. It seems a matter of culture and professional pride to be provide excellent service, which leads to a significantly more thorough experience -- being that nice in the context of a tip would seem pushy and awkward.
A rare-interesting UX problem with people thinking the screen froze. I guess it’s easily solved, but there are surely many ways to solve it.
It's very interesting observing people use the app in person, as opposed to privately on their phone where you have no idea how they interact with it.
For instance the Stripe Terminal reader is immediately to the right of the iPad POS, but a good number of people don't know where to tap the card. I need to design an arrow on the checkout screen for that because I've seen many people tapping the card to the iPad screen. I think Square got them used to that.
It's 2023 but I still think a lot of iPad based POS have a poor ending transaction UX. It needs to be a cute, super clear and simple "All done! Turn the screen around." It's jarring to sometimes be dumped at the item selection menu that is meant for the cashier. Or it just says "Thanks!" without a direction to put the screen back how it was.
This sounds great. I'm getting fed up with prompts for tips from places where tips are not customary (non-food) but also I am not a fan of seeking feedback from customers because they may over scrutinize their interactions with service workers --though presumably it averages out over time.
> (I've custom coded an iOS app w/ Stripe Terminal for it)
Most HN thing I've read all day. Sounds awesome.
Good luck!
> Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.
That sounds like the end of transaction screen can be improved
Adding a message like "All Done" then "We're a tip free restaurant" go a long way
I agree with others that you should not introduce a rating system or suggest giving to charity. If no one complains about an employee and you don't notice anything bad, then just take that to be a rating of "satisfactory".
I'm happy to tip when I'm receiving actual table service. I don't tip for a strictly carry-out or over-the-counter sale (e.g. coffee shop).
Even in Europe I tip servers and bartenders. It just seems nice. I've never had one turn it down.
I thought accepting cash was mandatory, but I was mistaken:
I would not run after anyone or fight my customers. Just put it in a jar and twice a year donate it to a good cause.
That is awesome! When you say: what the price on the menu is that is what the customer pays; does it include sales tax as well? If so, def a very happy development and pretty much revolutionary for being in the US. If not, is it something you could consider doing? I think it would be the next natural step :) Disclaimer: I’m Swedish, all prices in Sweden everywhere is always including everything, you’ll never pay more than what you see.
I’m in process of opening an all you can eat pancake shop and doing the same.
I’m thinking of charging a small ~$x per table fee for bussing tables. Refundable if they self bus. Probably would always refund it unless they wreck the table. Not sure I want to administer it, or if it would be perceived as a punitive thing and get bad reviews. Just an idea I had while coding the self checkout app.
Also, pancakes are made by a robot
If you want to go thay route, it might be better instead to add a % to all the prices, and then at the end give it back if someone left a clean table. Something like "as a small token of gratitude for leaving the place clean and saving us time, here's 1% of your price back!"
One is punitive, other one is rewarding.
I agree and this is my main concern. Only issue I see here is the gamification only works if they know about it up front/before they make a huge mess. I guess I could put something at the table that explains why they should help out.
That would definitely mKe me not-a-customer.
There’s a lot more to something BEING clean than LOOKING clean.
Oh yeah I’d still clean it. Syrup is too messy to trust them. But it discourages people completely trashing the place is my thought. Difference of wiping things down quickly and having to bring out the broom and mop and spend 10 minutes on it.
Where? I’d love to hear more about this journey too.
Dallas area. Early days right now but I’ll post some content if it shapes up.
> and we don't accept cash either.
I would not patronize your business.
Did you miss the six other comments that made a more substantive version of that objection?
where's the coffee shop?
Awakening Coffee in Inglewood
Just let people tip if they want instead of making a moral high ground out of it
I'm not sure if they're taking a moral high ground exactly, but I do appreciate a business taking a stand against tipping. It's bad for everyone in the end - I'd love it if it died soon.
>and we don't accept cash either
You're part of the problem, not the solution.
Keep in mind that a far more pernicious and rather evil system is that of the donation receiving “non-profit”. It has over time been exposed and highlighted at various points, but I don’t think it has really at all penetrated the consciousness of the general public as to what a vast majority of “non-profits are, borderline con-jobs; and that’s being generous.
I won’t go into explaining and outlining exactly why that is for the time being, but suffice it to say that I have personal knowledge of the extremely manipulative industry that “non-profits” are. But I get it, some will not want to believe me, I mean they’re called “non-profits” and profits are bad, right?
The point of my caution is essentially this, what you are trying to avoid by stopping tipping, you will only far undo by essentially making “non-profit” executives and their friends and family rich instead of that money going to your employees.
Non-profit are required to file financial disclosures, available via the IRS. https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/
You're looking for Lines 15-17 in Part I of Form 990.
The information's trivially available, if you're concerned.
Generational divide here. I used to work at Cacao coffeehouse in west LA in the 90s. Only took cash. Also, basically made no money other than tips. I moved to NYC and waited tables where there was no pay whatsoever other than tips. That was around when standard tipping went from 15% to 20%.
Having worked in the service industry, I usually tip 25-30%, per drink or per meal. But here's the relevant point: When I encounter a place that doesn't allow tipping, I still want to tip, and make sure to tip, because it's for the worker. I absolutely loathe the new system that's come into trendy restaurants in Seattle where gratuity is supposedly included. That's a skinflint way for a restaurant to raise their prices and assure you that their workers are being paid, without you as the customer having any say (or direct contact) with the workers. You may put up QR code menus and try to isolate the service staff from the customers, and eliminate tipping, but does that make happier employees? Does it make happier customers?
Tipping serves several purposes. One of them is to get the employees to give customers who tip well better service. Sometimes at the expense of an extra ounce from a whisky bottle, sometimes just with more personal care. The insertion of the management into the situation - trying to say it's good for customers and employees - strikes me as a very false, self-serving line of bullshit. And from everyone I know in the service industry, it seems like it quickly turns into a racket against them as well.
My prediction is that by 2025, places that eliminated tipping will be seen as just as infamous as any of the scammy disruptors of the tech industry in the 2010s; the practice of banning tips will be seen as disreputable, and life will return to its natural equilibrium where customers pay extra for good service.
Why do you expect as a customer to have anything to say about a worker getting paid? Do you follow your shoes manufacturing process making sure everyone in the chain is paid properly? I expect the employer to pay properly, otherwise for the employee to take their case to their union/court. This concept/way of thinking seems so strange as a non-American.
> My prediction is that by 2025 [...]
You do know that for the rest of the world, the CURRENT system of needing tips to make up the pay that the employer does not pay is seen as disreputable, part of the infamous scammy lawless American low-pay healthcare-less work landscape, right? Employers are supposed to pay livable wages, not let random customers make up for it.
I think it's the customer's responsibility to know whether the person directly in front of them is being paid, or relying on the customer to pay. If you go into a strip club in whatever country you are in, do you expect to get a lap dance without tipping the girl? Because she's in the union or being paid by the strip club? Probably not. In some states in America, like New York, waiters are basically like strippers. If you go there, you should understand that the service costs extra. You wouldn't go into a Buddhist temple in Thailand and not leave some change at the door. You wouldn't go climb Mt Everest and not give a few dollars to the sherpa who carried your bag. So don't go to a restaurant in New York City and screw the wait staff. Budget it into your travels. This is a plain rule for traveling anywhere.
[deleted; obvious trolling deserves no answers]
Did you ever go to a prostitute? Do you expect her to be paid by the establishment?
You cannot simply say that because you are ignorant of the customs in some place, or you would never go to such a place, that people should not have to learn and abide by the customs if they do go to them.
As with prosties, so with New York restaurants.
As far as leaving coins outside temples... perhaps it was a local contribution thing, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
> Did you ever go to a prostitute? Do you expect her to be paid by the establishment?
I haven't, but if you asked me if I think service workers should be paid more like regular salaried workers or more like prostitutes, I'd pick the former over the latter.
Great answer. I don't know if I agree, as I always liked the freedom of gig work. Plus not knowing whether or not you'll get tipped well makes a job more interesting.
There has been a deplorable profusion of dark patterns in restaurant checkout UIs, such as offering preselected tip amounts set along a 18-20-25% scale (standard used to be 15%), making it quite difficult to leave a custom tip, etc.
Add to this various "surcharges" and other mandatory fees added for this or that (my favorite: mandatory "resort fees" for hotels - seriously why is that not just rolled into the price of the stay?), and the service industry in the US has a serious price transparency crisis. It is quite literally impossible to predict the final cost of service, so as a rule of thumb I have come to generally expect to be out of pocket about 50% - 80% more than the listed price.
Any other country would call this fraud.
Don't forget:
- Asking for a tip for takeout orders
- Asking for the payment including tip before you've received service, often via one of those stupid QR menus that does who knows what with your order data that is now tied to your phone
- Not having 20% as a tip option, but something like 18%, 23%, 27%
- Looming over your shoulder while you enter the tip
I want servers to make a livable wage. I'm willing to pay more. I want my prices transparent, and I don't want the mountain of guilt and social pressure.
Also calculating the tip including the tax, instead of just the products/service provided.
(Shouldn't be tipping on tax, if you really want to send it to the IRS. :)
> - Looming over your shoulder while you enter the tip
I'm with you on the rest, but I find this one dramatically exaggerated by a certain type of person. If you're paying by card, the server is going to be around, waiting for you to finish so they can give you a copy of the receipt.
I find that there is a certain type of person will always describe this as "looming" or "guilted" or feel "social pressure".
Your feelings are legitimate, but the logic behind them is not. While there is definitely pressure to tip (and tip more and more), I've never met a server who would actually act in any way outwardly disappointed by 1) tip of 15%, 2) no tip on takeout, 3) no tip on counter service.
While some people will say "you SHOULD tip 20%" (or more), the actual staff will consider anything beyond the old standard bonus.
You should avoid characterizing someone as "a certain type of person." Especially an internet stranger that you do not know in the least.
I have encountered plenty of servers who hand you the card reader, step back, turn around, whatever, then take it when you're done and walk away. Zero issues. That has been fine.
I have likewise encountered overly pushy servers, often those who knew they did a less than stellar job, who literally stood over my shoulder looking at the screen, pointing over my shoulder saying "and here's where you can enter the tip." That sure as hell is creating a sense of "looming" and "guilt" and "social pressure" (if not physical pressure). I've likewise encountered servers who deliver less than stellar service who complained quite vocally when I dared to leave a 15% tip (they should probably have received 0%).
Don't mistake your personal experiences for those of others. Don't presume how you feel about social encounters is how others should feel or shame them when they don't align with your world view.
Thinking about your comment on QR codes -- If memory serves its not difficult on iOS to set something up to display the QR code data as text instead of acting on it.
I assume it's similarly opaque to use a URL for the same purpose, which would almost certainly be a "enter your phone / email so we can send you your URL...".
In your opinion, assuming electronic ordering, what is the best alternative to a QR code when considering privacy + ease of use?
An analog fallback via paper menu. If I'm doing sit down ordering, I don't want to order electronically unless you give me an ipad. And I don't want to pay until the meal is over. Period.
So "assuming electronic ordering" your suggestion is for them to provide a device. That makes sense.
100% this
Some of these places will also auto add grauituity charges as well for larger parties, and auto select a tip so if you don't look at the bill you could be footing out as much as 40%. Super shady UI practices.
I don't want to be guilt tripped in tipping for a baked item for instance, or a chipotle style served food restaurant.
Adding a tip for large parties has been a common practice for decades—long before the current trend of adding tips for everything.
Whether you agree with the idea of tips or not, that’s the system we have, and in that system large parties very often take up far more resources at a restaurant than smaller ones. They take more time to leave, they clog up the kitchen (as all dishes need to come out at the same time), they often occupy multiple servers at the same time (when a normal table takes only one), and very often don’t tip at a level anywhere close to the standard 15% (with so many people, everyone thinks they can get away with a low tip and others at the table will make up for it). Servers get charged taxes as if they received those tips, so getting shorted actually costs them money (paying taxes on money they didn’t receive).
This practice is different than dark patterns, as it’s actually addressing a real problem with the customers that’s been known be restaurants for a long time. It’s not the same thing as trying to trick or guilt people into tipping.
I’m not buying this overall. Large groups typically order more alcoholic drinks while they are spending more time, which is hugely profitable for restaurants. Also, the more waiters argument doesn’t hold when there are more people/tables. I agree that bringing out more food at the same time is more effort, but this is not insurmountable.
It’s basically a grift to get more money from the suckling pigs of wedding parties, birthday parties, and corporate dinners. Basically, extract more money from the big spenders. Really hate this practice.
Sounds like you’ve never waited tables!
Two-tops are the best for earnings, both for the restaurant and the server. Easier for a charismatic career server to separately charm three couples on dates than a single table of six all at once. And higher turnover is better for revenue. 1-on-1 business meeting? They’ve got work to do. Couples on dates? They’ve got fucking to do. Smaller parties -> faster turnover -> more money.
Large parties are worse in every way. Special table arrangements for reservations made in advance mean more seats left empty while waiting for the arrival. People at large gatherings will buy less food/drink just as often as they’ll buy more. Sometimes it’s a work party where everything is expensed; cool! But lots of companies don’t cover alcohol expenses, which is your most profitable item. Just as often it’s a going away party for a bunch of retail workers where everyone nurses one drink for two hours and splits 3 appies across the whole table.
Large parties suck. Some servers prefer them, but those people are heroes (and rare). Minimum 18% for large parties is standard where I am, but if it was my call it would be 30.
> Easier for a charismatic career server to separately charm three couples on dates than a single table of six all at once.
As an European from a non-tipping country this sounds really horrific to me. So you actively need to "charm/seduce" people into giving you larger tips to make over minimum wage?
Perhaps it’s an English translation thing, but note that I didn’t use “seduce”, intentionally. But yes, people who are more charismatic/friendly/charming/whatever other word, will make more in tips. Which is easier to do with smaller table sizes, hence my point.
I agree with you though! As I said, I also hate tipping, even as someone who grew up with it and worked (pretty successfully) in the industry. Lots of other service businesses have successfully demonstrated that you can incentivize good service without requiring tips (non-commission retail, etc).
It's worth noting that it's not just over minimum wage, your hourly can often be miles ahead of any other unskilled labor depending on how busy you are. Both of my sisters would frequently clear $400+ a night on weekends, amounting to over $50 an hour.
The state minimum wage is $10/hour, so they can make over a week's worth of minimum wage pay in a single Saturday.
Ultimately waiters and waitresses are hustling so they get paid like engineers, not Wal-Mart greeters.
Yea, I've seen the videos about Hooters waitresses clearing a grand a night just from tips. It's absolutely bonkers.
That's one nice thing about living in the EU, that it mandates full price disclosure for some industries. (Anyone got a list?)
In particular, when it says your airline ticket is NNN€, you will pay than NNN€. No screwball fees up the wazoo.
It's been that way for all kind of online services since 2011 [1].
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/MEMO_1...
Still plenty of restaurants with “service charge” at the bottom of the menu
Yep, in the UK it's almost always a 12.5% service charge. Almost always with terrible service of course.
This is because nobody carries any cash around anymore. And it's not socially acceptable for waiters to ask customers how much they want to tip. You just tap your card on the portable terminal.
As for the service being terrible, it can be. But British people generally don't like to be interrupted during their meal. So the waitstaff have a tougher job to be present but not harassing.
> don't like to be interrupted during their meal
it's mostly around being interrupted mid sentence, in my experience (and it's certainly the thing that annoys me the most)
That's at worst a couple euros per person, very far from a 10%-20% upcharge.
I have a photo of a menu from Munich earlier this year, not a particularly fancy restaurant - just a pizza place with a table on the street.
12.5% service charge at the bottom.
But it was up front, in genuine print, not buried on a terminal.
Just wait to you get to Italy or Spain, sometimes restaurants in very touristy areas will charge different service charges based on seating area. Eg nice area is 20% or more service charge, vs maybe 12.5% for a table without a view. You don’t see that until you are already in your seat, and then you have to deal with the social awkwardness of asking to move tables (which some don’t do because they are some mixture of introverted or embarrassed).
It depends on the country. It is not the case in France for instance. I don't know exactly what the law say, but you shouldn't have to pay for anything that you didn't order, and you shouldn't pay more than what's written on the menu.
Tips are appreciated but not expected. I's say that if you are used to the American way, tip what you would normally tip above your baseline. For example if you normally tip 15%, and 20% for good service, then in France, don't tip for average service, and tip 5% for good service.
Lol, more like 20/25/30
15/18/20 was in 2018
Try taking a taxi in NYC. IIRC the preselected tip options are 20%, 25% and 30%, and this is on top of a base fare of $100 to Newark when an Uber is literally half price.
Fortunately it is still possible to choose the tip amount. I just move it to 15%.
if they have 15% available I choose that
If they don't I do a custom $0 tip and tell the restaurant why I did it
Given that even retail stores have added tipping prompts to their checkouts, I'd say yes.
Plus many restaurants with placeholder tip icons that start at 25%+
You also don't know what the tip is really going towards in many cases. In the classic restaurant/waitstaff case you can reasonably expect it to go to the workers, in the random knick knack or general goods stores ???
Tipping in general is a system to transfer wealth from the charitable to the uncharitable (high tippers pay more and subsidize the business, low tippers pay less).
I believe in the spirit of tipping rewarding better service, but by and large it doesn't actually function that way. Most tip ~20% on everything outside of extreme circumstances.
Much better for everything to be baked into the price of whatever good or service it is.
Tipping at best is a form of bribery and at worst a feudal practice of wealth transfer. I tip because it is the social norm (and bribery: don't want my food messed with), but I think we can also acknowledge that this practice is weird and has a shaky history.
> don't want my food messed with
If someone has the mentality that they are free to spoil your food because they won't get a (good) tip, then they don't deserve to be paid at all, let alone be tipped well.
There's a lot of things the US has that are extremely strange, and the tipping culture is amongst them.
You don't bribe someone because you think they deserve a bribe. That's not a bribe, it's a gift.
And a tip isn't a bribe. Thinking tipping someone so they don't sabotage the job they are already being paid to do is, to use the article's words "getting out of hand".
It is not unreasonable for me to expect that you complete the job you are paid to do, for the price we already agreed upon. Period. Tips used to be for good service, circumstances where you know that due to circumstance you're asking a little more of the staff.
Many of the "pickup" order sites I have request a tip. There is literally no service, and I'm not even sure how the quality of the order will be, as I've literally not gotten it.
What op described in this thread "I tip because it is the social norm (and bribery: don't want my food messed with)" is an unambiguous bribe.
I ought to clarify: I meant that waiters don't deserve their wages and don't deserve to work if they think that spoiling customers' food is an acceptable reaction to a low/nonexistent tip.
Sure, but that's not a principle I'm willing to eat snotchos for. Paying the bribe is the rational choice, even if the vast majority of recipients would never dream of messing with your food.
>If someone has the mentality that they are free to spoil your food because they won't get a (good) tip, then they don't deserve to be paid at all, let alone be tipped well.
This is not a good follow-up for the parent's concerns. I tip for the same reason parent tips: for protection. I don't want my things to be messed with. I don't care who's in the right, I don't care what the server thinks, if it's the culture that we tip, then we tip, or potentially face the consequences of being outliers of the culture. It's not my hill to die on.
It’s frustrating as a Brit as it is actually illegal for me to pay the bribe (pay the money to ensure my food isn’t spat in).
> a feudal practice of wealth transfer
Quite fitting description. But since we are no feudal lords, I would also describe tipping as the daily power trip of the plebes.
I think tipping at its very best is an opportunity to give a stranger a small gift. I recognize your points -- sometimes it feels like an obligated payment and probably in nearly all cases the capital owning class could and/or should contribute more, but i think you're excluding some optional perspectives. Sometimes I just want to help someone have a nice day by giving them something they didn't expect, like a generous tip. The escalation of niceness and virtue signalling seems right now to be creating an expectation of that generosity, which undermines it, since it can feel non-optional, but sometimes it's still just a nice thing one human can do to recognize another human.
Having been living in the Netherlands, it now feels so patronizing to tip. Like,
“I am rich person. I will give you some money, service person. Now smile and appreciate my lordship.”—how it feels to tip.
I was in a taxi many years ago in Beijing. Meter said something like 16, I gave 20 and left.
Driver chased me into the lobby to give me the change.
I was in a KTV place in Shanghai several years ago and decided to tip the guy who was doing an excellent job at keeping our little room very well stocked with ice cold beer. I think I gave the guy like 100 RMB. A little later I had to explain to his manager what the money was for...
That would certainly look like a bribe
“Keep the change” has a benefit to both parties - no need to spend time waiting for change to be counted or carrying it round
Colleague of mine left a new generator with his fixer in the Phillipenes when there was a massive hurricane a decade ago. He could the value of it was minimal once the time and money to ship it back to Europe was counted, reality was they needed the generator on site. Could be argued it’s not a bribe/tip/gift.
Giving money directly for services rendered could be a bribe, could be paying him on the side (for more hours for example), could attract tax problems etc.
Buying him dinner would be different.
>I think tipping at its very best is an opportunity to give a stranger a small gift.
I think tips work well, if this is the case. When tips are expected, for example because otherwise the server makes much less than minimum wage, then it's not a small gift anymore, and that's problematic. But when I like a service, give a bit more, they like that, give me a bit more of a service, knowing that I'll give a bit more the next time too, then I don't think that's something I should be against.
But the base price must be fair.
Why so you give preferential treatment to those specific jobs?
Cash is a terrible gift. It shows you don't care.
The best Christmas gifts were actual things - not an envelope with $60 in it.
I give my wife €1 million every Christmas.
She gives me the exact same gift.
We’re thinking we need to increase it because of inflation.
Disagree hard. I’ve been given so many garbage gifts that I immediately threw away or donated. I tell my family members to just do cash or gift cards for me. I’d rather get exactly what I need than some junk I’ll never use.
Perhaps, but it can show you care that the person get what they actually want instead of another item for the landfill or something they feel obligated to keep around for when you visit.
But this isn't christmas ... ?
how on earth is this, a back-breakingly empathetic comment, being downvoted
thank you for being reasonable and for having far more patience than I
(and bribery: don't want my food messed with)
The correct term is racket. Bribery is when you get something above normal.
> Plus many restaurants with placeholder tip icons that start at 25%+
This is the most egregious part of it. Who ever invented that a percentage should inflate? The price is already inflating so a percentage of it goes up. You don't get to inflate both.
Tipping was always 10% to 15% if particularly exceptional. Although even that should be made illegal, just include all costs of doing business in the price like nearly every shop does.
Inflating restaurant price + inflating tip + tax are on the trend to make US restaurants the most expensive restaurants on earth. A simple Caesar salad is now starting at 16$ and more likely 20$ in a lot of "not that fancy" places. When you add tax and 30% tip, it almost 28$. This is almost or even more expensive than in Switzerland where you waiter earn at least 26$ per hour, and tipping is not expected. Tipping are just here to profit business owner and not the workers (that’s why it’s almost inexistant in socialist country), and don’t get me started on the business adding "don’t forget to pay your staff" on your check.
No, tipping is in general a system that shifts some of the employer's costs to customers explicitly, rather than hiding them in prices and wages. It's an idiosyncratic system, but not an irrational one: wages and prices are stickier than tip levels.
Yes, thus higher tippers subsidize lower tippers by reducing the list price of goods.
If tipping didn’t exist and were instead embedded in wages, the employer would just raise the list prices commensurately.
There’s a fair argument to be made that restaurant wages would decline in aggregate without tipping though. Certainly there would be both winners and losers
Which is generally what you want: for less price-sensitive customers to subsidize the more price-sensitive customers; see: any demand curve chart.
Of course, raising prices is exactly what happens when you eliminate tipping. But prices are sticky; people react strongly to price increases. They can, to some extent, modulate their tipping behavior (from 25% down to 15%), but if all they can do is take or leave prices, some customers will switch restaurants.
Tipping is not about price sensitivity.
On average, less price sensitive people will tip more, but there are no guarantees. Somebody who’s wealthy may still tip 20% over somebody who is less well off tipping 25% because they’re feeling charitable.
Or, more commonly, some people don’t tip at all, even if they can afford it. Anybody who’s worked in food service has experienced this.
You wont find anything close to a linear relationship between wealth and tipping percentage. Most will tip 20% ish regardless, because that’s what’s generally expected
Price sensitivity refers to how much the price of a good impacts someone’s willingness to buy it, not how wealthy they are.
A wealthy customer can be very price sensitive.
Tip size probably correlates with price insensitivity, but since it's completely voluntary, it also correlates with prosociality: prosocial people are paying to subsidize antisocial people.
Not explicit at all if it's optional though is it?
I don't see what optionality has to do with anything.
> tipping is in general a system that shifts some of the employer's costs to customers explicitly
it's not explicit because no one knows what the total cost is that's being shifted to the consumer and how much of that is recouped by tipping.
Sure they do. It's 15-25% of the cost.
Are you just referring to the default options? Am I the only one who always just goes for custom, 0%?
Anyway that's not the cost, that's post everything so including tax.
It makes is so that actual price of the product is different then the one on the sticker. It is manipulative pricing.
All costs are borne by the customer because the employer, i.e. business owner, is charging the customer -- or they go out of business, which rarely helps the customer or the employee.
Not only that, but then they want to donate to some charity. Roundup for charity? (sometimes they don't even bother to tell you what charity it is) Roundup, Red-Nose day, etc. etc.
> Given that even retail stores have added tipping prompts to their checkouts
Really?! Which retail stores?
Any store can enable tipping on the POS devices. Many stores that used to not traditionally operate off of tips have added the option.
Big employers don’t do it as far as I know. Have seen it many times in convenience stores or small grocery
Few weeks ago facing the tip selection screen at a liquor store here in LA, it clicked for me that this tipping thing has gone too far.
haha you have to tip us for the privilege of fetching your six pack out of our fridge : )
Likely not what the op meant, but food trucks and artist markets (square's bread and butter)
A food truck operator is providing no additional service than a McDonald's ignoring the choice of where to drive or park. They provide takeout with no delivery.
And then this started at food halls.
Similarly, for farmers markets, artists, and crafts; these are traditionally retail items, these items often retail on their website or at a gallery (there is an edge case of auction houses), but now there is at least a vendor option of having a tip screen.
I noticed the expected tipping percentage go up after most customers started tipping in credit.
Tipped workers had to up their game because they can no longer do tax evasion with everything on the record. Back in the days where most paid their restaurant with cash, tips were more like 15%. The move from 15 to more like 20 to 25% almost perfectly corresponds with the amount needed to make the same earnings after tax.
When I was a kid, Emily Post said always tip 10%. In college, the buzz around campus was that 15% was what the proletariat deserved. The past decade or so, I keep hearing you need to give 20% if you don't want to make enemies of the servers. Now, are you telling me it's become 25%?
I've always done 20% because it's easy to do in my head. Nowadays it's a low tip for those tip prompts and I punch it in manually if I tip at all.
When I delivered food my tip spread was funny. Many people wouldn't tip at all, many would just let you keep the change or give you a token amount (~5-10%), and a few people would give you over 50% tips. Not many gave me 15-25%.
> When I delivered food
A "token amount" is pretty reasonable if you take tipping at face value, no? It's supposed to be a reward for good service. Waitstaff engage with you many times over the course of about an hour, and every person at a table receives service. It's fairly reasonable in this case to tip in proportion to the total bill. On the contrary, it's roughly the same amount of work for a delivery driver to deliver $100 of food as it is $10. Tipping the driver a few dollars (at most) seems not unreasonable in this case. The tip cannot possibly be reflective of any service rendered and it's essentially random what driver you will get, so you're not being biased or harming a particular person.
This is, of course, wholly separate from whether the tipping system is a good idea on the whole.
> It's fairly reasonable in this case to tip in proportion to the total bill.
Someone who helps you at a $10/plate restaurant can be just as helpful as the person working at a $200/plate restaurant. Often less annoying, in fact.
I honestly don't know, but do you think the $200/plate restaurant spreads your tips among more people? I would imagine their ratio of tipped workers to patrons would be higher than most restaurants.
I'm sure this varies so I came to this same scenario at a high end sushi restaraunt where there is a waitress, a sushi chef, a non-sushi cheff, hostess, bartender etc and every single one of those people are working on your dinner (closer to $100 per person, but still).
I wasn't sure and I had hoped the tip worked as you said getting spread around (at least to the sushi chef who takes the sushi order directly and drops it at your table). I figured the hostess would tell me straight up since she's not taking my tip directly and doesn't benefit greatly one way or another.
She made it clear to me. Don't expect anyone beyond the waitress to get a meaningful share. I presume she meant either the sharing was very minimal or the waitress was likely to pocket most of it before reporting the amount to the people she may obliged to share it with. That didn't sit well with me but I have a feeling she was telling the truth, especially in light of the fact that the waitress would have every incentive especially with cash to just pocket the money and tell everybody else they were stiffed or got 5% or whatever.
$200/plate restaurants are weird and I'm not going to use them to decide anything about how I tip.
See my below post. The issue is the delivery driver has to pick up the order from a full service restaurant much of the time. The full service restaurant workers will blackball the delivery driver if he doesn't tip them, and that happens proportionally to the cost of the food. After 2-3 times the delivery driver not tipping the restaraunt at the food he's picking up, he will be waiting forever until his customers cancel.
I’m having trouble believing this. You’re saying restaurant workers are expecting tips from the delivery drivers coming to their restaurant for pickup? I’ve only ever seen drivers show up, confirm their identity and orders to the restaurant workers via an app, take the food, and leave.
> The full service restaurant workers will blackball the delivery driver if he doesn't tip them
Have things seriously gotten this bad, that restaurant workers are shaking down delivery drivers for extra cash? So much for solidarity with fellow workers.
Tips are for service, and selling food is not a service. At a restaurant, tips are for the waitstaff that brings your food and cleans up after you. Everything else is people hustling for extra cash. And yes we all like extra cash, but that doesn't make one entitled to it by putting a cup on the counter.
(Delivery drivers bringing food to your house, and drinks at a bar are two separate categories of service where tipping is legitimately expected. Although now that I think about it, maybe that second category was just the beginning of people getting suckered).
> Have things seriously gotten this bad, that restaurant workers are shaking down delivery drivers for extra cash? So much for solidarity with fellow workers.
This is why I call them bribes and say they are akin to feudalism (where the practice started). Because it separates us. Like I said in my main post, it divides a larger group that should be collectively bargaining for a higher minimum wage. I'm fine with tipping, but it being a social standard is barbaric.
Minimum wage is feudalism again though. You're outlawing the jobs of those who create less than minimum wage in value, thus relegating them to the black market and/or less employment. It separates the wage workers and benefits some of the poor at the expense of the even more poor.
> Minimum wage is feudalism again though.
This is absurd, I'm sorry. It is logically inconsistent and means that if wages, payments, or exchange of goods exist in any form as compensation for work, then the system is feudalism. This would not only go against the common usage (words mean what we collectively agree they mean), but render the word meaningless. Please don't do this, you're just adding noise to an argument and not providing a useful comment.
You said tips were akin to feudalism.
Personally I didn't agree with your redefinition, but since you go by a completely different standard than everyone else I went to your level to make you understand your absurdity.
> It is logically inconsistent and means that if wages, payments, or exchange of goods exist in any form as compensation for work, then the system is feudalism.
And no I was saying minimum wage law is doing the exactly thing you fear, which is split us apart by outlawing poor people from working if the value of their labor is less than the minimum wage amount. It creates the same bifurcated society you feared where the very poor now have their jobs outlawed and have to work in the black market and shadows already more than they already do. Minimum wage law is basically a giant "fuck you got mine" to people creating less than that value and creating a cartel where a number of poor people benefit at the expense of the even more poor through violence of the state.
The issue is the waitstaff that prepare takeout at some restaurants are "tipped" service workers.
Which means they don't earn almost any wage.
So if they spend all their time prepping takeout orders for delivery workers they make NO money. So they get very pissed doing this work and intentionally slow it down.
my experience is from several years back, things may have changed.
This sounds like straight up employee misclassification and wage theft that should be taken up with state regulators. Surely a fast food place like McDonalds can't just put a tip jar on the counter, play coy that their workers are tipped positions, and underpay their employees. So it's a matter of enforcement on the smaller outfits that are able to fly under the radar.
I don't want to completely wash my hands of it because it's certainly possible the state regulators could be corrupt and just ignoring the problem, but just giving in to the corruption doesn't seem right either.
The law has always included consideration for this loophole. Every employee must at least average state minimum wage for their 80-hour paychecks, including tips.
So the employee has to record their tips (often but not always, in the same computer system they record their hours) and make sure their employer correctly compensated them for the shortfall between actual earnings and minimum wage.
Minimum wage laws basically says “Every employee must make the minimum wage when tips and employer payments are combined. Also, employers must always pay at least $2.13/hr (federal) regardless of amount that is earned in tips.”
The “real” issue is that $2.13/hr combined with averaging earnings over a paycheck leads to very very mismatched incentives for a business deciding what hours they should be open. The business has very low marginal cost so they’ll stay open during hours when it’s not profitable to the laborers because not enough customers ever walk in to make them minimum wage during those extra off-peak hours.
Good point, I had forgotten about that. It seems like the real issue in this case is that minimum wage isn't really much of a guarantee. Waiters are expecting to make much more than minimum wage, but got pushed into a different role that unilaterally altered their wage.
There was a class action suit regarding servers not being paid a full wage while being made to roll up silverware and napkins and other tasks like that where they were on the clock but not able to earn tips. My wife worked at Applebees and got a couple bucks out of this lawsuit.
This sounds like the same thing.
What the businesses I saw this at did was the waitstaff worked the tables part the time and prepped take out orders part the time. So in effect delivery workers were stealing time they could use to wait tables or directly serve a takeout customer that would usually tip them something. It wasn't that they had staff just for takeout that wasn't getting paid regular wage.
Naturally the waitstaff super resented having to maybe take on less tables to do essentially unpaid work on the side of taking your order, prepping utinsels and drinks, possibly even making some very simple ready made stuff themselves, and plate bagging it up etc and a lot of the shit they have to do for a normal table except for no tip.
How much are they being asked to do? The rule is 20% of their time max or they're supposed to get normal minimum wage.
If it's less than 20%, well, that's just part of the job.
Yeah, it's certainly an unfortunate situation all around - mostly for the restaurant staff who are dependent on the tips - but probably doesn't change much from the consumer's point of view. FWIW I've not had significant problems with delivery. I think a lot of restaurants have gotten used to "the new normal", though to be fair the majority of meals I've had delivered have been mediocre, sometimes cold.
As any hourly worker waiting forever is a nice break from having to actually deliver food. Bonus if the orders are cancelled. Fault never makes it to driver.
I was working as a contract worker through postmates. I was not paid by the hour and earned nothing if the customer cancelled.
Later the courts ruled this was technically employment and I got a token check in a class action, but of course never back paid for the hours as an employee.
Yeah I did food delivery and a sizeable amount didn't tip at all. It also created huge problems picking up food because many of the places people ordered from were full service restaurants, and the workers would purposefully go slow as fuck because they knew they would get no tip as most the food delivery companies don't provision for a tip to the restaraunt people preparing the food for the food delivery guy. A few times I had to take a loss on orders to tip the restaurant I was picking the food up from just to get them to release the food.
The food delivery guy is basically seen like the UPS worker. All around I decided it was a fucked business model and quit pretty quickly.
Get a delivery job for the restaurant and none of this happens.
Do workers usually get a say in what those tip levels should be? I can't imagine that being the case.
I don't know all the mechanisms behind how it happened. I expect indirectly yes, as employees choose to work where they are paid highest (if possible) and employers putting the pre-calculated percentages on the receipt / point of sale that match those desires influence tips. You have to keep up with employee expectation to keep and retain employees and setting those expectation at the point of sale as a voluntary option is an easy win.
I had this debate with a server once. She exclaimed ! You have to increase the tip, don't you know about inflation.
I held my tongue about exponential functions, and just said "ok", I'll choose my battles...
I guess that's why I'm an engineer and she's a server.
One thing I've never understood is the argument for tipping. It has always been "because servers are being paid less than minimum wage." Which the issue with that is that that varies state by state. Most west coast states do not have a separate tipped wage[0]. So the question is, why do we tip at all on the west coast[1]? Worse, it seems to be expanding and increasing in size[2]
The followup argument is often "well they are still being under paid." While I can buy this argument, I do not think the solution is tipping. Because if they are underpaid so are non-tipped jobs like the fast food worker, janitor, grocery worker, or movie theater employee. All tipping does is divide these people and reduce the pool for a larger collective to bargain for a higher minimum wage.
I feel we have this collective belief that tipping is bad (it sure confuses my foreign friends, who sometimes get dirty looks because they didn't tip), but once we've effectively created the criteria necessary to abolish it[3], we still maintained the cultural aspect of it: that we __need__ to tip (often thinking we'll get our food spat in if we don't). I've had others get upset with me for these opinions (I do tip btw) but I don't understand how we can think tipping shouldn't exist but continue in this direction. It's also interesting that in early America we thought of tipping as akin to bribery (I still believe this and I think this is common). It also has a history with slavery[4]
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
[1] Obviously the argument no longer holds outside Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington
[2] When I was a kid (some 20 years ago) 10% was common for a standard tip. Now most places have an 18%/20%/25% option on screens. Some even higher! The second image in the article even shows a 30% tip
[3] I wouldn't completely abolish it, but I'd say it shouldn't be a standard.
[4] https://www.npr.org/2021/03/22/980047710/the-land-of-the-fee
Not saying it’s good or bad, but I used to know some people who made 6 figures a year on tips straight out of high school and stayed in the food business because of it. I never did… I’m not a particularly friendly or warm person. But, those people do actively defend tipping and they expressly do not want salary/wage systems.
You’ve just described my sister’s ex-husband. Friendly guy, knows how to work customers just right to get a tip and made good money for giving up his weekend nights. If I wanted to get a rant out of him, all I had to do was ask about tip pooling.
I'm not advocating for the abolishment of tipping (I explicitly stated this btw), but I am against its expansion and an economic system where bribery is required for an employee to take home a living wage. If we had a social standard where everyone was making at least a living wage then I have no problems with you wanting to depart with extra cash. No one here is really advocating for making tipping illegal, we just don't think it should be used to supplement income.
Stories like this make me think tipping should be abolished more. I feel bad for the other less charismatic servers. Just get rid of tips and pay them higher across the board.
I have a friend with no education who has been a server and bartender. When he is able to work as a server, the money flows in. He's currently working at a Brazilian steakhouse where the standard tip for a table of 4 is $36 before counting money spent on drinks, meaning that after splitting up the tips with other servers and the backroom staff, he's still making well over $70 an hour on a slow day.
Of course, when he was between serving jobs, he was working at a doggy day care for $12 an hour.
Tipping is a system in which customers explicitly, optionally, and variably share some of the cost of labor. It has the features of allowing individual patrons to modulate the labor subsidy they provide, based on their current price sensitivity, the value they place on warm fuzzies (don't dismiss this!), the relationship they want to build with the business, and the service they perceive themselves to be getting.
You can't do all these things with prices; prices apply universally across customers, and for the most part in the hospitality industry they can't float (see airline tickets as an example of a floating price, and the sheer loathing it creates in the customer base).
Later
I also should have added, and probably led with, the fact that tipping addresses a big agent-principal problem in hospitality: in restaurants where servers rely on tips, their incentives are strongly aligned with those of customers; without tips, virtually all the incentives are aligned with that of management.
I disagree with this. I'm reading your claim as "you should pay people so they become your friends." There's plenty of stores I've been regulars at that don't have a tipping system that I've become friendly with staff with. When I was a teenager and worked at movie theaters I became friendly with many regulars and tipping doesn't exist there. The warm fuzzies come from social interaction, face recognition, and being rememberable through your good/frequent business and friendliness. It feels wrong to suggest we should be buying them. That would just be confirming the bribery/feudal aspect of the system. I also don't think this helps those working non-tipped based jobs.
I don't want to abolish tipping, but instead I want to raise the minimum wage, make prices transparent (I am also a proponent of including tax in price listings), and making not tipping socially acceptable. If we have to supplement wages with tips then our economic system is broken (and akin to feudalism). If you want to provide an extra reward or explicitly bribe an employee for faster/better service (or to flex your wealth), I have no qualms.
When I pay people to perform services for me, I don't operate under the illusion that we've become friends. I go to my favorite restaurant in Chicago and get brought a couple dishes on the house as soon as we're seated --- that's not because we're friends, it's because I've built a business relationship with the restaurant (and its servers). It's exactly the same dynamic as exists for airline customers who pay up for the airline lounge.
That relationship with the servers, by the way, also has a name: it's a principal-agent problem. Servers have competing incentives: to serve the interests of customers (better service) or the business (reduce ongoing costs). Tipping shifts the incentives around. You could attempt that shift with other mechanisms, like after-dinner surveys, but you know how well that'd work.
It costs time, effort, and money to provide better service, so I'm not from where you get the moral dimension of having to buy them. They have a cost; of course you have to buy them.
> It costs time, effort, and money to provide better service, so I'm not from where you get the moral dimension of having to buy them. They have a cost; of course you have to buy them.
It's an odd industry where you perform a service, then hope your customer decides to pay you for it.
Variable compensation is widespread across all sorts of industries; tipping is just one (limited) flavor of it.
What other industries let the customer decide after the fact what (or if) they will pay for the service?
Massages too (massage envy)
The tipping there is kind of stupid since they tip at the base cost of the massage even if you get a discount for the membership.
Probably going to cancel it given how expensive it's getting
Babysitting.
(Obviously, you don't decide if you're going to pay for restaurant service; you decide only whether you're going to hold up your end of a cost sharing deal.)
What? I have not heard of a babysitter agree to babysit without also agreeing on a price beforehand. Where does this happen?
I definitely would not trust my kids with someone willing to accept that deal.
You generally tip babysitters (especially if you want them to be available in the future).
No? The price for babysitting is always agreed up front. At least, I never seen anyone babysit or have babysitter without price being clear.
> Babysitting.
Not generally.
> Obviously, you don't decide if you're going to pay for restaurant service; you decide only whether you're going to hold up your end of a cost sharing deal.
Tipping is not a “deal” that you have committed to, by definition.
As the meme goes, "that's a nice hypothesis you've got there. Be a shame if someone were to test it". If tipping fixes a supposed incentive problem that exists with tip-free service, than restaurant service should be better in North America than anywhere else in the world. Is it? Empirically, no. And even locally there is no gain from tipping: Seattle has several tip-free restaurants and the service is indistinguishable from the rest of them.
I consider obligatory 20% tipping as that weird American thing along with guns and (absence of) healthcare. People have elaborate arguments and discussions about them, and the side in favor can look very rational and plausible, and their hypotheses can even have a lot of explanatory power, but they are easily refuted by looking at basically every other developed country.
I travel a lot and eat out a lot and I haven't noticed any discernible difference in service between the countries with obligatory, optional and prohibited tipping.
That's interesting you consider tipping an American thing, I'm guessing you aren't very well traveled as you clearly haven't been to Canada or the Middle East.
There are certainly places without tipping, with much worse and much better service than America. Why? It's cultural (duh). And in American culture, you tip mechanically if you can afford it and your experience wasn't notably incredible or terrible.
In some places, it is acceptable to raise your hand and call for service. In other places it is not. If you know that it not acceptable, and you do it anyways, you're sort of an asshole. It's the same with tipping. You're not some iconoclast who will personally change the culture.
> Servers have competing incentives: to serve the interests of customers (better service) or the business (reduce ongoing costs). Tipping shifts the incentives around.
If that were true, we'd empirically be able to observe better service in countries with a tipping culture than in those without.
In my experience, that is not the case at all.
I don't want to start a nationalist flame war here, but: you and I should agree to disagree on this one. (Austria was lovely, though, from one end to the other.)
It is not, for what it's worth, my contention that tipping is the only way restaurants can work, or even the best one; only that it is a rational system.
> [...] it is a rational system.
I don't disagree on that, and I can see both how it developed and why some people prefer it.
But as a participant in interactions where tipping is expected, I very subjectively find it somewhat exhausting. I'd happily pay more, on average, and be rid of the (albeit small) decision each time.
> Austria was lovely, though, from one end to the other.
What gave me away? :) I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I hope you did tip – contrary to what some guide books say about Germany and Austria, tips are very much expected, although at a different percentage than in the US. (Coffee house waitstaff in the latter being rude is to be expected regardless of your tip rate – supposedly it's part of the charm.)
Regarding my experience with non-tip cultures, these are mostly limited to a few countries in Asia (where waitstaff will at least anecdotally follow you onto the street, returning your tip/accidental overpayment).
Nothing gave you away: Austria (particularly Vienna, but also Salzburg) were simply the examples that jumped out of my mind as the best service experiences I had in Europe. We tip everywhere, even when it marks us as obnoxious Americans; we're well (over)trained by our culture. :)
What you're saying here, about tipping being exhausting: I don't deny that at all. I can absolutely understand the preference against it. And: Japan is a good counterexample: very good service culture, no tipping.
Those same arguments apply to several other professions where it is not customary to tip. The reality is that tips are expected only for the lower social/economic classes, where it is acceptable that the price for labor is set based on the whims of the customer instead of being pre-agreed (which, personally, I find degrading).
Right-leaning people like it because it creates a power dynamic. Left-leaning people like it because they delude themselves that they're helping the working class. In both cases, it boils down to paternalism, and all other reasons are rationalization.
It's true that you can run any industry without tipping, but that's not really saying anything interesting, because you also demonstrably can run industries with tipping. I don't like tipping for the power dynamic or because I'm "helping the working class"; I just get the logic of it, and am fine playing along.
You're fine playing along because you're on the winning side of the deal.
Say you were a software contractor, would you be ok with working for a customer based only on an "expected price range" with a 4x spread, over which the customer has complete unilateral discretion, decided only after the work has been completed?
If your first instinct is "that's different", I'd like to know how.
In what way am I on the winning side of this deal, and how might I find myself on the losing side of it? If you're thinking that I'm beating out the people who can't afford to tip, you should bear in mind that the abolition of tipping would mechanically imply prices raising across the board to the average level of the previous tipping. TANSTAAFL.
> how might I find myself on the losing side of it?
Like I mentioned above, by having your livelihood depend on the whims of customers that may be offended by not having been treated with sufficient deference.
> abolition of tipping would mechanically imply prices raising across the board to the average level of the previous tipping. TANSTAAFL.
Quite the strawman, I never claimed tipping is extra cost, I just find the practice degrading. I would be very much in favor of bundling all costs in the displayed prices, like it happens in the rest of the world.
Most people's livelihoods depend to some extent on other people's whims. I tip mechanically, and think everybody else should too: as I said, it's a cost sharing mechanism. Part of the problem I think nerds like us have with tipping is that they think it's something they have to figure out, like a Yelp star rating. No: just divide by 10 and double, end of story.
I'll go you one further and candidly tell you that what I perceive lurking in the subtext of HN's biannual tipping freakout is the frustration some nerds have that they don't get to inflict their whims on American servers, because their tips are expected to be automatic. They feel ripped off by the expectation. That's the fucked up belief, right there.
You can feel free to ask one of your server friends how degraded they feel by your tips. I think you'll be surprised.
This thread is surreal. You started with "Tipping is a system in which customers explicitly, optionally, and variably share some of the cost of labor.", and now we got to no, actually, there is no optionality or variability, why would you want there to be any?
So we're back to tipping being just a way to artificially display lower prices on the menu and enjoy the psychological deception?
You have the option of not tipping mechanically; you might, for instance, find it acceptable to subject working class people to your whims about the quality of your service. I do not. Regardless, generally speaking, you are socially expected to tip at least 15% any time you dine out at a full service restaurant in America.
> Regardless, generally speaking, you are socially expected to tip at least 15% any time you dine out at a full service restaurant in America.
Then it amounts to psychological trick to make prices artificial seem lower. With added bonus of being able to bad faith argue "it was your choice".
It's true that you can run any industry with tipping, but that's not really saying anything interesting, because you also demonstrably can run industries without tipping. I like tipping for the power dynamic and because I'm "helping the working class"; I get the logic of it, and am fine playing along.
I don't claim there's anything interesting about observing that tipping exists; it obviously does, and is a system that has been functioning in America for generations.
The issue is that you're vehemently defending this practice. As far as I can tell the only reason for this is simply because of momentum. None of the arguments you are making really make much sense. There's strong evidence to the contrary in fact. Not only is the practice particularly unique to America (and Canada), but the practice and laws defending it just enable wage theft (employers not paying minimum wages by claiming tip credits that don't exist). The practice was developed during feudalism and was a form of oppression. The current practice also divides the working class and prevents them from working together in a larger coalition advocating for a larger minimum wage. No one here is really against the concept of tipping, but people are upset about its expansion and that the practice is essentially required. You have said that the money is optional, but we all know that this isn't exactly true. Technically/legally yes, but in practice this doesn't work out. People aren't tipping for service, they are tipping to avoid bad service (as many have said here) and to avoid social stigma from their peers. This is not the system you have laid out in your many comments, this is just a convoluted form of class oppression and wage theft. Sometimes we need to reevaluate things we've been doing just for the sake of doing. Momentum is not a reason to continue a harmful practice.
The issue is that we disagree. I don't think vehemence enters into it. The appeal to feudalism isn't persuasive; all sorts of things are traceable back to feudalism (something about feudalism being a pit stop most of our cultures took at some point), and not all of them are bad.
People shouldn't "tip for service". That's not how tips work. Tip mechanically: at a restaurant, divide by 10 and double (keep it simple include the drinks in the tab). If you're sitting there stewing about whether you achieved the requisite level of service, you're the feudalist.
Is it on a good track to continue existing, though?
TFA is specifically describing how the kind and number of situations in which a tip is expected/asked for (if only by a payment terminal interface) is rapidly expanding – and if every service is tipped, no service is tipped.
I don't follow your logic. If every service has an element of optional, variable, explicit customer sharing of labor costs, no service does?
A tipping decision is a decision in the end, which are drawing from a limited mental resource, according to some research. The way in which our mind typically handles repeatedly having to decide is by developing some simple heuristics and effectively running on autopilot most of the time, following them mechanically.
I could imagine a not too distant future in which tipping evolves into a quasi-fixed-rate quasi-tax, with only exceptional or atrocious service warranting a deviation from a cemented social norm.
What you describe in your last sentence is, I think, exactly how restaurant tipping works. It's best to look at it as a 15% labor tax, with an optional 5-10% upcharge if you're happy (or have a general policy of retaining a reputation as a good tipper).
Another similar example (probably outdated): airport skycaps.
An example of a tipping system in America that doesn't work that way (yet) is hotel housekeeping; a surprising number of people don't even know that there's a tipping custom there at all.
The "quasi tax" thing sounds alarming, but it doesn't bother me at all; it's just another way of expressing costs and prices. Things will cost what they cost one way or the other. If tipping becomes so common that everything has 5-15% tacked onto it (I doubt it'll happen, but we'll stipulate), base prices will fall. Businesses can't simply banish demand curves! There is ultimately a market clearing price.
> [...] a 15% labor tax, with an optional 5-10% upcharge if you're happy [...]
Ah, yes, that is in fact almost exactly my mental model for how to tip in restaurants or cafes (albeit with a conversion factor to the rate I was socialized with).
What always blindsides me is tipping in a place I (or even some locals, apparently?) don't expect it. And generally speaking, I much prefer taking social cues from local friends or other patrons than from a device.
I read about a study that found that the most pro-tip group of people are older men ... that is the way to buy love for them.
The existence of restaurants, barber shops, delivery services, all over the world in first world and developing countries indicates it's possible to run a business successfully without relying on charity or variable pricing models.
To specifically counter Tp's claims, I think we should note that these services also have plenty of friendly relationships between employees and customers.
That's explicitly part of the idea.
Cost sharing isn't charity.
A business that can't stay open when consumers pay the price for their services or goods is absolutely relying on charity donations to stay open.
I don't follow. When you pay for a meal with the tip, you are paying the price for the services and goods.
When I pay for a meal in Japan (often times with better, fresher ingredients, and prepared with more care) I pay for the meal and the service without a tip. It is the norm all over the world.
What makes the US so special that we have to provide charity on top of the price of the meal.
As has been explained repeatedly, you're not providing charity; you are sharing some of the restaurant's labor cost. When you refuse to tip, you aren't withholding charity; you're refusing payment.
Why does Japan do this differently? Japan is a different place.
The business transaction between me and a restaurant is for the food and service they provide. I pay the restaurant, the restaurant pays the labour.
Refusing to tip isn't refusing payment. If it were, I'd be illegal (i.e. theft). Labelling this as "sharing the labour cost" is precisely the problem at hand.
If I hand my pizza delivery driver a $5 bill, I intend it to be a bonus for the driver, not a subsidy for the business. I have zero incentive to pay the business any more than the prices they advertise.
You're absolutely correct regarding tips being a "subsidy for the business". The reason "tipped minimum wage" (where it exists) is lower than actual minimum wage is because the business claims a "tip credit" towards meeting their minimum wage obligation. They're essentially telling the government "this person will make up the difference (or more) in tips, and that will meet our legal obligation to pay the minimum wage."
In most jurisdictions, this is figured by taking the employee's wages plus reported tips for each pay period and dividing them by the employee's clocked hours for that pay period. If that result is not at least actual minimum wage, the employer normally owes the employee the difference.
I don't know if it's a lack of knowledge or actual malicious pay practices (probably some of both), but number of people I meet in the service industry who don't know that last bit and tell me they've never been paid the difference for "dead" shifts (those that generate little to no tips) is staggering.
> I don't know if it's a lack of knowledge or actual malicious pay practices (probably some of both), but number of people I meet in the service industry who don't know that last bit and tell me they've never been paid the difference for "dead" shifts (those that generate little to no tips) is staggering.
That's because wage theft is relatively common among the service industry and is also why several states outlawed special wage. You can probably imagine how easy it is to perform wage theft in this situation simply because how difficult accurately calculating that differential is. You're basically relying on every single person to act in good faith in an environment where every person has large incentives to act in bad faith (employers can easily get away with not paying and employees can easily pocket tips and not report them. One of these, or just the perception of, can create a coupled feedback loop with the other).
No, in an American restaurant, the business transaction is between you, the restaurant, and your server. You are explicitly given permission to refuse (extra) payment to your server, and the restaurant (to a limited extent) backstops that risk for the employee. You're going to have bad relationships (and experiences) with American restaurants if you make a habit of undertipping.
In an American retail or grocery store is my business transaction between me, the store and the cashier?
What's the difference between a server and a cashier? One walks between point a and b instead of standing in place? How much should I tip a cashier; 20% of the cost of my groceries?
No, grocery stores aren't restaurants. The difference is restaurants elect to establish different terms.
If my grocery store has a hot bar of to go food that is packaged by the employee and handed to me to eat on their patio or take home. Should I tip that employee? If they worked at a restaurant they would tipped. My point is the waiter chooses to take less pay in hope of a tip, while the grocery store employee would rather know what their check is going to be and have stable reliable verifiable income. Wait staff don't have that. They make $0 on paper, they take the risk to avoid taxes, while the grocery store employee pays their "fair" share of taxes and social programs. While the waitstaff complains about tips and not earning a living wage.
Complaining about a job they chose when there is a multitude of jobs that you know exactly what you're getting paid based on your hours.
All this being said I do tip. I don't mind it. I find it hilarious when they spin the iPad around around to "answer a few questions" ie "please please tip me, I'm not gonna look or judge you but I am going to look and judge you and most likely passive aggressively spell and say your name wrong to show you why you should tip better!!"
Does the point of sale system ask for a tip? Is there a check with a tip line on it that you sign? Is there a prominent tip jar? Then: tip (or do business elsewhere). Else: don't.
You're missing the point. The existence of that line or that jar will change whether tipping exists, even though your relationship with that person hasn't changed at all.
So maybe it's not really a three way relationship in any of these situations.
It is when it's optional. Charity with a guilt trip.
Except many other industries don't have tipping and the price of labor is just built into the cost.
That's not a counter to anything tptacek listed?
You can take it the other way and tip literally every profession.
You can. It's a system that makes more sense for some occupations and less for others, but plenty of occupations besides hospitality are routinely tipped. You tip your hotel housekeepers, don't you?
Why would you assume that? When I worked as a housekeeper, few left tips. And I do not see why they would need to.
Why not just pay people their wage rather than ask customers to decide if that person is worthy of making money today
Excuse me, in what way are hotel housekeepers not in hospitality industry?
It also allows game players to simply avoid tipping entirely, thereby getting a much cheaper set of good across all of the places that take tips.
Reinvest the savings and get rich off the stupidity of the system. Belligerence seems to be the only way to fix the system.
And managment should be aligned on happy customers if they want to stay in business for long. Maybe I'm missing something else.
Friendliness or a general level of service is in a lot of industries considered a competitive factor that contributes to increased customer lifetime value through repeat sales, loyalty etc.
Why should the restaurants be any different? If I like the food and the service, I'll want to come again - the restaurant increases their earnings that way and both I and the business are happy.
The question then again comes down to how is that an incentive for the workers. The obvious answer is that their pay should be linked to the earnings of the business. The fact that it is not shows the fundamental problem with current state of capitalism, where the primary goal is to exploit the work of the workers below your financial level (as a business owner) and increase your wealth based on the ever-increasing difference between costs / wages and revenue.
The incentive of business is in conflict with incentive of workers, and the interest of customers - business will be motivated to use the workers willing to work for less, count tips towards salaries, but also use lower quality/cost ingredients etc.
A system where the worker salaries would be linked to revenue, with some nuance of course, would ensure top quality / service / products for the customers, fair reward and aligned incentives for the workers, and access to top tier employees (since they would want to work for businesses with higher revenue), happy customers and increased revenue to the business.
People keep asking "why should American restaurants be different?"
The answer is simple: because they choose to set these terms.
Restaurants are far from the most idiosyncratic businesses customers interact with. Buy a plane ticket sometime! Different businesses have different pricing structures.
They did not set the terms.
There is no clear disclosure that you will need to pay more than the listed prices to get your food as you should.
Also, if you go to a counter service business, and the point of sale system asks you to tip, again, the terms were not set prior to engaging in the transaction.
In another comment, you write:
> You're going to have bad relationships (and experiences) with American restaurants if you make a habit of undertipping.
I classify this as the restaurant (and waiter) violating the terms. You do not get to claim your prices are low and then spring and increase on people, even if it is a “cultural” norm.
Did you see that sign "Welcome to the United States" when arriving at the airport? That was the clear disclosure that from this point on, every restaurant price is [menu price] * 1.3. Just keep that in mind when ordering.
No, that sign is clear disclosure that you are being welcomed to the United States.
Even if we assume the person is familiar with American culture, it is only restaurants with wait service having prices times 1.3 (including sales tax).
Everyone knows that in the US, price = menu price + tip + tax. "Everyone knows" is enough of a disclosure.
That's nonsense. If that were true, not tipping in an American restaurant would give the owner the right to take me to small claims court to recover the missing tip. Do you really think simply stating that "everyone knows" would convince a judge to rule in the restaurant's favor?
No, but you are very likely to be publicly humiliated, bodily fluids been added to your dishes should you dare to visit that restaurant another time, and yes, there were cases when police was called on account of insufficient tips.
> I also should have added, and probably led with, the fact that tipping addresses a big agent-principal problem in hospitality: in restaurants where servers rely on tips, their incentives are strongly aligned with those of customers; without tips, virtually all the incentives are aligned with that of management.
Very astute of you to mention this, though “address” and “cause” could be used interchangeably.
When I was a bartender it was always in my interest to give away free alcohol to my highest tipping customers, who generally understood that it’s customary to add 50% of the cost they would have paid to their tip for each free drink.
At a very surface level, the tipping system incentivizes employees to steal product from the business to give to customers. But the game theory gets very complicated. Sometimes this results in a great customer base that forms the core of a “social engine” that powers the popularity of a bar/restaurant and results in a win-win-win. Bar owners set various levels/thresholds/criteria for how much free sample can be given out and under what circumstances.
Tl;dr: the principal-agent problem can almost never be solved to align all parties in a system.
The argument is about harm reduction. You need to separate the ideal from stuff that improves the current situation.
The ideal all consumers should be pursuing for all forms of financial transaction is that all advertised prices are the out-the-door ceiling. Fees, taxes, surcharges, tips, etc may not be added, though discounts are ok. Tipping should not even be an option, though we've seen a lot of evidence that a visible percentage would much prefer to lord their power to tip over the heads of their servers, and get very upset when that's taken away. So this is a hard position to reach from where we are, even though it's clearly better than the current state.
But we don't live in that world. In the current world, many things are advertised at prices lower than are actually sustainable. And no, I'm not talking about loss-leaders. I mean the entire menu at a restaurant, for instance. If that is all their income, they can't afford to pay servers enough to be livable. So they underpay servers, and expect tips to sort of paper over the gap. And because that gap exists, I recognize tipping as sadly necessary, even though it is forbidden in my ideal world.
I don't like it, but of the options I have available when I choose to eat out, it's the least bad.
> advertised prices are the out-the-door ceiling
That's the law in Australia. We have a whole government department (https://www.accc.gov.au/) dedicated to defending consumers against companies, and they do pretty well at it.
Can I also recommend the Australian Electoral Commission (https://www.aec.gov.au) who are available for private events and functions as well as larger elections if you think you might have trouble running it yourself.
> The followup argument is often "well they are still being under paid." While I can buy this argument, I do not think the solution is tipping
The alternative is getting a restaurant to entirely change its identity.
Their POS system will always have a spot for tip on a receipt.
Their prices are based on the fact that they expect customers to tip the servers at least 15-25%.
It's a monumental change. It's not just "pay the servers at least $15/hr and turn off tipping". Nobody I've ever met who waits tables is happy with $120/night out the door pretax ($15/hr * 8)
For a restaurant to pay a server what they make now ($150-$300/night tips), their labor cost would be through the roof and they would have to raise the price of the food.
The customer wouldn't like that.
Lose lose lose.
Tipping for service is a little different than the tipping thats been getting out of control imo. Places are signing up for these square readers and whatever else is sold to small businesses to scan a credit card, and the default settings seem to be to add a tip. These would be jobs where the worker would never expect a tip normally, maybe a tip jar with a buck or two in it a shift if that. Plus you are expected to tip before you even get whatever service when you do it at point of sale like this, unlike the traditional restaurant approach where you tip at the very end of the meal even after you've closed out the rest of the bill.
i’ve ran into this at a smoothie shop
it’s implied you’re tipping for them taking your order then making your smoothie
I thought that labor was baked into the cost of the smoothie? Are you supposed to tip on a takeout order too since its the same work?
Perhaps we just need a quick break where customers realize that they're paying for the service, one way or another. Your hamburger costing $20 and you leaving $5 is no different from your hamburger costing $25. It's really only the poor tippers who shouldn't want this transition to a fixed wage with the costs added to the food. Currently, they're getting subsidized service from good tippers.
For what you say to be true, it relies on everyone tipping the same amount all the time. The problem is that people do not tip this way. Tipping in the USA has been studied for 25+ years and the results are clear: The amount a given waiter will receive in tips is far more influenced by their physical appearance, race, and gender, than the quality of service they provide.
For example, a white woman with blonde hair and large breasts will, all things being equal, make more in tips than anyone else working in the same establishment[0].
Paying $25 for that burger is fine if that is the advertised price. Everyone in the service industry deserves to be paid an equal wage for equal quality of work. Despite all intentions, tipping ensures this is not the case. That alone is enough to justify abolishing tipping as a form of primary compensation.
0. https://static.secure.website/wscfus/5261551/uploads/ServerA...
> For a restaurant to pay a server what they make now ($150-$300/night tips), their labor cost would be through the roof and they would have to raise the price of the food.
Is that every night or just weekends? Because everyone I've known that has cleared that kind of money has only done so on weekends (Friday/Saturday), and works at higher end or very popular restaurants. I agree that an extra $15-$30/hr would be an insane increase, but if that is spread out over the other 5 days a week then this is much closer to a $3-$6/hr increase. Large, but not obtuse considering a server is probably serving many meals an hour on average. I wouldn't expect food prices to go up very much to cover such a change. As a customer I'd be far happier with that version too. To be clear, I'm against abolishing tips, I just don't think it should be the social expectation for an average establishment.
> The customer wouldn't like that.
I’m already paying that much. If you keep the same total price but put it on your menu instead of making it an end-of-meal surprise, that is much preferred thanks.
I used ChatGPT to help talk through this with me:
> If the average waiter works a dinner shift from 5pm-11pm, waits on 40 customers during this shift, each customer has a check average of $40 and tips on average 20%, the waiter would walk with $320 in tips.
> In this example, the total cost of labor for the waiter is $55/hr for 6 hours, which is $55*6 = $330. The total number of customers served during the shift is 40.
> In order to eliminate the need for customers to tip, the restaurant would need to increase the cost of their food by $330 tips / 40 customers = $8.25 per check.
> Therefore, they would need to increase the cost of their food by $8.25, so that the check average would be $40 + $8.25 = $48.25 per check.
My argument is that I’m already paying $48.25 per check and don’t particularly care about the restaurant’s cost structure.
Passing wages (and in SF health care) onto me feels about as petty as an attorney adding “$5 for pens” into a $4000 invoice. I’m still sore about that 3 years later.
I'm sorry, you are 100% right. I don't know why I thought it was more complicated than that. Thank you for pointing this out to me.
Honest question : how do you think it works literally anywhere outside of Canada and the US?
We have bar and restaurants, too. People working there have kids, mortgage. I would even say that it’s more a “real” job than in the US.
“Real”, in the sense that, in the US, I’ve seen friends in their 40’s switching industry because they want to have kids. While for instance in France their is actual school you go to before become a waiter in the higher end places. Those are jobs were you are well compensated and that you can expect to keep for a while ( with a promotion path )
> how do you think it works literally anywhere outside of Canada and the US?
Being 100% honest, I was of the opinion that because of tipping in America, waiters/waitresses stand a chance to make $150-$300+ whereas in Europe, you probably make less than that.
What do you mean "$150-$300", net, a day ? Yah. No.
You checked for France on the statistical bureau website ( INSEE )
Average Net salary is 1558 euros / month, calculated from 196k salaries. Figures are from 2021.
With that you get unemployment, retirement and healthcare. It can be considered "play money" if you are sorta careless.
Not great, but you can definitely lives on that and find lodging. ( In Paris that will be a flatshare )
> One thing I've never understood is the argument for tipping
European here, from Italy, we don't tip much and it's not mandatory.
We do at dinner if it has been a long dinner usually as a way to show appreciation, but the tip is usually a modest amount (in the 5-10 euros ballpark for a table)
The argument for tipping here is that it is tax free money.
That's why here restaurants love American tourists and their very generous tips.
That's all there is to it.
Yes, the effect of a tipped minimum wage is that until you make it up to minimum wage in tips, the tip makes no difference in your take home pay. It only makes a difference after that, and if it can be sustained on average over all hours worked.
Tipping is to incentivize personalized, special, service. The proliferation of it is because people forgot what it's for. Don't tip when you're a fungible customer.
No, it has for the most part been "because servers paid based on their performance will perform better". The effects are easily observable in nearly any restaurant in the country - the servers are better than their European counterparts, whether in a fancy establishment or a tiny sandwich shop. 'Because they're paid less than minimum wage' is a straw man - the law that allowed that to happen was created in a pre-existing tipping culture that justified it on the merits.
> When I was a kid (some 20 years ago) 10% was common for a standard tip. Now most places have an 18%/20%/25% option on screens. Some even higher! The second image in the article even shows a 30% tip
Restaurant prices generally ran behind inflation; that's why tipping percentages increased.
A few years back I attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco and stayed at an AirBnB in Haight-Ashbury district. I discovered a nearby restaurant, Zazie, that advertised on their web site they were "proud to be tip free" so I tried it. I had dinner there more than once over my week stay in SF and it was so nice to get a credit card receipt with no space for tip and a reminder from the server that no tip was wanted. The service was great and the prices did not seem excessive compared to other places.
Many of the comments here have discussed how without tips paying a living wage would compel higher prices. I ask, what's the difference between a higher up-front price on the menu for the item or a lower price with the expectation that at payment you'll pay 20% more? I prefer the simplicity and less pressure of a bill with no space for "tip", that the price you see on the menu is the price you will pay when finished eating.
And the advantage of no tips is a-holes like me cant game the system for a 20% discount.
> what's the difference between a higher up-front price on the menu for the item or a lower price with the expectation that at payment you'll pay 20% more?
Taxes.
Yes. If you business wants to collect a "tip" up front, before services rendered, it's not a tip (Doordash, Instacart, etc). If 100% of the proceeds don't get straight to the employees, but some end up in the pocket of the business, it's not a tip.
This last one is going to be to hear, but if you pay your employees below mimimum wage and allow for tips to make up the difference, well.....
Always tip, in cash, direct to the employee.
I worry if I don't tip, they will vandalize my food. It's a hostage situation. I limit my use of the services because of it.
I've faced that after moving to SF. Stopped eating out unless its a actually special high end place or something.
I was in a rush and didn't put a tip, I found a hair in my fried rice and the tofu was not fully cooked. I'd ordered from that place a couple times before and its like $22 with tip for just Thai red curry with rice..
The prices are insane. Even if I made 10x what I make, I wouldn't eat out unless its really special.
Here's a tip: report this to the department of public health!
Sure, but this is an isolated incident. I don't want to attribute to malice what could have been a total accident that day, maybe the kitchen was just busy. However, it was coincidental that it happened at a time when I didn't tip.
I'll keep that in mind for next time though if it ever happens again! Now I kind of want to do a social experiment.. go to a restaurant like 4-5 times and then don't tip once to see what happens. If its really true service is affected that way, then its a broader problem.
Malice or not, a trend is found by data. Report it, if it's one off it's fine, if it's not it's a trend.
Will they know it was me if I report?
But you have no guarantee that your food won't be vandalized anyways when you tip before service. The bribe has no teeth. You're going to demand a refund if you notice the food has been damaged regardless if you tipped before or after.
Because online for-hire car services allow drivers to rate customers, I tip so that I don't get blackballed.
In australia we have no tipping culture and I've always been very against it, but I've found if I don't tip the quality of delivery driver is just abysmal, but if I do tip, I get "regular" service - ie. they come to my door in my apartment building, not just leave it in the lobby, and they usually don't completely fuck it up (ie. squished pizza from holding the box vertically).
It sucks but I just view it as an extra cost for using uber eats.
Most places allow you to give specific instructions to the driver. It's intended for things like "gate locked, text ### when you arrive" or something to that effect. But I bet you could say something like "will tip cash upon arrival" and it would have the intended effect, maybe even better than a tip in advance.
Drivers will avoid these as they interpret it “I’m going to stiff you”
Seems like a them problem and not a me problem.
Do they have an option to avoid these deliveries anyway? Where I live they're all employees (basically) of e.g. Grubhub, and Grubhub promises me delivery within e.g. 45 minutes. I had assumed Grubhub was automatically assigning a delivery worker in the area to make the delivery.
Well it’s a you problem if they don’t accept your pickup. And yes they can see the top amount. In most areas your basically bidding for their seevice
But that’s just the Grubhub/doordash branded drivers. In my area placing an order on those sites just triggers the place’S own delivery people if they normally do delivery
I tip up front with Uber Eats and Rappi because it usually means I get my order faster. But I have reduced tipping recently because I can see other orders are taking priority over mine.
I absolutely do not use these services unless there's a substantial coupon involved, it's madness. You get a delivery surcharge, a service surcharge, and a 20% tip to top it all or risk the food be messed with. Last order was 25 eur food and 20 eur charges for two hamburger before I went in and reduced the tip %. If it weren't for the 15e coupon I'd never have completed such a predatory transaction.
A few years ago Uber and Uber Eats in Ecuador was awesome. I could order a meal for $5-$8. Sometimes two dishes. I could take a taxi around town for $3. The promotions were dropped and the price of food increased substantially.
I contacted my senators and representatives about how the IRS should classify tips made before service. I got a call back from my senator’s office. The reasoning I presented was: that automatic gratuity for large parties is taxed differently than actual gratuity in some jurisdictions (why those have disappeared in most places), and that since the tip is used to determine order priority it is not a tip but is instead a bid for preferential service.
I also went through a call to get back a tip I made on a Chipotle order (DoorDash I believe) up front after the driver failed to find the address and then chewed me out after driving through parking lots for 5 minutes.
delivery services just need to rename it to a "bid" because that's really what it is.
Economists would probably love this, but I don't think consumers would.
Yes, and this is exactly what I proposed to my senators and representatives.
I really dislike tipping when I order my pizza deliveries. It doesn't offer me anything over giving the delivery driver a $5 bill.
Should the person greeting and seating customers get a tip? Should the people running food from kitchen to table? Cooks? If any of the above are a yes, then unless you want to tip each one in cash individually, you need them to split tips at the end of the night amongst themselves.
The fact that tips technically need to be reported to the IRS and thus your employer aside, I believe it is a legally fireable offense to pocket cash in order to avoid any policies on splitting it with others working the same shift.
A lot of restaurants do that? If it's agreed up by the employees BEFORE the transactions are taking place or even the employment decision is made, then whatever system they choose is fair (cooks or no cooks, etc). The key here is the the cooks know what they're getting into as well as the servers.
The problem is when the restaurant tries to change the rules in the middle of the game (Like the girl in Bentonville who's manager tried to confiscate a $2k tip) OR the restaurant owner sees this cash left on the table and gets a little greedy.
I recently saw a "3% cost of living" charge at a restaurant (in California). This same restaurant provided suggested tips of 18, 20, and (I think) 25%.
At a certain level I think this is just dishonesty. They want to raise prices, but they know some people will stop coming, so they try to hide it in extra fees instead. I don't mind tipping per se, but the hidden fees and tip inflation make me think that if this keeps going, we may need to pass some price transparency laws.
Went to this Mexican restaurant yesterday. On the payment handheld device, default selection for tip was 22% with buttons for 20% and 25% and a tiny "custom" button. Making a selection under pressure with the waitress staring at the handheld device was an uncomfortable interaction.
SF restaurants, when I last lived in CA, were rife with these hidden fees. (The restaurants were upset about a local mandate. I … don't care about your politics? I just want a burger. Be straight about how much that will cost me…)
SF restaurants are the worst about this of anywhere I’ve been. What’s next? A high rent surcharge? Toilet facilities fee? A business income tax reclamation charge?
Just ate at a place in CA with an 18% automatic gratuity added, and a second line for "additional gratuity".
Reminds me why I do all the cooking in my house.
I routinely tip 0% at places that practice this
I deduct 2x the added charges from the usual and customary tip and leave a note on the receipt. The goal is to incentivize the servers to agitate against the restaurant.
I particularly detest sneaky 'charges' that are not embedded in the prices.
Give them a 10% tip. Write why. It will make them think.
Zero. Don't reward it.
It's an extra fee, sure, but the salient quality is that it's an optional fee, which a price increase is not.
I'm not condoning it, just clarifying what strikes me as the central point.
OP states that it was a non-optional fee, a hidden surcharge.
OP discussed an apparently mandatory "cost of living fee" and tipping, which is optional. The overall discussion based on TFA is about tipping.
I got asked for a tip at an automatic car wash, because the guy was there wouldn't let me put the card into it myself, he wanted to push the touch screen buttons. I looked at him and said no. I hate tips, they aren't tips any more, they are subsidized payroll. I almost never eat at sit down places any more. Pick up orders? No tip. I will tip for a pizza delivery though, it's the one time I feel like it's deserved due to the hell they go through, but it's the exception not the rule for me.
He may not have even worked at the car wash. That’s a pretty common scam among panhandlers.
Oh he worked there, uniform and all.
I got prompted for a tip at an auto mechanic at one point
I would only tip an auto mechanic if it were a mom and pop shop and I asked them to do something not the norm to my vehicle.
In some countries like afaik Japan, it's customary to NOT tip and actually leaving a tip might be seen as an insult - as if you tried to insinuate they aren't paying their employees enough.
I don't know why here in the west it's common practice to actually not pay employees enough and rely entirely on tips. Without those tips, many job offers in the service industry would not be attractive, as they don't pay enough to make a living. Without tips, many of those positions never could be filled, unless wages were raised.
Of course, if wages were raised, the increased cost would ultimately have to be passed on to the consumer. So instead of paying €9 for your order, and placing a €1 tip - you might end up being billed €10 instead. At the bottom line, on average, this would work out to the consumer paying the same with or without tips, and the worker earning the same, with or without tips.
But with tips, that's just the average - while in actuality, some patrons will tip a lot more than others. And some workers might earn a lot more tips than others.
If you assume that workers are unfriendly by default, you could see this as an incentive to make them behave more friendly in an attempt to earn a tip. If you assume that workers are friendly by default, you could see that as a green-light for them to be unfriendly to those customers who don't tip. Not sure if creating a competitive environment between your workers is a good thing...
What tipping does, is make things more uneven. Some customer will pay more, some customer will pay less, some workers will earn more, some workers will pay less, some patrons will be treated more friendly, other patrons will be treated less friendly. The average stays the same, but the variance increases.
Without tipping, things would be more even. Individual cases would stay closer to the average.
> I don't know why here in the west it's common practice to actually not pay employees enough and rely entirely on tips
It's really mostly the case in North America. In most of Europe, tipping is more an exception than a rule. "Normal" service (i.e. being nice to clients and appropriately responding to requests given the standing of the place) is expected to be included in the price. I tip only when I got really outstanding service, and even then, mostly as a symbolic gesture of appreciation (2-5% ballpark figure).
It’s a US and Canada thing.
I’m 40ish and I gave a type twice in my life in France. Both were exceptional situations were I felt that the normal compensation was not enough and I felt bad for the worker.
And even then.. I might have been influenced in my reaction by a long period spend in the US.
In Britain (where I live) it's standard (I believe?) to leave a circa 10% tip at a restaurant. When I've travelled to Europe I've done the same (but haven't thought much about whether it was expected).
Restaurants are the place I'd associate most closely with tipping
Not necessarily only US and Canada.
Support for tipping is actually a much requested feature for the payment software of the company I'm working for, especially with customers from the restaurant business. I don't know though, which of the EU-countries we serve drive most of those requests. I suspect Germany, Austria and maybe Poland?
It's not quite the same thing if you take into account taxes. If tips are cash only and missing from the bill, the worker gets more money. There's no sales/VAT tax, no income tax, no social security tax and so on. So instead of getting something like €5, the worker gets €9. This is how things are most of the time in Romania.
> t's not quite the same thing if you take into account taxes. If tips are cash only and missing from the bill, the worker gets more money.
Tips, cash or not, are subject to taxes usually where they exist enough to have been considered in tax policy. (E. g., in the US they are subject to both income and payroll taxes.)
If you mean “it is easier to commit tax fraud/evasion with cash tips than other compensation”, that’s probably true, OTOH, tax authorities tend to also be aware of this and scrutinize people working in traditionally tipped fields, especially if they repirt less tips than are “expected”, for this exact reason.
Yes, I meant tax evasion :-)
I think tipping should be outlawed. The price should be the price. Workers should not be subject to inconsistent pay for the same amount of work. In addition it gets rid of any bias in wages (more attractive people or people of different ethnicities might get higher tips for the same work).
We don't have to outlaw it but we should do something more difficult: make it not the social norm.
I went to a religious university and there was a certain ethics class everybody was required to take. A discussion topic one day was about how to advertise you were a member of this faith while out and about, and the topic of tipping came up. The lecture pretty much worked out like you should be tipping big! People don't treat waiters so well after the religious service ends! At least 20% to share the good news:tm: with them! Oddly, this same class never took the same effort to address how to advertise to any other class of people.
I get this sounds like a random aside, but tipping is something that religious communities at least try to connect to people with (which surprisingly includes patrons who leave $0 tip and a "here's a tip, your pathway to %afterlife%" business card). If there was a push to make it not the social norm, I could see churches crusading to keep it a part of our culture forever.
Maybe it'd be OK to outlaw it.
This actually happened because Christians (maybe other religions too?) got a reputation for being bad tippers. IDK, maybe it was something about already giving 10% before tax to God to take care of orphans and widows, but seeing their pastor and politician in highend cars and suits? IDK.
So as a counter to that reputation pastors began to admonish folks to tip well, to show them the love of Jesus as 20%.
As far as bad reputation, don't forget all the fake-money evangelizing pamphlets.
I don't know what these are, can you please expand?
This kind of thing: https://www.businessinsider.com/20-tip-bible-pamphlet-2015-1...
I'm just ambivalent about making it illegal and prefer to not make things illegal. But I think your story supports the bribery aspect that I'm bringing up. That definitely isn't right.
I propose a middle way: Outlaw tipping unless the establishment posts an upfront notice of what their tipping expectation is (what percent, for what services, for what satisfaction level).
Under that system:
- You can still have tipping with only a trivial amount of extra work.
- There would then be common knowledge -- in the technical sense [1] -- across all parties, leading to expectation alignment.
- There would be a clear mechanism for competition over expected tipping levels, letting people know they're getting into at each place.
I expect that such a system would to more establishments preferring the no-tip option, but even if not, it would remove the worst parts of the tipping system.
[1] i.e. where everyone knows the same things, and everyone knows everyone's else's level of knowledge about those things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
Not sure how to do that when business can just decide not to pay fair wages and rely on strangers to supplement employee's income through tipping.
I mean, "require businesses to pay their employees minimum wage" is really not too big an ask in most countries.
Edit: to give you credit, I think that may have been your point. I lost track of context in the thread.
It's hard to ban people giving money to people.
But you can require that all posted prices include all taxes, fees, and expected gratuities; AND that the price on the bill include all taxes, fees, and expected gratuities.
Basically, just push the tip into the noise and require that the posted price be the sum of all the hidden fees.
It's not some impossible goal. Most of the world does not have America's crazy tipping culture.
I would say tipping is decreasing in the UK. It's pretty normal not to tip in restaurants now because the pandemic changed payment methods.
Before 10% was the standard (only if you pay after eating though).
I think instead tipping law should be that it is not be asked for until after the service is rendered. These days they will ask for tip BEFORE anything is served which makes me very upset. It traps you into paying and any incentive for good behavior is completely stolen.
Nothing should be outlawed unless it causes a reasonable amount of harm. This mostly doesn’t. First, it’s just semantics. Second, you don’t have to buy again.
The tipping system causes harm.
Provide evidence based examples please.
https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping here's some
Propaganda aligning with a certain modern day cult and nothing but subjective anecdotes isn't proof of anything. First of all you'd have to PROVE the tipping difference is due to racism.... something this article fails completely at.
Let's assume that people are actually tipping "people of color" worse. Do you think getting rid of tipping is somehow fixing this perceived racism? If so, why do you believe you can legislate a personality trait out of people?
> First of all you'd have to PROVE the tipping difference is due to racism....
No you don't. If tipped wages are more discriminatory you can ban them. Even if no racism is involved, somehow! And that's not trying to legislate a personality trait.
Yes you do, you do not get to just claim people are racist with no proof. Do you think it's a joke to make this claim? You're certainly treating it pretty nonchalantly.
You're talking about taking jobs and money from a specific group of people so you can implement your ideological beliefs that have zero data to back them up.
You haven't provided any proof this sort of racial tipping exists but you've certainly provided plenty of proof of wanting implement your own racist ideas to redistribute money from a very specific skin color, while claiming other skin colors are helpless victims.
> Yes you do, you do not get to just claim people are racist with no proof. Do you think it's a joke to make this claim? You're certainly treating it pretty nonchalantly.
I didn't say people were racist, I gave a link supporting the idea that tipping is harmful.
See where I said "Even if no racism is involved, somehow!"
Even if a lot of people.. look it doesn't matter for this topic.
> You're talking about taking jobs and money from a specific group of people so you can implement your ideological beliefs that have zero data to back them up.
Mostly I want to get rid of the idea of a tipped minimum, and fix some of the other issues around minimum wage. I don't want to take any jobs away.
> You haven't provided any proof this sort of racial tipping exists but you've certainly provided plenty of proof of wanting implement your own racist ideas to redistribute money from a very specific skin color, while claiming other skin colors are helpless victims.
You're reading a lot of things in my posts that aren't there. I just want all the waiters to get a good paycheck and make tips exceptional. "Pay everyone in the same job at the same tier the same amount" is not redistribution.
It causes a minimal amount of harm. What proportion of the tip requests you get are from your first time buying from the establishment? It’s very low. After that, you know there’s a tip request and choose to return.
I don't. For sit down restaurants, or many service oriented jobs it makes for a better customer experience. I agree for counter service it where they want tips BEFORE the service experience it makes no sense.
You ought to try sitting down in a restaurant in the EU. They do the bare minimum to serve you.
Tying a possible bonus to the way you act in customer service facing role has a lot of benefits.
"In addition it gets rid of any bias in wages (more attractive people more attractive people" Why are higher wages for a subjectively attractive person a bad thing... Are they not driving better business? Do you think it's somehow more altruistic to provide subjectively uglier individuals the same wage? Bias based on attractiveness is no worse than bias based on personality or any other trait. Your point is moot anyway, in a capitalistic society people can just choose to visit another business where the staff has the traits they desire.
> For sit down restaurants, or many service oriented jobs it makes for a better customer experience.
In my personal experience, it makes it worse. They annoy me with attempts to be ingratiating. They fish for tips with forms and devices which creates awkward and unpleasant situations, especially if I didn't like the service. There is nothing pleasant for me about having someone watching me and trying to guess when I want something. I know when I want something and I am perfectly capable of telling them when that moment comes.
> You ought to try sitting down in a restaurant in the EU. They do the bare minimum to serve you.
I live in the EU and I find the service at restaurants a hundred times better here. Nobody is pestering me, nobody is insulting both of us by pretending to be my new best friend. They stay out of my way until I ask for something.
That's fine... it's your country and continent. I happen to dislike that attitude and so do a LOT of other Americans. It turns out EU culture isn't something everyone strives for.
If I wanted to ask for something I'd stay home, they're called waiters and not for a reason. There's no "pretending to be a friend" going on, it's just called being cordial.
I disagree, I prefer the service in EU - I like the bare minimum. I hate in the US when they take your order as soon as you arrive, they check every 5 minutes if you're OK then whip away your plates as soon as you finish the last mouthful.
It does not mean better service. For example, no tipping in Japan, but sit down restaurants are perfectly pleasant.
Japanese people are culturally more inclined to be pleasant, it's part of the way they're raised, so I don't think that's a good example.
I've not had a pleasant experience in most other western nations. I won't say it was bad but it's nowhere near as efficient and you have to really get waiters attention before they'll do anything.
To provide some additional (counter) anecdotal evidence - I moved to Melbourne several years ago and can't recall a single, bad service oriented experience at a restaurant here.
I used to think that. Then I lived in Japan where not only do they not tip, they refuse tips. Haven't seen any issues with the service.
So no, tips do not promote a better customer experience.
I feel like this is because Japanese are more culturally inclined to be "nice" and cordial.
I agree it's possible to have a good custom experience without tipping but I do not agree that they don't promote better customer experience. Bonuses, tipping etc. are pretty powerful way of enticing people to be better at their jobs.
My experience in restaurants all throughout the EU is that service is perfectly acceptable. I really intensely dislike over the top service - I want the employees to be polite and friendly but not to fawn over me - I want to feel that they're my equals in a social sense, not servile (but that doesn't mean they shouldn't respond to complaints etc.) I guess I'll have to take a trip to the US to see the difference in expectations.
> Do you think it's somehow more altruistic to provide subjectively uglier individuals the same wage? Bias based on attractiveness is no worse than bias based on personality or any other trait. Your point is moot anyway, in a capitalistic society people can just choose to visit another business where the staff has the traits they desire.
Your point seems to be that there is no inherent moral good in distributing resources equally among people as opposed to allowing inequality to naturally emerge and/or optimizing for total value across all people. I don't necessarily disagree: it is hard to argue from first principles that each individual should be given the same weight, as opposed to any other arbitrary system like giving each family the same weight, or taking intelligence into account. However, it is also wrong to pretend that there isn't significant precedent in society for assigning each individual equal moral weight — for example, by allowing everyone an equal vote in elections, which has clearly been a useful practice. And I consider it obvious that "Bias based on attractiveness is no worse than bias based on personality or any other trait" isn't something that would be widely agreed upon.
You are correct. In fact, I'd call it a moral BAD to forcefully redistribute resources according to someone's weird dystopian fantasy that everyone can be equal through some ridiculous idea of UN-achievable utopian equity.
The ONLY way that is possible is to bring down the higher achieving people to the lowest common denominator. You cannot bring people UP past a certain level.
"And I consider it obvious that "Bias based on attractiveness is no worse than bias based on personality or any other trait" isn't something that would be widely agreed upon." -
This completely case dependent there are careers where intelligence is sought and there are careers where attractiveness may be advantageous. The only reason this is "obvious" to you is because you've been tainted by recent modern thought that believes there's no value in physical attractiveness.The fact your bias towards certain physical traits is fine while other physical traits are off limits should tell you something about the cognitive dissonance of this though pattern. Maybe you ought to ask yourself why it's ok to be biased against physical attractiveness but not physical skin color????
What? Who is harmed? Are we to pretend all waiters do an equally good job? Good service gets good tips, bad service, not good. It's just an incentive system.
The only reason it starts to breakdown is because there are really cheap people out there who will skimp on the tip and then complain when waiters treat them like shit.
If you are a regular at a place and you tip well, they'll spoil you.
Most places in the world do not have tipping. The US has tipping because for some reason, the law allows restaurants to pay below minimum wage. I think that tipping should be outlawed and waiters should be paid a wage supported by the market, at least whatever minimum wage is (in California, that's $15.50/hr).
> The US has tipping because for some reason, the law allows restaurants to pay below minimum wage
Tipping predates minimum wage laws. (indeed the first laws to ban tipping in the US also predate minimum wage laws, but it clearly didn't stick)
I'm not talking about the history of tipping. I'm talking about why tipping exists right now in the US. It's a form of additional tax on consumers that the restaurants don't have to pay and exploits workers with the promise of tips. Restaurants going below minimum wage should be illegal and if they can't afford to do that, then I'm perfectly okay with them going bankrupt.
You made a claim about causality, I'm suggesting the causality is the other way around: these laws exist because the US has a culture of tipping. It seems unlikely that this existing culture of tipping would've stopped being a thing if these laws didn't exist, given the long confusing list of people you're apparently supposed to tip in the US.
I would argue that most places in the world do have tipping, it just manifests differently.
> Are we to pretend all waiters do an equally good job?
Are we to pretend all supermarket checkout clerks do an equally good job? No, but we don't tip them. They get paid a wage which is bundled into the price of every item I buy at the store. Same as every other cost of business like their insurance, electric bill, etc.
While we're at it, Engineers?
Part of the issue is a seemingly ingrained concept of "fairness" between when we do the same job we want the same reward (a grape not a cucumber stupid researcher!) ... And combine that with the propensity to overestimate our own contributions and underestimate the difficulty of what others do.. Suddenly even rationally fair "feels" unfair.
Should we tip doctors then? Surgeons? Software developers? Are we to pretend all professions do an equally good job?
Here is a free tip for you: you can tip your Healthcare workers. If you have a family member in the hospital, bring some homemade cookies or treats for the staff. I can't prove that it helps, but I am confident it does.
Only until the precedent is set that you need to tip $$$$ or else you're a cheapskate.
So when you get bad service in the US, you don't tip?
I've gotten bad service while traveling in the US - how can I not tip? Someone tell me, please, because when I'm paying it's usually before I even get the service and I'm already supposed to pre-pay a 20 percent tip or some such from a checkout prompt that doesn't always let me opt out.
Or when it does let me opt out, it's in plain view of the staff, of course; in a "go ahead and hit 0%, take a chance on whether we'll shit in your food" kind of way.
Growing up, i've been told leave at least 15%, or 10% if the service is atrocious, but never 0% if you plan on showing up to the same place again, or if anybody you know might find out. Being accused of tipping $0 is not generally something want to carry around with them
> Growing up, i've been told leave at least 15%, or 10% if the service is atrocious
This seems nuts to me - if the service is truly atrocious, to the point where it’s questionable whether the service I asked for was delivered at all, I’m going to refuse to pay at all.
If it’s run of the mill atrocious service and I want to prove a point via tipping, I’ll tip $0.01.
Do you have the same productivity each week? Do you get paid less when you have a bad week?
I assume some of this comes from small businesses getting a Square terminal and thinking "Tips? Yeah sure, I'll check that box, can't hurt!". It can hurt. If I'm prompted to tip [15/20/25]% just because somebody grabbed a donut out of the rack and dumped it in a paper bag, I think less of the place and I'm less likely to come back.
Thought: Somebody should cook up an "AR" app that reads a menu and adds 20% tip plus local sales tax to every price. I'm just as guilty as anybody of visiting e.g. European countries and thinking everything's expensive, but that's because the prices on the menu are exactly what you'll pay, not 70% of what you'll actually pay.
Yes I realize I can just do basic mental math, but not everybody can do it, and it'd be kinda neat to point my phone at a menu and see all the prices instantly reflect what I'll actually have to shell out.
As a tourist it sucks though. You have to buy something to see the various taxes, then hope that they're the same for everything. Then you move on in your trip and have to repeat the process.
Just advertise the actual price, dammit.
And keep tipping for "OMG, this person was wonderful" not "this is 90% of their income".
One Australian's anecdata follows.
I hate tipping. It's an unwanted cognitive intrusion with no upside for me whatsoever. It also reflects a broken (wage / reward) system, and obviously my preference is they fix that.
In Australia I may tip - iff the service is really good. And only at sit-down / eat-in restaurants. Cafes, cabs, ubers, couriers, hotels, etc - these are not tipping places. If I'm tipping at a restaurant, in addition to exceptional service / food, it'll be a) only if I feel there's zero guilt or implied obligation to tip, b) 5-10%, and c) cash (ie. not via the EFT / POS device).
The rule I was taught growing up in USA was 15% and it was really only for sit down restaurants where waiters served you at your table.
Now, tipping in USA has metastasized, but I haven't changed. You want to play a guilt trip game after every business engagement? You'll lose against me. Tip for pouring a cup of drip coffee?---nah. Tip for making fast food? Nope. I will not enable the tip-everywhere culture.
As another Australian, tipping and tax are the worst part of traveling to the US (other than maybe the toilets....). I don't really mind what the final price is, but I really would like to know it up front without having to do a bunch of calculations, which vary depending on which state I'm in.
I used to round up back in Europe, but after living in the US for a while I never tip anywhere else. I don't want this cancer to spread.
I'm always put off by a server hearing my American accent and insisting / guilt-tripping that I add a tip, thinking I'm a tourist in Sydney...
Yes I do tip sometimes, but only if the service has been fun / great. So off-putting when a place tries to squeeze a tip if they think you don't live here.
Kiwi here, I will tip in an Uber because I know they're getting shafted by Uber, but typically try to do so in cash because I'm sure Uber tries to take a cut of the in-app tip.
It's very reasonable to apply this mindset to North America and you don't have to feel bad about it either.
I went to a little coffee shop in a museum the other day. I ordered a little sandwich from behind a display, as well as some tea. When I put my card in the machine, the gentleman taking orders immediately said, "press here, just press one of the buttons here," jabbing with his finger in the directions some on-screen buttons for adding a 15, 18, or 20% gratuity. It's true that the buttons weren't very noticeable but I was still taken aback by his forthrightness. I left a tip anyway, but then he handed me a pre-made sandwich, an empty paper cup, and a tea bag; and curtly announced, "Hot water's over there. Next!" So not only had he insisted upon a tip but he wasn't even planning on preparing my beverage. If people wonder why customers get turned off of tipping it's because of entitled people abusing the process. He did nothing but ring me up, but he was expecting the same tip as a full-service table waiter.
Museum. Flux of tourists. Probably doesn’t care about repeat business.
I live in Central Europe and I think our version of tipping makes a lot more sense than what's common in North America.
If we receive exceptional service, we pay a little extra - usually 10% or less.
Staff doesn't expect to be paid from tips, business owners don't expect their staff to be paid from tips, customers don't have a guilt trip because they feel like if they don't tip generously the staff will be underpaid.
U.S. tipping doesn't make any sense from a European point of view.
Just set the prices of things at a level where you can afford to pay your staff from your revenue.
> U.S. tipping doesn't make any sense from a European point of view.
Because you're thinking about it too hard or otherwise unaware of the inner turnings of the system.
Where it matters, servers are almost their own industry, swapping gigs at this or that restaurant to work with this or that regional manager. The restaurant gets their money from the bill, the server gets their money direct from the customer they helped.
My server goes to a different restaurant -- I go there and keep getting awesome service.
This type of arrangement gets really close to a guildhouse/coop more than a franchise.
In places with less stable relationships (tourist restaurants), asking for tips might be a predatory thing -- or you can see it as paying it forward: "hey person working to get people their demands in a moments notice, I hope this tenner will help you hold that smile in the face of another consumerist monster. Thanks for being a human."
> swapping gigs at this or that restaurant to work with this or that regional manager
This or that restaurant or this or that regional manager could give them a fair wage and incorporate their labour cost in the prices of the items on the menu.
I just had a chat with an AWS customer support agent earlier today... should I send them $10 for their service? Next month they could be working for GCP (or this or that) support, how can I expect AWS to pay them directly?
> This or that restaurant or this or that regional manager could give them a fair wage
They do... usually by way of appropriate schedules or other logistics of the job which delivers access to the richest streams of tips. This is why the good servers follow them.
The conversation around tips and it's appropriateness is largely blind to the other aspects of the hospitality industry. Real people with real jobs responding to real stimulus -- it takes coordination on many axes to deliver a golden hour. The conversation of where on the scale from 0-20% to fall is all bourgeois.
> usually by way of...
How about by way of a bank transfer?
Are you mistaking restaurants for hedge funds?
Franchises never have much margin to begin with -- they're mostly real estate vehicles. It's why a Chipotle will operate at 20% staff like it's a normal thing.
A local restaurant might actually be profit seeking enough to have optimized a return on the food/drink service -- but that's usually reflected in the servers wages already.
I honestly laughed out loud.
You're protecting a deeply, fundamentally messed up system.
If you're an European waiter working in a touristic restaurant you get the best of both worlds. European pay and benefits plus large tips from unknowing USA tourists.
I’ve implemented a personal policy to make it easier for myself and reduce bias:
Full waiter experience (seated, handed menu, food brought to table, plate cleared) gets 20%.
If the level of service is less than that, the percentage starts to go down proportionally.
Counter service is flat-rate $1 per person served.
This is the same every time regardless of quality of service (unless something truly malicious happens, but I’ve never experienced that.)
> Full waiter experience (seated, handed menu, food brought to table, plate cleared) gets 20%.
I don't understand this. Why do you Americans tip for this? Isn't being seated, handed a menu, food brought to the table, and plates being cleared part of a waiter's job?
Why does the customer have to 'reward' waiters for doing 'a good job'?
Why do restaurants not just drop a flat 10% service/cover charge (it's 10% where I am) and be done with it?
I do it because it’s a social norm. I’m sure you also do illogical and inefficient things solely because your culture dictates it, weather you realize it or not.
And some restaurants are starting to implement a standard service fee, it’s more common at high end restaurants.
> I don't understand this. Why do you Americans tip for this? Isn't being seated, handed a menu, food brought to the table, and plates being cleared part of a waiter's job?
1. Because nobody you'd want waiting a table wants to be a waiter for minimum wage.
2. And because restaurants don't want to pay waiters more than minimum wage on slow nights.
Your options if you don't like this situation are:
1. A ~20% price hike in the cost of your food.
2. Significantly worse service.
3. Significantly limited hours.
Pick two.
the short answer is for wait service it's customary. this thing where you're now being asked to tip 20%+ for any product or service as long as there's a touchscreen POS terminal is the new thing everyone is getting rankled about.
I think that would be considered socialism /s
>Full waiter experience (seated, handed menu, food brought to table, plate cleared) gets 20%. If the level of service is less than that, the percentage starts to go down proportionally.
I have implemented the same policy of 20% BUT with strict process to make sure it isn't 20% of the full bill:
1) I tip 20% on the Sub-Total amount after subtracting all alcohol (see #2). I am not tipping 20% on the sales tax as well. So don't make a common mistake and tip on the total, go with sub-total.
2) Subtract alcohol from sub-total, calculate 20% on that new sub-total and then I add $1-2 MAX per drink or $5 for a bottle.
With the price gouging on alcohol at restaurants/bars (particularly wine - which they literally charge for a glass what a full bottle costs in the store) I refuse to tip 20% of their inflated prices. Sometimes wife and I can have 3-4 drinks total at a long dinner and can be like $50-100 just on alcohol. No WAY I am over-tipping our waiter $20 to walk the drinks over to our table.
This process drives my wife crazy sometimes and she calls me cheap, but just flat out giving 20% on the full total of the bill is over-tipping. Steakhouses drive me nuts too because they can be very expensive and 20% tip on the full total could be $60! That is just dumb for someone performing the same job at Applebees of taking order and bringing food/drinks to table.
Yeah, the thing I'm most often paying for that I would tip for is my 12oz double-shot Americano. Usually between $2-$4, but I feel stingy giving the servers quarters, so it's always $1 tip.
If the level of service declines below "full waiter experience", likely so too do the prices.
There’s significant overlap between counter service and sit down restaurant prices. The front of house labor is not a massive proportion of restaurant cost.
This is not generally true in my experience. You can buy cheap take-out/counter-service food, or expensive take-out/counter-service food.
Pretty much every place I've eaten at will do takeout. Back when I lived in SF, I ordered a $60 takeout steak dinner once or twice.
I usually still tip for these because it's tying up the kitchen for the in-restaurant diners which might slow down the service for the staff. But not the full 20%.
And so should the tips. It makes no sense to tip someone who just hands you something from behind a counter.
That's my point: as the price declines, so too does the amount you pay in tips.
I also think the proportion of the tip should decline. They are doing a lot less work to give you the food, disproportionate with the small decrease in cost.
It's not clear to me why the proportion should decline alongside the price, since the decline in price also reduces compensation to the server, and a single prevailing tip rate is more convenient to consumers than a floating rate, but I don't care enough to make a stink about it.
They started this in Australia just before the pandemic, but I haven't seen it since we reopened.
I suspect enough people, when prompted with these uncomfortable requests, paid it reluctantly then just never came back. At least, I know I've never been back to any business that asked for or expected a tip.
I'm sure this showed up on the metrics as an immediate spike in revenue, followed by a large downturn some months later.
Honestly can't think of a quicker way to ruin your business.
Good article - mirrors my thoughts.
I moved to Australia from the US in 2006. I swear that when I left the tip was more like ~15% (as the sales tax where I was was 7.5% and the rule was that you doubled the tax to work it out). Every couple years I'd go back and it would seem to creep up. All of the sudden it was 20% and, then when I was back last year, somebody told me 20% was minimum and 25% was really more expected if the service was good.
The last time I was there I was out with 6 people and the bill was $500 and I watched them tip $150 (and then expect us all to evenly split it). The service was not exceptional - if anything I remember waiting ages to get the second drink and the bill. I am sure that person was working at least 5 tables (likely more) and you'd think at least a couple sittings so they'd be making some quite good money for a night at those kinds of numbers.
I made a bit of a comment about how it felt generous and they said "if you can't afford to tip like this you can't afford to go out to eat in America" - and I remember feeling things had gone way too far. It is a bit of a strange flex?
To me, this relates to a broader subject: the way prices are displayed.
In Europe, laws basically mandate that what you as a customer see on a price tag or price list, is what you ultimately pay.
You don't have to do any guesswork, looking at the fine print, compute anything in your head. You pay the price that is displayed, and there should be no expectation from any one that you pay anything above that.
When I go to a restaurant, I'm not like buying the food on the one hand, and the service on the other hand, and everything that the taxes cover above all that. I'm paying the restaurant for dining, which includes the food, the service, and whatever taxes the restaurant has to pay.
The details are none of my business... and I shouldn't have to do any contorsions to compare prices between restaurants!
the tax being calculated separately seems suspiciously petty to my French ass.
I’m used to it now, but the only rational I could find by asking around “why is the tax not part of the final displayed price” were :
- “it depends from state to state.” Taxes are also different in Spain, France, Germany and Italy … we use the same currency and we don’t feel the urge to display our taxes by removing them from the displayed prices. Even in places like Andorra, where the tax on Tabacco is close to 0.
- a less common rationale; often find in the libertarian type of interlocutors. “It’s to show what the government is taking you”
Sadly; I think it’s the second one? I’ve ask that question a lot in the last 10 years. People just shrug it as un-important and we move on with the sale.
Or maybe nobody knows?
American taxes vary way more than in Europe. You walk a mile to a nearby town and suddenly it's a different tax. Not by much, it's like less than one percent, but still.
Taxes can varies from counties to counties? Ha, I never noticed that.
Kinda goes to show that it's not helping to display them like that.
Brazil is also a federation, it is larger than continental US, and has much more complicated taxes that also vary per state and per municipality (county) -- and yet we have "European-style" laws that require that the advertised price is the full price. It has been like this since forever.
If Brazil, a much poorer country in comparison, can do it then so does the US. I think that arguments in the contrary don't hold any water and are poor rationalizations ("US is special").
“Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed”
It is funny how words change meanings depending on which meaning is better for the person who says it.
Was really shocked to go through my normal Starbucks drive thru recently and was verbally asked “are you going to leave a tip?” and they thrust the card reader in my face which starts with a $1 tip as the first option you see on the left hand side. You have to hunt for the “No”. Of course Starbucks knows their target, those that feel too embarrassed if they don’t leave a $1 tip. (I paid). I tell myself, not again. Then I was back there today and paid it again. They got me. Not again.
Jeez, are people really this spineless? I'm assuming you also get roped into paying for some random dude's mixtape outside a grocery store?
Your community may have a local coffee shop that either doesn't do these shenanigans or will deliver service worthy of a tip.
If you pay with a Starbucks card through the app, it’s just a quick scan, and it asks in the app after the fact.
If we’re bot careful, this could “tip” in the wrong direction, where consumers will actively rebel against tipping, and I am nearly there.
I was just in Europe and it was refreshing to eat in restaurants and never have to worry about tipping. If a meal was €50, that’s exactly what I paid and not a cent more. Even though prices in many places were more expensive than in the US (also considering the USD to EUR exchange rate), eating out ended up being a lot cheaper than in the US in the end.
I can tell from experience if you come from a non-tipping country you can really have some negative experiences before you realize what's going on :)
That said, the "need" for a tip does make the waiter/ress a lot more pro-active and helpful than in my country where waiter/ress's can be cranky even. In the US they introduce themselves ("Hi I'm Jerome, I'm excited to be your waiter today!" Made me smile every time), make sure you are ok, the level of service is pretty high.
We do tip here (Netherlands), but it's more when service was really good. But personnel won't bat an eye when you don't. Of course, we learned from Reservoir Dogs [0] that tipping is basically part of the income in the US. Is that still true? In the Netherlands we generally agree with Mr. Pink, minimum wage is higher here though (I think).
I always have to cringe about such exaggerate expressions, "excited to be your waiter" and the like. What is the intensification? It just feels like an unnecessary lie or even hypocrisy.
Exactly. I'm just getting a sandwich, man. Even I'm not that excited about it.
And this in turn, diminishes the whole thing. Can I _not_ pay for the false charm?
I have been living in the US for years, but I am not from the US.
Over the past two years, I have greatly reduced the purchase of coffee and the like in coffee shops and the times when I eat outside because I am turned off by the tipping and the murkiness of the final price. When I see $10 as the price of the item I am buying, I expect it to be the final price. Instead, surprise! I have to add taxes, tips, and the cost of the air I breathe.
On the one hand, I don't want to be "culturally inconsiderate" and not tip; on the other hand, I don't have the same bovine acceptance toward money and spending issues that unfortunately many Americans seem to have -- see, for example, health care spending. I have therefore decided not to contribute to something that makes me uncomfortable. I wish many more people would say no.
I pointedly refuse to add any tip when the only special "service" is ringing up my purchase. I've become resigned to accepting the unpleasant glares of staff as I dial their tip to zero. That I'm even put in that position is just grossly antithetical to customer service. So here's my tip to all you business owners: pay your people, make it transparent, and stop annoying and insulting your customers.
Tipping has become a burden and nuisance for most Americans. We need a plan of action to remedy this.
I quite dislike the tip system, but feel I have no good way to protest it. I could "just not tip," but that mostly harms the people who have the least power in the situation (the waiter) rather than the people who can change it (management).
Instead, I feel like the only ethical option available to me is to preferentially frequent no-tip restaurants. Unfortunately there aren't too many of those and although I hate the tip system, quality of food is usually more important except at the margins.
It seems like the sort of thing where maybe there's a regulatory answer, but I'm hard-pressed to think of one. California already takes the reasonable step of mandating minimum wage before tips, but that doesn't seem to remove the tip expectation.
I think tipping waiters in restaurants, at the end of a meal is fine.
It's the request for a tip at practically every cafe or donut shop, where a person is simply pouring drip coffee or placing an item in a bag, for to-go/carry out, which gets to me. Or the expectation to tip for a re-fill of a coffee mug, at a cafe. It's not service-- it's dispensing a product.
I am starting to wonder how much baristas make, for example, if it's $10-$15 per hour, plus 15 customers per hour (x$1-$2 tip each)... that's potentially $50-60k+ per year. Which is more than many teachers and healthcare workers make-- people with degrees, training, and who provide a skilled, emotionally-involved service.
The logical conclusion is that we should tip the teachers daily based on how little Johnny felt the educational experience was for the day /s
I echo the feeling of a lack of capacity to change things. Given my income level and current situation I resorted to the penultimate form of not tipping: No longer going out to eat, by and large.
It sucks, for sure. We do not have any no-tip restaurants in my area. But price transparency is something that is very important to me and I will stand by my principles on that matter. And since not tipping a person you are face to face with carries a social weight that renders such a move untenable I just don't go out for food at places that ask for tips in any capacity. I'm sure there's an argument one could make about my choice being harmful for tip-heavy employees that use that money to live on. But I have never chosen to subsidize businesses whose practices I don't agree with and tipping has hit a point where it has fallen squarely into that category. I'd like to think if more people thought like me, the market for tipping restaurants would begin to shrivel, but I have little reason to think such a thing will happen in my area at least.
Does this mean maybe we have a glut of restaurants operating in a preferential-to-the-business economic environment, and some might not survive such a change, maybe yeah. Does it mean those employees will have to look for work in a changed market if that does happen, yes. But I want everyone who works to be paid a fair, predictable, agreeable wage for the work they do and continuing to support places that are (I feel) diametrically opposed to that principle does not work towards that goal.
So cast iron chicken and rice pilaf at home it is!
> but that mostly harms the people who have the least power in the situation
They have the ability to choose another job (250k new jobs are created each month!) and they have the ability to negotiate/complain to their manager.
Just dont be surprised when the coffee shop starts to charge $10 for a drip. 50c of beans, 50c of hot water and $8 labor.
I frequently see tipped employees argue _in favor_ of tipping because it allows them to have a higher take-home than they normally could get at an hourly job. I think tipped establishments could have success by removing tipping but offering commission to their formerly-tipped staff.
It's built into the price (bonus points if they add sales tax as well), so you just pay what it says on the menu, and the servers stay happy.
Or you can just pay a good hourly wage, but no one really seems interested in making that happen.
I’ll pick some examples from the article.
> Schenker says it’s hard to sympathize with consumers who are able to afford pricey coffee drinks but complain about tipping.
How will it reflect upon tipper if they in turn judge Mr Schenker for being in this position in the first place?
> Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed
This just sounds ignorant because the comment is pointing to the wrong entity - as in “who owes”. This is barking up the wrong tree. But society has enabled and allowed business establishments to create a situation like this. At the same time this is also entitled — the thought that the tipper is supposed to pay for service provider’s bills above the cost of the item purchased.
This is sad and outrageous. A person is driven to think like this. Is it society, or the culture and tradition? Or the businesses collectively doing this?
> Moore said she believes consumers shouldn’t be asked to tip nearly everywhere they go — and it shouldn’t be something that’s expected of them.
This is what I do. I leave a tip if I feel like. I exclusively do not tip if an establishment points to it, or asks me to tip. I say a simple no and that saying no is difficult but I always say no in this situation.
The last thing I want is this outrageous tipping culture, especially like USA, where I live.
Completely agreed. Tipping by definition is paying for good service - what you feel they've earned. Not what they're 'owed.'
My personal rule is – if I didn't tip for something 5 years ago I don't tip for it today. Restaurants, taxis and food delivery make the cut, as do most personal services like cleaning and haircuts. Self checkouts, grab and go items, food trucks, fast food, online shopping, convenience stores, grocery stores and lots more all get $0 extra from me with absolutely no guilt. Oh and the default 20/25/30% options all come way down as well. If others want to get socially shamed into it, well that's fine by me.
Those POS made by Square are the reason for this. Always begging for more...
I'd much rather pay one (higher) price than to have to negotiate an individual transaction with each person who works at the place.
The greatest scam perpetrated by tipping was the idea of it being a percentage of the cost of the product you ordered.
This is why tipping still exists in America. Because there are urban restaurant workers, and busy bartenders being tipped absurd prices not because of their stellar service, but because they are lucky enough to work in a place with high prices and the cultural percentage mindset benefits them so much they will fight against a "living wage" because they are making more than that, and most of the time, not reporting it as income.
It's inequality disguised as being the "hard worker" when in reality, the shitty diner selling 8$ meals has servers working just as hard, or harder, than the upscale place selling 50$ meals.
I mean, the US could just get a decent welfare state like a grown-up country, but instead you have the worst paid members of society depending on tips.
What does a "decent welfare state" mean? Have you seen the amount of people that are jobless in the US right now even though there's a plethora of jobs available? The US must have a pretty heavy welfare state for that to continue.
Additionally, I assume you believe decent welfare state = a handful of 1st world western European nations and maybe Australia/NZ? You may want to check the average salaries of these locations. Higher welfare states come with a lot of cons... it's not all rainbows and daisies.
A safety net should be just that.... a safety net. Otherwise, you risk LA Skid Row type ramifications or feces/meth needle ridden streets in SF where essentially no one is benefiting.
Economically, exactly how does your plan work?
Germany has "a decent welfare state". Wait staff depends on tips to make their job worthwhile. Not as badly as in the US, but there's a reason they weren't rushing back into the hospitality industry after the Covid lockdowns were lifted: when they had to work elsewhere, many realized how much more they'd make, how much easier the job is, and how much less abusive the bosses are.
Tipping is just a cultural thing, the welfare state doesn't have a lot to do with it.
waiters aren't the worst paid workers by far
Thanks to tips they make roughly 3x what the back of house staff make and their work is much easier (I have experience).
> grown-up country
Sanctimonious without good argument.
No thanks. I don't want a welfare state and I don't want to tip either.
You already have a welfare state, but it goes to businessmen instead. The more money you have, the easier it is to pay fewer taxes. Money want to trickle up.
Give us an example of how higher taxes have benefited the low class. Maybe you could use a high tax haven like California?
I think you've made the mistaken assumption that government has your best interests at heart. Has the government trickled down that tax money to worthy causes? Do you expect that same government who gives these wealthy businessmen so much to suddenly invest MORE tax money wisely?
It seems to me that we have constant tax increases with no benefit except to pad elitists pockets in Washington.
I agree with 2OEH8eoCRo0 . When I say I do not want a welfare state, I mean for businessmen too.
Simply put, there is no defense of tipping that stands up to rigorous scrutiny.
If you think any of the following points are incorrect, please look for a study that reflects this. I'm willing to bet you won't find any.
Studies show that tipping is inherently biased in favor certain races, genders, and phenotypes.
Studies show that tipping is not strongly related to service quality. In fact most people in the USA tip even when they judge the service to be bad.
People in tipping professions are more likely to be living in (or close to) poverty than people in other professions.
Tipping on price makes no sense. A bottle of wine may cost $15 or $1500 but the effort to serve it will be the same.
Expected tipping is a scam to artificially lower menu prices and nothing more.
“Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed” - This sums up the entire problem with tipping. It's just simply wrong / false.
Actually tipping is making sure that the owner of a café can get away with paying a too low salary to the employee.
So best advice: don't tip! You are keeping alive a system where it is up to you, the customer, to (maybe) ensure the employee is making a decent amount of money. That is flipping the issue of money on the head. This should be a matter between the employee and the business, using a contract, you know, like every other normal business relationship works!
Tipping also makes sure every restaurant is slowly turning into a Hooters. When was the last time you've seen an unattractive nonwhite male waiter?
As far as I can tell, there is no point whatsoever to have tipping as an option on payment terminals.
You use them when you are getting takeout, or when you are at a fast-casual place. If there is waitstaff, then they take your card and you never see a terminal. But tipping is only customary when there is involvement of waitstaff. Complete disconnect.
Printing receipts with a tip line in a circumstance where there is no involvement of waitstaff is also pretty sketchy.
They should just ban it on these terminals and on the receipts. Tip with cash if you want to. Let businesses set fair wages and prices accordingly. End of story.
It's starting to crop up here in Australia too - thankfully Aussies are pretty stoic about looking them in the eyes and clicking "No Tip".
To be clear - I will tip for exceptional service or if we have been a particularly difficult table (dietary requirements, number of people etc), but its an exception rather than the rule and its rarely more than 10%.
However often in these cases a surcharge is already added or the meal has been altered in such a way as to negate these issues (Set menu only for tables of 5 or more is common).
Asking me to tip for basic service is going to be refused.
I ate out at a restaurant in Australia, there was a tip section that as an American I instinctively filled out. The waiter didn't even know how to accept the check with the tip section filled out. Felt like a fool.
Yeah its rare here that it goes on the paper receipt, I found that confusing in the US too because I had already paid, so do they take a second charge out for the tip afterwards?
I don't think I have signed a credit card slip in 10 years here in Australia and haven't even inserted my card in the last 5 - everything is tap and go!
The problem is payment terminals have it in the software and most places don't turn it off because "why not?"
I have a set of rules, I will not tip, regardless the social consequences, if a drink was not poured, food was not delivered to my door, my hair wasn't cut, a hostess didn't seat me and a waiter didn't come around and hand me a menu and ask me what I want, or someone didn't roller skate to my car. And then, the tip starts at 15%, it goes up for above and beyond service and goes down for sub par service. Everywhere else I proudly push no.
A few days ago I got dinner delivered, and I added a $5 tip through the app (which came out to about 22%). When the delivery person came, he expressed disappointment about the size of the tip, which really surprised me. As much as I know that it would be better for businesses to pay better wages rather than tips being expected, I also know that the system being unfair isn't any consolation to workers who are just trying to make a living and don't have any power over the situation, so I've always tried to make sure that I give a sizable tip whenever receiving any sort of service where it might be expected. I admit that I haven't had any recent discussions with anyone who relies on tips to make a living in the past several years (the last one that I remember was a discussion with my older brother who had waited tables at a restaurant for several years), but my general understanding was that 15% tends to be low enough to not make up for below minimum wage that restaurants can get away with paying due to exceptions in law for jobs where tips are expected, but that 20% was a good baseline. Has this expectation changed in recent years? (Based on the specific wording of the complaint, I know that the delivery person did see the exact amount I tipped, so I don't think that the complaint was due to the app taking a share, but I guess I don't know for sure since he might have assumed I knew that or didn't think to mention it).
It's hard to say. I would argue that yeah, that baseline tip %age is creeping upwards in the US at least, though the rate at which is hard to quantify. There seem to be a lot of social factors at play that are continuing to put upward pressure on that number. I was taught 15-20% a decade or more back, but that feels to be closer to 25-30% now.
Delivery app tip culture is a fascinating rabbithole in and of itself. /r/doordash is a great repository of posts to look at. You can get a sense of expected order pricing/tip amounts/driving distances sufficient to compel a dasher to pick up your order. Much like with the restaurant industry you will notice that quite a few (I would say a majority of posters there) take issue not with Doordash but with the delivery recipient as the cause of their low earnings. Tips are the name of the game, and any fervor to change or push Doordash into changing their payment models are hushed by the collective din that laments "stingy customers".
Whether it was planned or a happy coincidence, that mentality is a sociocultural win for doordash as a company. The customer, who themselves can make no guarantees how much of that tip a driver will receive if paying digitally, is to bear the burden of blame more than the company that contracted that service to a driver when said driver feels underpaid. It feels me with a sense that's hard to describe. Disheartenment maybe? That new markets and services appear and the tipping culture we crafted for ourselves comes in with them, absolving some companies of paying market wages and sometimes shielding them from certain wage laws.
I wish we in the US could collectively agree that this culture of tipping is (imo) a net negative for everyone involved. But with an economy looking over an uncertain horizon, and the recent bottom-to-top wealth transfers facilitated by the chaos of covid, I think the simple act of throwing a few bucks to the service worker will remain the average American's daily act of "helping the little guy" regardless of how real that benefit truly is.
Thanks for the insights!
> It's hard to say. I would argue that yeah, that baseline tip %age is creeping upwards in the US at least, though the rate at which is hard to quantify.
I misread this at first and thought that it was saying the recommendation was to tip at a percentage equal to your age, which I found intriguing. It's certainly a lot easier for me to afford a 29% tip right now than it would have been ten years ago when I was 19, and that trend probably holds for most people, but age isn't _that_ accurate a proxy for wealth given that everyone gets old, but most people don't become rich.
> I wish we in the US could collectively agree that this culture of tipping is (imo) a net negative for everyone involved. But with an economy looking over an uncertain horizon, and the recent bottom-to-top wealth transfers facilitated by the chaos of covid, I think the simple act of throwing a few bucks to the service worker will remain the average American's daily act of "helping the little guy" regardless of how real that benefit truly is.
I strongly agree with you that tipping is overall worse for both workers and customers compared to guaranteeing proper compensation and then adjusting prices to reflect this in lieu of tips, but even as someone looking to "help the little guy" it feels like I don't have any significant ability to improve the situation, and I ultimately don't think it's right for me to withhold tips to try to pressure companies to pay their workers better. It just doesn't seem like it should be my choice to weaponize someone else's misfortune, even if I think it might help things in the big picture.
"..says it’s hard to sympathize with consumers who are able to afford pricey coffee drinks but complain about tipping.." Hmm.. wat? I don't drink "pricey coffee drinks" (I'm cheap), but I think everyone can do whatever they want with their hard-earned money.
They should complain to their employer. If it doesn't work, to government as policy maker. As mentioned at the end of the article, "If you work for a company, it’s that company’s job to pay you for doing work for them"
Around me the restaurants are still doing "economic recovery fees" and "kitchen appreciation fees". I just tell them I'm not paying it and to take it off the bill.
I pride myself on being a big tipper in restaurants with table service, but when the point-of-sale prompts me for a 25% tip on a counter-service transaction before I have even been served I balk. Why should I pay so much extra for service when all they did was hand me my food/coffee/whatever? I recently got into a big argument with my wife over whether and how much we should have tipped a "valet" who didn't fetch the car and just handed me my keys.
Solution: pay people a decent wage. Stop externalizing the costs of running a business. If you can't make enough money to keep the business viable, then maybe the law of supply and demand and the free market is trying to tell you something.
Plenty of restaurants have a sign advertising $15 starting wage and have too jars
And this is fast casual where you don't even have a waiter.
> $15 starting wage
Let me say again "a decent wage"
That law works on the side of labor too : if competition (more supply of workers vs fewer work slots) for the job is high enough that employees are willing to risk working for a crappy wage plus tips, then employers can still get away with this. As long as regulations permit. I agree that a decent wage is the best path forward.
Why would businesses stop asking for tips if wages rise?
Tipping is a cultural norm in the US that won’t be changed by the price on the menu going up a few bucks. If anything, the relationship is the opposite. You are socially expected to tip better for more expensive meals.
I started tipping for a while, and I think I will stop unless I am being served sitting down.
I see no benefit from the tipping, and the staff are not thankful nor do they seem to notice. and in most cases they do not do anything at all to benefit the tips..
I’ll offer some dissent. I like tipping because I usually tip a lot, and it causes the staff to remember me and go above and beyond.
During the covid pandemic instacart times would go as high as several days, but if we would tip $100 or so, we’d get our delivery within hours.
I like free markets, and I like being able to bribe service workers. In fact, I wish there were more people I could tip.
I'm not in US, but here in my part of Europe it is common to leave a 10% tip when eating in the restaurant (though nobody will complain if you forget). Some restaurants will collect 10% service fee if table was sat by more than 5 persons.
I quite often order food through apps like wolt or glovo and always think twice when going through "tip" section. First- the app asks for a tip before I receive service (even though uber eats used to state that tip can be cancelled). But what makes me more curious is if courier knows about tip, or is the tip included in fee collected so higher the fee more couriers are interested to take the call..
I also have local pizza shop, whenever I order pizza there I tip delivery guy even though he does not, in any way, makes me to do so. I do it more eagerly if there is bad traffic outside or bad weather, basically being happy not having to drive/walk to collect the food..
Today I ordered a physical item from an online store.
The checkout page asked if I wanted to tip the employees, with buttons for preset percentages, and an option to enter a custom amount.
I considered aborting my order.
I've actually started avoiding places solely because tipping has been getting out of control. I stopped going out to eat. I now cut my own hair. I don't go out for coffee. Etc. All because I get so much anxiety when the flip those screens around and stare at me while it asks me how much tip am I going to give.
In Czech Republic, where I live, the tipping and payment system in restaurants is very convenient. As for the tips, if you paying, say 241 CZK, you don't need to worry about percentage, just round up to 250 and all will be good. Also, if you don't tip and just pay 241, it is totally acceptable, nobody will ever say nothing or look at you wrong. Just "Thank you" as usual. Regarding the payment it is also very convenient: you pay for yourself. E.g. your company at the table ordered very different food, drinks, some of them leaving sooner, some later. So when you finished, you just go to the cashdesk (or wait at the table) and say to the waiter what you had. That's it, you are not bothering with splitting the bills, counting tips or other annoying stuff. So far this is my favorite model of how it can be done.
As a point of reference, Ross tips $20 on $200 in a nice restaurant, after Rachel’s dad tips “like 4%” in a season 3 episode of Friends:
So we can say that 15% was more than generous in 1996 according to the NY/LA TV writer set.
Agreed. I remember the days of 10% being standard.
It's the stripe/square payment machines that started offering 18%, 20%, or other.
This may just be a side-effect of the insurgence of new POS systems and customer-facing systems.
Many of the newer POS systems were first developed with the hospitality industry in mind. In those cases, tipping is on by default. These POS systems have since expanded into retail and convenience stores, leaving tipping on by default. The shop owners have little incentive to turn it off, or may not even know how to turn it off.
Additionally most older POS systems were not operated by the customer and so did not display set percentages. They relied upon manual input based on a signed receipt. So percentage norms were mostly word-of-mouth. Nowadays, with customer-facing POS systems, it’s easier to just provide a percentage button. And the owner or manager or even the lowly register attendant, can adjust as needed. And of course, higher defaults are better for all of them (within reason).
Guys, please tip your AP News reporter. These people work long hours for little pay. It’s also a good idea to tip your HN moderator, and the SREs keeping HN up and running.
This is not tipping. Tipping is giving money without being asked. When you are asked, it is called begging.
My issue with all this is the dishonesty. Yes, tips are ok, but don’t force me to pay them. Let me decide. Also, don’t lie, add a 25%-30% gratuity, charge me, then give me the check with additional tip along with all the same social pressure that it is “expected”. If I had an expensive meal, maybe I’ve been saving for a while to have it, and maybe that was a bad decision and maybe I won’t be having another one anytime soon. Don’t assume I just have money to burn. Because of this, I made it a point never to pay tips in the US if I feel a hint of pressure, regardless of how great the service is. I actually pay tips elsewhere, even when there is no tip item in a check.
In France, supermarkets now offer to round up the bill to make donations to associations. This way, supermarkets have a good image and, at the same time, they reduce their taxes by donating to associations.
It is much better to make direct donations to associations.
This has begun happening in Australia at the self service machines.
One thing I was surprised by recently as an American ex-pat (living in Australia for years) too was tipping housekeeping in hotels. I was told by an American colleague on a recent trip there that I was meant to leave $5 in the room every day for housekeeping. This was because it might be somebody different every day - and I was expected to directly recognise each one.
I have gotten used to not having to carry/worry about cash and the idea I need all these $5 notes whenever I stayed in a hotel in the States stressed me out a bit.
Is this a thing?
I think it used to be. It was common travel advice. But only for longer stays. After covid hotels rarely do regular cleaning ime or they want to conserve water. I used to do it, but totally forgot about it until you mentioned. I've pretty much stopped. I also don't carry cash anymore except for emergencies and tipping isn't an emergency
I guess it's a thing. Happens in America too. Optional though.
Tipping is a societal defense mechanism to rationalize & justify gross inequality.
People will leave a 5 dollar tip, but they won't invest in helping change someones life by giving them knowledge and experience they don't have.
Starbucks: "No, we won't raise your wages, but we'll add digital tipping."
Seems like a win for the consumer. You don't have to tip but if they raise the wages you'll be paying more for the same service and same product.
"We won't raise your wage, we'll just let you beg for it instead"
Who is you? Is there someone out there requiring Starbucks workers that make minimum wage (or higher in many cases) to stay at that job and ask for tips? Are you considering providing good customer service begging for a wage? I'm confused here.
Not exactly tipping but very similar: Panera became very annoying in recent years by hassling me every time I ordered at the cashier about whether I wanted to "round up" to ostensibly donate to some charity or other.
Here's my take: I might already be doing charity work or donations elsewhere, and I'm at my limit. And I went to Panera for food and a place to sit a while. If Panera's ownership or rich executives want to donate somewhere as individuals, do that. If they want to make the biz itself donate, do that. If you want to pass this cost on to customers then simply build it into the pricing. But DO NOT hassle each customer and waste everyone's time with cognitive clutter. If anything it feels like a form of intentional guilt-tripping or griefing. What Panera offers isnt unique enough that a person cant go choose an alternate service.
Anyway, not a rant on tippping itself, but a very similar structure. I believe tipping too should just be built into the prices a business charges. Massively simplifies each transaction and reduces griefing and psychological games. (Really, its another case of a more general rule, imo: simplify, simplify, simplify...)
I believe this is a corporate tax game they are partially playing, as they can write off your charitable donation as their tax benefit. (Never round up, just donate directly to charities you choose.)
So we're stopping the gratuitous kindness of strangers towards lower income workers so some other people don't "feel bad" now?
Seriously! Why is this a story?
LOL look at where the "contrarian" views are here: voted to the bottom after 30 "I hate tipping too!" "It's irrational" "No really in MY ideal technocracy you just wouldn't need tipping!"
Even some of the "contrarian" views are incredibly timid. "I say allow me to offer a different viewpoint because I wouldn't dare condemn your extremely rational stance kind sir!"
Fact is, any chance you can take as an overpaid software dev you should tip to pay your debt to society. While you're at it, give some cash to beggars too. "Effective altruism" doesn't cut it.
' “Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed,” said Schenker, who’s been working in the service industry for roughly 18 years. '
Shouldn't that be the employer's job? I'm not exaggerating when I say this tipping culture is a major reason why I wouldn't move the US. It's ridiculous.
Ordering on Uber eats feels like game theory. I have to calculate how much to bribe the driver to get me my food, since Uber underpays
I've never experienced the US tipping culture, but have been aware of it for a long time. Am I remembering correctly that the 'standard' tip has been increasing over the past few decades? I don't mean just the dollar amount, but the percentage that is expected. Why has this happened? Is there some standard explanation or justification given for this?
I think it’s gone up because of the cultural marking of “cheap tippers.” You see it lambasted in movies and TV (in Reservoir Dogs it’s even a significant point of foreshadowing). The scale as I understand it is:
For delivery, tip 10-20% on the subtotal based on the size of the order and the service/delivery time (and perhaps your relationship with the deliverer or business, in cases where they have a dedicated pool). Often these people live off tips and their wage doesn’t even cover gas/maintenance on their own vehicles.
Dining in? Outside of very bad service, I’ll tip 18-20% of the subtotal. Service industry is hard and there’s a lot going on. Even with a bad experience, sometimes it’s not your waitstaff’s fault and they’re trying to roll with it themselves.
Take out/coffee/etc: tip 10-15% based on your relationship to the business and price. If I’m going to a pricier coffee place, I may tip less because I do have a upper limit on what I’ll tip for anything paltry (a buck or two for a latte and a muffin).
Moving guys/tradesmen: May slip em a ten if the job was a pain or they were real punctual.
yes: restaurant workers are increasingly fucked and low income.
Let's start a no-tip revolution. Everyone stop tipping. People that rely on tips will lose their minds and push for change.
Well, during COVID shutdowns I got into the habit of paying sit-down tips to takeout staff and 20% to patios because I knew how servers were suffering at the time, while I got to be a "laptop person" at home.
But now since there's been no formal "end" to the pandemic, it's hard to say when/if you change that.
> Schenker says it’s hard to sympathize with consumers who are able to afford pricey coffee drinks but complain about tipping. And he often feels demoralized when people don’t leave behind anything extra — especially if they’re regulars.
Seriously? If I have $10 in my pocket and want to buy something good for $10, why I'd choose something cheaper just to leave the tip?
> “Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed,” said Schenker...
This does not make sense to me. If I'm a CEO, manager, or working for Google, Ford, or any company, behind the desk, should I be expected to be tipped for my service? If people are working for below minimum wage and expecting tips to compensate for the difference, they should be negotiating a higher paycheck. Some things in USA do not make sense to me.
Imagine if the title of the article was instead:
"Is companies not paying a fair and living wage getting out of control?"
I've seen a lot of people saying that tipping is uncommon outside the US, and that it's only a thing there because of the wage structure for servers.
But that's never been my experience. Over here in the UK, I almost always leave a tip when eating in a restaurant, as well as when getting food delivered or having a haircut. None of these folks are paid under minimum wage or rely on the tips to survive, they're just offered as a bonus for their service.
And most others I know act the same way. They'll tip those who provide good service almost regardless of the kind of job that's involved.
So is that uncommon or something? Are there really folks here who just... pay exactly what a restaurant charges and no more? Or am I missing something with these whole 'no one tips outside of America' discussions?
Contrarian opinion: Tipping could be good if you look at it the right way.
I always consider tips part of the entire price. If dinner is $30 and the customary tip is 20% then the dinner costs $36, not $30. Yes, it's annoying that the price you see is not the price you pay, but then in the US there's tax you're adding anyway.
This makes tipping good: If there's some sort of problem - someone's rude, they took their time, something's wrong with the food and they won't replace it - you can actually just legally pay less.
By the way - 10%, 15%, 20% are easy calculations to do: divide by 10 and multiply. Let's say your order is $35. For 25% halve twice.
10% = 35/10 = $3.5 15% = 35/10 * 1.5 = 3.51.5 = 3.5 + 1.75 = $5.25. 20% = 35/10 2 = $7 25% = 35/2/2 = 17.5/2 = $8.75
It's easy math once you get used to it.
My pet theory is that tipping became more common by almost accident. As the proliferation of various kiosk-based credit card processing machines took place (Square, etc.) where a little screen gets shared with a customer, the 'tip' step was either so easy to be turned on by the store/merchant OR it was even defaulted to on when the merchant applied for their credit card processor account and then the merchant just kinda left it that way; not enough people complained loudly enough or cared to do so, and so it stuck. Repeat tens of thousands of times across stores that opened or switched their CC processing over the years, even for places that didn't traditionally accept tips, and there you have it. Tip tip tip everywhere.
Tipping is an abuse of workers. https://www.flanlate.com/2020/11/dueno-del-baco-explica-por-... Chilean restaurant without that tipping shit
I like paying tips at restaurants, but I agree - tips everywhere are maddening, especially the digital tipping at places where you are not served at your table by a wait staff or other places where tips are normal - like tipping a bell hop and people at hotels, bartenders, dealers at casinos. The normal classical tipping jobs.
For all the other places like coffee shops, I never pay, I take pleasure in not paying a tip on the digital pad, because don't try to jam me up. I so when there's a tip jar at those places, but now I make it a point never to tip on digital. And when it does happen, I start looking for an alternate location where they don't have that crap. I might not find one this month, or for six months, but I'll be low-level looking for alternatives.
I dislike tipping because it turns every tip-eligible service interaction into a kind of low-key hustle. It drives a wedge of insincerity between staff and customers. Service in Europe with no expectation of tipping is a more human experience - it's just someone doing their job.
On a recent Disney cruise, I was greeted at the end of my trip with a "receipt" under the door for over $250 in mandatory tips for our 5 night cruise. Even the "head server" (who only did so much as greeted us at the table each night) got $80 of that. Such BS.
I think "mandatory tips" is just another name for a bill.
Important to add: in fields where tipping is standard (notably, restaurant waitstaff), in many areas of the US the minimum wage is much much lower. Nationally, $2.13/hour. That pays their taxes... For all intents and purposes, restaurant and bar staff are gig workers that are working for a variable rate determined entirely at the customers' discretion. If you don't tip them, they're essentially working for free, or rather, the rest of us are subsidising your service.
It is a mind-blowingly terrible system, but until we fix it, "tips" (in the US, in industries that are traditionally tipped) are not a bonus, they're part of the base wage, and if you don't pay them you are absolutely freeloading.
In CA it is not. But it doesn’t stop this 25%+ tip minimum for normal service advice.
I’ve started asking if they get to keep the tip.
Surprisingly, bartenders told me they don’t get the tip at:
An MLB stadium
2 large outdoor LiveNation venues
> Clarissa Moore, a 35-year-old who works as a supervisor at a utility company in Pennsylvania, said even her mortgage company has been asking for tips lately
What sort of mortgage activity involves asking for a tip? The article didn't really go into this, but I'm very curious.
I’ve stopped leaving tips for anything that isn’t a sit down restaurant with a waiter. These retail iPads asking for tips are ridiculous. At first it felt awkward to zero out the tip, but soon it got better, and now I zero it out with no mercy. I recommend you try it.
It's somewhat infuriating. You use to tip waiters/waitresses. They took your order and brought it to you. Now they ask for tips when they do none of that. Every non-chain fast food joint / coffee stand where all they do is stand at the cash register, take your order, and hand it to you, they now ask for a tip. The bakery asks for a tip. The taco stand asks for a tip.
On top of that, in SF, prices are off the chart. Went to a bread store. One loaf of bread + 1 canele + 1 coffee + 1 sandwich, $47. Got chinese dumplings. 3 people 3 plates of dumplings and 3 side dishes, $135 (with tip). That same thing would have been < $30 in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei. Even Japan
I don't get why food is so expensive in the US. You would think economy of scale would kick in at some point. I eat at home now except for being social and tbh even then I'd rather just cook for a group. A good cookbook will get you better food then almost all restaurants. Even obscure ingredients from Asia are imported or even grown in the US now. There are a few exceptions
The solution to eliminating tipping while also incentivizing servers and others to provide excellent service seems pretty obvious - raise prices by 20% on every transaction in the service industry, and then the employee gets that percentage.
This is good for the business as it encourages the server to provide good service (as long at they clearly understand the importance of the return customer), and also rewards them when the business gets really busy (the result of continually providing good service & good products).
It does eliminate the ability of the customer to play the role of generous or stingy aristocrat, but if they don't like it, they can just not come back.
interestingly we actually wouldnt need to raise prices 20%. Some customers do not tip. Some groups of people tip far less, so actually the increase likely is less than 20%.
I generally won't tip If the POS screen start at 20% and makes me do a "custom" amount to leave less. Its slightly embarrassing hunting around to give a 0 tip but maybe they'll eventually get the hint.
Why is this on HN? This isnt even remotely related, all I see is Europeans not understanding the f'ed up wage policies of the US, and people from the US acting entitled like they do in restaurants.
It is nice to see logical comments. I brought up the tipping culture issue during COVID-19 cause that is when I saw businesses start exploiting it substantially, and I swear there was some pro-tipping mafia on major message boards that would say you deserve spit in your food is you don't tip, you deserve to be beat up, etc. I believe the service industry is literally engaged in culture wars but fortunately other people have started to wake up to the issues and the discussion is no longer being insta-downvoted like it was before.
Something I don't see mentioned often is how much TIME tipping takes.
I recently visited Australia and realized that each transaction at a cafe/restaurant was very quick, perhaps an entire 10x quicker than an equivalent transaction in the US. You just tap your card and go.
Transaction time at cafes can compound against people waiting in line as well, especially if the customer wants to tip but the default on-screen amount is too high.
Would be curious to know how much time is collectively spent on these minor transaction decisions in countries with tips. I'm sure it's substantial.
Tips is a way to advertise false price, attract more customers, and then exploit their guilt to charge the full price. It's telling that food service businesses arent viable without this sort of lying.
Tipping in central europe work fundamentally different compared to the US. I never do the math 'what are roughl 10 percent' instead round up to a meaningful amount. It is certainly less than 10%.
If you don't tip its because you were not satisfied with the service. Sure, recipients expect it and will look at you in dismay if you don't.
In countries like Italy or spain it's not common at all.
I tip more of late as unfortunately the US habit of earning less than being able to make a living became the rule and so service personell is dependent on the extra cash.
I don't understand why people tip. I never tip. Sometimes tips are included in cheque as a flat percentage, that's fine for me as long as it's stated before order. But why would I pay more than necessary to someone who did his work? That makes no sense for me. If you're not paid well, leave and find another work, that's none of my business. I'm not that rich to throw money around to everyone who wants it.
And if the service is bad, I'll require to fix it or decline to pay at all.
I guess that cultural thing.
From a macro-economical perspective: Recession. Inflation is way up. Wealth distribution still growing more uneven: 'Classical' middle class is disappearing.
From a non-US/middle European perspective[0]: the US-tipping system is weird[1] to say the least and easily exploitable.
Combine those two and yeah, "service" gets ugly on both sides.
I can understand why so many are upset in their experience about their respective situations (especially in the US) and trying to think about solutions to counter the "exploitation"/"inefficiency" in this new context. But it is also easy to get caught up by the dynamics at the ground exerted by the pressure from above (macroeconomics).
Historically, the issue of "tipping" seems to erupt in times of hard economical/societal challenges. Like US-Prohibition 1919 or my favorite example during German industrialization in the late 19th century:
>More generally, tipping, is a morally fraught issue in the history of hospitality and public education in Germany (more accurately, nationalen Pädagogik, or national pedagogy), going back to the nineteenth century. The jurist Ihering (more commonly referred to as Rudolf von Jhering, with a "J") argued that tipping encourages vices like begging, greed, false or feigned friendship, vanity, and hedonism among service personnel. He wanted service people to be penalized for receiving tips, and employers to pay enough that tipping would not be necessary. The controversy about tipping continues.[2]
Interestingly through this moral/social debate in late 19th century Germany, "tipping"/"Trinkgeld" didn't vanish (intention of Jhering) but people became more aware of the social situation and a balance has arisen out of it.
[0]https://switzerlandtimes.ch/lifestyle/the-impact-of-credit-c...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity
[2]Touwal, Amital: Anthropological Study of Hospitality (2016): The Innkeeper and the Guest, p.70
in vietnam and estonia i encounter regularly someone refusing to take a tip or even seem slightly offended and it took me a while to get the right signals when it seems condescending, but it felt quite relieving to accept no tips are the default. especially delivery drivers made a real shift from being happy about tips to being proud and refusing and instead wanting real recognition by their companies and a livable salary instead of seeing responsibility shift to gratitudes.
This reminds me of the brochure I once received from a fishing camp.
In the pricing section of the brochure, there was an item described, completely un-ironically, as “compulsory gratuities”.
It's out of control. People are tipping 25% to 30% on almost all transactions with chip checkouts. Businesses are being shady and reversing the preselected % orders from lowest to highest and presenting highest to lowest. I've seen more videos of fraud on the rise where staff at businesses will add charges (not gratuity) or just select a % and inform customers this is "policy. "
We need to get rid of tipping all together.
America's tipping obsession was such a huge culture shock to me when I visited last year.
With the poor USD/GBP exchange rate, a $20 item on the menu would often cost me £25 or even more after tipping
From what I can see, tipping exists to subsidise awful wages so someone's ability to make a living and pay their bills exists solely on how well someone else perceives their customer service skills. As a brit, that's just wild to me.
We all started tipping high during COVID, and everyone on the receiving end got too used to it. What was done out of generosity turned fueled a new entitlement.
I think it's a symptom of a bigger problem. It's tied to shrinkflation.
The problem is that the cost of many things has just gone up, a lot. And the US has bent over backwards to ensure no one has to pay the real cost of gasoline.
If customers were really seeing the true cost of every good and service they bought with no manipulation, hidden fees, shrunken products, etc, demand would fall drastically and we'd go into a recession.
I recently ran into a retail self-checkout stand that had a tip option. It's a low point I didn't think we'd ever reach, but here we are.
When I booked people to move my belongings to my new house, I picked a company where all of the employees were full-time salaried employees making a decent wage and had relative security in their jobs along with PTO, pensions, etc.
When they finished, they still asked for a tip. I said no because I paid a premium them for the very reason that I didn't expect that they'd ask for a tip.
I recently noticed this on Fiverr.com. I had used it in the past and wasn't ever hit up for a tip. Paid for some work to create some icons just the other day, and the payment flow hits you up for a tip at the end. With wording like "It's customary". And a minimum tip of $5, regardless of the order total, though you can opt out altogether.
I have a personal rule that in order to get a tip you must do something (anything really) that is not simply giving or dispensing me an object that I paid for otherwise. If someone cooked or baked it or brewed it or pulled a shot or whatever great I’ll leave a tip. If it’s just handing me something or pouring into an cup and taking my money I have no problem hitting no tip.
I don't hate the 10% "service charge" fees I see abroad. It's automatically added, can be removed if you really have an issue, and 10% is a fair charge for being waited on. Wish payment terminals could move towards this. No guilt 10% charge, bury the option to increase it for those who want, and remove it entirely if you're unsatisfied with service.
"“Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed,” said Schenker, who’s been working in the service industry for roughly 18 years."
Yes, this would be what some call "wages".
It's a terrible system. People are not valued by their employers. Employers distance themselves from employees.
I stopped going to Starbucks because of this. Simple Americano (espresso + hot water) is $3.50. They ask for tip on the pad, customary at least $1. This adds up to about $5 with tax, for a medium coffee. It's not sustainable. I maybe getting old and still live in times when the same Americano cost me $1.69.
Tipping is like every place expects an additional 15% tax and they look at you funny if you don’t give it.
Regardless of how good or poor the service is. 11% to Uncle Sam, 15% to the workers.
It’s become the fabric of life. I really do enjoy when I don’t have to tip. Even though the amount is slightly higher and the 15% is included in base price.
I very rarely visit places where I have to tip so my sanity is kept in check. The whole idea of tipping however ruffles my feathers. Just give me price and fuck off. I did not come to the place to think how much should I tip and feel guilty if I do not want to tip for shitty service / food.
I do give generously to homeless though.
Tipping is awkward. I feel guilty of being an ashole in both cases: if I don't tip I feel like I'm a greedy asshole, If I do tip I feel like I am playing an arrogant aristocrat. I wish everybody would just rise the prices and pay their employees enough for them to be happy without tips.
https://www.dt.gob.cl/portal/1628/w3-article-109452.html Tipping is almost mandatory by law in Chile (southamerica), it’s really hard to just say no
Most people wouldn't care if it wasn't for the shady things the payment terminals do. Like reordering the tip % to either be reverse of what is expected or random.
Additionally they wouldn't care is the % was standard.
From left to right: 15%, 18%, 20%. Leave it there and stop using dark patterns.
Most of the people loudly evangelizing tips, have themselves worked a job where they received tips.
Huge problem is that restaurant owners are usually extremely bad at economics. They think that defaulting to 22% tip (in addition to increasing prices by 50%) will sustain them. In reality many customers avoid sit down restaurants purely because of this.
> What’s next, they wonder -- are we going to be tipping our doctors and dentists, too?
Japan is often called out as a tipless wonderland of excellent service, but while you don't tip in restaurants there, it is fairly common to tip doctors!
I'd love for us to abolish tipping, but I don't really get a say in it, because these are expected wages and I can't just say "no, I want to keep my money." Its a social norm, not something we all voted on.
Counter-service tipping is the most confusing to me. What service am I tipping for? And if I don’t tip, will my food be worse or take longer? Tipping before receiving any service or no service at all feels like bribing.
I wonder if the POS companies take a share of the tip as part of the total transactions flowing through their systems.
Then they'd be incentivized to show the tip screen by default, and maybe jack up the default amount to 20-25%.
Most POS systems do not charge per transaction, neither by count nor dollar amount. It’s usually an upfront or flat monthly fee, based on number of terminals, level of service and feature set.
We can regulate this in a variety of ways
The point of sale system can be shamed or regulated, or have codes for the merchant type that dictates whether they have the option of doing a compulsory tipping screen
The payment processor can dictate all or cut them off, payment processor can also be regulated from on high
We can also make viral articles shaming a random shop for their behavior. This is not normal now but we can make it so.
We can realistically address the conflict of interest from service workers wanting more tips that are shaming consumers for not tipping a certain amount. We pretend that because they’re closer to the environment then their thoughts should be more privileged, when it is so convenient to just gamble on getting more tips that its a conflict of interest.
And of course the crazier thought of raising wages, but we should stick to things we can control
I personally love tipping. When you can tell that someone actually makes a real effort to take care of the customer and do their job well, there's nothing better than being able to make their day (or at least, make it better and show your appreciation) by going above and beyond.
Most of the situations in which you tip are already signs of you not being too frugal. If you are eating in a restaurant, buying coffee out, valeting your car - you are not penny pinching so you can give someone a few extra bucks without breaking your bank.
Of course you have to be culturally sensitive. In the US tipping is expected and appreciated. Other cultures don't expect it and would think it's rude.
I'm not a fan of tipping but I'm very much a fan of the incentive alignment between the person providing the service and the person paying for the service it produces.
Tipping in the US isn’t tipping. It’s a fee that’s not included in the price. You’re expected to “tip” a certain amount and employees can get quite upset if you don’t.
But over that expected amount, it's still tipping. It hasn't gotten too much out of control, except in Vegas.
When I was a child, the set of rules were pretty common:
* Don't tip at counters
* Don't tip the owner of an establishment
* Tip on the quality of the service, not the quality of the food
* Very low tips should be utilized only in case of very bad service. (A penny tip sends a much bigger message than no tip)
* Round up to the nearest dollar for taxi drivers or Ubers, since they are almost all self-employed, and you don't tip bus drivers do you?
Also, I only tip in cash, and only by putting that cash directly in the hand of one of my servers. Otherwise the manager, who is not supposed to be tipped will likely take a cut.
If you want to see tipping go away, then the lower + tip minimum wages would need to go also. Some states it's as low as 2.39 an hour...
That would be great! Who wants to keep those, apart from restaurant owners?
I've started leaving bad reviews for restaurants who a semi-agressive on asking for tips. Its becoming the worst part of the experience.
If a company outsources wages, what exactly is it doing, besides providing a situation for two strangers to exchange services?
Is this a thing in countries other than the USA?
Yes. Here in Canada it's a couple percent points less (15-20%, I here it's higher there) and servers have a proper minimum wage, but tipping is still expected here.
And the pandemic has shifted things and now everybody's got tip options on the takeout touchpad... I'm iffy on that. It was one thing when everything was shut down and so takeout was a fallback for restaurants with a lot of staff, but that's over.
It used to be. For instance, France passed a law in 1987 to include an automatic tip on all bills (12-15%), i.e., switched from optional to automatic tipping.
AIUI, French restaurant menus still say "service compris" (service included).
And, FWIW, the top hit about this when I searched for articles on this in French is an article where the hotel-industry association is thinking about getting tipping reintroduced... (https://www.ouest-france.fr/europe/france/restauration-bient...)
The tipping situation is numerically very similar in Canada, unsurprisingly.
But at least in Canada, the waiter brings a wireless point-of-sale machine to the table for you to pay. Whereas in American, they take your credit card all the way to the cash register (unsafe!), bring the receipt to your table, make you write the tip and total on the receipt, and collect the receipt.
There’s handheld machines now at American restaurants which have a very bold tip screen. At the one I see it at, the waiter (who usually only took our order, didn’t even fill drinks, bring food, etc) holds it towards me and says “tip?” instead of the common “it’ll ask you a few questions”. Maybe it’s a clover POS system?
Handheld POS terminals exist in America but I found them to be rare. When I was in New Orleans last year and went to a bunch of restaurants, 9 out of 10 of them had the traditional opaque payment system. Only at one restaurant did I I experience the waiter bringing the wireless POS to my table.
I've only ever seen this in the US. Not in Europe, Asia nor Oceania.
it’s been exported to mexico and others, especially tourist traps where a lot of americans come
Another thing that gets out of control is manipulating the browser history in order to keep us on a website.
So it used to be 18% off the base.
But credit card receipts show 18% off the price + tax, effectively 20-25%
Most don’t do the math, just pay.
I went to a grocery store, and purchased some items. Tip options: 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%. No thank you.
How many people on HN have worked tip based jobs? Clearly not many based on the comments.
Waiters need a fucking union. Tips are pretty much used exclusively to fuck over workers
What will be end-game of the tipping?
When will police, customs start to accept and ask for them? For better and more personal service?
Or judges and prosecutors. A hundred given at start would sure improve the vital service they provide?
And before that, why not tip at any financial transaction? Maybe some money when meeting some person buying your SaaS product?
I get asked to tip at Taco Bell up in Canada. I'm not tipping at Taco Bell.
Mortgage companies asking for tips? Hahahaha
Can’t wait to see this prompt at the back atm!
I like tipping at bars and restaurants: it eliminates the middle-man between me and the person providing the service, and I can reward (or consequently punish) servers who provide good or great (or poor) service.
But in other cases, I see the tip line and click Zero. It makes the math easy.
God, I hate it. 20%, 25% , 40%, or none? How about stop being so greedy.
Why yes I’d love to pay arbitrarily more for this $6 latte, thanks
What's next? The coffee machine down the hall asking for a tip?
Microtransactions have made their way into real life.
30% tip? More than 10% tip is extortion, not tip.
its expensive but I always tips atleast $10 on my $20-40 doordash orders now so it gets atleast picked up
That doesn't seem unreasonable. I don't think I've ordered delivery in like the last 2 years (when someone else was ordering and I got something).
It's like 8 minutes to all the places that deliver here though, so it's worth picking it up to have it fresher.
> Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed
Here in AU we call that "wages".
Having to do quick maths while under social pressure and the threat of having your service quality degraded to make up for an employer or state being unwilling to pay workers enough to live might be called "coercion", but certainly it is externalising costs onto the customer.
As a European living in Canada, the tipping culture took some time to get used to. It's such a stupid/bad system.
Am Canadian, can confirm...
I do wish there was a way to tip the drivers who deliver my Amazon Prime stuff, though.
I don't want to tip someone who presses a few buttons on a screen to take my food order, that they usually mess up and sometimes add on a free side of bad attitude.
I would like an easy way to tip the guy who is trudging through the snow to deliver my 2KG jar of peanut butter at 9:30pm in January. I like this guy...
Wouldn't that just continue to expand a bad practice? If drivers got tips, Amazon would lower their wages, and we'd just have another domain where we have to make extra decisions.
This may be true, but my calculus in this situation was limited to "Guy came through deep snow at 9:30pm to deliver peanut butter...he deserves some money, I have some money, I would like a simple and effective way to transfer it to him."
(Note: I was not home when the delivery was made...)
>(Note: I was not home when the delivery was made...)
If you know when an order is coming, you could copy some of the older folks I doordashed for. They often left money for the drivers in an envelope on the door.
You already transferred money to "him". The problem is the employer is not forwarding it on.
You want to tip without Amazon finding out.
Aka, cash, or venmo
People used to give money at Christmas to the postman
We still do
Found this after a quick google but can't vouch for it: https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/shopping/you-can-...
EDIT: seems like a limited program. But a more permanent one would be good
At least in the US, that would be drivr.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/17/drivr-tips-last-mile-deliv...
A bowl of hand warmers set outside, similar to a bowl of candy on Halloween, would be one way. In the summer, swap for a cooler with waters on ice.
Amazon Fresh has a tip system in place.
Tipping in Canada is extra absurd. The minimum wage for servers and bartenders is the same as for regular workers (eg. $15.50 per hour in Ontario). But thanks to cultural osmosis from the US, 15-25% tips are also expected on top of that.
US tip workers also get full minimum wage. Tip workers who don't meet the minimum wage threshold on total earnings are compensated for the shortfall. The lower tip worker rate is a subsidy to business owners paid for by guilt tripping their customers.
> US tip workers also get full minimum wage. Tip workers who don't meet the minimum wage threshold on total earnings are compensated for the shortfall.
So they don’t get tips on top of the minimum wage.
Another way to see it is that the employer steals the first hours_worked*(minimum_wage-actual_wage) dollars from what the employee got in tips.
In states like Washington and I believe California, they get minimum wage at least before tips.
The expectation from the tipper is that the tips are unrelated to the wages.
You could tip 10k, and they'd still be paid at least minimum wage by the employer
Where I live in the US, mandatory minimum wage is $18.69/hr. Tips are on top of that. It has less to do with a living wage and more to do with the fact that the employees make less money with a mandatory 20% service charge than they do via tips.
What's a mandatory service charge even supposed to be? Are restaurant bills cost-plus contracts? Is there also a refrigeration charge, and an ingredients charge?
Yes, service is added as a 20% charge based on the total bill. This is to offset the absence of tipping. If you simply add 20% to menu prices, it has other adverse consequences that reduce employee income in practice.
To be fair that's a recent change in Ontario (2022).
In southern Europe, automatic 10% tips are often included. But the server will whisper into your ear that he doesn't see any of those 10%, owner takes it all for herself.
That's the first time I ever heard of that. Maybe you just went to a bad place.
Where exactly? As Italian, I never saw this.
Well, unless those areas have worse laws than the US somehow, make sure the server knows that at the very least they should sue the day they quit or get fired.
This compulsion to threaten a lawsuit is such a quintessentially so American. For an American service worker, it also isn't realistic to carry out a lawsuit given that most are working paycheck to paycheck.
Unfortunately, wage theft dwarfs petty theft in the United States due to economic inequality and the inaccessibility of the mostly pay2win American legal system, for the average worker. Millions of workers lose billions in stolen wages every year—nearly as much as all other property theft. [1]
I didn't say threaten.
And I didn't say "carry out a lawsuit". You can go to small claims court. Especially since you just lost that job; you can afford the few hours.
I also said "at least", because this is just the plan B if labor enforcement won't do their job and get the money for you. But I assume you don't trust labor enforcement if your plan is to let that 10% get stolen and do nothing.
Heh, I was in Canada recently and asked a waiter "Do you tip here?" Apparently they do.
The US faced a dilemma: Post civil war, many people didn't want to pay freed slaves for their labor.
A combination of tipping and converting jobs that were typically held by blacks to unpaid positions provided a solution. It became popular despite attempts to ban the practice.
Today, tipped workers in the US are paid, but have a lower minimum wage than normal workers.
Source: https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...
FWIW: Because I abhor the practice, I always tip 20%. If service is sufficiently bad, I tip 20% and never come back.
A sociologist was joking on twitter that “every time I dig a rule that has been on the book for a long time but doesn’t seem to make any sense, it ends up to come from slavery” (paraphrasing)
I didn’t expect tipping to follow the same rule.
> Today, tipped workers in the US are paid, but have a lower minimum wage than normal workers.
Not in all states.
Relevant link: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped.
If there's anything we could actually call "institutionalised racism", I think tipping culture fits the bill.
It's a system literally implemented because a large portion of society didn't want to pay black people wages.
All states that border the Pacific Ocean have full minimum wage (as in at least $14/hour) no matter what your job. Source: have lived there, have worked in restaurant
> Today, tipped workers in the US are paid, but have a lower minimum wage than normal workers.
No, they have the same minimum wage as all workers. The employer is liable to pay the employee if tips + earnings from tipped min wage are less than earnings from non tipped minimum wage.
That's true on paper, but I worked as a server for like 12 years and never heard of it happening once. In contrast, I've had like 4 bosses who practiced wage theft.
That's not "the same minimum wage as all workers", that's an entirely different payment system--one that the person above was trying to describe.
> No, ... The employer is liable to pay
This is incredibly naive, the employer is unlikely to pay the difference despite being liable.
Thanks for the explanation! I didn’t know the history
I can see the point of leaving a tip when a server has done a really good job (of course they should be paid a decent wage too). For me the annoying bit is being asked to tip before I have been served - I don't know yet if I would like to leave a big tip or a small one.
So you tip the cook when the cook does a really good job?
At least in the cafes I worked in as an undergrad we split tips between the waitstaff and kitchen, which of course also sort of shifts around the "rewarding good service" aspect, but I think then you feel like you're letting down your coworkers if you piss off customers enough for them to tip badly.
When I was a dish washer I worked my ass off (meanwhile the cooks just filled baskets with sous vide crap and pushed a button). I didn't get jack.
How do you determine which labor there is a point to leaving a tip for and which labor there is not a point to leave a tip for?
Why does it matter? That isn't some kind of gotcha.
I wouldn't mind if 100% of customer facing jobs were tipped. At worst, is an optional lower price to pay if you are dissatisfied or light on cash. Normally it is just I'm part of the price. I'm not sure why people would be so much happier paying 120% the price instead of 100% and then a 20% tip. It's all the same in the end
Part of the problem is that an expectation of tipping is cropping up in many places where it didn't exist before, and prices certainly haven't dropped 20% to compensate. In these circumstances I would rather just pay 100% of the price and be done.
I think it's partly a crude fix for the problem of some states allowing for waiters and bartenders specifically to be paid below minimum wage[1], as low as $2.13 per hour in some states! Which is of course far worse than most customer-facing jobs.
1: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
Would you tip an airline attendant who served you a meal/drink?
What is customer facing? Doctor to patient? Employee to employer? Real estate agent to homeowner? Everyone is selling their labor to someone, and everyone has a customer.
I want to pay 100% of the price, otherwise I'm overpaying.
Or plumber, or mailman, or pilot, or cop?
> threat of having your service quality degraded
Or even worse, be publicly outed by a waiter online because they didn't agree with the tipped amount (retrieving your full name from the CC receipt). Happens.
Foolish move. I’ll bet the restaurant owner loves (fires) the waiters for doing this. It hurts the restaurant and the waiters more than the single customer.
I most certainly get paid a lot more than the person behind the counter does. If it's a person who did something helpful and the person gets the $, then I'm happy to tip. If they can give me some attention (e.g., not chatting away with someone behind the counter while I just stand there), I'm happy to tip.
You also get paid more than the staff at Walmart. Do you tip there?
No. I don't go there, and I'm hard of hearing and usually use self checkout any time I can. And perhaps you're perceiving my post as being supportive of "tip culture", whatever that is.
I don't condone tips, but I realize it's more effective for me to "help" those who live partially on tips than to try and change that culture.
I go to a few select places I like, and I tip well there. I also put money to artist and others who's work I appreciate.
I don't want my name in their credits, I don't want a shout out, I just want them to keep doing what they do because they are good at it.
I like tipping (high almost regardless of service quality, as long as it's not aggressively bad) to support the workers specifically. I think service workers/low-level contractor crew workers/etc. have one of the highest "people who I admire" x "people who don't get enough money" scores. So it's a small wealth transfer - like taxes, but instead of being completely wasted or given to whoever, the best people get it. Sure you could also try to change the "unfair" world. Or you could just give people money :P
I can't believe these comments, what is wrong with you people?
if you are a highly paid technology worker, when you go to service establishments where people are working hourly and are desperate to work 40-50 hour weeks just to pay their rent and feed their kids, you *tip*. *generously*.
the US has an insanely out of control income inequality issue that is very intractible and structural. If you are so fortunate as to find yourself on the winning end of it, as is the case for a vast portion of Hacker News members, yes, (WHILE SAID STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY CONTINUES TO NOT BE SOLVED BY OTHER MEANS), you should be transferring to the members of your local community who are not so fortunate (AND ARE EXPLICITLY ASKING FOR TIPS AND/OR WORKING WHERE TIPPING IS CUSTOMARY) and you should be happy to do it.
hi - not as *a subsitute for raising the mimimum wage*, of course not, of COURSE wages should be raised. of COURSE if everyone were paid fairly in the first place, THAT WOULD BE GREAT. however, at the moment, the federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in 14 YEARS, so FOR THE MOMENT, until said inequality issue can be structurally modified, workers really could use tips. that's why they are asking for them.
> you tip. generously
No, absolutely not, that is not the correct solution to the very real problem of underpaid staff.
Instead I want laws to ban tipping and force jobs to pay a reasonable living wage at a minimum. Yes the product will cost more in restaurants but so be it, it's the honest way to do it.
Push for those laws. Patronize restaurants which pay well.
Until that’s universal, tip generously anywhere you aren’t certain pays their works great wages. Good intentions don’t help anyone make rent.
I used to work as a janitor for minimum wage. I never got a tip. How was that fair?
Did I not provide a service?
You sound like someone who used to work as an employee who received tips.
I wasn't saying that was fair, and have supported raising the minimum wage every time it's been on the ballot. A key difference is that in most of the U.S. restaurant workers have a much lower minimum wage with the expectation that tips will make up for that. That's why I mentioned the difference between what you should do before anything changes and afterwards: if someone's base pay is $2.30/hour and tips are supposed to bring that up, not tipping is probably costing them money their budget is based on.
None of that says that we shouldn't be trying to get both jobs to be more humane.
Okay, yeah, sure - it's a very good point. I live in WA, where the minimum wage is the same for every profession. So, that argument just isn't valid for me - unfortunately.
States like Alabama keep finding new ways to screw states like Washington.
I picked Alabama out of alphabetical order, of course. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
I'd rather just increase the minimum wage. Why do this pick and choose thing? If the minimum is not enough then it isn't enough for __everyone__.
Servers in fine dining restaurants make much more than the minimum wage on tips. $25-$30/hr isn't a crazy high amount for a server to be making; $50-60k/yr is also a thing.
Sure, don't abolish tips, just make it not the norm. Or rather return the custom to fine dining. We're all just upset that we're being asked for tips at places like McDonalds or takeout. That's just a push back to feudalism
I don't think I've ever tipped at a fast food restaurant; even the fancy ones.
(I tip at coffee shops, of course.)
How come? What makes coffee shop staff intrinsically more deserving of tips than those working at a fast food restaurant?
Deserve's got nothing to do with it! When I shop at places that clearly establish an expectation of tipping, I tip, because I can read a straightforward social cue about the arrangements the business operates under. If I objected to tipping there, I wouldn't do business with them.
> I can read a straightforward social cue about the arrangements the business operates under
What are some examples of such "straightforward social cues"?
I would genuinely like to know, because the only social cues at coffee shops I have seen pre-Square terminal have been super context-dependent. For example, you tip if it looks like the baristas are kind of overwhelmed – e.g. at a super busy time like the morning rush; or if you waltzed in with a large group and ordered seven lattes or something. Because the baristas are gracefully operating under pressure and getting the coffee to you on time, you tip them.
After Square terminals, it seems like tips are expected even if there is literally no one else in the shop because the app says so. Which is not really a social cue.
1. Point of sale system that explicitly prompts for a tip.
2. Large jar labelled "TIPS", partially filled with money.
3. Check to sign with a tip line.
Happy to help!
> 2. Large jar labelled "TIPS", partially filled with money.
That's my preferred one.
> 1. Point of sale system that explicitly prompts for a tip.
Seemingly the same general idea, but also for...
Buying things, as opposed to eating/drinking? (I've seen some at what was arguably grocery stores that also had some sit-down dining, paid on the same terminal.)
Bars that already include a 20% service charge, and the prompt says 26%/28%/30% on top of the service charge? (Fortunately, I've only seen that one once, so far.)
> 3. Check to sign with a tip line.
These can be confusing at takeout places!
Only very recently, after settling on leaving a "compromise tip" between nothing and a sit-down rate (and feeling appropriately mediocre about it) at a local takeout place, I ordered with the owner for the first time – and he immediately threw away the receipt as it came out of the machine with a smile, not giving me a chance to fill the tip line. Apparently no take-out tips expected!
I prefer the POS to the tip jar, because I tend not to carry cash.
If you're paying a service charge, you're not expected to tip. (I know, this is annoying; the most annoying thing here though is the service charge).
Oh, I do tip at the POS almost exclusively!
Still, a physical tip jar tells me "a person actually working here put this here intentionally", while a POS sometimes (probably irrationally) makes me wonder if these were just the defaults Square or competition shipped the thing with, an A/B test on proposed amounts run by a faceless corporate board etc.
I should have probably clarified whether we were talking about to-go orders, because obviously you would tip at a sit-down place, similar to a sit-down restaurant.
For to-go orders, 1. and 3. are often because they use the same PoS (usually a Square or Clover terminal these days) for the to-go and sit-down orders. You are free to read accidents of technological convenience as social cues, but that doesn't automatically make them so.
2. is probably a true social cue, for either sit-down or to-go.
I tip to-go coffee shop orders (when there are clear tipping norms, as is the case at all the coffee shops I go to). You can call the POS system an "accident of technological convenience", but it is also a prominent, clearly legible sign expressing the expectation that you're going to tip.
It is less of a big deal to stiff a coffee shop than a restaurant (you might actually get yelled at at a restaurant!) but if you talk to them when the shop is quiet they'll mutter under their breath about the regulars who don't tip.
So you tip because you're expected to tip and that justifies tipping?
Correct.
Then you can understand the frustration with the circular logic, right?
It's not really circular logic to me (and I don't like tips):
Me not liking something does not make it acceptable to express my displeasure about it at the (literal financial) expense of service staff that is providing the same service to me as they are to other, non-tip-averse patrons.
That's what orange URL sharing site discussion sections were made for :)
No. To me, this is like complaining about the social expectation that I'm going tp pay the price listed on the board for my sandwich.
A friend of mine told me flat out that although he thinks tip abolition is the right thing to do policywise, he and his waiter friends personally hope it doesn't happen because it would effectively result in a pay cut for them (even though it would probably increase wages for BOH workers, waiters at low-volume restaurants, etc.).
Well the federal minimum wage hasn't been increased in ... 14 YEARS. So...maybe tip in the meantime?
not to mention current legal frameworks allow workers who are tipped to be paid less than minimum wage. as well as some workers are undocumented and are victims of an obsolete immigration system that has not been fixed for decades due to political gridlock.
so maybe just TIP, at the very least.
> So...maybe tip in the meantime?
Do you tip every employee in every industry that might be making minimum wage?
no, I tip in establishments where the workers are service workers who explicitly asking for tips, as well as for specific transactions where tipping is customary hence expected.
note that restaurant workers in the US make less than minimum wage before tips in many cases.
> no, I tip in establishments where the workers are service workers who explicitly asking for tips, as well as for specific transactions where tipping is customary hence expected.
Hopefully you see the inconsistency here? You mentioned that minimum wage has not increased in a long time so people making are underpaid (true). And that tipping is somehow the solution. But unless you tip everyone you ever interact with that might be making minimum wage, that's a highly inconsistent position.
Instead we can simply raise minimum wage to a living wage and outlaw tipping. Fair to everyone.
> I can't believe these comments, what is wrong with you people?
I had a similar feeling while reading comments here, but then I reminded myself that most of people commenting here are from the US and are used to this strange tipping culture.
Oh wait, you mean comments criticizing American tipping culture? ;-)
Seriously though, I wished Americans would keep this broken tipping culture to their own country. Unfortunately they are polluting other places (especially the ones popular for American tourist) and introduce this broken "mandatory 20-30% tipping" madness.
Every day I benefit from the labor of people who make less than most waiters, and I can't tip them. Either they're not physically present to be tipped or company policy prohibits them from accepting tips. I think it's fair to point out the absurdity that it's considered socially necessary to make additional payments to waitstaff and delivery drivers but not to dishwashers and package handlers.
I live in a place without a tipping culture and significant income inequality.
I really don't like the idea that service in a bar might be prioritised according to who gives the biggest tips. That seems like highlighting inequality to me. It would go down very badly here. A queue is a queue. Queues are fair.
ive never heard of servers or bartenders doing that. they are pretty good here about being fair to people.
Bartenders and other service-industry workers absolutely prioritize good tippers. I was a valet-parking attendant in my 20s, which allowed me to pay my way through college, and you’d better believe we gave better service to the regulars who threw us a $20 on the way in. If a large function breaks and two guests hand you their claim check, one with a $5 and one with nothing else, who do you think is getting their car first?
confession, I actually dont have a high opinion about college-age kids who do valet parking :) you're never going to have a system where people aren't doing what you describe, someone's always going to slip them a 20 or whatever. how do you stop that?
Talking here about bartenders with a crowded bar to handle. They tend to be a little more mature and I've never had issues with bigger tippers making it impossible for me to get served.
Buy a plane ticket. Plenty of other countries have the same structural inequality issues, and don't have a tipping culture.
Agreed the inequality is a problem. However making people who serve wealthy people the highest paid is a bad solution.
No. Workers should be paid a fair wage and all prices should be transparent. As well, different types of work deserve different types of pay. End of story.
Your "oh these poor, hopeless blue collar workers that desperately need our help" is just your own classism, looking down on them and making you feel better about yourself by thinking you're helping them survive, like small swimmer fish eating the leftover from the shark that you are.
Note the “for the moment” part in the comment you’re replying to. Until we have successfully voted in fair wages and robust enforcement, those workers are depending on tips to get by.