Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request

In my view, a drawback of tipping is that it's impossible to predict how much a job actually pays. This makes it harder for workers to compete for higher wages by changing jobs. Thus it probably has the net effect of depressing overall earnings.

Not knowing how much people get paid probably also frustrates collective bargaining.

It also leaves the price / performance relationship up in the air for customers. They're tipping, but they don't know how the tips are being split. Between people tipping habitually, and not knowing where your tip is going, I'm not sure that "reward for good service" is a meaningful incentive. It may be as much a reward for quality management.

Disclosure: Both of my kids are tipped workers. They both receive a split of the tips depending on what job they're doing. I also receive cash tip income as a musician, but it's not my main job.

Maybe I am a chud but if I am driving to pick up my food and the cashier is just ringing me up, nobody's getting tipped and I have no problem hitting no tip.

Personally I make almost double the median wage in my HCOL small town. It’s hard to make it here, i know it. People are sleeping 3 to a studio. So it’s simple, I just choose not to be a miser and I hit yes on the lowest tip option for every purchase and never give it a second thought.

Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.

Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.

IMHO, more people need to grow a spine and never tip via a screen.

I never tip at my local Starbucks counter. They ask for it before any service has been rendered. That’s not how a tip is supposed to work. And who knows how the tips are getting to the workers.

I tip in cash after a service is rendered. If it’s on a screen there are renter seekers between you and the person who helped you.

Everyone -- including Fox -- seems to have missed the tax-avoidance game: Tips are deductible, wages are not. So one of the few employee and management mutual interests lies in short-circuiting a share of revenue directly from customer to employee, with no filtering through the IRS.

There is pretty much one way to stop this: stop patronizing carry-out and counter service establishments that throw a tip question into the checkout process. It's not enough to just elect zero tip. Stop giving them your money, period.

No problem tipping for good sit-down table service, or a good bartender at a bar. But at carry-out and self-service places, there's no service provided so nothing to earn a tip.

Time to start the #NeverTipper movement!

Tips are evil. They essentially treat service industry jobs as charity funded, destroy dining and other experiences by forcing the customer to become the manager and hide costs in a way that make the customer or the employee the bad guy and not the industry. But they won't go away without some sort of change in regulatory structure. I think there are two problems creating this in the US at least:

- We are conditioned to expect that the price listed is not the actual final price. If I see 1 euro as a price in Italy, I can hand them 1 euro and walk away. In the US if I see $1 as the price I could get a bill for??? 1.20? then tip? 1.40? Some random magic number I have no idea how it happened? The price listed should be the price paid. Period. Stop pretending taxes aren't part of the price.

- We have legislation that makes tips part of expected compensation. Minimum wage is different for servers. Get rid of any legislation like that. Every job should pay a living wage (including benefits) or shouldn't exist. If that were in place you would see a lot fewer places begging for tips since the cost of things would be higher to match the salaries they would need to pay. So right now if you don't tip you are actually taking away someone's paycheck and that is wrong on all levels.

Of course all of this is also part of the American psyche. We really like being lied to about price. Show us a lower number, even though we know it is fake and we will end up being charged way more by the time the transaction is done, and we will hop there. Take the taxes off the price and don't include the cost of labor on the listed price and we go 'Look! A bargain!'

This reads to me (and pangram agrees) as almost entirely AI-written. I wonder if that matters anymore. Did someone express editorial judgment? Or did they just prompt “write column about tipping defaults, go”?

Anyway, the most egregious tip request I’ve ever seen was in a self-service airport kiosk. I chose my bag of nuts or whatever; no human even in the kiosk, completely unmonitored; I scanned and tapped my credit card and there it was — [15%] [18%] [20%]? So insulting.

This what I do. I learnt this from one of the HackerNews comments months ago.

Tip the person if they do a direct service to you, which may involve touching your body. Barbers, massage therapists (all kinds, you know!), Facials, nails etc.

Also (as per another comment in this thread), no tip if we pay before we use the service (or food).

If it isn't any of the above, say "Thank you, I enjoyed your great service. But at this time, I don't have money to spare. How do I get past this screen?"

I just wanna know how everyone thinks is acceptable to tip for a product that you did not even receive yet. How do I know if it’s even good? Can I take my tip back if it’s not?

Just buy with cash. Then you don't even have to look at the machine.

My thought is that this doesn't shift the burden to those that can afford to pay (and choose to tip) it shifts the burden to many of those who (for a lack of a better way to put it) don't have the money but feel bad if they don't tip. Also I fully understand why businesses do this but it creates a negative feeling at the point of purchase in terms of rejecting and not tipping.

In my state, and I suppose other areas of the US, it is a win-win for a business to institute tips-plus wages.

Firstly, the business is permitted to pay below minimum wage and play accounting games with "tip credits" and having the employees pool/share their tips in common. So, the business contributes less to those wages overall, and therefore can hire/keep more staff than it would, ordinarily, and run on a slimmer margin, when food service is generally not very profitable.

Second, the business can advertise lower prices! If tipping pays wages, and tips don't need inclusion in the menu prices, then your $5 hamburger isn't going to cost $5 at checkout, but if you're the owner, you still get to print $5 on the menus and put $5 burgers on your website.

At this point, customers are being shamed and goaded into tipping, because if we don't, we're the bad guy: we're the wage thieves; we're the rude customers who can't afford to eat but do it anyway.

It is a valid strategy to boycott/avoid businesses that mandate tipping unjustly, but ultimately, that seems to be another way you're hurting the workers trying to make a living, where that includes being forced to accept a job in a "mandatory tipping" industry.

Shamelessly AI generated articles on the front page of a national news site (albeit not a very good one). What has this world come to

American sucks balls with this tip thingy, which has racist root in the first place. America is racist.

Americans are beggers because they don't have employee rights. Some people euphemistically call this "tipping culture"

I like the way the payment processing systems give an option to leave a tip. It makes tipping really easy. I always tip generously for any service-oriented purchase (mostly restaurants).