What sort of mortgage activity involves asking for a tip? The article didn't really go into this, but I'm very curious.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 the pricing section of the brochure, there was an item described, completely un-ironically, as “compulsory gratuities”.
We need to get rid of tipping all together.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 do give generously to homeless though.
Additionally they wouldn't care is the % was standard.
From left to right: 15%, 18%, 20%. Leave it there and stop using dark patterns.
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!
Then they'd be incentivized to show the tip screen by default, and maybe jack up the default amount to 20-25%.
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
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.
* 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.
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.
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...)
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.
But credit card receipts show 18% off the price + tax, effectively 20-25%
Most don’t do the math, just pay.
It is much better to make direct donations to associations.
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?
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
But now since there's been no formal "end" to the pandemic, it's hard to say when/if you change that.
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.
"Is companies not paying a fair and living wage getting out of control?"
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?
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.
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.
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.
Surprisingly, bartenders told me they don’t get the tip at:
An MLB stadium
2 large outdoor LiveNation venues
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?
Can’t wait to see this prompt at the back atm!
But in other cases, I see the tip line and click Zero. It makes the math easy.
It's like 8 minutes to all the places that deliver here though, so it's worth picking it up to have it fresher.
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.
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...
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.
I didn’t expect tipping to follow the same rule.
Not in all states.
It's a system literally implemented because a large portion of society didn't want to pay black people wages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until that’s universal, tip generously anywhere you aren’t certain pays their works great wages. Good intentions don’t help anyone make rent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is incredibly naive, the employer is unlikely to pay the difference despite being liable.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Tipping is just a cultural thing, the welfare state doesn't have a lot to do with it.
Sanctimonious without good argument.
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.
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!
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.
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 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!
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.
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"
And this is fast casual where you don't even have a waiter.
Let me say again "a decent wage"
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 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..
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 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..
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.
So we can say that 15% was more than generous in 1996 according to the NY/LA TV writer set.
It's the stripe/square payment machines that started offering 18%, 20%, or other.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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]
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.
Do you tip every employee in every industry that might be making minimum wage?
note that restaurant workers in the US make less than minimum wage before tips in many cases.
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 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
Did I not provide a service?
You sound like someone who used to work as an employee who received tips.
None of that says that we shouldn't be trying to get both jobs to be more humane.
States like Alabama keep finding new ways to screw states like Washington.
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.
(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.
Aka, cash, or venmo
EDIT: seems like a limited program. But a more permanent one would be good
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/17/drivr-tips-last-mile-deliv...
So they don’t get tips on top of the minimum wage.
You could tip 10k, and they'd still be paid at least minimum wage by the employer
1: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
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.
2. Large jar labelled "TIPS", partially filled with money.
3. Check to sign with a tip line.
Happy to help!
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 :)
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, if they weren’t, that would be unprofessional from the FBI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me why I do all the cooking in my house.
I particularly detest sneaky 'charges' that are not embedded in the prices.
I'm not condoning it, just clarifying what strikes me as the central point.
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.
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.
Just advertise the actual price, dammit.
And keep tipping for "OMG, this person was wonderful" not "this is 90% of their income".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.)
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.
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?
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!
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?
It is funny how words change meanings depending on which meaning is better for the person who says it.
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.
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).
And this in turn, diminishes the whole thing. Can I _not_ pay for the false charm?
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.
Tipping has become a burden and nuisance for most Americans. We need a plan of action to remedy this.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
You a hater.
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.
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.
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.
Ballard Coffee Works, corner of Leary & Market.
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.
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.
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
New York City has a law preventing businesses from refusing cash because only accepting cards is discriminatory.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 would assume they make them do it via management, training, treating them well, and firing for non-compliance.
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?
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.
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."
Give your employees the same stress free and untransactional experience you are trying to provide to the customers.
> 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.
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.
One idea is to print qr codes on coffee cups: customers can scan those and leave anonymous feedback later.
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.
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.
This seems to go out of the way to fight tipping culture and seems to cause more confusion than necessary.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Most HN thing I've read all day. Sounds awesome.
Good luck!
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
Even in Europe I tip servers and bartenders. It just seems nice. I've never had one turn it down.
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
One is punitive, other one is rewarding.
There’s a lot more to something BEING clean than LOOKING clean.
I would not patronize your business.
You're part of the problem, not the solution.
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.
You're looking for Lines 15-17 in Part I of Form 990.
The information's trivially available, if you're concerned.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
(Shouldn't be tipping on tax, if you really want to send it to the IRS. :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
In particular, when it says your airline ticket is NNN€, you will pay than NNN€. No screwball fees up the wazoo.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/MEMO_1...
15/18/20 was in 2018
If they don't I do a custom $0 tip and tell the restaurant why I did it
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.
Quite fitting description. But since we are no feudal lords, I would also describe tipping as the daily power trip of the plebes.
The correct term is racket. Bribery is when you get something above normal.
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.
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
Really?! Which retail stores?
Big employers don’t do it as far as I know. Have seen it many times in convenience stores or small grocery
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.
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 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%.
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.
Of course, when he was between serving jobs, he was working at a doggy day care for $12 an hour.
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 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.
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.
Reinvest the savings and get rich off the stupidity of the system. Belligerence seems to be the only way to fix the system.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 )
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.
Restaurant prices generally ran behind inflation; that's why tipping percentages increased.
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.
It sucks but I just view it as an extra cost for using uber eats.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Restaurants are the place I'd associate most closely with tipping
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
So no, tips do not promote a better customer experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
And some restaurants are starting to implement a standard service fee, it’s more common at high end restaurants.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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!
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.
"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."
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 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.
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.
Whereas having the option to select a charitable donation, or passively ignore it, as a part of the normal checking out is fine.
The problem is when you put the donation at checkout to "improve" conversion.
This makes going cash free a pretty smart choice.
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.
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...
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.
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/
This should be illegal.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not Square doing this, it's the restaurant owner.
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.
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 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)
:)
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...
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'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.
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????
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.
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.
Edit: to give you credit, I think that may have been your point. I lost track of context in the thread.
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.
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).
But credit cards in the US are also like 3% and come with additional risks.
Kinda goes to show that it's not helping to display them like that.
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").
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.
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 )
it’s implied you’re tipping for them taking your order then making your smoothie
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...
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.
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.
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!
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’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)
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?)
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).
Do you tip everyone you interact with? How do you know who to tip? That sounds exhausting.
What evidence you have to back up this claim?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
A wealthy customer can be very price sensitive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.seattle.gov/laborstandards/ordinances/minimum-wa...
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.
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.
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.
Lol the simple mention, and not even favourably, of crypto in an extremely relevant context gets a DVote. It's like mentioning Joe Rogan.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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 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).
[0] https://www.cashmatters.org/blog/right-pay-cash-now-protecte...
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.
It's almost always a silicon valley bubble
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about by way of a bank transfer?
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'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.
“I am rich person. I will give you some money, service person. Now smile and appreciate my lordship.”—how it feels to tip.
Driver chased me into the lobby to give me the change.
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.
The best Christmas gifts were actual things - not an envelope with $60 in it.
She gives me the exact same gift.
We’re thinking we need to increase it because of inflation.
thank you for being reasonable and for having far more patience than I
So as a counter to that reputation pastors began to admonish folks to tip well, to show them the love of Jesus as 20%.
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?
People believe all sorts of weird thing about tax deductions (almost always _income_ deductions).
Interested to hear specifics if anyone knows!
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.
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90683033/the-post-office-is-fina...
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.
it's mostly around being interrupted mid sentence, in my experience (and it's certainly the thing that annoys me the most)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway that's not the cost, that's post everything so including tax.
You're protecting a deeply, fundamentally messed up system.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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's an odd industry where you perform a service, then hope your customer decides to pay you for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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) "
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!
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.
Not that you asked ;)
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.
The pros may still outweigh the cons, but it’s not all roses with cards.
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 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.
I mean by all means use your card everywhere but I think we should make a concerted effort to keep our options open.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
What you don't understand is that tipping became a thing because racist Americans didn't want to pay newly-freed black people properly.
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.
There is absolutely no reward for sticking with an employer in this industry, if another employer has a better offer it's goodbye.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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
At least it's a serious issue in Germany, especially for Indians whose passport is not accepted by many authentication services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Taking cash? It's illegal in NYC not to... Not sure how fringe that is.
"Quite a bit" is not the same as "to my satisfaction when traveling"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"It's gone forever without any recourse" certainly isn't exclusive to cash. And it can be expensive to even try.
How?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you believe that a majority of food workers are underpaid, then I, as well as market research, disagree with you.
What makes the US so special that we have to provide charity on top of the price of the meal.
Why does Japan do this differently? Japan is a different place.
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.
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.
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.
So we're back to tipping being just a way to artificially display lower prices on the menu and enjoy the psychological deception?
[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]
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.
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.
Why is that?
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.
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.
It doesn't work without javascript.
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
(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.)
I definitely would not trust my kids with someone willing to accept that deal.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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?
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 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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> ...then I, as well as market research...
Any what market research is that?
Here you go: https://www.eater.com/21398973/restaurant-no-tipping-movemen...
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.
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".
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.
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"
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds like the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
If it's less than 20%, well, that's just part of the job.
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.
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!
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.
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!!"
So maybe it's not really a three way relationship in any of these situations.
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.
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?)?
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.
It took the form of a tip jar. It was my main source of gas money when a barista.
The Pulp Fiction shake quote always comes to mind for me:
Vincent: "I gotta know what a five dollar shake tastes like"
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.
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.
This would earn you the reputation of being especially expensive, even if customers aren't actually paying you more.
Order, pay, pickup, done. No tip expected (though nobody stops you).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Not for a long time. It would likely fold within weeks.
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.
. 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.
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 ?”
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.
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.
I take this as local employees stating their entitlement to nickel and dime tourists as much as possible.
:(
dang being super chill by letting it be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
more realistically, unless they are capable of finding another job that will pay as much they’ll just end up earning less without tips.
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.)
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.
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.
That's the key point.
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.
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...
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.
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."
How is this detected by the state?
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.
the irony!
It is tax evasion, but it was commonplace.
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.
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.
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?
[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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Maybe they aren’t supposed to be tipped, as we never got the hang of it and blundered about trying to avoid causing offended.
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
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 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.
And yes, I can back this up: https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/01/p717_12-22...
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Not a legal expert, but that looks very much illegal.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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’m terrible with names, though.
In Argentina I revert to "chico"/"chica" but ...is that offensive? Hah.
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%.
It's the same as strippers. Better, because strippers often have to pay to dance.
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.
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.
All unpaid internships should have regular independent auditors because, as you say, interns are unlikely to report abuse of the law.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that it's not included on the label as the price I pay at the register.
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.