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Comment by bootlooped | Hacker News Reader

I dislike the tip-at-purchase-time paradigm. I haven't even seen my order yet, how am I supposed to evaluate how much of a tip it warranted? But that gets to the heart of it really: tipping is more about subsidizing payroll than rewarding good service.

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DoorDash does this as well, and I don't understand why. Why should I commit to a tip before my order is delivered? At one occasion the delivery guy completely forgot about my delivery until I called 1 hour later saying I still see the food waiting at the restaurant. I still had to pay the tip.

This is the heart of it for me. If I tip cash, even if the tip jar is next to the register I always make a point of going back to tip at the end of my drink / food if the experience was good. A digital version should be some kind of contactless payment point at the door where you can easily set a tip amount and tap your phone / card.

Or just adjust your payment after the fact, like Uber and Lyft. It would be pretty easy for Square to implement this.

Since we're talking about coffee shops: the Starbucks app allows to add a tip for a certain period of time after a a mobile order (something like an hour)

Do you use Square every day? The last time I went somewhere with specifically a Square reader was probably two weeks ago. Even if I went back tomorrow, am I going to remember my last experience enough to judge a tip?

Even if I go to the same coffee shop and use the same Square every morning, unless I'm holding a grudge it's de facto back to front end tipping rather than upon services rendered.

> I dislike the tip-at-purchase-time paradigm.

The tip at purchase time paradigm is in many cases an artifact of integrating credit card workflows with cash businesses with established pay up front and tip after workflows (fast casual dining, etc.) If you are against it and not against tipping, just bring cash for tipping and tip on the back end.

Tipping on a digital device (iPad register) also doesn't make sense because the tip money is going straight to the bank account the owner connected to the point of sale software.

It goes to the workers though. Are you claiming that the owners are not distributing them back?

Are they? Why do you expect they do?

All the servers I know seem to expect credit card tips to eventually appear on their paycheck.

>Why do you expect they do?

Because they almost always do and it's illegal for the owners to keep it?

Not the parent but: I would imply exactly such a thing. Just like how, in some/most states you are supposed to pay a tipped employee minimum wage if they don't make the equivalent in tips. As far as I can tell from having worked in food service: that payout never happens.

I was a waiter for years. I personally never made under min, but I knew people who did. They got paid. I also got paid every cent of every cc tip. What are you basing this on?

worked BOH for years, had friends in FOH of many small restaurants and bars for years. Saw all sorts of shady stuff.

Sure, and murder is still a thing even though we have laws against it. All laws are broken by some people, but the matter at hand isn't "does this ever happen?", it's "does this happen so often as to constitute a massive and consistent pattern of wage theft?"

From another comment:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-w...

https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-r...

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-p...

https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-ste...

I owned two Domino's pizzas for 15 years. I paid every cent in credit card tips to the employee, and never passed along the transaction fees. There were routinely thousands in tips weekly and I never even thought of keeping any of it. I started at the store answering the phones and did years of delivering. I understand tip money is the difference between eating and going hungry.

What you've described is a state crime, a federal crime, and a violation of several different state and federal labor laws. Easily a dime worth of prison time, plus criminal fines, plus civil penalties, plus having to pay out the stolen tips to your employees with treble damages for the intentional tort you've comitted.

Not really worth it. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but the calculus is so bad that it's extremely rare to happen at scale. Especially if there's a digital trail run by a third party...

It happens all the time. Connie Schultz won a Pulitzer for writing about this, among other things: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/connie-schultz

I can understand why you might think it never happens if you are completely ignorant of the facts on the ground but nevertheless familiar with the criminal and civil sanctions involved. It's about lack of enforcement.

I see a short article about a few dinner parties this author attended wherein the owners were keeping the tip. Am I missing the real data here? Is the real story somewhere else? That's a far cry from "this happens _all_ the time."

Weird how the proof that owners are pocketing credit card tips is a story about someone stealing cash from the tip jar.

It has been years since I read her series of articles on the topic of tipping, although I remember it being influential at the time. It's possible I linked to the wrong thing, but in my defense I didn't realize that my post would be required to rise to the level of mathematical proof. Ahem.

data not being the plural of anecodte and all and Not the exact issue but: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/restaurant-chains-hit-w...

https://www.phillyemploymentlawyer.com/wage-theft-epidemic-r...

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

https://www.restaurant-hospitality.com/legal/la-restaurant-p...

https://www.eater.com/2018/9/25/17886990/how-restaurants-ste...

Obviously, none of these are scientific studies but I don't know if there are any done in the industry.

What I'm trying to point out is: Wage theft of all types happens all the time and I've known people too poor to risk losing their job who suffered under this issue. I'm sure it doesn't happen often -at scale-, in chain restaurants with big corporate backing but in an industry where most close after their first year and the workers are frequently undocumented or transient. It happens.

When the employers multiply these consequences by the (extremely low) probability of a legal claim, they may just decide that it's worth it to pocket the tips...

This is my personal experience from having worked in a restaurant when I was 17: the owner would "pool" the total tips for the night and then distribute them to the workers before we went home. The owner said pooling would keep the tips distribution "fair" because some workers wouldn't get a chance to wait tables if they had to handle takeouts behind the register for most of a shift.

However, pretty quickly us workers discovered the math wasn't adding up. We would pool $300 of tips for the night and only have $200 equally distributed to us. When we asked the owner, he would say something like "you must have added wrong" or "the receipts only show $200", which was bullshit. After that happened, us workers made it a point to always make up an excuse to the customers why we couldn't handle electronic tips, and then immediately pocket the cash tips and split them ourselves.

Fortunately, most of us left before the owner caught on to the point of becoming confrontational (it was a short job before university). Moral of the story is some guy in his mid-40s, who made enough money to drive a BMW, felt that he could deceive some young kids because he had the chance. In hindsight, now I know more about things like labor laws and enforcement hotlines, but at the time most of us were also being paid under the table (which we didn't even understand because this was our first real job) and were scared of having to face the IRS and lose the money we made.

That was the first thing I asked the barista once I became a regular and tipped Them: do you actually get these tips? She reassured me they did.

What bothers me is the ACH networks still get their cut of the tip (assuming they get a percentage of sale and not a flat rate). No visa, you don't need 5% of the waitress hard work.

If it makes you feel better, you paid Visa not the waitress. You just subtracted that amount from what you left the waitress.

You could choose to ditch the credit cards and just go cash only. Of course, you'd have to deal with your customers spending significantly less money. Plus you'd have to deal with the extra security costs of collecting, storing, and moving that money to the bank.

The reason that vendors accept credit cards is because it's usually worth the additional costs. If you don't think your credit card processor is worth the cost, try dropping them and seeing how it affects your sales. In some instances, vendors have dropped processors entirely (like Amex and Discover) without noticeably impacting their bottom line.

I love it. No awkwardness of a zero tip after being served. Anyway there are very few places I've seen with that where there isn't also a tip jar. If you indeed felt the service was tip-worthy you can drop a tip in the jar on the way out.

I don't understand why people (buyers) are so thin-skinned about this. Leave a tip or don't. Whatever.

Even if the tip were scheduled differently, how often do you find yourself adjusting tip in an attempt to adjust service?

If you get good service, will good tip ensure a good experience the next time around? If someone gave you bad service, do you make it known? I think most would prefer not to say anything.

Yeah, admittedly, I almost never adjust my tip amount based on perceived service quality. I don't think tipping generally affect service quality. The only way I really react to bad service is by not going to the establishment.

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