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Comment by angry_octet | Hacker News Reader

This will hopefully go away as soon as the US moves away from antique payment systems with huge interchange fees. In other countries you just tap on the terminal to pay (either MC/VISA/Apple/local EFT system) and it completes in real time.

The idea that I would give my credit card digits (and CCV!) to a bartender for safe keeping is almost physically painful. I'm the one thinking they are the criminal (and not without justification given the rate of card fraud). I don't let restaurant servers walk away with my card now.

(And split bills should be automatic, they just don't do it because they get bigger tips that way.)

Where are the book stores that ask you to leave your bag? Except for teens maybe it seems weird.

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I've never had a problem with service staff splitting bills in America. I've heard it's a problem in Europe, but then again I've also heard that tipping is not commonplace there.

IME split bills are super easy in France/Italy/Switzerland, the waiter brings their EFT machine to the table and tap tap tap all done. An no, you don't tip in Europe, even spare change, but the quality of service is more dependent on labour market conditions and choice of restaurant (i.e. wages are very high in CH and staff are hard to come by).

Bill splitting is a major pain in Australia and I've done the whole yelp outrage thing after rude staff have refused to split the bill (when we said at the beginning!). I much prefer Denmark, where the bill is always split, and you have to take someone's bill to pay for them. See also: a year of living danishly https://www.amazon.co.uk/Year-Living-Danishly-Uncovering-Hap...

> An no, you don't tip in Europe, even spare change

Highly dependent on the region. In Germany and Austria [the only countries that I'm sure about :)], you're not as expected to tip as in the US for example, but it's still customary to do so.

If your service was bad, you don't tip. If it was okay, you may or may not tip a small amount. If it was great, yes, absolutely, you do tip.

> i.e. wages are very high in CH

That's probably because wages in CH are very high in general. Kind of evens out, seeing as the cost of living is equally high compared to most other countries in central Europe.

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