UK hotels adding service charge to room rate
headforpoints.com
headforpoints.com
Of course he does, tipping cost them nothing.
Tipping is not supposed to be the norm nor is it supposed to cover people's living wages.
I would be happy to tip for people that go above the line of duty but I shouldn't be tipping every worker for doing their job nor should I be guilt-tripped into doing it, especially since I need the money as well.
Except they want to get bigger "tips" from shareholders by exploiting their workers and not paying them fairly so that they get better performance.
After moving back to Toronto (and now living in SF), my biggest beef at cafes and restaurants is with the Stripe/Square terminals that force the customer to decide whether to tip or not, requiring the user to interact with the screen. Just let me tap my phone/card and be done with it.
Raise prices 20% or do whatever you have to do so workers can be paid fairly. Don't make the purchasing UX worse by introducing decision fatigue or guilt.
Now, living in the US I got used to putting the tip on credit card bill or leaving as cash (rarely any more), which is a bit better since I have more control over the tip amount although I wish servers got better base pay and tips were smaller.
The Square terminal approach actually seems pretty good to me, I feel totally fine leaving a smaller or no tip for counter service or larger for Covid times, etc. Once you get used to the UI it takes 5s to enter custom tip.
Since the market for good employees is competitive, restaurants that replace tipping with a 20% service charge have more difficulty finding and retaining employees. Most of the restaurants that tried this here eventually abandoned it because employees were quite reasonably unhappy about the reduced income.
It is a fascinating example of the structural complexity of even relatively simple economic transactions.
The no tipping experiment became trendy several years back, with many restauranteurs converting their restaurants including at many of the restaurants I frequent. It was actually quite jarring because so many restaurants made the transition at around the same time. As a consumer, I simply adapted.
However it was quickly reversed because it produced poor results per the telling of both the restauranteurs and employees. At this point, it is experimentally "settled science" in Seattle; you'd be hard-pressed to convince people to try it again given how poorly it went last time.
The federal minimum wage for jobs with tips is $2.13 per hour.
If your employer arbitrarily reduced your income by 10% you'd complain too, and in this case the employer wasn't pocketing the difference because the difference was simply lost. It was basically lose/lose for the employer and employee. That's why it isn't popular.
This social dynamic of tipping 25+% is an expression of patronage for their favorite restaurants, no different than donating to the local museum. It isn't about the cost of the food per se. That said, this is probably more pronounced in regions that have a strong restaurant-centric culture like the Pacific Northwest.
I am sure there are winners and losers, but on the balance, paying a fair wage beats tipping.
Bumping up their pay by 50% and eliminating tips would be worse for them.
This seems right thing to me if customer know beforehand the cost of eating out.
I often receive these advertorials in mail about food festivals etc admonishing customers to be generous with restaurant pop-ups to add at least 20% tip and order extra food and drinks so that restaurants make money. It could be just me this thing pisses me off to stand in line for re-heated food and order extra stuff which I do not want for the privilege of not getting called cheapskate or not having someone spit in my food.
> Most of the restaurants that tried this here eventually abandoned it because employees were quite reasonably unhappy about the reduced income.
Gouging money from customer that they did not plan to spend does not seem ethical to me. I don't get how employee welfare becomes direct customer's responsibility instead of employers'.
I am not against tipping. I am against mandatory tipping. I know a hairdresser which costs me 17 EUR, and I know one which costs me 26,50 EUR. I tip the 17 EUR one 3 EUR, and the other one 0 EUR. Since COVID-19, the 17 EUR one has mandatory hair washing which is IMO bullshit. Now it costs 19 EUR. They get 1 EUR tip. The 26,50 EUR one does not require the mandatory hair washing which makes my preference for the cheaper one (its a slightly longer travel) less my preference.
Anyway, mandatory tipping is part of the final fee and should be processed as such (including taxes). Simple as that. It isn't my responsibility to care about all kind of service fees.
> Anyone who has travelled in Asia or the Middle East will be familiar with the concept of ‘++’ pricing. Any published rate you see for a hotel will come with ‘++’ after the price, meaning that you will also be subject to local taxes and a service charge. These are likely to add at least 20% to the total price.
So while there a prevailing "regulation is bad" attitude about stuff like this, it really does benefit both the customer AND business if all pricing is listed equivalently up-front. Which is to say: I hope the UK bans this too, and room-rates are again flat (with or without VAT).
I never understood why there was no backlash at the aggregators for disguising the true price of the product (or offering "comparison" of noncomparable products.
A service that accurately shows comparable, out the door prices is more useful than the one that says "$30 cheaper" only to find out after the fact there's $50 in missing services or hidden costs buried in it.
I wonder if there's anyone that accurately does it now: a flight search that lets you say "show me lowest fare inclusive of a checked bag an inflight meal" or "hotel prices including the various undisclosed fees and taxes."
Essentially companies are getting away with lying about their prices until after a purchase has been made. In an ideal free market, people can't lie just lie about their prices and get away with it because "everyone does it". So enforcing honesty on this particular point at least would be good of you like free markets.
Huge proponent of “the price you see is the price you pay”.
Has anyone tried this? My suspicion is that you either can't actually do this, or that the staff have been instructed to make this difficult. In that case, it would obvious that the fee isn't actually optional, and the regulators should be having a field day.
No I imagine they're extremely polite when you try to remove it - that way that get the charge from most people, and the few who actually care about 5% this way or that way will remove it and if you're polite to them you can try to avoid angering them while still getting it from the people who don't care.
The question is, are they smart?
in 2019 I met a young eastern European hotel worker who proudly showed me his British passport while telling me how he'd merely recorded six years of entry and exit documents for obtaining nationality despite having spent almost all his adult life in his home country in prison. I discovered this is tip of the iceberg for the failure of visa application and immigration systems in the UK, and I am thinking that post covid rehiring processes of laid off and furloughed staff is exposing significant numbers of unemployables.
edit : because obtaining furlough funds and other assistance is only possible in relation to individuals who have recourse to public funds and new UK nationals don't have automatic recourse to public funds and this will trigger a new hiring process and background check, as I understand it.
He may have been very lucky with his case worker, but this is definitely not the “tip of the iceberg” of anything.
You don’t need to be a British citizen to claim benefits or furlough money or public funds. An ILR or having worked for X months should suffice (assuming you can live in the UK on 150£ per week).
Kudos to those honorable people that do declare tips on their tax return though.
If you are somewhere that tracks your individual sales, you'll get hit with this.
To be fair, the rate is pretty low and so almost everyone will still have a large percentage of their tips go untaxed.
Sure, individuals often don’t pay tax on their tips, but blaming that on the government seems harsh.
I have left money on rare occasions when I left a mess that I wasn't able to clean up though.
I mean, maybe if I had the option of not paying it, but somehow I suspect I don't...
I will. And I will make sure I remember to add not only that charge, but extra faf in getting it removed, if I ever need to compare the price of that establishment with another in the future.
Assuming I don't find out about the extra charge ahead of time of course. I once chose between two endurance running events a week apart (i.e. not enough recovery time between to be able to safely do both) on the basis that the one I nearly picked tried to charge a “payment processing fee” at the last checkout stage that wasn't quoted anywhere else. I checked the other event, no hidden fee, they got my business. The only problem with this comes when everyone is doing it, when it becomes a race to the bottom like the budget airlines which I don't generally even consider dealing with these days.
> You just have to deal with the staff judging you,
I doubt the staff will judge me. They are not stupid, they know the business is trying to con me into thinking something is cheaper than it is. They know what it is like to be on the receiving end of a con.
The business (i.e. its management) may judge me. Fair's fair: I'll be judging them too as soon as I notice the attempted hidden charge.
> and a mandatory interrogation from a manager about why.
If it feels anything like an interrogation, said management will feel less comfortable than I. Of course, if they ask politely they'll have the situation explained politely. And in any case the time taken will be added to that “faf” consideration when deciding if I ever do business with the firm again.
Its also a race to the bottom: how much BS can I get away with squeezing the customer. "They do it, too" is just an equivalent of "they are getting away with it, too".
You get this kind of crap when there's no regulations or when they are not actively enforced.
[1] https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-jordan-harbinger-show/epis...
What next, a "cutlery" charge at a restaurant?