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Comment by adam_arthur | Hacker News Reader

Given that even retail stores have added tipping prompts to their checkouts, I'd say yes.

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.

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Tipping at best is a form of bribery and at worst a feudal practice of wealth transfer. I tip because it is the social norm (and bribery: don't want my food messed with), but I think we can also acknowledge that this practice is weird and has a shaky history.

> don't want my food messed with

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.

You don't bribe someone because you think they deserve a bribe. That's not a bribe, it's a gift.

And a tip isn't a bribe. Thinking tipping someone so they don't sabotage the job they are already being paid to do is, to use the article's words "getting out of hand".

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.

What op described in this thread "I tip because it is the social norm (and bribery: don't want my food messed with)" is an unambiguous bribe.

I ought to clarify: I meant that waiters don't deserve their wages and don't deserve to work if they think that spoiling customers' food is an acceptable reaction to a low/nonexistent tip.

Sure, but that's not a principle I'm willing to eat snotchos for. Paying the bribe is the rational choice, even if the vast majority of recipients would never dream of messing with your food.

It’s frustrating as a Brit as it is actually illegal for me to pay the bribe (pay the money to ensure my food isn’t spat in).

>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.

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.

I think tipping at its very best is an opportunity to give a stranger a small gift. I recognize your points -- sometimes it feels like an obligated payment and probably in nearly all cases the capital owning class could and/or should contribute more, but i think you're excluding some optional perspectives. Sometimes I just want to help someone have a nice day by giving them something they didn't expect, like a generous tip. The escalation of niceness and virtue signalling seems right now to be creating an expectation of that generosity, which undermines it, since it can feel non-optional, but sometimes it's still just a nice thing one human can do to recognize another human.

Why so you give preferential treatment to those specific jobs?

how on earth is this, a back-breakingly empathetic comment, being downvoted

thank you for being reasonable and for having far more patience than I

Cash is a terrible gift. It shows you don't care.

The best Christmas gifts were actual things - not an envelope with $60 in it.

But this isn't christmas ... ?

I give my wife €1 million every Christmas.

She gives me the exact same gift.

We’re thinking we need to increase it because of inflation.

Perhaps, but it can show you care that the person get what they actually want instead of another item for the landfill or something they feel obligated to keep around for when you visit.

Disagree hard. I’ve been given so many garbage gifts that I immediately threw away or donated. I tell my family members to just do cash or gift cards for me. I’d rather get exactly what I need than some junk I’ll never use.

Having been living in the Netherlands, it now feels so patronizing to tip. Like,

“I am rich person. I will give you some money, service person. Now smile and appreciate my lordship.”—how it feels to tip.

I was in a taxi many years ago in Beijing. Meter said something like 16, I gave 20 and left.

Driver chased me into the lobby to give me the change.

I was in a KTV place in Shanghai several years ago and decided to tip the guy who was doing an excellent job at keeping our little room very well stocked with ice cold beer. I think I gave the guy like 100 RMB. A little later I had to explain to his manager what the money was for...

That would certainly look like a bribe

“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.

>I think tipping at its very best is an opportunity to give a stranger a small gift.

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.

(and bribery: don't want my food messed with)

The correct term is racket. Bribery is when you get something above normal.

> a feudal practice of wealth transfer

Quite fitting description. But since we are no feudal lords, I would also describe tipping as the daily power trip of the plebes.

> Plus many restaurants with placeholder tip icons that start at 25%+

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.

Inflating restaurant price + inflating tip + tax are on the trend to make US restaurants the most expensive restaurants on earth. A simple Caesar salad is now starting at 16$ and more likely 20$ in a lot of "not that fancy" places. When you add tax and 30% tip, it almost 28$. This is almost or even more expensive than in Switzerland where you waiter earn at least 26$ per hour, and tipping is not expected. Tipping are just here to profit business owner and not the workers (that’s why it’s almost inexistant in socialist country), and don’t get me started on the business adding "don’t forget to pay your staff" on your check.

No, tipping is in general a system that shifts some of the employer's costs to customers explicitly, rather than hiding them in prices and wages. It's an idiosyncratic system, but not an irrational one: wages and prices are stickier than tip levels.

Not explicit at all if it's optional though is it?

I don't see what optionality has to do with anything.

> tipping is in general a system that shifts some of the employer's costs to customers explicitly

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.

Sure they do. It's 15-25% of the cost.

Are you just referring to the default options? Am I the only one who always just goes for custom, 0%?

Anyway that's not the cost, that's post everything so including tax.

Yes, thus higher tippers subsidize lower tippers by reducing the list price of goods.

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

Which is generally what you want: for less price-sensitive customers to subsidize the more price-sensitive customers; see: any demand curve chart.

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.

Tipping is not about price sensitivity.

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

Price sensitivity refers to how much the price of a good impacts someone’s willingness to buy it, not how wealthy they are.

A wealthy customer can be very price sensitive.

Tip size probably correlates with price insensitivity, but since it's completely voluntary, it also correlates with prosociality: prosocial people are paying to subsidize antisocial people.

All costs are borne by the customer because the employer, i.e. business owner, is charging the customer -- or they go out of business, which rarely helps the customer or the employee.

It makes is so that actual price of the product is different then the one on the sticker. It is manipulative pricing.

Not only that, but then they want to donate to some charity. Roundup for charity? (sometimes they don't even bother to tell you what charity it is) Roundup, Red-Nose day, etc. etc.

> Given that even retail stores have added tipping prompts to their checkouts

Really?! Which retail stores?

Any store can enable tipping on the POS devices. Many stores that used to not traditionally operate off of tips have added the option.

Big employers don’t do it as far as I know. Have seen it many times in convenience stores or small grocery

Few weeks ago facing the tip selection screen at a liquor store here in LA, it clicked for me that this tipping thing has gone too far.

haha you have to tip us for the privilege of fetching your six pack out of our fridge : )

Likely not what the op meant, but food trucks and artist markets (square's bread and butter)

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.

I noticed the expected tipping percentage go up after most customers started tipping in credit.

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.

Do workers usually get a say in what those tip levels should be? I can't imagine that being the case.

I don't know all the mechanisms behind how it happened. I expect indirectly yes, as employees choose to work where they are paid highest (if possible) and employers putting the pre-calculated percentages on the receipt / point of sale that match those desires influence tips. You have to keep up with employee expectation to keep and retain employees and setting those expectation at the point of sale as a voluntary option is an easy win.

I've always done 20% because it's easy to do in my head. Nowadays it's a low tip for those tip prompts and I punch it in manually if I tip at all.

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%.

Yeah I did food delivery and a sizeable amount didn't tip at all. It also created huge problems picking up food because many of the places people ordered from were full service restaurants, and the workers would purposefully go slow as fuck because they knew they would get no tip as most the food delivery companies don't provision for a tip to the restaraunt people preparing the food for the food delivery guy. A few times I had to take a loss on orders to tip the restaurant I was picking the food up from just to get them to release the food.

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.

Get a delivery job for the restaurant and none of this happens.

> When I delivered food

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.

See my below post. The issue is the delivery driver has to pick up the order from a full service restaurant much of the time. The full service restaurant workers will blackball the delivery driver if he doesn't tip them, and that happens proportionally to the cost of the food. After 2-3 times the delivery driver not tipping the restaraunt at the food he's picking up, he will be waiting forever until his customers cancel.

Yeah, it's certainly an unfortunate situation all around - mostly for the restaurant staff who are dependent on the tips - but probably doesn't change much from the consumer's point of view. FWIW I've not had significant problems with delivery. I think a lot of restaurants have gotten used to "the new normal", though to be fair the majority of meals I've had delivered have been mediocre, sometimes cold.

As any hourly worker waiting forever is a nice break from having to actually deliver food. Bonus if the orders are cancelled. Fault never makes it to driver.

I was working as a contract worker through postmates. I was not paid by the hour and earned nothing if the customer cancelled.

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.

> The full service restaurant workers will blackball the delivery driver if he doesn't tip them

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 issue is the waitstaff that prepare takeout at some restaurants are "tipped" service workers.

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.

This sounds like straight up employee misclassification and wage theft that should be taken up with state regulators. Surely a fast food place like McDonalds can't just put a tip jar on the counter, play coy that their workers are tipped positions, and underpay their employees. So it's a matter of enforcement on the smaller outfits that are able to fly under the radar.

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.

The law has always included consideration for this loophole. Every employee must at least average state minimum wage for their 80-hour paychecks, including tips.

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.

Good point, I had forgotten about that. It seems like the real issue in this case is that minimum wage isn't really much of a guarantee. Waiters are expecting to make much more than minimum wage, but got pushed into a different role that unilaterally altered their wage.

What the businesses I saw this at did was the waitstaff worked the tables part the time and prepped take out orders part the time. So in effect delivery workers were stealing time they could use to wait tables or directly serve a takeout customer that would usually tip them something. It wasn't that they had staff just for takeout that wasn't getting paid regular wage.

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.

How much are they being asked to do? The rule is 20% of their time max or they're supposed to get normal minimum wage.

If it's less than 20%, well, that's just part of the job.

There was a class action suit regarding servers not being paid a full wage while being made to roll up silverware and napkins and other tasks like that where they were on the clock but not able to earn tips. My wife worked at Applebees and got a couple bucks out of this lawsuit.

This sounds like the same thing.

> Have things seriously gotten this bad, that restaurant workers are shaking down delivery drivers for extra cash? So much for solidarity with fellow workers.

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.

Minimum wage is feudalism again though. You're outlawing the jobs of those who create less than minimum wage in value, thus relegating them to the black market and/or less employment. It separates the wage workers and benefits some of the poor at the expense of the even more poor.

> Minimum wage is feudalism again though.

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.

You said tips were akin to feudalism.

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.

I’m having trouble believing this. You’re saying restaurant workers are expecting tips from the delivery drivers coming to their restaurant for pickup? I’ve only ever seen drivers show up, confirm their identity and orders to the restaurant workers via an app, take the food, and leave.

> It's fairly reasonable in this case to tip in proportion to the total bill.

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.

I honestly don't know, but do you think the $200/plate restaurant spreads your tips among more people? I would imagine their ratio of tipped workers to patrons would be higher than most restaurants.

I'm sure this varies so I came to this same scenario at a high end sushi restaraunt where there is a waitress, a sushi chef, a non-sushi cheff, hostess, bartender etc and every single one of those people are working on your dinner (closer to $100 per person, but still).

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.

$200/plate restaurants are weird and I'm not going to use them to decide anything about how I tip.

When I was a kid, Emily Post said always tip 10%. In college, the buzz around campus was that 15% was what the proletariat deserved. The past decade or so, I keep hearing you need to give 20% if you don't want to make enemies of the servers. Now, are you telling me it's become 25%?

I had this debate with a server once. She exclaimed ! You have to increase the tip, don't you know about inflation.

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.

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