Just tell us the fucking price.
No fees. No tips. No taxes. No special assessments. I don’t care about your costs.
There’s a reason Americans hate buying cars and those that sell them.
No fees. No tips. No taxes. No special assessments. I don’t care about your costs.
There’s a reason Americans hate buying cars and those that sell them.
Whatever tip I give will be either too little and I'm guilty, or too much and I'm annoyed, or zero and I'm a monster.
It's exhausting. Just put a number on the sticker and let me either take it or leave it.
And tipping on the after tax amount too!
For a short time it succeeded for well known and established restaurants. Prominent restauranteur Danny Meyer signed all of his (mostly high-end) restaurants on. However while it worked at known entities that catered to very price insensitive customers and whose employment was considered a stepping stone, lesser known establishments couldn’t make it work. Employees left for jobs where they’d make more from big tippers and customers balked at higher service included prices.
The pandemic shattered pretty much all traction when even the most elite restaurants had an impossible time finding and retaining talent. In 2020 Meyer’s Union Square hospitality reversed their no tipping policy [0].
Long story short tipping is baking into US hospitality culture and very hard to change on a restaurant by restaurant basis.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/dining/danny-meyer-no-tip...
At least that's how it always goes for me, but the point is, the price you see for entrees in the U.S. is pretty much +$10. If the advertised prices were this high, I wager fewer people would be walking into restaurants.
The industry as a whole is probably interested in this systematic bait-and-switch, and to get from there to the real, "service included" prices would be too much of a shock to the system. The price of being served food is actually higher, and people need to get used to that.
If you think about it, it should really be illegal - it's a legalized way to fool people into becoming customers, but in the United States the interests of a business almost always come before the interests of the public. The only exceptions are extreme dangers to health and safety.
Generalized, I just add 30% to whatever I see. Sales tax is 8.something% here (and if it's food service, there's often a "Healthy SF" fee of a couple percent), so adding 30% ends up being roughly accurate, or even an over-estimate. I'd rather over-estimate and end up seeing a lower final bill than the opposite.
> it's a legalized way to fool people into becoming customers
Pretty much. People are calibrated to expect certain things at certain quality levels to cost a certain amount. If laws changed and businesses were required to report the final cost of everything on menus, price stickers, etc., that would likely -- at least for some amount of time -- cause patronage to drop. People would get sticker shock and pass on things they'd usually buy, even though the final prices are actually the same.
And of course few to no establishments will buck the trends and include all costs, because then -- at first glance, at least -- they'd appear more expensive than their competitors, even if they're the same.
You might go so far as to say Americans don't really buy cars; they buy the feeling of having gotten good deals on their cars.
I’m also the kind of person to negotiate on lots of other things too. You can definitely save money on random things if you ask. Subscriptions for phone/tv/internet, electronics, furniture. Maybe not at ikea, but at a more local showroom
Bought a bike on Craigslist for less, too. In fact, as far as I know, everyone prices things on Craigslist higher than they actually think the thing as worth. Because they know the buyer will offer them less than they post.
I’m a young millennial.
I'm a xennial, so a bit older than you. I continue to be skeptical that our arbitrary generations matter for all that much.
American hospitality taking a page from American healthcare.
* There’s always a middleman
* It is expected that you will be grifted as much as is legal
(Taxes are different. I wish those were required to be included in the posted price, but since they really are diverted to a separate entity, I understand how we arrived at the itemization. Don't get me started, though, on "regulatory fees" that are actually a business's claimed cost of complying with regulations, which somehow lets them bury it among the real taxes...)
What I don't understand is why they are going to larger tipping percentages. The only explanation I have is they are doing this to try and retain employees in a tougher market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_effects_on_suicide_ra...
I teach people to schedule their vacations for January-March, not the pleasant summer months.