Apple’s Unionized Store Wants to Start Accepting Tips from Customers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
or you? the potential customer paying with a tip to the store's employee??
(Obviously you have to tip in restaurants to not be a monster, but everywhere else just don’t do it. And if you want to not tip waiters… the world needs monsters sometimes.)
Tipping is only considered socially obligatory for waitresses and this hasn't changed.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_tipsandgratuities.htm (which is returning NXDOMAIN right now for some reason)
The Federal DOL page says minimum wage for tipped workers in CA is currently $15.50.
After that I gave up and no longer tip. I also, interestingly, as a side effect, just stopped eating out.
I saw that the feds are trying to pass a junk fees law (primarily targeted at resort fees and the like). I fully support this legislation as well.
IMHO - people (companies/orgs) have become so greedy of recent, its interesting.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-urges-states-jo...
That's just... not intense social pressure. That's the least intense social pressure I can imagine.
Refusing to tip a waitress will very likely subject you to intense social pressure; your own friends and family will likely berate you for it on the spot. They'll tell you that you're an asshole and may refuse to eat with you in the future if you establish a pattern of refusing to tip waitresses. The waitress might even dox you on social media for it, and in the past before social media, they might chase you into the parking lot to loudly tell you that you're an asshole taking food from their children's mouths. The manager might chase you down to ask if something was wrong with the service, or tell you that you aren't welcome back.
Refusing to leave money in a tip jar is nothing like that, nobody says a thing. The most you'll ever get is a surly look from the person behind the counter and in all likelihood their poor attitude that day had nothing to do with you. They do work in retail after all, they have a hundred other reasons to be in a bad mood that have nothing to do with you. Follow the golden rule and be courteous to them, but don't let them walk all over you. If they glare at you, just take it in stride; they don't have American culture or customs on their side. Waitresses do.
My rule is to only ever tip with cash and only then directly into the hands of the worker. Tipping through a computer system is a scam, the business owner almost certainly takes most of it. If you're paying with a credit card, X out the tip field and leave cash instead.
And of course, never tip in cases where it isn't customary to tip. Waitresses, bartenders, barbers and taxi drivers. That's about it. Tipping into tip jars is never customary, don't do it. Never tip at a starbucks or a business where you get your own food at the counter. And you sure as hell should never tip a salesman, these Apple store workers have lost the plot.
If they were doing as you say, asking for something they're unlikely to get as a negotiation tactic, they should have asked for commissions. Salesmen getting commissions would be perceived as completely reasonable. It degrade the customer experience by making the salesmen pushier, but commission for salesmen is totally conventional while tips for salesmen is pants-on-head dumb and bizarre.
>In addition to an overall raise, representatives from the store are asking Apple for higher pay over a larger slate of holidays, including the day after Thanksgiving. The union is also seeking to expand vacation pay and available time off based on years of service. And it wants to extend paid bereavement leave from 10 days per occurrence to a maximum of 45 days a year and for the policy to include pets and close friends.
45 days a year for pet bereavement? If it includes goldfish, I'm in!
Every time this comes up on Reddit people in the food service industry say they do not want to get rid of tips.
Tax evasion*
Taxes are already progressive. You don't get to decide what you pay or don't pay, it's already incredibly little.
Yes, it might annoy customers, but I have a hard time buying the idea that people will go buy a Samsung phone because Apple stores ask for a tip.
I've seen online checkout pages for e-commerce stores asking for tips now. Not even for custom products or commissioned art or anything but just straight-up factory made products like motorcycle parts and electronic goods.
Personally I don’t regard it as such a severe affront. To me, modern payment flows are such a bloated mess of screens that I’m half surprised Apple Stores don’t already have a tipping screens. If it wasn’t tipping, it’d be an appeal to donate to the St. Jude’s Children Hospital or to the Ronald McDonald fund. When supermarkets and fast food joints have all of these extra payment screens, a tipping screen at an electronics retailer doesn’t trigger me any more intensely.
Is this right? No. But it’s the state of payments, and it’s easy enough to tune out. Just another way how every vendor is trying to squeeze every last drop from consumers.
(iphones can be purchased online, btw)
This is a bad read of this.
While 45 days is ... huge, the inclusion of pets and friends is almost certainly a result of companies who refuse to let anyone grieve when their friend dies.
As someone who has lost _way too many_ people in the last 18 months and only 1 of them being immediate family, having those others considered not worth mourning according to the company is just repulsive.
If some exceptional edge case comes where someone abuses the system for goldfish, that's worth the cost if I can grieve when my dog of 7 years or my best friend of 25 dies.
Such companies are few and far between, though. Very few. Very far between.
The judgement is not that the others are "not worth mourning", but rather that it's not worth having an employee who is going to spend a sufficiently substantial fraction of their overall tenure on bereavement leave, and at some point you have to tell them to either work or quit. Which is of course trivially true, eg. the goldfish case.
> But this tipping proposal is so antithetical to Apple’s customer-first retail experience that it feels like a joke, or that the union negotiators have never even been in an Apple Store.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/04/apple-store-mar...
"They might as well ask for employees to be allowed to vape while working."
Thank you for your understanding.
Tipping is out of control as it is, at least in the US. Where does it stop I have to wonder.
Lets just keep the fight about fair wages, benefits and working conditions first and foremost. This feels like its waiting for public backlash
Wanting tipping is a signal that pay is not high enough - you see it here, with the reactions. A deeper look might reveal they could be paid more. Just like Starbucks employees.
I knew a tattoo artist that owned his own shop and made well over six digits in a town where the average income is barely 30k and he would bitch all the time about “getting stiffed” on tips whenever he did tattoos.
I am utterly unshocked, as most service workers seem to view tipping culture as providing a free boost to wages - and if so, why should they not fight for this via a union?
You make substantially more than other jobs of the same skill level. I'm not talking edge cases like waffle house in rural Arkansas, if you work for tips somewhere where people are, you are going to be making a killing relative to other work.
This is why you get talking out of both sides of tipped workers mouths. Tips are perpetually terrible and not enough, while switching to regular hourly pay is a hard no. Of course these workers want tips, they probably envision getting tipped $200 for picking the $1000 iPhone off the shelf. Delusional.
I always tip very well because I empathize with and appreciate the services provided by people at this layer of the economy. However, I hate it. I found it demeaning that my salary as a waiter was dependent on fluffing up the customer and found it gross at best how compelled the girls were to flirt because of how much it inflated their tips. As a customer it adds a psychic burden--decisions suck. Now I have to do math and decide my level of generosity. Do I really need to tip Starbucks for the brewed coffee I just ordered? And so on.
I don't like this additional friction with every human interaction I have that involves commerce.
I have never been in an Apple store myself, I'm sure the people there work hard and that it's quite demanding (which is why I support their having a union). But I also hate tip culture and American society's constant requests for money. Every place you go has a tip jar out. Every retailer puts on price on the shelf and then adds on tax and fees at the register, so that I have to do pointless mental arithmetic as I shop (especially annoying for groceries where there are many different items and prices fluctuate frequently). Every political campaign asks people for cash with a frequency that would make a Nigerian scammer blush. Every large nonprofit seems to spend an increasingly large % of its intake on further fundraising.
I am not rich myself and I prioritize my charitable giving towards people I see that are in need but not asking for money. There's a lot of people who are not in desperate need (or sometimes in any great need at all, eg many political campaigns) and are constantly asking for money. This society disgusts me sometimes.
> The workers’ negotiators also want Apple to adopt a tipping system, letting patrons offer gratuities in increments of 3%, 5% or a custom amount for in-store credit-card transactions.
> “This will allow thankful patrons the ability to express gratitude for a job well done without any obligations,” the union wrote Apple. “All monies collected through this manner would be dispersed to members of the bargaining unit biweekly based on any hours worked.”
That’s it. The entirety of the rest of the article is not focused on tipping.
Ideally we need to move away from tipping. It’s like a hidden tax everyone needs to pay. They’re supposed to be union so they can negotiate a fair wage. I do not like this descent into the tipping space.
So in practice, building a tipping screen into the payment system is as seamless as Apple Pay and for most customers will not amount to anything more than perhaps a moment of self-doubt or embarrassment as they tap “Other amount > 0” before going to the next screen of the flow.
The anger in this thread does not match the reality of what will actually happen if this was to come to pass, which it probably won’t anyway.
The rest of the proposal is dog-bites-man, which isn't really news. This is so far out in left field that of course it is news. It may be a small piece of the proposal, and perhaps even a negotiating tactic, but it makes the union look unreasonable and impossibly out of touch.
So it seems like it would make sense to ask for things that the customer would actually like/be okay with, like basic higher pay, some sort of seniority structure maybe, etc.
I'd be surprised if the actual end-goal of the union was getting tips.
> Workers at Apple Inc.’s unionized store in Maryland are asking for higher pay and additional time off, along with changes that could affect the company’s tightly controlled retail experience, such as letting customers tip employees.
That right there is giving this as an example, and not as the actual thing they want. I'm wondering if the narrative on this might've been editorialized. It would be more reasonable to me if someone had mentioned this in a general brainstorming session, and it wasn't an actual explicit goal of the union.
"give me a pay raise, if you can't give it to me from your budget you could add tips"
>And it wants to extend paid bereavement leave from 10 days per occurrence to a maximum of 45 days a year and for the policy to include pets and close friends.
>Tipping
>Finally, the union is asking Apple to pay $1 an hour more to employees who become first-aid certified, and to provide as many as 34 weeks of severance pay in the event of a layoff.
I get the idea of asking for everything as a starting point, but some of these are just wow.
Tipping sounds like a bad idea for both the customer and the employees.
Good luck to the union workers in the rest of their negotiations.