Implementing a policy (at, say, Starbucks) to add a prompt to every point-of-sale interaction to simply ask for more money is corporate panhandling.
I'll happily pay higher prices to support your staff.
I feel like the whole modern POS system customer UX is designed to make the act of not tipping feel so overt, miserly, and risky.
Well, they would see it on their screen anyway right?
Not all restaurant workers are rational agents.
Same with fudging credit card tips. I HEARD of that happening exactly once.
Both are overblown, almost urban legends.
It happened to me a couple years ago. Got a copy of the receipt where they wrote their own tip, which I could trivially prove since I had a picture of the receipt as I left it. The bar tried to blame it on a random customer. Yeah, OK. Informed everyone in the big group I was with that the place tries to steal from you and have never been back. You have now heard of that happening exactly twice.
There was a place (in Berkeley of course) where I was pretty sure that if the barista didn't like your tip, they'd boil the milk for you.
It seems to me that if someone takes your order and cooks hot door for you and a place you go to twice a week, it’s decent to tip at least occasionally. If staff knows your name and order and remembers details about you, but out always select no tip, that’s pretty anti-social.
To be fair, most fears people have are weird when you really examine them.
Ditto for tipping before you get in the cab. They could take you on a loop around the city, or drive you to a back alley and rape/rob you. You tip after you arrive.
Table service, taxi, and maybe bellboy schlepping heavy luggage to a hotel room -- and after the work is done.
Feels like punishing the wrong person, but it would be still interesting to test.
Has anyone managed to try tipping a negative amount (to fill a security curiosity )?
That's already the case. Tipped employees have to be paid the normal hourly minimize wage if their reduced wage plus tips doesn't equal out to minimum. This has been the law for decades.
This is already the case in California where minimum wage is $15.50 and many localities are higher. There is no exemption for tipped employees, regardless of how much in tips they may receive.
It's not about paying fair wages because as others have noted, takeout is being handled by the same people on the same wages. It can't be about taking the order, because again, takeout. Is it about bringing the food to the table? Because boxing up takeout orders or bringing them out of the kitchen feels pretty much the same to me. Is it about serving drinks? Well those are also in takeout/fast food/etc. Is it about asking how your meal is going? That doesn't have a direct equivalent, but is it worth tens of dollars to be asked how your meal is and reply "it's great thanks".
I'm only familiar with US tipping culture from the internet, the UK doesn't have the same, or I'm oblivious to it and don't tip. I've always found the tipping reasons a bit arbitrary though. I understand using table service as a condition in order to reduce the situations in which you're tipping, but it feels like the tipping needs to be connected to an explicit service, and yet from the above I feel like it isn't, so it's still arbitrary.
There’s also bussing the table and cleaning up afterwards.
Carrying plates is more work than carrying a takeout bag, but is carrying plates a few meters the thing that warrants tens of dollars? Hell to save $10 on a meal I'd happily collect it from the kitchen myself. Some places even do this with the little buzzers that go off.
It’s worth noting that the tip is distributed amongst people who serve, so at a $50 price point that probably includes whoever made/recommended your drink.
I also wouldn’t tip at buzzer places.
Counter help at starbucks or whatnot are paid normal wages, and don't need tips to make more than $2.50/hr
Which makes tipping even more infuriating, since why single out service staff when Amazon warehouse workers have worse jobs at the same basic pay? Raise the minimum wage to something livable, make prices transparent, and be done with tipping.
What's worse is where I live in Canada servers get paid the same but there's still this weird expectation to tip them.
That's because they are completely arbitrary.
The staff are the ones who benefit from tipping the most. That's why the Starbucks union demanded it. Tipping does help businesses as well, but it's because of price discrimination rather than "panhandling". So long as you're a customer, they don't care either way. If you're happy to pay higher prices that get passed to employees, you should be happy to give that money to them directly. If you feel that tipping degrades your customer experience, that's a perfectly justifiable reason not to tip. Pretending that you're sticking it to corporations by not tipping just comes off as childish.
I disagree. The problem with tipping isn't the money, it's the way that the money is demanded.
So why is paying them directly more objectionable? I get the objections of people who wouldn’t pay who now feel coerced, but if you would pay a higher price, isn’t it better to send the money directly to the staff?
It's just a bad system.
Just raise prices. Stop adding fees, pushing tipping, etc.
1) The kind of people who bitch about tipping actually just hate the expectation of it. They're the same people who bitch about the price of everything and how "no one wants to work" when there's a staffing shortage that inconveniences them. They want to keep things just the way they are so they can continue feeling rightously indignant for not tipping instead of admitting they just don't give a shit about labor.
2) Business owners love the system because it effectively means the customers who aren't jackasses subsidize the ones who are and they can pretend the cost of their product is lower than it actually is.
3) The US is a hellscape run by sociopaths that routinely and gleefully burns its people on the alter of mammon. Nearly everyone in a position to do anything about this situation is both 1 and 2.
I think that brush is too broad.
I would hope that businesses would rather have customers going away feeling good about an aboveboard transaction than feeling guilty or extorted.
I want to buy coffee, not take a mandatory personality test.
How is this a personality test? Just price in the tip exactly like you would for going out to a restaurant.
> Just price in the tip exactly like you would for going out to a restaurant.
You tip 20% at Starbucks window?
> they want to know the posted price, so that they can decide to buy or not
It's trivial to know the price of the coffee with tip: you just add one dollar. To make it sound like this is task is so difficult OP would sooner not buy a coffee seems disingenuous to me.
For your convenience, I've included the top two definitions of "disingenuous" below. I think the second one is particularly apt.
1. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating.
2. Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naïf.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=disingenuous&source=deskto...
Think of it in terms of privacy. Whether I can afford to pay $1 or $5 or $50 for a cup of coffee is none of your business. I don't care if I'm destitute or a serial Powerball winner.
Suppose you stood next to a Starbucks cash register. As each person reaches the front of the line, you announce "you look like the kind of person who can pay more," or "yikes, you can barely afford that lemon-twist chai, here let me press the no-tip button for you." Can you imagine how you are making those people feel? No customer wins in that scenario.
Yes, buying coffee should be "trivial." Now it's been elevated, by design, to a public shaming.
Heck, why not reclassify staff as independent contractors and charge them an hourly rate for the opportunity to interact with onsite customers? Now the local coffee shop is a two-sided marketplace!
- It creates an artificial friction between customer and service-worker. For example there's someone a couple of comments up worried their food might get tampered with if they don't tip right.
- It creates stress/negativity in an otherwise pleasant/fun transaction.
- It makes published prices misleading, since the actual price is baseline + tip%
If a position is classified as a tipped position the federal minimum wage is $2.13/hour. For a non-tipped position it is $7.25/hour. (Many states also have minimum wages but for the examples I'll assume a state where their minimum wages are not higher than the federal ones).
If the tipped employee does not receive $5.12/hour in tips (the difference between the non-tipped and tipped minimum wages) they employ has to pay the work the difference between $5.12/hour and the tips they got.
The effect of this is that it is as if the tipped employee was paid a base wage of $7.25/hour, and the employer gets the first $5.12/hour of tips left for the employee. Any tips above that $5.12/hour go to the employee.
Tipping on a POS system isn't paying them directly. Honestly, I have no idea if it even goes to the employee at all, instead of just into the company. With waitstaff I believe it does, because there's a long-standing system for that. With POS systems, who even knows?