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?
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%
I would hope that businesses would rather have customers going away feeling good about an aboveboard transaction than feeling guilty or extorted.
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?
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.