“Tipflation” may be causing backlash as more digital prompts ask for tips
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
And the tips at the end. Always begging and begging.
I sent them a message: no more custom from me until the buttons go. I gave them the link to an alternative source i found.
Still no reply.
In Europe I go to a supermarket, and if something has a 1€ price tag, I only need a 1€ coin. Every price includes VAT,unless the seller is B2B, since companies don't pay VAT. And in those cases, prices must indicate N€+VAT.
And the tips, that stupid model of calculating the percentage and stuff is new, copied from the US. At least in Spain it's common not to tip, or at most round to the next euro and "keep the change"
As a seller this absolutely sucks. Not saying it's a bad thing. It's not. But imagine you're a small business, and you price the croissants you've just spent hours making at €1 each and you know you'll only get €0.79 of that. It feels unfair. Especially since you'll end up paying even more tax after that too.
So I guess you could say the US method favors the seller, while the (mostly) rest of the world method favors the buyer.
Then price the croissant at €1.25 instead? The US method would still make the customer pay that amount; the only difference is whether the math is done once by the seller or every 10min by a new customer.
Lower advertised numbers (even if the out of pocket cost is the same) will likely result in more customers and sales.
Where I live, we go even further: if you offer a subscription with a binding period, you also have to write the minimum total amount to be paid by the customer before they can cancel the subscription.
This helps prevent customers into getting tricked into spending more money than they can really afford, which is a good thing?
Oh wait. That’s exactly how every small business in the world outside the US does it.
And small businesses in Europe are thriving far more than chain shop laden America.
And when those business owners come to the US they nearly gag at the ridiculous arbitrary pricing they see here.
The more authoritarian state isn't the one where police not only carry guns but shoot citizens with them on a daily basis ?
Instead it's the one where you only see the vat seperate out on your receipt, OK.
The GP is convinced that being lied to on a daily basis and by every commercial entity they interact with is FREEDOM.
Even though, as you point out, one can get the same FREEDOM without being lied to. But FREEDOM means whatever they have been told all their life is true and that they shouldn’t think for themselves at all.
People get paid a salary for their job. Seriously if that's not enough to survive just raise the wages by 15% and move on from tipping culture. But I heavily suspect that it's because of tax evasion.
As for raising wages... We've been trying to do that since 1993. There was a push in the '90s that wanted an increase from the $5 mark for federal minimum wage. There was an even larger movement called "Fifteen By Fifteen" which was designed around pushing the minimum wage up to $15 an hour by 2015 instead of the $7.25 it's been since 2009. Outside of the minimum wage, most hourly jobs in the U.S. have had their actual wages stagnate since 2011 when adjusted for inflation, if they've not outright decreased. Warehouse handling labour for example still only pays about $15 an hour national average, which when adjusted is actually less than it was in 2012 when it was $12 an hour. Working full time in that job without overtime ($15 an hour, 40 hour work weeks, 51 weeks a year) that's about $30,000 a year. For reference the average new car price nationwide is $48,000 a year (median $43,000), the average rent price for a two bedroom apartment is $1,900 a month as of May (median $1,600), and the average price of a house is $436,000 (median is the same although sources range from $420,000 to $480,000).
Non-specialist workers are kind of screwed over here in the States.
EDIT: Accidentally put rent as yearly instead of monthly.
Nothing. That's exactly what happens, especially once you get sent into the Finance Office.
It's directed at at the system that enables this. If I don't tip, I'm being an asshole to the worker. If I do, I'm enabling the system that lets them get by with less on schedule wages. I hate it. I don't have a problem paying a service fee for table service, etc. (would much prefer it just be included, taxes too) but, yeah, I can't buy a pack of gum in the US without a screen asking me if I want to tip.
No you're not. It's the employer being an asshole to the worker. Just because the asshole employer is begging you to volunteer to subsidize his labor expenses so that he can pay his workers less and less that doesn't make you obligated to and it ultimately hurts the workers anyway since what they really need are higher wages that aren't dependent on the whims (or wealth) of whoever happens to walk in, and the employer has no reason to provide that if customers agree to pay their employees for them.
I'll start paying tips for basic/retail transactions when companies start tipping me for being a good customer. I'd even be tempted to start carrying around an ipad and demanding that employees enter a tip for me on it, except that the employees have no control over the POS system their employer users and I don't want to waste my own time. Hopefully pressing the "No Tip" button every single time gets the message across.
With more places asking for tips I often see "I only tip if I am sitting down". Why? Because it's what people are used to. In time, this too will be normalized and people will one day tip at these places too like they do at restaurants.
And frankly, people should be tipping at other places if they tip at restaurants since all the same principles apply - your plumbers, doctors, etc. work hard too, so they deserve the compensation the same way waiters do. And before anybody says that waiters make less (which is not true in certain states and Canada where they make minimum wage), then just remove the exception for minimum wage instead of having tipping. And no you shouldn't continue to tip in the interm because the servers themselves have no incentive to switch since they make more under tipping - they don't care about making minimum wage so why would customers worry about it for them? The usual response to this is that we shouldn't push people down but pull people up, so let's do that, tip everybody and pull up those compensation numbers.
Food service workers are in a situation where, the expectation is self-service, and as such all of the service they provide, ie, the things you wouldn't do yourself, is exceptional and therefore it is necessary to communicate that additional value provided in the form of a tip.
The reason the mass deployment of unnecessary tipping prompts seems so consumer adverse to most people is that they do not have a well thought out idea of what is actually happening when they tip, and instead have to wrestle with guilt or tradition to make their decisions. When you understand the situation at hand, there is no such guilt and that allows you to see the mass deployment of tipping prompts for what they really are: a ploy to manipulate customers into subsidizing employee wages.
I’ve thought about it time and time again and the only justification I can identify for tipping is as a proxy for surge pricing. Maybe we just need to figure out how to price products based on business traffic. Do you price the empty hours higher because of the added value of privacy and exclusivity, or the busy ones to keep traffic manageable? The practice of “gratuity included for tables of 8 or more” seems to suggest the latter is a more natural business move, but there might be a place for the former as well…
Tipping should be illegal.
I would love to see a study on the difference in take-home wages between systems which are setup the same but have one with cheaper out-the-door offerings made through lower base wage and expected tip for the worker. I want to say I would expect the 'tip + lower pay' come out ahead of the 'set wage' on average, but I that may be me projecting my own actions onto others.
Soon, your local gas station's pump will ask you for a tip. USPS will drop an empty envelope for tips. When paying for a parking ticket, an extra line will be added for gratuity.
Do you not have a day job that can supplement your rent-seeking behaviour?
Honestly, this is berift with why tech should be as remote as possible; it is these kind of parasitic fake jobs become lucrative in HoL areas who exploit this feature of a crony-capitalist model, which is often referred to as late stage capitalism by the vocal misinformed: they fail to realize that this has been baked into the system all along--the very term landlord has overtones of a fiefdom based structure, wherein a monarch allows an initiated member of likely lower class/caaste to take care of there lands as a 'trade' and operate as an enforcer. Tips are just the new veiled bribe in order to get things done to your dwelling etc... this is as old as history itself and a subsequent component of Society and we should just be honest about it after millennia, because we clearly seem to want to keep it in place.
When these idiots start telling them to eat the 21st century of cake (insect protein?) is whem you know things are about to kick off, and the WEF has been a bit too vocal on this for some time.
While true, it is just veiled and normalized in 1st World nations and perhaps more pernicious due to severity; at least it's honest in the so called 3rd World as you mentioned which ironically makes it more tolerable to me.
I don't like it, but I'm also beyond the hope we can undo this until an immense reduction in population makes housing, and the maintenance that supports it, a post-scarcity commodity which I fear will likely never completely happen.
I have seen many food delivery workers (they are all contractors, of course) who brag about stealing food from bad tippers. I am not a bad tipper, and delivery drivers steal the drink from my order all the time. In fact they did it more often when I just ordered one drink; now I often order two, and I find that it comes in a carrier and they leave it alone. Perhaps it's a huge bother for them to wrestle one lonesome moist cup, and they'd rather keep it for themselves.
If I do decide that the driver caused some big problem or outright stole from the order, I will pursue customer service to reduce the tip to $0. They don't always understand that, so I have to spell it out. And yes, I do increase the tip when I find that exceptional service has been rendered.