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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> I feel betrayed that these laws are enacted without capping or preventing the practice of tipping

How exactly can they do that? Make it illegal for two people to exchange money? Tipping is a social phenomenon, and it isn't going away via laws.

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Everything humans do is a social phenomenon. That doesn't really mean anything.

You just ban asking for tips, leaving a space for a tip on receipt, etc. It's not hard.

Wouldn’t a blanket ban on “asking for tips” be an infringement on a person’s freedom of speech? It’s essentially just asking for some money, which surely anyone is free to do

Tell that to Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes and SBF. There are limits on what you can say to people and how you can exchange money.

Ha, those are fairy strong examples IMHO. A bit apples to oranges

The difference is temporal: tip is for a "past" already rendered product or service. Sbf, Holmes, et al, it's about a promise for "future" services, which have a risk associated of no delivery or render. When you've already eaten your burger there was no risk of uncertain delivery. The causal relationship is reversed

True generally, but it gets murkier all the time. Just last week I ate at a traditional restaurant that stated up front that there is a 15% service charge on all checks. This was in a city that has a very high minimum wage even for tipped employees. More traditionally, parties of a certain size at a restaurant always are charged a fixed gratuity.

Then there’re the square terminals that are normalizing up-front tipping for everything, not even just food service anymore. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has tipped up front for something and the service wound up being terrible. So there are three examples of tipping towards the future.

There’s another future component to tipping: in many places there is regulation that states if the tips don’t make up the prevailing normal minimum wage, the employer must pay the difference in salary. I’ve personally never seen this happen and I worked for tips for about 7 years.

It depends if you mean the individual asking, or if they're asking because of company policies.

We ban businesses from having signs that are too tall or too bright, from doing door to door soliciting, making phone calls without consent, and a pile of other behaviors that could all be labeled as "speech", but which people find extremely irritating.

It's a simple law: "price at the register cannot exceed the advertised price".

Price at the register is exactly the same as the advertised price.

Em.. no, the advertised price usually says "latte 4.50" but at the register it gets mysteriously padded with sales tax, tip tax, foo tax and bar tax, so you have to pay 6.50.

Nobody thinks anything is getting "padded" with sales tax other than Europeans who have never heard of the practice before and can't get over the fact that ~5% (the median US sales tax is 5.1%) wasn't disclosed as if that is making their breakfast unaffordable.

You're never required to tip so the "advertised price" and the price at the register are identical. You choosing to leave $2 on top of that doesn't change anything, even if it's only done through social pressure.

Silly attempt at shrugging off legitimate complaints notwithstanding, at least use an average sales tax when you do.

Now it just comes across as you saying that half the country is above 5%, which would’ve been a more honest statement as it seems considering few states however around 5% combined sales tax: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/2023-sales-tax-rate...

The average sales tax in the US is 5.1%.

Got a source for that?

My source shows that the combined average sales tax (i.e. state, county, city and municipal) comes down to 6.57%, 6.59% if you don’t count DC.

26 of them have an average combined sales tax of 7% or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity#/media/File:Restauran...

Which bit do you not understand? End point taxes are not ubiquitos, and at least other countires have decent laws so people can see what they actually pay.

Uhhh..

> > says "latte 4.50"

> > pay 6.50

> You're never required to tip so the "advertised price" and the price at the register are identical. You choosing to leave $2 on top of that doesn't change anything, even if it's only done through social pressure.

Taxes and tips aren't the same thing. Their $2 example is something you are required to pay.

Not in Seattle, they have a host of fees they add to the menu. That look like tips but aren’t

I'd love this! Not for tipping, but so that we can stop with this nonsense of not including sales tax in the price listed for things.

That could be tricky. When I live, a cold burrito in a refrigerator cabinet is considered to be groceries, and is untaxed. Heat up that burrito, and it's a taxable meal. Also, some non-profit organizations aren't taxed on purchases, so the sticker price is the final price for them.

You can't pre-calculate the final taxed price using the local tax algorithms as they are today. They number can't be known until the transaction takes place.

you can just list two prices for cold and hot

That would be OK in that specific instance. However, there are a lot of rules like that, and I just wanted to mention a couple.

In any case, I'm not saying that it can't be done, just that it may be a lot complicated than adding a fixed percentage to every price label.

if that is the case then the rules are too complicated and need simplifying. that is not automatically an argument to not have a rule to list the full price, but it could also be an argument to remove or change other rules that make things more complicated. the lawmakers here need to weigh the pros and cons for each.

While I agree, I suspect there’s little political will to overhaul the local sales tax system right now.

Europe manages it just fine

For a given class of goods Europe generally has one VAT rate for the whole country.

In the US the sales tax for a given in-person sale is the state sales tax, plus possibly county sales tax, city sales tax, and sometimes even special tax district sales tax.

For remote sales, it is similar except the tax is computed using the buyer's location rather than the seller's location.

If they can calculate the price at the tills, they can calculate the price for the labels on the shelves, or the price stickers

They can do that but that costs money so they never will. We worship the dollar like its a god above gods. No way we're going to willingly do something that costs the rich a dime more than absolutely necessary.

But they cannot calculate price on ads. Also, can you deduct VAT from your taxable income in Europe? Sales tax in the US is deductible.

VAT is deductible if the buyer is a VAT registered business. The amount of VAT is still printed on the receipt by law, so you can still know how much you pay.

Companies already manage seperate ads in the EU for language, currency and price discrimination reasons, it's really not a huge bother.

So customers cannot deduct VAT from their personal taxes... I also doubt that separate ads per township are common in EU. For example, in Los Angeles the city is made from several separate townships with different sales taxes, two shops on the same street may have different taxes because one can be in LA and another in Santa Monica.

Oh this is easy

Revoke the alcohol license if there are tip jars present, if its mentioned on receipts, the point of sale system, or if staff brings it up

Other discretionary things can be revoked too. Easements, performances, outdoor dining. This is entirely easy.

Have random audits to see how often payments match the receipts

Have a consumer protection agency launch random lawsuits and distribute funds to patrons

Encourage staff to mention that everyone is paid a full wage and have similar disclaimers on the menu and receipt, just like they put shellfish and undercooked disclaimers on the menu and in some places have to state it verbally

Create liability so that any private lawyer can try to sue everyone just like was done to create California’s cancer disclaimer, they can function alongside the consumer protection agency

Make it illegal for point of sale systems to push tipping for certain merchant codes, merchants have to snitch on the POS provider and vice versa when anyone questions why the system is guilt tripping them into a tip

Everyone is a node within a network, graph theory, you can control behavior by regulating the intermediary, the nodes will flip their behavior in a distributed fashion. Think about everything that way and you can find how to control all facets of life under any governance system.

When the town clerk is processing your building permit they can't ask for a tip. Well, they can and do in some cultures, with the understanding that you'll get better service! But it's illegal in the US.

So it's not too difficult to imagine that it can be done.

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