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Comment by ultimafan | Hacker News Reader

It's absurd too how it starts to creep it's way into businesses where you don't usually expect to give a tip. I got new tires and an alignment today at one of those chain tire shops and they asked for a tip at the end when I went to pay, starting at 15% minimum going up to 25%. Which is just nuts to me, isn't that what the (pretty hefty) labor charge is for? It just baffled me. I declined but by the peeved look on the guys face and the way he turned the screen to me and waited it was pretty obvious he expected something. I don't understand who the people are paying 50-150$ extra on top of the crazy rates mechanics already charge that are normalizing this.

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It became a thing during the pandemic. There was a very visible inequity, where the "essential" workers were making minimum wage while literally putting their lives on the line. A lot of people wanted to assuage their guilt about that.

Once that became a thing, yeah, a lot of other places took advantage of it. It wasn't hard to turn on the tipping feature on your payment processor, so they did -- even if the reasoning was much less clear.

And of course it's a ratchet. Nobody turns it off even as the pandemic normalizes.

The payment processor itself is also incentivized to default to having a tip, and to having it at higher default rates, since they're allowed to take a percentage cut of all tips too.

>And of course it's a ratchet. Nobody turns it off even as the pandemic normalizes.

I guess as long as even some small portion of the population always tips when the option is presented- they don't really have an incentive to turn it off. Like rejecting free money when your competitors aren't. I think for any reasonable attempt to stop these kinds of practices it really has to be stigmatized on the cultural level for people to feel some revulsion when asked for a tip in an inappropriate situation. If there was no option on the processor they'd probably just leave out a tip jar or continue to ask for it in an awkward and roundabout way ie hanging around waiting for you to get some cash out after the transaction is complete.

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