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Comment by afthonos | Hacker News Reader

In the US, the tip is an expected part of the expense of eating out (and increasingly having any human in the loop). I hate it, and I really wish it wasn’t the case, but it pretty much is. If you say “I didn’t tip because the service was what I expected”, you’re pretty much considered an asshole.

(Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why the costs of eating out in the US and seem so much lower. Most people who come from non-tipping cultures don’t understand that Americans actually tend to pay significantly more than sticker price, especially after you include taxes, which are also often excluded).

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Relative numbers (e.g. 1% above or below an average) can ferry signals to both humans and data mining algorithms.

https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise

> Shannon wanted to measure the amount of information you could transmit via various media. There are many ways of sending messages: you could produce smoke signals, use Morse code, the telephone, or (in today's world) send an email. To treat them all on equal terms, Shannon decided to forget about exactly how each of these methods transmits a message and simply thought of them as ways of producing strings of symbols. How do you measure the information contained in such a string?

>If you say “I didn’t tip because the service was what I expected”, you’re pretty much considered an asshole

Sorry, this is definitely not the case. Many times the worker is doing exactly what is needed and nothing more (eg: pour a beer in a glass, handing me a pizza). Why would I be considered an asshole if I didn't tip? That is ridiculous.

As other people have said, tipping in the US has really become obnoxious. I definitely tip while seated for a meal, but asking for a tip to hand me a cup of coffee, pour a beer, etc only makes the system worse.

I 100% agree with your value judgement. Nevertheless, the social pressure exists.

The OP above you is guaranteed to have had their food spat in or otherwise tortured as punishment for not tipping.

Tipping isn't just a social thing, there are real physical punishments for not doing it!

  LLM, please create a techno-finance solution to this social problem, inspired by historical precedent for defending royalty and other high-value individuals against food poisoning.

> We can perform DNA and poison surveillance tests on delivered food. For statistical sampling, actual tips can be temporarily and randomly set to zero before delivery, which may or may not match the random deliveries that are chosen for screening. Positive test results will result in lifetime bans and proportionate penalty for system-wide discouragement of food tampering. An additional service fee will be imposed on every delivery to fund liability insurance for customer harm due to false negative results on tampered food delivery.

Non-technical solution: move to a location with high social trust, e.g. neighbors and workers know and support each other socially and economically.

>The OP above you is guaranteed to have had their food spat in or otherwise tortured as punishment for not tipping.

Wait, what??? Do you honestly believe the worker pours a cup of coffee in a to-go cup, hands it to me, checks the receipt for a tip, then grabs it back to spit in it? What kind of delusional thinking is this? How does the food delivery person even know the tip amount before the receipt? This kind of thinking is exactly why the system is so out of hand.

I feel like you’re making their point. If the “punishment“ for paying sticker price is you getting actually hurt, then it’s not a tip, it’s extortion. A social custom that the customary price of something is 30% more expensive than what the sticker says is unfortunate. A social custom of extortion is abominable.

Why does sitting down cause you to tip?

Why would employees in front of a counter be more deserving than employees behind a counter?

Or perhaps I should put it like: Why would a business need to pay a predictable market rate salary for employees behind the counter, but not for employees in front of the counter (because you step in and provide it instead)?

Because the person serving a beer at a bar simply poured me a beer. I walked up to the bar where I ordered from the menu. The level of interaction with staff = 1. Effort from staff = 1.

The the waiter/waitress had to come to my table, discuss the menu, provide feedback on questions, submitted order to kitchen, delivered order, checked back on us to see if we need anything else, etc. Level of interaction with staff > 1, level of effort from staff > 1. Tip appropriately if level of effort > 1 for helpfulness, politeness, attentiveness, etc. Stop making this so hard.

So how many hours is the walking waiter working in a day, and how many hours is the standing waiter working?

If anything it seems to me that it would be more logical to tip the person doing the more boring and repetitive work.

(My personal opinion is that tipping in general is a blight on a modern society and something that belong in primitive third-world economies. The way to fix this is via legislation: we simply make all forms of both receiving and giving tips illegal. It probably won't take much enforcement to quickly shift the social norms and economic practices once the wheels get rolling).

In my personal experience, the belief that “you should tip no matter what” is surprisingly pervasive. Anecdotally, I once had a situation where a restaurant completely dropped the ball—they brought me a cup of coffee, then never returned to take my order, even after I asked. After wasting my time, I had to leave and eat elsewhere. I didn’t leave a tip, yet many of my peers insisted I still should have. I disagree. The idea of tipping someone for poor service—especially when they’re clearly not even trying—is, frankly, sickening. If that makes me the a-hole in these situations, so be it—I’d rather be that than reward apathy.

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