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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Yes but here in France where service is included and tipping is never compulsory (or expected), payment terminals are appearing where you need to select the tip before typing your code. This is usually shoved in your face by the waiter at touristy places, and they're watching you.

Don't fall for it though! Just select "no tip" or "0" like in this game and you're good.

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Exactly. Only by selecting 0 this will put pressure to get rid of it

I saw this in two restaurants already and I am pissed

It won't though. A screen on the card terminal is free - if just 1% of people misclick the button and pay a tip, the company still wins.

> A screen on the card terminal is free

... consulting companies developing the terminal entered the chat ...

(just kidding, I agree with you)

A restaurant is fundamentally selling an experience. These screens do not improve the experience. Therefore, they have some cost to the business. The question is whether the cost is recuperated.

Doesn't matter in touristy places though, because you don't rely on repeat customers.

This is no pressure. You can exert pressure by saying that you are cancelling the transaction because of the tipping screen and you'll eat somewhere else.

This is too late, at that stage you have already eaten. I am not sure if they appreciate if you give them the food back.

You could tell them that you are very happy to pay them the price they printed on the menu and that they can present you with a payment terminal charging exactly that price, but that you will not do that job for them. Basically make the waiter select the 0% option.

But in the end you'll only annoy the waiter and not the owner of the restaurant who is actually running the tipping scam.

At least in that case you can safely select a 0 tip. It's worse when you pay up front and have to worry about a lower than expected tip resulting in some kind of retribution from the staff.

Yeah that's not possible. When you're presented with the terminal the food is already in your system.

Or maybe you can be like our former Ministry of Culture, Jack Lang, who just resigned from a prestigious, if useless, post in the wake of the Epstein scandal. It was revealed that he never paid for anything in his 60+ years of public "service", always leaving restaurants, hotels, etc. without footing the bill.

For you and me, this would be called stealing and would eventually land us in jail. But if you're a minister in France it's called "living like a prince" and being "a little stingy".

I was extorted 15% tips in Paris in a restaurant with shitty food not too far away from the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, I didn't have roaming package at the time so I couldn't check that place's rating on Google Maps before ordering food. Turns out, there were lots of complaints about their service. In retrospective, I should have probably called police when they were actively insisting that 20% tips are mandatory and after like 5 minutes of arguing they "kindly" agreed to lower it to 15%.

You don't need a "roaming package": just buy an eSIM from one of many online services like AloSIM or Airalo.

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