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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

We need to at least normalize not tipping for counter service. Given the current wage structures and labor laws in the US and Canada, if I sit down at a table and I receive table service, I'm going to tip 15% unless the service was abhorrent.

I am not going to tip if I order and take my food from a counter and serve myself (and then almost certainly clear my own table as well), or I buy any other form of product standing up. Basically, if I'm standing for the entire customer service transaction, it's not tippable.

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And you are tipping before you even see the service in that case, as you pay before the food.

Of course, the staff also see how you tio before they prep your food...

Using the example of my local chipotle as a typical stand up and order and pay at counter arrangement, the food is made before I get to the POS terminal.

Is that really typical though? IME there are more places where you order and pay and then wait for your food to be made than there are places where your food gets put together while you are ordering and you pay afterwards.

I guess it depends? Subway, Chipotle, lots of other places (poke bowls?) you choose your stuff and the food is made and then you pay. Taco Time as a randomly chosen fast food example, you pay at the time you order and then someone in the kitchen (not the cashier) makes the food. Both seem common.

> Of course, the staff also see how you tio before they prep your food...

Lol. Yeah, that's where the game theory breaks down for me.

I'm all for not tipping people that don't interact with you directly until I start thinking about how the 17-year-old making my pizza feels about tipping on pick-up orders...

What are the Canadian labor laws you're referencing?

To my knowledge, the only province which still has the "liquor server" minimum wage is Quebec - everywhere else gets the same minimum wage as other workers.

To be clear, a server in Ontario is not legally allowed to be paid any less than $17.60/h _plus_ their tips.

One example would be that BC minimum wage does not pay anywhere near enough to live in Vancouver, it's culturally expected that servers in sit-down dining restaurants, bartenders and similar are still tipped. It's true that the servers don't make some ridiculously low "hourly wage" like tipped jobs in some US states but it's still not a lot.

Too late to edit my own comment but one obvious exception to the "don't tip if paying standing up" is of course at a bar. I'm not going to fail to tip my bartender. Very different thing than a POS terminal prompting me for a tip at Subway.

> We need to at least normalize not tipping for counter service

Most people get 4-5% credit card cash back at restaurants (Amex, Chase, Cap1).

I prefer getting 18-25% cash back by leaving $0.01 tip.

I leave 1¢ so they know I didn’t forget. It saves a lot of back and forth.

I don't know where you're from but on the north american west coast intentionally leaving a $0.01 tip is a "fuck you" message.

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