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Comment by jbail | Hacker News Reader

Is it expected of you to tip when you aren't getting waiter/waitress service? When I get a burrito at Chipotle, I don't tip. I stand while ordering. I pay at a counter. When I'm finished eating, I bus my own table. These are the things I always assumed you were paying a server for when you tipped them.

When I order delivery, I always tip generously because somebody actually got in their car or bike and came to my house with food. That's extra effort in my book. Same goes for when I eat in and have a waiter or waitress waiting on me, refilling my water, etc.

Certainly $170 is a large grilled cheese order, but more generally, I'm asking if it's expected to tip when you are not getting service beyond having your food handed to you.

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I think that is part of the issue. Nobody really knows if you're supposed to tip at an artisanal grilled cheese food truck. If it was Chipotle you wouldn't tip. If it was a hot dog cart you wouldn't tip, but you also wouldn't ever order $170 worth of hot dogs. Do people tip for big orders at Shake Shack? If not, I'd say you don't tip at fancy food trucks, either.

It gets trickier here in the future because if the business is using Square and you pay with a card there's always a tip solicitation screen before the signature screen. This has caused the unintended effect of me always paying for my third wave coffee in cash.

On a semi-related note: I'd love to see studies about the effects Square has on tipping. My intuition says that it increases tipping but reduces overall CLV.

Agreed - I tip only if I'm actually getting service from a human beyond just the putting-together of my food.

Perhaps this is dysfunctional of me, but if you bug me about a tip, I'm definitely not leaving you one (that hasn't happened yet though).

That said, I don't think anybody deserves to lose their job over a tweet, given what happened here. However, if this guy's boss asked him to apologize and he refused (which sounds like it would have happened), then by all means, open fire.

Even at full service restaurants where tipping is expected, this wouldn't be appropriate practice to begin with.

I would immediately call up the restaurant and complain if their employee calls me out for not tipping enough.

I only tip when I'm served actually. Maybe this should be a poll? It sounds like what happened here was a food truck order.

I've had $100+ orders from Chick-filla before, but I don't think I need to leave a tip for those...

If food or drink is carried to anywhere that I am sitting, I tip, otherwise I don't (except perhaps coinage that I don't feel like carrying.)

The exception to this is that I tip bartenders when I am standing at the bar/counter. I attribute this to my looser attitude towards tipping while drinking, since I absolutely never tip baristas in otherwise identical situations. This sort of tipping isn't hard and fast for me though; one of the places I use to drink was a "pub" inside of a Wholefoods (the situation was constructed to get around state laws about selling beer. A building inside of a building with it's own cash registers, beer on tap, some seating and bar nuts, etc). You would walk to the walk-in fridge to get your own beer then walk it over to the counter to pay, so I never tipped there.

I think a good reason for this (since its pretty common practice) is unlike a barista, where you'll have a cup (or maybe two) tops during your entire interaction with him/her, you're gonna see that bartender many times over the course of a night. Factor in the fact that the competition for his attention is much fiercer than that of a barista's, and suddenly its quite rational to do everything in your power to make sure he remembers your face.

Excellent point, the two situations are actually quite dissimilar.

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