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- Hacker News
- Time to start the #NeverTipper movement!by rustcleaner
- In my state, and I suppose other areas of the US, it is a win-win for a business to institute tips-plus wages.
Firstly, the business is permitted to pay below minimum wage and play accounting games with "tip credits" and having the employees pool/share their tips in common. So, the business contributes less to those wages overall, and therefore can hire/keep more staff than it would, ordinarily, and run on a slimmer margin, when food service is generally not very profitable.
Second, the business can advertise lower prices! If tipping pays wages, and tips don't need inclusion in the menu prices, then your $5 hamburger isn't going to cost $5 at checkout, but if you're the owner, you still get to print $5 on the menus and put $5 burgers on your website.
At this point, customers are being shamed and goaded into tipping, because if we don't, we're the bad guy: we're the wage thieves; we're the rude customers who can't afford to eat but do it anyway.
It is a valid strategy to boycott/avoid businesses that mandate tipping unjustly, but ultimately, that seems to be another way you're hurting the workers trying to make a living, where that includes being forced to accept a job in a "mandatory tipping" industry.
- This reads to me (and pangram agrees) as almost entirely AI-written. I wonder if that matters anymore. Did someone express editorial judgment? Or did they just prompt “write column about tipping defaults, go”?
Anyway, the most egregious tip request I’ve ever seen was in a self-service airport kiosk. I chose my bag of nuts or whatever; no human even in the kiosk, completely unmonitored; I scanned and tapped my credit card and there it was — [15%] [18%] [20%]? So insulting.
by aaronharnly - At least in that case the card reader probably came configured that way, and why bother turning it off and refuse free money?
The most egregious I've seen was in the check out flow of a web store. Someone actually went to the effort to implement a tip nag at the end of check out, to ask for more money for a no-humans-present transaction.
by diggernet - IMHO, if I paid for something, and the only “service” was just handing me the thing I paid for, it was a transaction, not service. The bare minimum is to hand it to me, or put it on the counter, which is REQUIRED to not count as theft, so ya, like other comments mentioned, if I’m waited on and have someone meet my additional needs, (extra this, or sauce me that, or a double Lagavulin, neat of course) then that different.
Someone else mentioned dental hygienists, bus drivers, and now I think of teachers, mechanics, lawyers, etc, what ARE the rules of tipping? Cuz apparently it’s not really that cut and dry
by jon9544hn - I just wanna know how everyone thinks is acceptable to tip for a product that you did not even receive yet. How do I know if it’s even good? Can I take my tip back if it’s not?by Noaidi
- I don't think it's acceptable, and I don't tip if I pay before I eat. Ironically, I also don't adjust the amount I tip at sit-down restaurants based on how the service was. I refuse to allow tipping to expand beyond where it was customary when I was growing up. There should be less tipping, not more. It should be outlawed entirely.by Mindless2112
- My thought is that this doesn't shift the burden to those that can afford to pay (and choose to tip) it shifts the burden to many of those who (for a lack of a better way to put it) don't have the money but feel bad if they don't tip. Also I fully understand why businesses do this but it creates a negative feeling at the point of purchase in terms of rejecting and not tipping.by gist
- In Germany, it is not very common. Where I see it, I avoid the business.by chopin
- There is pretty much one way to stop this: stop patronizing carry-out and counter service establishments that throw a tip question into the checkout process. It's not enough to just elect zero tip. Stop giving them your money, period.
No problem tipping for good sit-down table service, or a good bartender at a bar. But at carry-out and self-service places, there's no service provided so nothing to earn a tip.
by SoftTalker - No service provided? Like, the line cook isn't juggling 8 orders in order to package your stuff and get it to you in a timely and accurate way? Agree that you don't really know how well they did until you open up your order, but I also disagree that the tip is based only on "good" service. The idiotic wage structure we have right now makes workerbees dependent on some level of tips.by nilram
- It's close to 100% of carry out/counter service establishments. This advice isn't practicable.by bobro
- A good way to bypass this (and increase your privacy) is to just pay cash. Then you don't interact with the screen at all and there isn't even any expectation of a tip. Funny how it changes.by jjav
- I was told, when growing up, that if they come to your table, take your order, bring your food—you tip.
Otherwise, negatory.
by JKCalhoun - A tip at McDonald's. Hello I ordered at the kiosk and just spoke literally one word to the young lady over there why am I tipping...by PearlRiver
- I suspect that the "service" distinction is no less arbitrary than tipping in general. It might not seem that an occupation has a service component until it vanishes. How can counter service go wrong? Famous last words. If tipping sets up a relationship between quality and pay, it could affect any job.
Who gets tipped is a matter of social custom, though each person is free to come up with their own criteria.
Disclosure: I earn tip income in my side job as a musician.
by analog31 - You can only vote with your feet if there’s somewhere else for you to walk. You may do the best you can avoiding all these places. But then you’re there at a local arena for a show. You take a beer out of the fridge and check out. The cashier takes your card and flips the screen towards you and the screen wants 25% on a $15 beer for the cashier’s labor of cracking the can (which they have to do anyway by policy).by teeray
- I have a problem tipping for anything now. If a tip is something someone expects, it's no longer a tip, it's a hidden charge, and I don't like it.by stavros
- Everyone -- including Fox -- seems to have missed the tax-avoidance game: Tips are deductible, wages are not. So one of the few employee and management mutual interests lies in short-circuiting a share of revenue directly from customer to employee, with no filtering through the IRS.
- Wait, what? This sounds important, but I can't quite parse it.by dogline
- In my view, a drawback of tipping is that it's impossible to predict how much a job actually pays. This makes it harder for workers to compete for higher wages by changing jobs. Thus it probably has the net effect of depressing overall earnings.
Not knowing how much people get paid probably also frustrates collective bargaining.
It also leaves the price / performance relationship up in the air for customers. They're tipping, but they don't know how the tips are being split. Between people tipping habitually, and not knowing where your tip is going, I'm not sure that "reward for good service" is a meaningful incentive. It may be as much a reward for quality management.
Disclosure: Both of my kids are tipped workers. They both receive a split of the tips depending on what job they're doing. I also receive cash tip income as a musician, but it's not my main job.
by analog31 - IMHO, more people need to grow a spine and never tip via a screen.
I never tip at my local Starbucks counter. They ask for it before any service has been rendered. That’s not how a tip is supposed to work. And who knows how the tips are getting to the workers.
I tip in cash after a service is rendered. If it’s on a screen there are renter seekers between you and the person who helped you.
- It's quite literally a spinelessness / empathy tax. The disparate spending probably will show up in demographic data eventually.by eudamoniac
- Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.
Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.
by adastra22 - And they put the highest tip button right over the "No tip" button. My hand once slipped and I gave a 40% tip to a barista who handed me a sandwich when I meant to give 0.
I hate tipping so much, I want to start a "no tipping" movement. Then hopefully the industry will figure out how to pay their people a living wage without making paying a game of social pressure for me.
by stavros - Yes I'm sure the businesses that are getting bonus money are very angry that their technology prohibits them from removing the feature asking for bonus money. The people you should be mad at are the technology companies who are forcing this extra money gathering opportunity on these poor, technologically illiterate business who absolutely do not want to get bonus money.by jhhh
- Maybe I am a chud but if I am driving to pick up my food and the cashier is just ringing me up, nobody's getting tipped and I have no problem hitting no tip.
- I don't find that to be a valid reason. After all, some low paid (but still decently skilled) workerbee prepared the food and packaged it up. When I tip, I'm tipping for both the food and the service. It's a crap shoot about whether it's the practice for the servers to tip the kitchen very well, but they usually tip them something.by nilram
- Been that way all along.by julianlam