The one person in America happy about tipping fatigue

I worked for tips for many years before one of my regulars helped me with getting into tech (yes I was very lucky). One aspect of this issue that doesn't get talked about a lot is that there is a portion of workers (think bartenders or servers) who work for tips that prefer that system because you can make a LOT of money on certain shifts with the right kind of hustle. To put it another way, if you are working one of these jobs and you have a big expense coming up, you can work your ass off and make more money. Your pay goes up proportionally to your effort. In an hourly job that doesn't happen. You just make what you make. To be clear: I AM NOT DEFENDING TIPPING CULTURE. I am just pointing out that there is a certain cohort of folks who perpetuate it to the detriment of everyone else. When the whole fair wage discussion gets brought up, those folks are the ones who rally the hardest against it. It's kind of insane.

I'm not sure the law changing will do much unless they literally ban tipping. In Canada most or I think all provinces now have no subminimum wage for servers, yet tipping is still expected. It's honestly sort of silly. I'm not entirely sure why some lady taking my order and maybe handing me extra napkins is entitled to 15%+ of my bill while the McDonald's fry cook isn't when they make the same base salary.

One of the big problems with tipping at the moment is that menu prices have increased and % gratuity expectations have also increased making gratuity dramatically outstrip inflation.

Say that twenty years ago the norm was to tip 15% on your $10 burger ($1.50) now it may be 20% on your $20 burger ($4.00) which is a 167% higher tip for your 100% more expensive burger.

At the same time median income went from ~$60k to $75k or a 25% increase. Eating out/tipping is simply much less affordable in current times.

There are plenty of other problems with tipping but I think the raw price is what people are feeling the most.

[]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1b7rss8/30...

[]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...

I don't disagree, but find the way the stats are displayed to be interesting because flipping the numbers seems to imply that the majority of Americans feel the opposite

> 35% of Americans think tipping culture is out of control, according to a 2024 Bankrate survey

> 25% of U.S. customers will actually tip less when presented with suggested tip amounts on a touch screen

> 29% of Americans see tipping as an obligation, according to Pew, rather than a choice (21%)

It's only just starting here in the UK. Those card payment things seem to have a tip option that can be enabled and they make you hit "no" (or choose a nonzero amount). A dark pattern basically. So many people must feel pressured to press a nonzero button. I'm going to start refusing to press them and make them get it ready to accept my payment.

Tipping culture can change. In the early 1900s, people in Berlin complained about how little americans tipped [1] . And now, Germans complain about tipping at all when coming to America. https://www.nytimes.com/1912/07/14/archives/tipping-in-berli...

I'm not American, and the culture here wasn't to tip everyone for doing their job, but I don't mind it if I feel the food and service were good. But presented with a screen suggesting I tip, with/out a suggested amount, is pretty much a guarantee I'm not tipping. If I tip I want to make sure it's going to the people I want to tip.

Regulate the intermediary! Or merely apply social pressure.

Just forget about hospitality worker opinions with their completely glaring conflict of interest, everyone collectively ignore them.

Tell payment processors that they cant sell tipping screens to certain (or any) vendor code

Tell insurers of the payment processor they cant insure them if they push tipping screens

At the local level create incentives for non-tip culture businesses that go out of their way to that to discourage it, effectively penalizing the tipping culture ones

The article briefly touches on it, but complicating things are practices like tip pooling at restaurants (tips are shared among all low wage staff, regardless if they did anything) and tips going into the revenue bucket of the business.

I’m less inclined to tip when I don’t know where the money is going. Handing people straight cash frequently also ends up in tip pools from policy as well.

I find the tipping-before-service stuff down right creepy. Each time I hit zero I feel I'm taking a gamble they're going to spit in my cappuccino. I don't think this needs legislation - just avoid businesses that use these dark patterns

next up, don't forget to tip your surgeon and your lawyer

As anyone who has ever worked for tips or traveled abroad knows, tipping is observably a cultural phenomenon.

Me, personally, I think complaining about it is tacky and shows poor character.

I even tip (albeit less) for takeout. Why? Well for one the kitchen staff did just as much work as they would have had a waitress brought my order. And second and far more importantly, because that’s how I’d like to be treated and I generally aim to follow the golden rule in my dealings.

As another aside, normally there is significant hysteresis between prices and wages. Percentage based tipping has no hysteresis and is thus observably a more just compensation model for servers. Especially in a time where grocery prices are up 20% over the past four years.

Also, wage theft is a pervasive problem and tipping is resistant.

So what happens if you don't tip?

Asking Americans here as we don't have a tipping culture in my country, at least not to this extent.

Also, is it just in restaurants and food related businesses or services in general? Are you expected to tip your hairdresser or mechanic or plumber?

Personally I love tipping. I’ll tip even for ridiculous things like buying a bag of coffee bean. Guy seemed nice and smiled and tried to answer a question I had - sure have an extra couple bucks. Not a big deal to me, but who knows maybe it is to him. Hell sometimes I’ll even tip an additional 20% on top of the built tip at places where they add ~20% to the bill before you get it, though I reserve this for exceptional cases.

On the flip side, I’ll just as happily tip near 0 at a restaurant when the situation calls for it. If we were somehow to abolish tipping, this would not be possible - prices would just increase uniformly.

Great servers DO NOT want to get paid a higher wage from the restaurant instead of tips because they make so much more in tips.

while I dislike tipping culture on everything, working for annual bonuses, RSUs, options, sales commissions, and other conditional or discretionary comp is the middle class version of it. ironically, the justice in tipping is that the person doing the work is getting equity in the transaction and direct consideration for their work.