Here is a crazy idea, Pay Workers A Livable Wage and price goods accordingly… that is the easiest step forward as I would be tempted to ask for more because profits are unpaid wages.
I ordered food from a place with zero human interaction. I ordered from a tablet and picked up my food from the counter after receiving a text. I was still asked to tip. At that point, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be tipping for.
I used to not tip for takeout (since I had thought there was not really “service”), but I’ve since learned that the packaging for take away can be rather involved. So, I do tip now for the labor of readying the meals to go
That makes sense, I just wish they included those costs in the price rather than making me guess how much I should pay, especially when it’s less clear who the receiver of the tips will be.
@wholemilk @Harold exactly! The tips should be the exception not the norm. I tip when the service, the quality or the experience was so good to me that I want reward the ppl o made it possible as complimentarily. An incentive to them keep doing an exceptional job. No job should be dependent of charity. That is subverting how a business should be run. Can’t accept it as a rule.
How do you know if your tip went to the person who did that labor though?
The problem I have with that is you have to tip before you even eat the food. They could have screwed up your order, burnt your food, etc., but you won’t know until after you’ve already tipped them.
If you can’t afford to pay your employees a decent wage, you should raise your prices or you shouldn’t be in business.
There are a few places here in Seattle which have eliminated tipping, raised prices, and raised wages. I greatly prefer this, personally speaking. Add no, I’m not going to start tipping every random cashier just because they start prompting me to.
The problem is - restaurants in most parts of the states cannot reliably do that. They’re going to see a higher price and they’re probably walking out soon after. Or worse - they stay and leave a shit review because they set their expectations at a higher bar of food quality than was provided.
If we could unilaterally remove exemptions for tipped wages, I’d see the possibility of it becoming much more common.
Most restaurants in America as they exist now should not exist. We’re essentially all subsidizing low quality, frozen food.
So these people are willing to tip for naff food but not pay more to begin with?
I was ordering a pizza online for pickup. When it prompted for a tip at checkout I canceled the order. This is the worst case scenario in my book.
I just hit 0.
When someone said something to me, I stopped picking up pizza from there….
I’ll tip and quite well (usually 25-30%) for full service stuff. But for buffet style/sandwich lines and takeout. No thanks
Same here… If I’m being served I will tip well. However if I call in my order, go pick up my order, and the “server” who took my order doesn’t even collect my money, then what my tips are really going towards is making up for the fact that the restaurant isn’t actually paying their staff a livable wage. During the COVID shutdowns, sure I was willing to help keep their doors open. Everyone is back to full business now, so what exactly are you asking me to pay for?
Yeah same mindset.
Also those other schemes like round up or add $2 to “donate to help first responders” or “save the puppies” I opt out of too. Because when I looked into it I found a company only needed to actually donate like 10% of that total donation to remain in the clear from a tax standpoint and the rest can be used to “administer the program”.
So no, never do those either.
Wow, a whole 10% you say? How can these companies afford to operate on only a 90% commission? /s
I hate the tip before service prompts so much! If I am gonna tip, it’s coming down to service. If you ask me before to tip you based on the price alone, I’m out.
I am so tired of it. Pay your god damn employees.
A solicitation for tip BEFORE any service is rendered is essentially blackmail.
“Hey, not for nothing, but sometimes pancakes can fall on the floor before they get into your to-go bag… I’m just saying… Anyways, here’s this tip screen, no pressure [holds eye contact]”
Said absolutely no service worker ever
I made an online order for a restaurant a while ago, and there was a tip option with a message that said “100% of tips go toward supporting the restaurant.” First of all that’s a super vague statement, and secondly, that’s not what tips are for. Tips are for supporting the specific people who serve me, not for supporting the restaurant as a whole. Why would I want to leave a tip when I don’t even know where the money is going.
Obviously I can’t be sure without knowing exactly which restaurant it is, but it is probably a message in response to how the delivery apps were capturing customer tips and delivery fees for themselves and sharing nothing with the restaurant. There was a period of time where restaurants were getting added to delivery apps without the restaurant’s consent. They’re probably trying to make you feel like you’re supporting them by paying the tips and fees directly to them.
I worked at a place that did this. We only saw the tips in the jar go to our pocket, we never saw the online or digital tips.
That is horrifically illegal and you should have/should still sue
I hate the tipping culture, and wish it would go away. But I’ll still do it for sit down service as that’s part of the deal. The ones that really get me are for pickup as well as the fastish food services where you go to the counter to order, prepay, you pick it up from the counter and bus your own tables. What exactly am I tipping for?
And why do taxis need tips? Or hairdressers?
Over covid we would tip fairly frequently for takeout. We still on occasion tip to local places, but most of the time we don’t. I’m literally picking up the food, no service is being provided.
I usually tip maybe 5-10% for takeout. Primarily because it’s my way of making sure my money goes to local folks who need it and it will help the local economy and it might take time away from serving tipping dine-in patrons. When COVID was hitting businesses hard, we upped our tipping substantially. But I think it’s time to go back to normal.
Tipping is absolutely everywhere and it feels like a lot of these screens default to 20% or more. And the employees usually give you a look if you change it to below that or no tip at all.
A sit-down restaurant I understand for your server, but I still disagree with it and feel that they should just be paid a normal wage, not dependent on the tips. But I’m not going to tip for takeout 9/10 times.
Also how do we even know, as customers, if the tip is actually going to the employees?
No no, don’t feel bad about hitting that 0% button. I feel like this is a PSA but in the USA if you tip a minimum wage (untipped) employee, THEY WILL NOT GET YOUR TIP. Severs get paid on tips and a minimum wage (tipped) of about $2.50. Tipping a normal employee (on screens, not cash) will just mean that the employer has to pay them less wages. Seriously? Yes seriously. You can tip at subway, the only person getting that money is subway.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t true throughout the entire US. Wait staff in Washington, for example, get paid the full state minimum wage, and the minimum wage act explicitly requires that tips be paid to employees rather than retained by the restaurant. Of course, actual practice or compliance can differ, but there are a few states with better laws than the norm.
I appreciate the added details. As far as I’m aware, they aren’t keeping the tips. But it is legal to pay a tipped employee down to about $2/hr in every state. So most places like Sonic will reduce your pay when you get tips and you claim the tips (which you’re required to do wink wink). So rather than Sonic just paying their employees $10/hr at minimum wage, they’ll pay them $5/hr assuming $5 in tips. Saves the company money and the servers don’t make much more than normal minimum wage while the customer fronts their wages.
Isn’t that lovely?
I feel like how you’re describing it makes it sound more complicated than it is.
All employees are required to make minimum wage.
If your tips don’t take you over minimum wage, your employer has to pay the difference.So tips given before you get to minimum wage just reduce how much your boss needs to spend to make up the difference. Once you get there, your boss has to pay you at least some very small quantity and the tips increase your take-home
It’s a stupid system and exploitative, but it’s not as “wink wink nudge nudge” as you made it sound.
Thats fair but I don’t think this description is entirely accurate either. And I do think it’s a big scummy because minimum wage is already very low. So putting employees tips into their wages is just employers taking advantage. It’s legal, yes, but it’s bad for everyone except the employer.
not in every state. in Washington, my home state, there’s no such thing as a tipped wage and employers must pay all tips to employees. does this always happen? no, but it is illegal unlike what you’re claiming
This is only true for positions paid in tips. (Workers making below minimum wage like waiters/servers)
This is not true for people working jobs at or above minimum wage, like baristas at coffee shops. The vast majority of those places give their employees the tips on top of their wages. Most employees don’t put up with tips going to the owners and will let you know they don’t get it.
That’s the worrying part of this trend. The local coffee shop might still give their employees the tips. But the local chain fast food place? No. I’ve had subway workers tell me that directly. They said “don’t tip me, I don’t get any of it” and sonic employees will sometimes tell you the same.
I never tip with takeout. The only way to stop the cancer of tipping from spreading is to refuse to buy in to it. Pay your damn employees a living wage and then they don’t need tips!
I would not object to a law banning establishments from requesting tips before service has been provided.
They shouldn’t request tips at all. Tips only should be provided if a customer feels like the service was above and beyond normal.
Sure, but that’s a societal and cultural change. I’m talking about a legal change.
There is a legal solution too. It’s called: regulate the minimum wages.
FYI: Denmark doesn’t have minimum wage.
Guess what’s the difference between minimum salary of McDonalds worker in Denmark vs USA.
Keyword: labor union.
I’m sure the invisible hand of the free market will sort it out and arrive at an optimal solution soon.
At payment wait staff will tip the customer. Whoever tipped highest wins bourgeois status for the day.
That’s not true in the US. They have a tipped minimum wage; there, if you’re not tipping you’re stealing someone’s labour.
It is a sucky system, as the buried lede in that article shows:
However, data from the very checkout system that prompted tipping revealed disparities in pay. Neitzel noticed that Black employees were earning less tips than their White counterparts.
But, until it is burned to the ground, that is the system and (in the US) you should not use it to exploit people.
Technically the employer is stealing their labour, the customer is paying the advertised price in a perfectly legal exchange.
If the staff don’t like this, they need to unionise and fight the employer to pay a proper living wage.
Some areas in the US have tipped minimum wage. Some areas have an actual minimum wage that is paid regardless of tips. Don’t accuse others of exploiting people when it is truly the employer backed up by the local state law. Blame your state and do something about it.
my favorite thing is places that have a 20% gratuity automatically added to every bill to compensate employees fairly (i am begrudgingly accepting of this even though it should really just be on the menu price) but then have an extra line for tip on top of that. and sometimes that extra tip line calculates a tip for you based off of the already added 20% gratuity. insane.
Yeah, I actually stop going out for any restaurant or outing ever since the tip inflation went out of control. I just rather spend the money on a cooking class and cook things myself. I really encourage everyone else to do the same, you save a lot of money, and you can add whatever creativity you want to the meal.
Same here. For me it was the realization that what I thought was appropriate tipping – 15% – was actually an insult to servers. Thanks to the internet, I saw how servers retaliate against what they think is a bad tipper. I realized that proper tipping is subjective, and there was no way to be sure I wouldn’t be punished for something I did wrong unknowingly. So rather than risk it, I just decided to learn how to live without eating out.
When I was a kid 10% was the standard. I don’t know of any other profession whose pay has doubled in real terms during my lifetime. As far as I’m concerned, if 15% isn’t enough, too damn bad.
Yeah, 15% was considered good in the '90s, but it’s been upped to 20% for a couple decades now.
The alternative is 0%, because i just won’t eat out anymore
Which means the longer that the minimum wage for tipping remains $2.13 for nearly half the United States - we’re probably going to see that social expectation rise to 25%.
Which honestly- sucks more for the workers than most of us who will be shifting to that level of tipping. Because it will be met with social resistance to wanting to pay more, and probably a period of actually less income for them.
It’s bonkers how much money you can save making food yourself by just planning meals based on what’s on sale this week. People don’t believe me, but chicken thighs/legs go on sale here every 3/4 weeks for 99 cents a pound. Week’s worth of meat for the equivalent price of a McD’s meal.
I don’t really eat meat. The thing that gets me are the vegetables. If I want anything fresh, it costs so much more than canned or frozen. Frozen/canned veggies are fine for some meals, but for others they can really taste a bit off. We just moved and I’m hoping there are some good farmer’s markets around where I live now with decent prices (the place I moved from were worse than the grocery store).
If you can, I highly recommends saving up for farm bot, while you might not be able to grow every food yourself, but you can grow quite a lot and those would be extremely fresh.
Goddamn that’s cool! I only wish it had a flamethrower attachment to ward off the squirrels that keep raiding my garden…
Lol, you could use electrified wire to shock the squirrel away (not to kill the little rodent, but enough that it’s deterred from raiding your plant.)
This looks dope! I don’t know if I have the space for it right now (renter so can’t change the outside too much, plus most of it is not usable), but I’m bookmarking this for if/when I buy a house. I actually might talk to my wife and decide if we should do a small growing bed for tomatoes or peppers.
Exactly and I also love spicy black beans and beef, it’s delicious and cheap. Cost like $0.75/meal and you can cook them in a large batch that feed you for a week. People are basically addicted to consumerism and it really shows when they don’t know how to cook.
I didn’t expect one of the things to carry over from reddit is the rabid anti tipping culture and abunch of people making up shit to justify their preferences.
I now have a job that gets tips, if someone doesn’t tip IDC, the overall tips are good and I don’t know the story of the person not tipping. When I give a funny look is when someone hits the no tip button and looks up at me like they’re waiting for some kind of response.
I don’t have time to care about your financial state, you all are just making up shit in your heads to justify shit to yourselves
Tipping isn’t prevalent here so your comment seems strange to me. I’d never tip unless service was above and beyond. The reason why is that I feel companies use tips to depress wages, and tipping culture puts pressure on customers and not the company.
I don’t see why you’re angry at people who choose not to give you money in a system that allows them to choose, when the system is clearly the issue.
I’m sorry, I misunderstood who I was responding to. I don’t get how to see the parent comments on this service.
I don’t care if someone tips or not. If you provide top tier service regardless of the tip amount, then the tips you get at the end of the pay period are quite good.
I’m upset and tired of the near conspiratorial tone and constant complaining about tipping. Would it be better if wages were better? Yes, but they are not, tip or don’t, that’s fine. Some people may get upset if someone doesn’t tip but I find it really unlikely that servers will even remember who you are by the end of the night much less hold or grudge or try and mess with anyone’s order over you not giving a couple bucks or so.
This seems like a weird take. Put another way, you’re withholding what you know to be fair compensation for services rendered as a form of protest against the company, but at the workers’ expense? Just trying to make sense of your perspective.
The fair compensation for the service is the actual price of the service I have to legally pay. How the worker gets compensated for their work is not my concern. The service worker is employed by the restaurant for example, not by me just wanting to eat a pizza.
Tipping is an optional reward for outstanding service, and american companies realised their employees could survive (probably) on tips so they don’t have to fairly compensate their employees. If you have to ask for optional donations from people just to survive you are just a beggar, the fair compensation for your work needs to come from your employer.
Hear hear. I’ll support any workforce if they unionise and fight for better pay. I won’t support them passively aggressively shaming customers for not wanting to pay more than the advertised price to top up wages they agreed to in their contact.
The way I see it is that the company is already withholding pay for this situation to even exist.
Americans are being led to believe tipping is the only way “unskilled” low paying work can exist. Yet these companies often make money hand over fist. They’d just make less money if they had to fairly pay their staff. But Americans seem to look down on the workers that do these roles, so companies get to exploit them.
If you’re salaried, imagine your boss randomly said to you “Sorry, I can only afford half your salary. But you can ask our clients if they could graciously donate a small percentage of what they’re paying for our services. Hopefully it makes up the difference.” You’d be furious! You wouldn’t agree to such a change. So why agree to it for food service workers?
Then the workers need to unionise and bargin with their employer to get a living wage. It shouldn’t be on the customer being guilted into topping that up.
It’s not just people being cheap. I encourage you to read this piece and think about the ideas in it:
I never said it was “just people being cheap” also that’s an article written by the business owner, who’s business went under a month before. He also tried that again in Oakland and that closed as well
You know lots of us on Reddit were anti tip as we come from countries without the “pay your stuff under minimum wage and let customers top it up volunterily” culture. In the UK, I don’t feel guilty about not giving a tip as I know the waiter, delivery driver, etc is being paid a living wage to begin with. I may leave a tip of I think the service or food is above anf beyond what’s expected, but it’s not for every meal. I’ve noticed a lot of food places have delivery costs now they didn’t have before Covid so I’m less likely to top those drivers.
Related, but has anyone else noticed the “default” tip amounts (on registers and such) are higher now, too? In the past I would see 15-18-20% as kind of the standard options, and now I don’t seem to see anything lower than 20% on those preset options. I saw one the other day that had 35% as a default option.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but that’s why other -> 0% is always a valid option. I’ll tip if I’m paying after eating a meal or if someone delivered some food to me, otherwise miss me with that shit.
I forget if there’s a term for it but I think it’s intentional because it raises the expectations for what people think the minimum acceptable tip is.
You might be thinking of anchoring. Some restaurants have a couple of outrageously expensive wines on top of the menu for that reason - everything else looks cheaper in comparison, since the first thing you saw is “anchored” in your mind and used as a point of reference.
Is it price anchoring maybe? Seems like I knew the term for it and can’t remember it now, ha ha!
I love that vast majority of Europeans don’t tip. At least the ones thinking rationally.
Lately I’ve been at some finer diners in my country, and the payment terminals now have an option if you want to tip.
I’ve made it a rule never to tip. Even if the service was magnificent.Out of all the things I don’t want my country adopting from the US, the tipping must be somewhere in the top.
I assume that’s to account for how many people are cashless now rather than making it mandatory. I personally haven’t handled anything more than a few coins in years. Can’t remember the last time I saw a bank note.
can only speak to Germany, but it definitely is pretty common to tip here. Just less across-the-board and less money than in the US, usually 1 or a couple of Euros.
I’ve been in the UK for the past week (first time). No tips, not even an option to tip.
Tip if your enjoyed the service. That’s about it. Not to subsidise shitty employment laws.
Here in the Netherlands, we only tip for fancy restaurants, if the service was good.
In the UK, it’s always been a reward for above average food or service. Not a something you leave everytime to make up for short wages.
I was browsing a retail website and when they automatically added a +10% tip on the advertised price I noped out immediately.