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Stop Turning every purchase into a tip request
- gist 2mo agoMy 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.
- chopin 2mo agoIn Germany, it is not very common. Where I see it, I avoid the business.
- weinzierl 2mo agoIt's getting increasingly common in Germany as well, especially at bakeries and the like. I recently had one at one of the big coffee chains where it offered 10%, 15%, 20% and an unlabeled fourth option. The fourth option went into a submenu with 5%, 10%, 15% and this time a labeled none option, which sent you to a another yes/no screen. I don't avoid the business but I do not feel bad at all not tipping when there is no service involved. And, no, the 3 second interaction of handing me out goods from behind the counter doesn't count. When there is service involved it usually is already included in the price and rounding up is a courtesy but not required.
- ferrouswheel 2mo agoAmericans are beggers because they don't have employee rights. Some people euphemistically call this "tipping culture"
- adastra22 2mo agoEvery time there is an initiative to require paying living wages, food and bar service representatives fight to get it killed because they make _more_ money from tips than they would from regular wages. Tip-earning workers in America are well represented.
- singpolyma3 2mo agoCould always do what we did in Canada: pay living wages but still inexplicably keep tipping culture
- BeetleB 2mo agoSeveral states do that.
- tolugenius 2mo ago> pay living wages But have you thought about the poor shareholders? /s
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rustcleaner 2mo agoCould ban tipping by law. Businesses where employees are caught accepting tips get fined. The price on the menu or shelf must be the final price at payment (including sales taxes and other fees).
- singpolyma3 2mo agoBusinesses shouldn't accept tips certainly. They go to people.
- XorNot 2mo agoExcept the actual workers don't: very very few consistently earn a higher wage, instead on a "good night" they count the win and ignore the losses when it's not. Even with reliable good nights the off nights eat away at that margin. It's a false economy.
- xyzelement 2mo agoI would say that America has a culture oriented towards rewarding performance. A good waiter's tips net them more pay that their foreign counterparts. It's the same as looking at an American engineer's bonus that's 3x a foreign engineer's whole pay and calling them a beggar.
- Freedom2 2mo agoGiven that tips are a percentage of the overall bill, could you explain the potential performance difference between pouring a $7 bottle of wine and a $700 bottle of wine? Assuming that the customers already clearly know what they want to purchase, so the waiter didn't offer recommendations of any kind. But even if we take that last point into consideration, a good waiter that cares about their customers can offer a cheaper, more suitable bottle than something expensive. How can they receive a higher tip than the person who does not offer suggestions but merely pours a more expensive bottle? This is not even mentioning that the baseline of "performance" is sub-par indeed. Americans tend to gloat about how their tables never receive water top-ups or someone never asks how their food is going so they have an opportunity to ask for condiments or napkins. But most people in the world typically know how to ask for themselves if they require something, and don't need a pseudo-butler hovering over them. Not to mention that when it comes time to actually pay the check and leave, Americans tend to be some of the slowest at actually fulfilling this process.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoIsn't that interesting? Here is another human who is unaware of traditional tipping culture. In traditional tipping culture, the tip is calculated on the subtotal for food and drink, minus your bar bill. Therefore, alcohol, taxes, fees, whatever? Those are not part of your tip calculation at all. For tipping a bartender, or if all you did was drink, I'd usually drop a fraction on each drink served, whatever they were. The POS tipping prompts are all wrong, and they're encouraging more than just mandatory tip-shaming: they are forcing a shift in the basic calculations which was never intended by ordinary tipping customs. A $700 bottle of wine in a restaurant warrants an identical tip to a $7 bottle.
- rustcleaner 2mo agoTime to start the #NeverTipper movement!
- adastra22 2mo agoBlame 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.
- stavros 2mo agoAnd 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.
- donkey_brains 2mo agoI’ll join your movement but we won’t be popular among our peers or our servers
- AnonEM00se 2mo agoA few years ago I was talking to my aunt, a restaurant owner. I found out she wasn’t paying the tipped minimum wage for her area, but the non-tipped wage even though they did tips. I was complementing her on doing this, as it’s a good precedent to set and whatnot. Quickly realized the reason she was doing that was that she didn’t know there was a lower potential wage for tipped employees, so I quickly shut up and changed the subject, and didn’t accidentally screw over her employees. Tips should become less of a thing and tipped wage should go away.
- jhhh 2mo agoYes 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.
- Noaidi 2mo agoI 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?
- Mindless2112 2mo agoI 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.
- xyzelement 2mo agoJust today a waitress offered my kid to taste a few different things before we committed to what he would eat. It was an example of amazing service. Are you saying you wouldn't reward someone like that with a few extra bucks?
- d_sem 2mo agoAmerican tiping culture is a form legal discrimination, were customer tip less for workers of different races, religions, genders, sexual orientation.
- bluGill 2mo agoOnly a minority do that. Most people tip based on service not racism.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Freedom2 2mo agoThis is common in other countries outside of the US that do not demand tips, even western ones? When I was at a kebab shop in Germany, the owner offered my family to trial new sauces and falafel he was experimenting with, before we committed to our order.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoThere 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.
- stavros 2mo agoI 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.
- bluGill 2mo agoA tip needs to be for the part of service you can directly evaluate. If you give the same tip everywhere you are doing it wrong. If you don't stop think about it that is wrong. If paying for the group the tip is a group discussion even if the rest of the cost is kept secret. Pay for value, the percent is a suggestion.
- PearlRiver 2mo agoA 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...
- leoapagano 2mo agoShamelessly AI generated articles on the front page of a national news site (albeit not a very good one). What has this world come to
- tobadzistsini 2mo agoMaybe 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.
- julianlam 2mo agoBeen that way all along.
- nilram 2mo agoI 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.
- 627467 2mo agoHow do you know it's low paid? Why not tip 100%? You seem very certain about parent invalid reason as well as your own assumptions. Please enlighten us
- nilram 2mo agoI help a line cook with finding employment, so I learn about the pay and conditions. The wages make it nearly impossible for him to find housing.
- scoofy 2mo agoWhy don't we tip bus drivers then? Why don't we tip dental hygienists? Why don't we tip the pilots on our flights or the janitors at our libraries? The choice of who we tip is entirely arbitrary. How much we are supposed to tip is also arbitrary. There is no logic behind it. The system is entirely stupid. It clearly existed so that the proprietor can delegate the duty of finding and punishing bad service employees to the customer... which is, again, a terrible system that makes no sense, and it make even less sense now that it's spreading to all manner of jobs where this tenuous connection doesn't even exist!
- RoadieRoller 2mo agoThis what I do. I learnt this from one of the HackerNews comments months ago. Tip the person if they do a direct service to you, which may involve touching your body. Barbers, massage therapists (all kinds, you know!), Facials, nails etc. Also (as per another comment in this thread), no tip if we pay before we use the service (or food). If it isn't any of the above, say "Thank you, I enjoyed your great service. But at this time, I don't have money to spare. How do I get past this screen?"
- PorterBHall 2mo agoI tip for service I’ve already received and I’ll tip in advance if I’m using the space. E.g. if I go to a coffee shop to work, I’ll buy something and leave a tip. I’ll tip if you make something for me, like a cappuccino. I don’t tip at point of sale simply because it isn’t fair. I don’t tip at grocery checkout. Why would I tip for a drip coffee?
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoIn 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.
- everybodyknows 2mo agoEveryone -- 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.
- dogline 2mo agoWait, what? This sounds important, but I can't quite parse it.
- drivebyhooting 2mo agoHe’s saying no tax on tips.
- saxonww 2mo agoThis is really, really recent though. The tip-everywhere phenomenon has been growing for a lot longer than the tax deduction.
- what 2mo agoThat’s too recent of a change for it to be what they’re talking about.
- s__s 2mo agoNo one was reporting their tips, or at least the full amount, prior to the changes.
- JKCalhoun 2mo agoWell, more specifically, people don't (always) report (all) tips.
- atmavatar 2mo agoOriginally, yes. But Trump campaigned on eliminating taxes on tips, and that was part of the BBB. Workers are now allowed to deduct up to $25k of their tipped income from their federal income tax, though they still have to pay into Social Security and Medicare from their tipped wages. Of course, in aggregate, it would still be far better were Congress to eliminate the distinction between tipped minimum wage and regular minimum wage, then raise the overall minimum wage, and we as a culture did away with tips entirely.
- anonymousiam 2mo agoI like the way the payment processing systems give an option to leave a tip. It makes tipping really easy. I always tip generously for any service-oriented purchase (mostly restaurants).
- leftouterjoins 2mo agoIMHO, 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.
- eudamoniac 2mo agoIt's quite literally a spinelessness / empathy tax. The disparate spending probably will show up in demographic data eventually.
- aaronharnly 2mo agoThis 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.
- diggernet 2mo agoAt 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.
- 1over137 2mo agoJust buy with cash. Then you don't even have to look at the machine.
- yipinwong 2mo agobut you gotta look at the tip jars spread everywhere.
- yipinwong 2mo ago[flagged]
- PorterBHall 2mo agoIf you put more effort into this comment—-like explaining how “this tip thingy” is rooted in racism—-I might have left you a tip.
- yipinwong 2mo agohm. i really want to use my ais to answer other bots like this... HN is really starting to push me
- jmward01 2mo agoTips are evil. They essentially treat service industry jobs as charity funded, destroy dining and other experiences by forcing the customer to become the manager and hide costs in a way that make the customer or the employee the bad guy and not the industry. But they won't go away without some sort of change in regulatory structure. I think there are two problems creating this in the US at least: - We are conditioned to expect that the price listed is not the actual final price. If I see 1 euro as a price in Italy, I can hand them 1 euro and walk away. In the US if I see $1 as the price I could get a bill for??? 1.20? then tip? 1.40? Some random magic number I have no idea how it happened? The price listed should be the price paid. Period. Stop pretending taxes aren't part of the price. - We have legislation that makes tips part of expected compensation. Minimum wage is different for servers. Get rid of any legislation like that. Every job should pay a living wage (including benefits) or shouldn't exist. If that were in place you would see a lot fewer places begging for tips since the cost of things would be higher to match the salaries they would need to pay. So right now if you don't tip you are actually taking away someone's paycheck and that is wrong on all levels. Of course all of this is also part of the American psyche. We really like being lied to about price. Show us a lower number, even though we know it is fake and we will end up being charged way more by the time the transaction is done, and we will hop there. Take the taxes off the price and don't include the cost of labor on the listed price and we go 'Look! A bargain!'
- bluGill 2mo agoTips should be pay for great service. It should be a pleasure giving a large tip because it means you got good service, and painful to get the service that results in a good tip. That also means most places asking for a tip are not giving the service needed for a top. Of it isn't a tip to a specific person providing service it isn't a tip.
- atmavatar 2mo agoWhat's really fun are the places (typically upper-scale restaurants) which automatically include a tip, and then still add a space for custom tips, hoping you won't notice that there's already a line item for a 15/18/20% tip.
- analog31 2mo agoIn 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.
- davkan 2mo agoPersonally I make almost double the median wage in my HCOL small town. It’s hard to make it here, i know it. People are sleeping 3 to a studio. So it’s simple, I just choose not to be a miser and I hit yes on the lowest tip option for every purchase and never give it a second thought.
- loco5niner 2mo ago> I just choose not to be a miser and I hit yes on the lowest tip option for every purchase Calling others a miser but always hitting the lowest tip option
- davkan 2mo agoThat was internally directed. Also the lowest is like 18% everywhere for counter service which I feel is generous. Ain’t like I’m making bay area money.
- jon9544hn 2mo agoIMHO, 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
- newsomix9xl 2mo agoIts not even a request. Some Amazon grocery choices for delivery come with a $5.00 tip by default, no way to opt out or change this default. You are only allowed to edit it, every single time, at purchase time (if you notice it).
- ethersteeds 2mo agoSince we're riled up about the state of compulsory tipping, I'll throw in my bugbear: the calculated percentages are frequently based off the post-tax total! Tipping has historically been based on the pre-tax cost, but the rise of receipts and screens that do the math for you has smuggled the taxes into the tip umbrella. Infuriating.
- stasomatic 2mo agoI don't want to think about tipping, period, I want to pay a fair price and if I can't afford it, rice and beans it is tonight. Make that burger $15, not $10 + tax + arbitrary tip, plus a $1 x number of smiles. It's disgusting to me how tipping casts the tip receiver into a servant. It is services, but service workers are not servants. Another pet peeve - Barber shops near me started adding "How did I do? Good - 25%, Great - 30%, Excellent - 40%." GTFO. These guys are independent operators, they rent the chair from the shop. The haircut was already $40, just make it $50 so I don't need to worry getting lawn mowed next month. I've started cooking more and am comtemplating learning to cut my own hair, this is getting out of control.
- roryirvine 2mo agoThere seems to be a huge amount of cognitive overhead on everyday life in America - tipping, sticker prices that don't include taxes, three (or four?) completely separate systems for saving for retirement, and the way that even the lowliest worker has to fill out a tax return (and having to pay for special software to do it). Not to mention the situation with healthcare, etc... It must make it so much harder to budget and to confidently plan for the future. Is it worth it? Do people feel they're getting something in return for all that additional stress, or is it just that fixing it seems like too big a task to realistically be able to carry out?
- Freedom2 2mo agoIf you read through the comments in this very thread, there's an underlying sense that many who enjoy tipping like having a feeling of "rewarding" workers, which is absurd and astounding to see justified in real time in 2026. Somehow other countries have figured out how to give great service (read: not the weird hovering that American waitstaff do) without tips, but it's impossible to figure out how sadly.
- stasomatic 2mo agoTipping culture is the least of our problems, lol, it's only an annoying mosquito bite we can bitch about collectively. I haven't bothered to look into how it started and why it's different from the rest of the world. Some do make a killing on tips, think high-end restaurant servers, bartenders, doorman in Manhattan, but even then it's a "long rise to the top", you've got to pay your dues for years. But it's nothing compared to child rearing costs, healthcare, social safety nets. A kid is at least a grand a month, you are lucky if you can get them into a nice public school, it's impossible to book doctor appointments, and when you do, expect at least an hour wait before your BP is taken and then another 30 mins for the doc to come in for 5 and dismiss you. Dentists? Oh, "no sir, we don't take Aetna, nor United Healthcare. You can pay out of network and submit the invoice to your insurance provider". Crazy shit like that just builds up. You want progressive glasses at LensCrafters? It'll be $800. This isn't going to change in my lifetime. I'm always perplexed when folks from developed countries want to move here and suffer through TSA level humiliation rigamarole at every level. Varies state by state though, some are nicer, and that's another PITA. I've moved three states over the last 5 years, each time new license plates, new registration fees, new inspections, FFS.