"Tipflation" may be causing tipping backlash as more digital prompts ask for tips

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.

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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.

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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.

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- Yeah, 15% was considered good in the '90s, but it's been upped to 20% for a couple decades now.
  
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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.

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- 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).
  
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Yeah I have no idea who the tip even goes to sometimes.

And really in those cases, I assume straight to the business/owner. And then it's like why am I volunteering to buy this at an additional markup?

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Tips go to employees and it's even illegal for managers to get tips. You know exactly who it's going to, you're just playing games rather than accepting you don't like to tip

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- No? 1) I'm perfectly happy to say I don't like tipping in general, too. I do it because that's how we've apparently agreed service workers make any money at all. 2) I didn't explicitly say I'm in the US, altho I did imagine our tipping culture to be a bit unique, so to be clear - I also don't have much faith in labor laws getting consistently enforced here. 3) Who is getting tipped from self-service machine screens?
  
  You can also take the smug armchair psych somewhere else, guy.
  
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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.

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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

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- 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.
  
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- How do you know if your tip went to the person who did that labor though?
  
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Pay employees a decent wage.
Long past time to get rid of the lower tip minimum wage
I will choose to go to no-tip places

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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.

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How do Americans budget when you don’t actually know how much things are going to cost you? I’d be lost without my spreadsheets

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I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of Americans don’t budget at all. I don’t. I should, but I’d probably walk into traffic if I had to look at the numbers.

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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.

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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.

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- Most restaurants in America as they exist now should not exist. We're essentially all subsidizing low quality, frozen food.
  
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- So these people are willing to tip for naff food but not pay more to begin with?
  
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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.

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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

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- 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?
  
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I would not object to a law banning establishments from requesting tips before service has been provided.

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They shouldn't request tips at all. Tips only should be provided if a customer feels like the service was above and beyond normal.

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- Sure, but that's a societal and cultural change. I'm talking about a legal change.
  
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- 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.
  
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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?

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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.

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I'm glad to have moved from a country where taxes and (high) expected tips are on top of the price, to a country where tax is included in the price and tips are usually not expected. It makes a surprising difference in affordability when you can actually buy a €5 item with €5.

As soon as companies started asking for tips at self check-out, it became obvious that it's just a way of trying to underpay their staff and shift that responsibility on the customer.

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Went to a concert the other day and they were asking for tip on their $6 hot dogs. The options were 20% 25% and 30% and no option for custom lol.

I'm not tipping at a concert concession stand when stuff is already outrageously overpriced. GTFOH.

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@Dankenstein @RotaryKeyboard as an European, US tips things is just ridiculous. Seriouly can't understand that shit. Why don't you pay your ppl for the work they do?

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- With so many things in this country, the origins are racism. While tipping originated in Europe, it became popular in the States post-slavery as a way to not have to actually pay black people. Haven't shaken it yet.
  
  And annoyingly, the ones who often push the hardest to keep tipping culture are the servers themselves as they can take home a lot of money on a busy weekend evening. Hopefully, we're getting closer to getting rid of it though.
  
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I love that vast majority of Europeans don't tip. At least the ones thinking rationally.

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Here in the Netherlands, we only tip for fancy restaurants, if the service was good.

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A large portion of you in the replies don't feel like they should be obligated to tip because they feel it's up to the employer to properly compensate their workers, and yet they feel comfortable enjoying the product of these exploited workers' labor. My question to all of you is, if you care about worker exploitation, why don't you, the consumer, speak out against this practice directly? Call employers out, speak to the workers, see what you can do to help them organize. If you can't be bothered to do any of that, consider not dog-piling on the worker for the faults of their employer by deciding not to tip and making it harder for workers to organize. It seems to me that by not tipping, you're just helping employers and not workers.

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It's called voting. Most people do that.

Tip culture is an obvious moral blackmail. While being against it I tend to go with it in countries that struggle moving past slavery.

To a certain extent if everybody stopped tipping things would change probably faster than by any political mean anyway.

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- If absolutely everybody stopped tipping in America this instant maybe something would change. But that's not going to happen, just as voting tipping away won't happen. It's incredibly easy to sway people who have no opinion on the matter (more than you'd think) to believe that tips are good and necessary and actually beneficial to the worker. And the people/entities most motivated to argue this (employers) happen to have the money to throw into shifting public thought on the matter. No, the only real solution is worker organization, and the only way workers can organize is if they have the resources (time, energy, money) to do so, also external support can help.
  
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