I know this has been getting a lot of attention, but tips are out of control.
I recently went somewhere and was forced to tip — as in, 0 USD/% was not an option — for literally doing nothing but ringing me up. The minimum amount was 25% of the bill.
Tips are becoming another mandatory hidden fee, which is a form of bait and switch. Wages shouldn't be part of that and it shouldn't happen either way.
That is illegal. You should report the business to the IRS.
> “Revenue Ruling 2012-18 reaffirms the factors which are used to determine whether payments constitute tips or service charges. Q&A 1 of Revenue Ruling 2012-18 provides that the absence of any of the following factors creates a doubt as to whether a payment is a tip and indicates that the payment may be a service charge:
> - The payment must be made free from compulsion
> - The customer must have the unrestricted right to determine the amount
> - The payment should not be the subject of negotiation or dictated by employer policy; and
> - Generally, the customer has the right to determine who receives the payment.
It's only illegal if they are reporting it to the IRS as tip revenue. Mandatory tips aren't tips, they are service charges and must be reported to the IRS that way.
Or the FTC. That's fraud - the advertised price isn't the actual price.
You could say "what about mandatory tipping on tables of 6 or more?" But in every case I've ever seen, it says so on the menu. That is, you're told what the deal is before you order. Whereas in this case, it sounds like the price was changed after you ordered, when you tried to pay.
Given that this is an IRS rule, it’s probably only illegal if the business reports the income as tip income to its employees, as opposed to a service fee charged by the business.
I had to go through similar nonsense recently. I was getting pizza and the cashier said (smiling) "it's better with tip". The first time he did it I figured I'd tip him. He handed me the pizza when it was ready and that was that. The second time I didn't tip him and he was like, No tip?? I said yeah I don't understand why - isn't tip for service? He said well yeah, I'm trying to provide service. As I was about to reply "but that's already in..." he interjected "when you don't pay a tip, I just give you the pizza. But when you tip, I put in a little something extra." I was confused and just looked blankly and said I didn't ask for anything extra. He stopped arguing and when the pizza was ready, didn't say anything until I was about to inquire. Then he gave it to me - another pizza exactly like the one he'd given with the tip before.
I honestly kind of felt bad, in that he probably wasn't making that much money, and the tip probably meant more to him than it meant to me. But demanding a tip and falsely telling me I'm getting more than I'm paying for is not the right way to fix that, and the pizza wasn't particularly cheap either...
I was actually worried he would put less of the toppings or something; I'm glad he didn't do that. I have a hard time figuring out if the delay was intentional or not, though it certainly seemed suspicious. But thankfully I didn't end up wasting more than a handful of minutes as a result of that, since I was expecting something like this and thus keeping an eye out.
If it wasn't stated up front during ordering then it's not a tip, you are just getting scammed. I'd just not pay it and walk out. What are they going to do?
If you aren't willing to stand up for yourself then you don't get to complain.
A local place near where I live have a 15% employee wellness fee added to the cost of the purchase. This money goes to the employee and is, in essence, a tip. There was no sign stating this fact. I found out after looking at the receipt. I’ll never go back to that place.
I’ve seen that at some restaurants in the US too. There’s usually a CYA clause like “you can ask for this fee to be taken off,” but it’s deliberately a policy designed to make customers uncomfortable and accept the surcharge.
I normally tip 20% or so, but if there’s a mandatory surcharge, I just subtract it from the tip.
I got my item and went to the register to pay for it, and the credit card screen gave the price, and then displayed a menu for tips (it was specifically labeled as being for a "tip" amount). This tip menu had three options, in USD amounts (not percents), none of which was 0 dollars. There was no option to skip or "no tip" or anything like that. I would have had to refuse to pay and put the item back.
I suppose I could have, but I was buying food for my daughter, who was with me and was hungry.
It wasn't that much money overall, but the minimum tip amount was a pretty large percentage of the total cost. Five years ago it would have just been bundled into the cost of the item.
I use these opportunities to stretch my "No" muscles. Is it uncomfortable? Of course. But flexing the non-permissive "No" muscles helps you say "No" when it's really important.
I’m happy to say “no” on visits to the USA because I’m just that, a one-time visitor to any establishment. But isn’t saying “no” if you are a regular customer fraught with risk? I've seen Americans who work as wait staff claim on FB or Reddit “If you don’t tip at least X%, you’re going to get some nastiness in your food or your drink next time.”
There is a difference between "I am a foreigner, so I refuse to tip because I will never see them again" which is taking advantage of the implied service contract and morally wrong and "I refuse to tip in new categories to employees already compensated as thought they are not getting tipped."
Not really, even as a local, you can avoid the place and will probably never see them again. They won't remember you anyway if you did randomly cross paths at Wal-mart or whatever.
And now they aren't getting paid enough, which gives incentive to the employees to demand actual wages instead of the bull shit system we have now.
Can confirm. I remembered everything that might possibly be important about an address back when I used to deliver pizza (tip amounts, broken doorbells, so so many broken apartment intercoms, violent neighbors offended by my car, ...). I guarantee if I had seen any of those customers out in the real world I could not have recognized them if my life depended on it.
> gives incentive to the employees to demand actual wages instead of the bull shit system we have now.
Ah good, revolutionary theory to support not tipping.
Sorry to have to break this to you, but "incentive" for employees to fight back is not the issue when it comes to the power dynamic between service employees and enormous companies that employ them.
Don't get me wrong, everyone unionizing and having a general strike until tipped wages are abolished seems like it would be a better solution.
But this attitude punishes people already under massive stress for not taking on extra stress and risk getting fired for complaining in the hopes that eventually the system will course correct (with how many victims between now and then?).
Yeah to be clear, I tip my bartenders and waiters even though I'd much rather they just get paid a normal, living wage. But when you're working at a counter just plugging my order into an iPad, and I have to go up and grab my food—I'm certainly not tipping then.
On previous HN threads on this topic, there definitely has not been unanimous agreement that refusing to tip is “morally wrong” and that the “implied service contract” is binding. The opposing argument is that if wait staff are not satisfied with their remuneration, that is a matter between them and their employer (and some good old labor organizing is called for), and the customer shouldn’t be brought into it.
Cultures shift through an aggregate of individuals’ actions, and each person refusing to tip in hope of moving to the system found in certain other countries is “being the change they want to see in the world”.
If you intend not to tip in an effort to “be the change”, declare your intention on arrival to the host and the server. They deserve to know that they are participating in your social project. The other option is to get the food and not the service. I.e. get your food to go. Recognize that in essence, you are buying the food from the restaurant, and the service from the waiter. If you don’t want to pay for the service, don’t ask for service.
Additionally it is disgusting to visit a country and intentionally violate social norms, especially ones around paying people for their labor. If Americans want to change their culture, they can do that. Behaving selfishly as a guest in another country isn’t “being the change you want to see in the world”.
> If you don’t want to pay for the service, don’t ask for service.
If the idea that you're buying this "service" from the waiter is implied, then surely I should be able to not buy it, but that's not really an option anywhere right? You can't go to a restaurant and pick up the food yourself from the kitchen and bypass the waiter. Even if the waiter is happy to let you, the restaurant owner wouldn't. So it's not like "don't ask for service" is really an option - the restaurant is the one requiring the service payment.
(I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point, but this reasoning doesn't lead me to it.)
It’s pretty rare for restaurants NOT to have a pick up option, you just aren’t allowed to use the service area that the servers maintain and use. Part of the service that waiters provide is the use of silverware, napkins, the cleaning of the tables and the restaurant, etc. Many servers do these duties while getting paid minimum wage under the expectation that they will be compensated later by those who use the facilities.
Pick up your food and go to a park, or choose a restaurant that operates on a different model.
Then go to the multitude of restaurants that offer exactly that, and don’t patronize the ones that only offer table service. The majority of restaurants in America are counter service, so you won’t even be starved for choice. It’s so common that you can even google it: “counter service restaurants near me”.
You don’t get to dictate the service that an establishment chooses, you do get to choose whether or not to go there.
To reiterate, I'm not commenting on your conclusion. Just saying the reasoning doesn't hold, since "then don't ask for service" thing you suggested isn't a real suggestion, given you can't refuse just the waiter service itself, even if you declare your intention. It's more like "then don't go to that restaurant".
I’m an American citizen living abroad. I’m damn well going to learn from how things are done elsewhere, and try to bring any practices I find good back to the country that belongs to me as much as it belongs to any American here.
And no, I’m not going to “declare my intentions to the wait staff”. Another feature of restaurants in certain other countries that I’d like to see brought to the USA, is minimal interaction with wait staff. At a restaurant I want to be left alone to talk the people I came there to dine with, and the inane exchanges with wait staff and their feigned positivity (which they feel obliged to feign because of the tip culture) are tiresome.
Again, wait staff have multiple avenues available to them should they wish to increase their remuneration, like political involvement to shape legislation and organized labor, without expecting anything from customers.
You aren’t trying to change culture, you’re just being selfish. If the “custom” you are bringing back only benefits you at the expense of others, you need to rethink how you are “being the change”.
Stiffing waiters is shitty behavior, especially when you know the expectation, and withhold expressing your intent to act contrary to custom to your own exclusive benefit. Ask for them to include service in the price they charge you so you can protest without it being at someone else’s expense. In countries where tipping isn’t the norm the service is built into the price, so if you are going to skip tipping, make sure that you also aren’t skipping the behind the scenes changes necessary for that business model.
If you wanted to actually change things you would speak to management and workers and explain that you are trying to change the world and why.
How is a waiter or management supposed to differentiate your noble intentions from those of a selfish prick, seeing as how the actions and effect are identical?
This is a dodge of the actual issue at hand. If a person is choosing to patronize a restaurant and get the benefits of someone's labor, refusing to tip is wrong. The direct result is that the person waiting the table is unfairly denied a portion of expected compensation.
If you want to "be the change you wish to see in the world," patronize restaurants that have no-tipping policies. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
There is no implied service contract when it comes to tipping.
An implied service contract is a legally-enforceable contract. For example, if you went to a barber shop and sat in the chair and the barber gave you a haircut, then it is implied that you will pay for the haircut. Theoretically, the barber could take you to court if you refused to pay, and the barber would win.
A tip, on the other hand, is gratuitous. The server performs their service in the hope that the customer will give a tip, but there is no obligation for the customer to do so. If a server tried to take a restaurant patron to court for not leaving a tip, he would lose.
I don't think OP is advocating for not tipping at places where you're getting table service. Agree or not that's the standard arrangement and it's a total dick move to refuse to tip in that situation.
What everyone's complaining about is situations where you order at a counter and are offered an option to tip on the payment system. These usually default to having a tip selected, which means you have to change it to "0%" to avoid tipping for counter service.
Seriously though, please don't come to the US and stiff waiters at sit down restaurants of their tip. It's a bad system but that's the system and it's wildly unfair to the table waiter when someone decides they're not tipping due to some sense of principled resistance to the practice.
It's a dick move because the expected social arrangement at an American restaurant with table service is that the customer tips the waiter. American labor laws encode this expectation and people who work as waiters expect part of their compensation to come from that arrangement.
If you eat a table service restaurant and refuse to tip because you think the arrangement is stupid (which it is), you're directly harming the person who serves you by reducing their wages for the amount of time they spent on you. You're taking a philosophical stand (at best, at worst you're just being cheap) at the cost of a real person's income. This person who has no control over the standard tipping arrangement. Your protest does not cause any change and accomplishes nothing expect worsening the day of someone who provided you a service expecting you to hold up your end of the customarily agreed upon bargain. The waiter is not offered a chance to agree to this bum deal (and if you walked into a restaurant and said "who's willing to serve me with no tip to protest the stupidity of American tipping culture?" you'd be rightfully laughed out of the room).
That's why it's a dick move.
There are plenty of options for getting fed which do not involve table service, and if you want to protest tipping culture by not participating in it, you should patronize restaurants which either don't have table service or have a no tipping policy, rather than taking it out on low level wait staff.
The law does not require customers to tip, it requires employers to pay employees at least minimum wage if employees do not receive enough tips to meet the minimum wage requirements.
The problem is that you flexing your "no" muscles doesn't hurt the business. That's the nefariousness of tipping. If you say "no", it means it hurts the employees who resent you, rather than the business owner.
The only way to hurt the business owner, would be to stop buying their products. Which is much more correct than not tipping.
Flexing my “no” muscles has nothing to do with hurting the business. It has to do with getting comfortable with the most important word you can learn for personal boundaries. It’s a word most people a phenomenally uncomfortable with.
I consider myself a fairly good tipper — a trait I picked up from my grandfather. However I feel this is tipping culture is nonsense. The calculated amounts at bottom are on the receipt total, including tax —- why am I tipping 20% on that? Then there’s the misc fees. A random X% Covid, inflation, health insurance cost.
It’s not that I don’t mind paying. I look at the total bill and shocked by the the difference from what it was to what was advertised. That puts a real damper on an otherwise good time.
Consequently I vote with my wallet and stopped going out almost altogether. I much prefer cultures where the price advertised is what you pay. I hope the silver lining to excessive tipping results from backlash and the movement to a non-tip society. My wife is from a non-tip society (Japan) and always asks me why some counties can do it and others don’t. It’s incredibly frustrating.
The way the culture of tipping has changed in the last 25-ish years is really amazing. It used to be that you'd tip 15% of the pre-tax amount, excluding alcohol, for *good service.* Then, it became 20%. Then, you were supposed to tax on the total pre-tax bill. Then on the post-tax bill. Now, 20% is kind of a 'meh' tip and is viewed as some kind of entitlement by the waitstaff industry and everybody and their grandmother is asking for tips.
A bunch of places in the US have added additional percentage fees in lieu of raising their marked prices (someone in another thread mentioned an “employee wellness fee”, for instance).
An additional 3% fee (for whatever) is common. You can ask to have to taken off, but then I feel like an asshole. I get that things might cost more — rent, raw materials, staff, etc. The business should build that into the price upfront. It feels like a dirty trick to disclose it at the end and puts me, the customer, in an awkward spot that makes me feel bad.
As a muted protest to municipal, county or state mandates requiring employers to pay for employees' health insurance, some businesses -- restaurants especially -- have taken to exposing this cost to the customer in the form of an added fee.
I feel like what's wrong with it isn't the exposure of the price breakdown to customers, but the lack of exposure of the final price until the last moment.
So they mark how much employee insurance is costing them, do they also breakdown their profit? Since business like restaurants often price based on a margin doesn't inflation sometimes increase profits?
I also don't understand protesting inflation a global phenomenon (in varying amounts) that is difficult to solve.
Tips in the U.S. are insane. I feel like there's now a social expectation to tip for everything, even if it involves no actually tip-worthy service due to credit card machines. And the low end is now 18-20%. I recently went to Europe and tips were not expected, the food was no more expensive (maybe even less so) than the US, and the service was fine.
I had waiter in Italy tell me "select zero on the card terminal, that goes to my boss, not me, if you want to tip leave some cash".
But yes, the craziness is coming here too. I have not seen it myself, but my friend complained about grocery store self-checkout asking for tip. Touchscreen order terminals in fast food takeout places also ask for tip, of course.
Self checkout? Not only no. Who did the work? Why, I did. If I tip someone, I'll tip myself.
I could see more of a case for tipping at non-self-checkout. At least there, the employee is doing the work. But even there, why has it changed? What's different from what they were doing 10 years ago?
I could also see tipping checkout people during Covid (though I didn't think of it at the time). They were putting their health, and maybe their lives, on the line so that I could continue to eat. That was way above and beyond the job they thought they were signing up for. Tipping then would have been a kind of hazard pay.
We are importing in Europe tips trough those dash/uber apps. I thoroughly hate that, especially if the app ask a tip beforehand, and I wish those services fee would be legislated out of existence.
The sad thing is that food-delivery drivers in a number of EU cities are largely migrants employed by organized crime. They have to hand over all the money they make to their bosses, and get only a tiny amount back, so the customer gets the annoyance of being asked for a tip, and the delivery person doesn’t even get the tip.
The NYT article doesn't even mention organized crime, just French delivery workers subcontracting out their deliveries. It is sort of an ironic twist on the independent contractor vs. employee debate:
> French labor law allows independent contractors to outsource to legal workers, but Uber Eats, Stuart and Glovo said they prohibited subcontracting.
Sorry, can't find anything about how organized crime has taken the field.
But: if this happens in Marseille/Nice, I'm ready to bet organized crime has a hand in it. Mafias still have a lot of power there, and they're taking all the fringe paralegals businesses.
Any time Europe does something it doesn't like I always read how it's an "imported" trend (usually from America). Europeans just can't ever accept they are responsible for their own behavior. They're just helpless and twisting in the wind at America's mercy when it comes to these things.
Of course, when it comes to things they're proud of then they're a strong independent people that don't need no America.
Rounding up cash transactions, sometimes significantly so (e.g. 80 CZK to 100 CZK) was always a thing in Czechia at least, though it was very activity-specific.
A restaurant or a pub, yes, a taxi, yes, a bellhop or another hotel employee, maybe (there, the tip might serve as a borderline bribe for being discreet, e.g. if a married man books a room with an unmarried lady for one night). Literature older than 100 years mentions tipping in similar contexts.
OTOH tipping would look very strange, say, at the post office. Just not done. Perhaps leaving some very small change on the tray, but that's it. Same with most retail shops.
It always feels weird as an outsider observing American culture about how accepting and expecting tips is not seen as dishonorable or shameful over there. The power dynamics in tipping are the same as those of someone tossing change to a beggar. How do working people suffer this instead of just putting a static value to their labor?
> The power dynamics in tipping are the same as those of someone tossing change to a beggar.
Perhaps not a beggar who does nothing. But there are beggars around here who will provide services. There are buskers playing guitars, violins and drums, with the case open to accept cash. (Or Stripe, if they're savvy.)
There are also dudes who will run up to your vehicle at a stoplight, wash some windows and squeegee them, before you even know what's going on, and then you're supposed to offer some money for the valuable service you just received.
I've also seen dudes who will, like "keep an eye on your bike" while I'm in the restaurant. Is that a valuable service or a protection racket?
I most certainly do. I am from India and I can wager all that I have that American workers, or even the American unemployed are wayy better off than their counterparts in India. But that's not the point.
India also has massive degrees of unemployment and poverty, and probably the largest population of beggars. It still doesn't dignify tipping and begging, let alone put the onus of disgrace on customers who don't tip.
> “We can’t just say, ‘Oh, we’re going to charge $2 extra’ instead of having tips, because we have a duty to our customers to have a very fair price point,” said Cheaney, who also consults for Main Squeeze’s corporate office. If customers think the price is too high, he said, they won’t return. Asking them to tip, he said, is different because it’s optional.”
Firstly, how is charging $15 for 1oz of liquor a fair price? Secondly, I don’t think anyone thinks tipping is truly optional.
I consider requests for tips to be worse than higher prices and am much less likely to return. Tips feel a bit like small scale extortion, especially with food.
You don't think it's optional to tip someone who pours and hands you a cup of juice at the checkout counter? Thanks for subsidizing the rest of us then I guess..
The tipping culture lead to the unfortunate situation that laid off staff received only little unemployment benefits during covid, because their base salary has been low. So it is favorable for the worker to receive a higher base salary without tips (and rather higher prices).
At a certain point I’m just going to start setting it to 0% every time. And if I can’t I’ll stop going. I’m already paying $15 for two ice cream cones, I don’t need to pay another $3 for someone to spend 30 seconds scooping them. I can do that at home.
Universal health care. Universal health care. Universal health care.
Yes, tipping in the US is its own peculiar local minimum -- a cycle or trough that is difficult to escape from. A big component of the costs to both employees and employers alike is health insurance, something that if we nationalized, spreading the burden across the population as a whole, would be relieved from individuals and businesses. Especially small businesses.
Do you have some source that universal health care would reduce costs? I think it would be just extra tax, and medical expenses would just increase proportionally, similar way as with student loans.
My country has nationalised healthcare, yet you still have to pay for private doctors. There are no state dentists or pediatricians. And waiting list for surgery is months or years.
I’ve stopped tipping at places where I wouldn’t have normally tipped pro-Covid. Probably perceived as an A-hole by the service worker, whose pay wasn’t raised in liu of tips. What irks me more are businesses who tack on a service fee (disclosed in small print on the menu) to cover minimum wage increases.
I don't like that tips are a trick to make you think things are less expensive than they are. However, I see it as my duty since I'm lucky to be paid a lot for my job to share that prosperity with the people in my community.
I would prefer that prices reflected their true cost, but in the meantime I'm not going to stop tipping because that is only hurting the workers and isn't fixing the core issue.
I have started generally going out to restaurants/service places less just to avoid this awkward interaction.
Another thing I have seen is the POS machines placing the highest tip amount next to the 'No Tip' option. So if I feel like tipping the least amount, and I intuitively select the button next to 'No Tip', it actually ends up being the most.
In general, tipping in Hospitality is an outdated practice in my view, mainly because :
1. eating out or holidaying is no longer treated as a special occasion or reserved for the wealthy or aristocracy etc as say decades ago or earlier
2. it's an unreliable income stream as markets adopt innovations like Food Delivery apps
However, it makes sense to tip in niche industries e.g casinos, special clubs, digital content providers/opensource software etc.
Doordash in particular has been trying to charge a ton of service fees and "suggest" high tips. Sorry/not sorry to say their service fees come out of the driver's otherwise generous tip.
This is Hacker News. The site has “hacker” in its name and is widely regarded as the news-for-nerds successor to Slashdot. It’s a reasonable expectation that people here will be familiar with paywall-circumvention websites like Archive.XY, so a WSJ link is as readable as anything else.
I recently went somewhere and was forced to tip — as in, 0 USD/% was not an option — for literally doing nothing but ringing me up. The minimum amount was 25% of the bill.
Tips are becoming another mandatory hidden fee, which is a form of bait and switch. Wages shouldn't be part of that and it shouldn't happen either way.