Yep. My favorite thing is when I am not even at a restaurant and I'm being asked to tip a retail worker making well above minimum wage. As a former bartender who made $2.65US an hour and relied on tips for my "paycheck" each week, seeing this new "tipping everyone" trend is like a slap in the face.
Bottom line, if your business can't afford to pay its people a living wage, then it can't afford to operate.
Two of the most hilarious things I've seen are tips at self-serve kiosks, and tips where you carry the food to the person behind the counter. Tipping them for ringing up an item..
At a corner store I frequent, they recently changed POS systems, and the new ones show a tipping screen. The person there always quickly dismisses it; I think they haven't figured out how to disable it, and are a little embarrassed that the machine is asking you to tip for just ringing up your items.
(Well, they also make espresso drinks and made-to-order deli sandwiches, so I guess it's appropriate to tip if you order those.)
Sorry for the late reply, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you tip for delivery?
In my area, pizza delivery drivers (read: not DoorDashers, etc. I am not sure what they make since I refuse to use those services) make about $12 - $15/hour and get paid for mileage (usually between $0.50 - $0.62 per mile.) I'm not seeing a reason to tip them. They are making well above minimum wage in my State, unlike the restaurant servers/bartenders that only just barely crested $4/hour as of 2025. The latter is in a position to rely on tips, the former is far from it.
I ask because we don't seem to have an established "hard line" on when tipping is appropriate in the United States, and when it is not. This extremely fuzzy understanding is allowing companies like DoorDash, coffee shops, etc to under pay their staff by off-loading part of the cost to the customer, which makes your $7 latte cost $10, or whatever. It's steamy bullshit and needs to be shoveled into the bin.
If we had a hard line on when tipping is justified, we'd quickly see a change in the other direction. I've always felt that the hard line should be "if you are making less than minimum wage, then tipping is justified." That's it. No soft maybes, no washy-washy justifications.
That being the case, if a barista (avg $15/hour in the US) is not happy _without_ the tips, then they have two options: demand more from their employer, or find a different job that pays better. Either way, the employer is left to consider either raising wages to keep people satisfied, or doing the same just to keep people in the door and stay in business. The barista is, in essence, the face of the company. They do the work the customer sees, which makes them important to the sustainability of the company. Ergo, the company needs to put more resources in the barista's pocket to ensure quality work.
It sort of blows my mind why everyone else in the US does not think this way, but I have tried to dissect my own stance on tipping (from the standpoint of having spent nearly a decade working front-of-the-house in restaurants), and I'm really having trouble poking holes in my own logic. So, I'm always interested to hear other people's takes on why they tip the way they do.
Imagine it’s raining, or they come really fast. Even if not so, it is always expected to tip the person doing delivery. That’s just the custom, like tipping in restaurant or tipping the bartender is the custom.
This is the problem. You basically said "we do it like this because that's the way we've always done it," which is the weakest form of justification for anything.
Rain, snow, etc...do you tip the person who delivers your mail? They do it in an LLV (a rather treacherous vehicle with little to no climate control) or on foot, but nobody tips them. When the pizza delivery person applied for the job, they did so knowing they would have to deliver in bad weather, but somehow we reach the conclusion that the responsibility of making sure that driver is being paid adequately for their risk and efforts is shifted to the customer, rather than than their employer.
Now, I should clarify that despite my years of restaurant service where my $2.65/hour paycheck existed nominally for the sole purpose of covering taxes (hence, my "take home" pay coming directly from the customers to my pocket), that I am in the camp of abolishing tipping altogether. Raise the wages of all service workers to a livable wage, which all these companies can certainly afford, and we'd be done with it. But I know that's a huge leap, so we need to take baby steps to get there.
Having a well-defined notion of which positions should be tip-based and which should not is the first baby step.
Great film, but bad scene, honestly. The arguments it makes are intended to make Mr Pink look like the pseudo-intellectual a-hole of the group, rather than be the social commentary on capitalism, labor relations and whose responsibility employee compensation actually is or should be, which is at the crux of any good discussion about the appropriateness of tipping.
I guess what I am getting at with my other comments is that we do not have a clear understanding of said appropriateness, and thus, we, the consumer, along side the food service worker, are generally taken advantage of by the companies that perpetuate the idea while said companies are off the hook for labor costs.
Now, before someone (if anyone is still following this thread) chimes in with "but if the restaurants pay the bartenders/servers a full wage, the food and drinks would be way more expensive!" I am here to tell you "travel more." I have been to many other countries where tipping is not at all a thing, and the food costs about the same as it does in the US.
When you walk into a restaurant in the US, you're getting ripped off. The dish you just paid $16US for cost them about $3 to make, including wage. It's not like the cooks are prepping one dish at a time, or the servers are only taking one table at a time...not to mention most restaurants in the US are using frozen, prepared ingredients that they are really just heating up or re-hydrating. Overhead costs like electricity and rent? A drop in the bucket compared to what small businesses have to deal with. The staff is making bare-minimum wages as it is while the parent companies and investors are making bank. That money from your $16US meal goes up, but very little of it actually comes back down.
Tipping exists because greed at the top exists and its unfair to both food service workers and the customers, but we've been at it so long that it's been normalized. And now it's spreading to other industries, like retail and online sales.
Yes, it's pretty common. It's also common for businesses where customers tip to underpay their employees on the expectation that they'll make it up with tips. It's legal to do this in many jurisdictions.
As an American, I wish we didn't do this, but it's a collective action problem that's very hard to solve.
What exactly is the definition of "underpay" here? Back when my wife was a server, it seemed like a cheat code to the service industry - she was making way more money waiting tables for $2.65/hr + tips than she had made at any other job she'd had (something like $18-20/hr 15 years ago)
In college I worked at a Chili's and made anywhere from $15-20 an hour in a busy ___location, which was decent wages for a college student at the time.
Correct. bruckie has never actually worked as a server; otherwise he would know that tipping in the US is hugely beneficial to waiters, bartenders, etc., even with the legally allowed lower minimum wage. This is why tipping has never gone away through legislative means despite no shortage of waiters and bartenders in the populace, and why the occasional restaurant that proudly announces that it is a "no-tipping" establishment, and gets the requisite amount of slavering coverage in the usual virtue-signaling subreddits, never stays open long.
My dislike of tipping isn't to help the "poor servers" (and other employees partially compensated via tips). You're correct that I've never been a server, but I've had several friends and roommates who have been, and I'm aware of how it works. The good ones make (relatively) a lot of money; the bad ones sometimes don't, and usually find a different job pretty quickly. (I totally see how mentioning the lower minimum wage muddled my point, though.)
The reason I wish we didn't tip is because I think the list price should reflect the true cost of whatever I'm buying. I think that is more honest, encourages healthy competition, and is a pleasant consumer experience.
I was really glad when the DOT forced airlines to include taxes and fees in ticket prices in 2012, and wish there were a similar law/regulation that applied to all commerce. (And yes, I realize this is hard, given the incredible complexity of U.S. tax laws in a bazillion different—and often overlapping—jurisdictions.)
One thing that annoys me is that some states, like California, don't have a tipped minimum wage. (Well, we do, it's just set to the same number as the non-tipped minimum.) And yet we're still expected to tip. I guess the real problem is that it's expensive to live in CA, and our minimum wage needs to be hiked up quite a bit.
One of the many reasons I left the USA. Too bad US-Americans are so used to tipping 20% they even do it when traveling... giving the rest of us a reputation as being suckers.
Yes, one of the MANY cultural reasons. One less thing I have to think about when paying for food. There's honestly too many reasons to list: cost, safety, food, transportation, work life balance, education, being near family, and to see more of the world.
"Guilt" is an exaggeration, but the human behind the machine might care. It's a tiny inconvenience all things considered, and more of a principal than a practical issue. It helps tip the scale of where I'd rather live.
Yes, for nearly any restaurant this is the unspoken recommendation, and sometimes enforced automatically if your group is larger than 6-8. Source: I am an American.
Yes, at least in NYC. And you get to tip in coffee places too, even when your coffee is to go. The card payment device (whatever they are called) gives you options such as 20%, 40%, 60% when you try to pay.
for some people it is. Maybe you'll become a believer when you realize that waiters wages are only around $2.35 an hour plus tips. Some states require that wait staff make -at least- federal minimum wage ($7.50? or so). Most do quite a bit better than that in all but the worst restaurant jobs. Not really a living wage tho. Some people do well on tips in upper crust restaurants, and often bartenders have enough turnover to do pretty well too.
