People are a little bit stingier in barber chairs and Ubers than they were just a few years ago.
The shares of adults who say they always tip their hair stylists, servers at sit-down restaurants and food delivery people have each fallen 8 percentage points since 2021, according to a Bankrate survey released Wednesday. That rate slipped 7 percentage points for taxi and ride-hail drivers over the same period.
Three years ago, the economy was reopening from the pandemic and inflation was higher than it is now, but so was concern for front-line workers.
At the time, three-quarters of consumers reported always tipping restaurant servers, but today just two-thirds do. Despite modest upticks since last year, barely more than half of people now count themselves reliable tippers of hairdressers (55%) and food delivery drivers (51%), while only 41% say the same when it comes to ordering a ride.
The survey reflects Americans’ growing ease bypassing ubiquitous tipping prompts, from coffeeshops to airport terminals in the post-Covid economy, especially as sticker prices have risen. While consumer spending has held remarkably steady, many households are feeling the squeeze from persistent inflation and tightening their belts accordingly. Some of that newfound caution may be factoring into when, where and how much people tip.
I’m a generous tipper at sit down restaurants, but draw the line at places where I’m grabbing a prepackaged sandwich and drink and being asked to tip the employee to literally ring up the items at the cash register. I wonder if the expansion of this practice is turning people off of tipping even when it’s warranted, hence these statistics
Yeah. The blurbs examples are places you really need to tip. They are providing a direct service to you. But pretty much every digital pay interface is asking for tips now. And a lot of them aren’t even offering 15%. They start at 18% and go up. It is really souring me on going out at all.
The blurbs examples are places you really need to tip. They are providing a direct service to you.
Do you really not realize how ridiculous this sounds?
Yes. But there is no other alternative in America. If you stiff servers, they get hurt. If enough people do it, they quit and your favorite places die. You can encourage places that don’t allow tipping and pay a living wage but those are so rare as to be pointless.
Only assholes refuse to tip for service in America.
Pretty much every sit-down restaurant now has tips calculated on the bill, and 15% is never one of the calculations. It’s typically 18%, 20%, and 22%, but I’ve seen them start higher.
Is this due to the same machines? Since it can differ, I assume it’s the owner who chooses to make it higher.
It depends on what payment thing they use. Most places use a third-party payment POS and stick with default settings.
To be clear, it’s never warranted. It’s just some cultures that have normalized the practice for certain services. Companies should always fully pay their employees. Full stop.
there’s a new fast food drive through near me and if you buy a $13 burger with plastic they turn the little machine to you at your car window and expect you to enter a fucking tip.
I’m an overtipping bastard. I learned to tip from Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven. i love to tip.
I even tip at the weed store and the liquor store if they give me suggestions or any kind of service in addition to ringing me up.
YOU CAN SUCK MY DICK ASKING ME TO TIP IN THE GODDAMN DRIVE THROUGH!!!
I’m not eating there because the burgers are too expensive for how good they are ($5.50 for a plain kids burger come on) but even if I loved the food i’m not tipping for fast food.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this written about so -
The reason these tipping prompts are so egregiously inescapable now is that those point of sales systems are handed out by Clover and the like when the business starts using them for POS and inventory and credit card processing.
For each CC transaction, the business pays something like 2-3% of the transaction and so the CC processor becomes incentivized to make that transaction amount higher. That’s how we got here. You’re being guilted into tipping a shitty tech company.
Carry cash. Pay cash whenever possible. That’s how you avoid that screen.
Is clover getting money for cc transactions? I thought it was the cc companies charging that fee.
Clover or whoever also gets money for letting whoever use their system. They get an upfront fee then a percent of sales.
Point of sale companies like Clover charge a fee and the credit card company gets a cut of that. The rest is for the point of sale’s services.
Anyone else notice the “essential workers” never got that minimum wage increase?
I get republicans not supporting it, but the moderate Dems not fighting for them is going to hurt in November…
Voters know Republicans obstruct progress, but they need to see that Dems are at least willing to have the fight.
Where I live they got it. While it isn’t law, the local fast food is all starting at $16/hour or more.
…
I mean, wages can go down, and will go down when there’s a larger labor pool.
Which is why we should have taken advantage of the small labor pool during COVID to raise minimum wage.
We had a chance to raise it while workers have leverage, but republicans will always oppose it and moderate Dems didn’t push for it, so nothing happened.
That’s wildly considered the biggest negative of moderate Dems, they don’t act when we have the leverage to get things done. They tell us to be happy with temporary things we can lose tomorrow, like how they refused to modify Roe v Wade while we had the numbers to codify it, now it’s gone.
They don’t actually want to fight for us. They’re controlled opposition to make sure when we do have the opportunity/leverage to fix shit, we waste that time “looking into” if we should really fix it. Then when the opportunity passes, they say they tried.
But they didn’t.
I don’t know about hairdressers and drivers, but many servers are legally paid less than minimum wage because they are expected to make up the difference in tips.
So this is essentially people being fucked over by not being paid enough fucking over other people who aren’t being paid enough. And if you object to them not being paid enough, the solution isn’t to not tip them, it’s to not go to the restaurant.
They are supposed to be paid the difference if tips plus base pay don’t add up to minimum wage. But I’m guessing a lot of places don’t do it.
The minimum wage for tip workers is often lower in most states then minimum wage for non-tipped workers.
New York is the only state that I know of that has a minimum wage equity law where tipped workers have to be paid the same minimum wage as anyone else after tips, and if they aren’t, the employer has to make up the difference.
California has, for a while now, required that tipped workers be paid the same minimum wage as anyone else, period. Tips are extras on top of minimum wage.
No, that’s a Federal requirement, too. It only requires them to be brought up to the $7.25/hour Federal minimum wage so it’s pretty useless, but it exists.
% based tips are bullshit and always have been. And moving the scale up to 18,20,22 is insane.
Especially because a 15% tip is almost twice as good as it was 10 years ago due to rising food costs
Yes! The raise is already built in.
When they flip that screen, I cringe. US tip culture sucks.
I worked in craft beer pre-pandemic. Man, beer release days were nice. Get a bunch of bozos all lined up for the minute we open, all want a whole case of the latest IPA for like $100, all of em blindly tapping the 20% tip option. Like, homie, I did nothing for that tip. I’m over here bartending, getting less from the people I’m actually serving beers to. Thanks I guess?
So now, especially that the economy is fucked, I’m very particular about what I tip on.
Yesterday I went to a juice place. Got 2 bottles of juice and a fruit bowl thing. I’m only tipping on the fruit bowl thing. I’ll tip 20% on it, but you simply grabbed the bottle of juice from a fridge. That’s not a service.
All in all it looks like an 8% tip, because their juice is $11 a bottle and the fruit bowl is like $20 after everything I added to it.
$4 tip. That’s 20% on your $20 bowl. I’m ignoring the other $22 on the bill. That wasn’t a service. I’m not tipping $9 for this interaction. A fruit bowl and two juices isn’t worth $51 dollars. It’s hard enough to justify the $4 tip when the juice is $11… The boss can’t pay you better with margins like that? Or is the fruit vendor raking it in? Fruit isn’t that expensive…
I don’t get it.
I do that too. Get draft beer, pizza and then a bunch of cans at a brewery. 60% was prepackaged so I’m not tipping 20% on the whole bill. Did my own math and it was like 10%.
I don’t get it.
What’s not to get? You seem to understand it just fine. Rather than actually paying their workers a living wage, they can have customers subsidize their pay.
And then when they have a bad night and end up making $4/hour, tips included, you blame the customers for not tipping and not the employer who pays you literally $3/hour.
STOP TIPPING. The whole world doesn’t tip, it’s a strange and stupid US thing. Just stop tipping please!
Also, while you’re stopping dumb shit like tipping, may as well switch to the metric system as part of the integration!
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This should be the next “movement” the internet gets behind. Everyone stops tipping, and watch people freak out.
And then, after a bit of confusion, tipping will end and waiters will get paid the right amount – no tipping needed
From Germany, wholeheartedly, fuck off with your POS terminal tip prompts. I simply won’t.
- laughs in european *
Gotta love corpo news.
have made some people stingier
They’re no longer appreciating service industry workers
Shut the fuck up and pay them a living wage you animals. Don’t try and continue pitting individuals against each other. “Blame the consumer for everything” is so played out at this point.
The reality is that many of these jobs rely on tips. If they were to “pay them a living wage” then the cost of the service would just go up.
Don’t get me wrong, I want tipping to go away, and it’s gotten absurd where people are asking for tips now. But it’s absolutely stingy to not tip in these places where traditionally they would be tipped. If you don’t want to tip, don’t buy their services. It should be a recognized part of the cost: you just think it should be made official, some think it should be based on the quality of service they received.
The cost would not increase. That is not how supply and demand works.
It is extremely unlikely this has not been explained to you before.
When entrees are all up in the 30s versus in the 20s, it doesn’t matter if [customers] know that you are gratuity-inclusive.
I tip 10-15%, how are prices so much higher that then jump into the 30s for a meal? Most of my meals our, tip included, don’t hit the $30 threshold. I think that their prices, even accounting for tips included, were off.
“I think a lot of people don’t see the system as being broken, or anything. And a lot of people love tipping,” he observed. “They feel some kind of power.”
He thinks people like tipping because they have power? That’s kind of fucked.
They spend a bunch of time saying that the locations they included tips in payed $5-6 less per hour. How can they even say they ran a location with tips included if they didn’t even match the tipped wages? They overcharged for food and still didn’t pay the staff enough. I’d say that’s a lot of mismanagement rather than a failure of a no-tipping restaurant.
Here’s another core concept that places don’t seem to understand, if your business cannot make it without underpaying staff then you shouldn’t be in business. Someone else who can manage it will fill your gap in the market or the market will correct itself.
- Uber’s get $1 - $3 depending on driver/distance
- To-go orders get NOTHING.
- Sit down food gets 15-20%, depending on server
- Drinks at a bar get $1-$2 each drink.
- Barber probably gets the biggest tip at $10-$15, but base price is going up so maybe adjusting down next time.
And I do not do delivery apps.
I’ll tip my waiter/waitress. I refuse to tip a PoS device. I have no shame selecting the “No tip” button on those things.
I quit tipping. That is not true. The last pizza I had delivered to work I gave the lady a ten. Physically gave it to her. Not added it to a app that you know is going to give them less than the tip. If they give them anything at all. I quit tipping through the checkout/payment process.
In the US, it is quite illegal to not give any of the tip to the worker. Managers and apps can’t keep any amount of the tip, and the only way it’s legal for the worker to not get the whole thing is if the service uses a tip sharing setup where it goes into a pool that is distributed (in which case it is evenly distributed amongst the participating workers, management still can’t legally take any).
Illegal things happen, but almost certainly not as often on an app that helps records like that than you’d think
I tip if there was something to tip. Fast casual dining with me bussing, nope. Receiving a cup for coffee that I pump and setup, nope.
I went to get blood lab work done today. When I went to pay the kiosk asked for a tip.
I imagine it’s just built in to the POS software they use, which is probably generic. Doesn’t really make that better, but
