Tip screens now pop up at self-checkout kiosks and coffee counters where nobody even serves you. Is tipping a fair way to pay real wages, or has it turned into guilt-driven extortion? Pick a side.
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentbro i got a tip prompt at a CAR WASH. automated car wash. there were literally no humans involved in washing my car. it was conveyor belt and spinning brushes. who exactly am i tipping. the machine? the soap?
Hot take: if your business model only works because customers subsidize your labor costs, your business model is wrong. Full stop.
what i hate most is when the receipt guilt-trips you AFTER you already said no. "you left NO TIP" printed in bold. yes i know what i did susan.
Honestly? The pandemic broke something in me regarding tips. I was genuinely grateful and tipped 30%+ on everything for like two years because these people were showing up while I stayed home. Now the screens expect that as the new floor. My generosity got codified into obligation. That's frustrating.
I tipped at a self-checkout kiosk last week before I even realized what I was doing. Muscle memory. That's how far gone we are.
Okay but can we talk about airport kiosks? I bought a bottle of water from a self-serve refrigerator unit — just opened the door and grabbed it — and the payment terminal still asked me for a tip. A TIP. For what? For the refrigerator being cold? I genuinely stood there for 45 seconds trying to figure out who I was tipping.
Former waitress here, two decades ago, small Italian place in Cleveland. I made $2.13 an hour. TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTEEN CENTS. And we're sitting here debating whether tip culture has 'gone too far' because a coffee shop iPad makes you feel awkward? Honey, the system was broken from jump. The discomfort you feel tapping 'no tip' is a feature, not a bug — it was designed to transfer the guilt of poverty wages onto the customer instead of the employer. Get mad at the right people.
The self checkout tip prompt is genuinely one of the most baffling social developments of my lifetime and I watched an insurrection on TV
Actually tips are absolutely taxable income and the IRS requires servers to report them. Employers are even required to report estimated tip income if the server doesn't. This has been federal law for decades. Please do not spread misinformation that could get someone audited.
At this point I tip out of pure social anxiety and I want everyone to know that about me so we can all collectively decide to stop together like a flash mob of fiscal courage
Here's a thing I've been thinking about: the tip prompt at a self-checkout isn't asking you to tip an employee. It's asking you to tip the store. Because who actually gets that money? Do we know? Has anyone audited this? I feel like the answer would genuinely surprise people.
The whole system is broken and everyone knows it but we just keep hitting 20% because we're scared of looking cheap. That's not generosity, that's coercion.
I grew up poor. My mom waitressed double shifts for tips. Ending tipping overnight would devastate working class people before any raise ever kicked in. This isn't theoretical for us.
My husband and I visited his family in rural Georgia last month and ate at this tiny barbecue spot, cash only, tip jar on the counter, no prompt, no screen, no guilt architecture. Just a jar. I put in five bucks and felt genuinely good about it for the first time in years. The coercive UI design is doing something real to people's relationship with generosity. It's converting a voluntary act into a toll booth and we're all worse off for it.
Guilt-driven extortion is EXACTLY what it is and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. The fact that a corporation can legally shift the moral burden of paying its employees onto ME, the customer, while its shareholders collect dividends is one of the most audacious economic sleights of hand in modern American history. We just accept it because we've always accepted it.
The day I got a tip prompt from a vending machine style snack wall at a hotel is the day I fully checked out of caring about social norms around this. I pressed zero. I will always press zero on a machine. I refuse.
The pressure is the thing that gets me. The screen is FACING YOU and the EMPLOYEE IS WATCHING. That is a designed psychological trap and I will not pretend otherwise.
I grew up in a small town in Mississippi. My aunt ran a diner for thirty years. You want to know who tips the worst? Church crowds on Sunday. Absolute fact that everyone in the service industry knows and nobody wants to say.
The Toast and Square and those companies built tip prompts into their default UI and then sold that UI to every coffee shop and sandwich counter in America. We're not just experiencing cultural drift here. We're experiencing a product design choice made by software companies that benefits from higher transaction amounts. This was engineered.
Worked in restaurants for 11 years. Tips are the only reason I could pay rent. You want to reform tipping? Great. But make sure servers get a living wage FIRST, then we can talk.
Can we just acknowledge that the tip percentage suggestions on the screen are calculated on the PRE-TAX subtotal in some places and POST-TAX in others and nobody tells you which? That's a whole separate scam nested inside the main scam.
Been a delivery driver for three years. Bad tippers, I remember your address. Good tippers, I remember your address too but in the nice way. Tip your drivers.
nope. not tipping at a tablet that spun around at me at a cookie counter. the cookie was $4. i am not adding $1.50 for a robot to hand it to me.
I moved back from living in Japan for two years and the culture shock is real. In Japan, tipping is considered almost rude — like you're implying the person needs charity. You get excellent, attentive service because service workers are paid a living wage and take professional pride in the job. I'm not saying we copy Japan wholesale, but the idea that good service REQUIRES tipping incentives is just... not evidenced by reality.
Easy for you to say "just press no tip" when you're not the one who has to look someone in the eyes who's making $9 an hour while you walk away with your $7 latte.
The thing that actually got me was tipping on ONLINE ORDERS I pick up myself. I ordered, I drove there, I carried it to my car. The labor involved was kitchen labor which should be baked into the price of the food. Instead I get a tip screen at pickup. No.
The answer is federal minimum wage reform and it has always been federal minimum wage reform. Tipping is a bandaid on a bullet wound and we keep arguing about the bandaid.
I keep seeing this argument that raising menu prices would 'solve' everything but I want to complicate that. I ran projections for a small bakery in Austin. If we absorbed full living wages into prices with no tipping, a $4.50 croissant becomes around $7.20 to cover labor, taxes, benefits. That's not made up, that's math. Customers who claim they'd rather pay higher prices have never actually been confronted with those prices. The cognitive trick of separating the tip from the bill is frustrating AND it functions as a subsidy that keeps small food businesses alive. I don't love it. I'm just being honest about the tradeoff.
Tipping is classist in its origin — it came from post-Civil War America as a way to pay Black service workers less than white ones. Look it up. We've built an entire wage structure on something with a genuinely ugly history and we act like it's just a quirky American custom.
hard disagree with everyone on here clutching pearls about tip creep. the real issue is that the federal tipped minimum wage is still $2.13 an hour. TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTEEN CENTS. that number hasn't moved since 1991. maybe focus the outrage there?
The tip percentage creep is real. 15 was standard, then 18, now the default options start at 20 with the top option at 30. The software companies that design these prompts are doing this on purpose.
I asked a cashier at a coffee place if she actually sees the tips from the kiosk. She laughed. Said it goes into a pool split weird ways by management. So who exactly are we helping.
I'm a former restaurant owner. Closed during COVID. I want to push back on the 'just raise wages' crowd not because I disagree in principle but because the math doesn't work at the margins most independent restaurants operate at. We're talking 3-5% profit margins. A $5/hr wage increase for a full staff means I need to raise prices 18-22% AND hope customer volume holds. That's an enormous gamble on consumer behavior that the big chains can absorb but independents often can't.
People who say "just tip better" are missing the point. The point is WHY are we tipping at all instead of paying people actual wages. The question answers itself.
I challenge anyone who thinks tipping is pure extortion to work one Saturday night dinner rush at a busy restaurant and then tell me a flat hourly wage captures what that job demands. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The real villain is venture-capital-funded startups that built tip prompts into point-of-sale software because it improves their metrics and makes the business look profitable while workers and customers both get squeezed.
I always tip cash directly to the server now. Read an article saying some POS systems skim a processing fee off card tips before the worker gets them. Whether or not that's legal everywhere I don't want my two dollars being filtered through Square's fee structure.
What bothers me philosophically is that we've weaponized tips as performance reviews while simultaneously insisting they're moral obligations. You can't have it both ways. Either tipping is mandatory — in which case build it into the wage — or it's discretionary based on service quality — in which case stop guilting people who had bad service into paying anyway. The current system is this weird hybrid where it's psychologically mandatory but legally optional and economically unpredictable and it serves basically no one well except the businesses that get to externalize their labor costs onto strangers.
I think Americans are capable of holding two ideas simultaneously: tipping culture has gotten out of hand AND workers deserve more money. One does not cancel the other. Reform both.
I'm a small restaurant owner in rural Tennessee. I can't afford to raise wages to $20+ and survive. Tips let me keep five people employed. Big city policy ideas don't always translate.
My wife is a hair stylist. She owns her own booth, sets her own prices, does incredible work. People sometimes stiff her completely. Like, she spent three hours on a balayage and someone left nothing. Tipping culture being 'optional' hits very differently depending on the industry.
counterpoint: i make six figures in tips as a bartender in NYC. abolish tipping and i make $18 an hour. no thanks. sometimes the current system actually benefits workers.
my kids asked me why we tip and i had absolutely no coherent answer for them. i said 'because thats how it works' which is maybe the least satisfying explanation ive ever given for anything. seven year olds are merciless about logical consistency.
there is a version of this conversation that is completely legitimate (tip prompts at self checkout are weird) and a version that is just cover for people who dont want to tip servers at sit down restaurants. i see both versions happening simultaneously in this comment section
I find it genuinely fascinating that Americans have outsourced the moral weight of paying a fair wage entirely onto consumers. Employers got away clean on this one.
Asking sincerely: does anyone know what the actual research says about whether tipping correlates with service quality? Because my intuition says no — I've gotten great service with no expectation of tips and terrible service at places where tips are expected. What are we actually incentivizing here?
Nobody is being EXTORTED lmao. Extortion involves a threat. The screen rotates away in three seconds. You are a grown adult who can press a button. The drama some people perform around this is honestly more exhausting than just tipping would be.
My solution: tip servers at sit-down restaurants. tip nobody else. done. we made this complicated ourselves.
raise prices and pay people fairly. i know this is apparently impossible according to restaurant owners but every other developed country figured it out so
genuinely asking: when did 20% become the baseline? wasnt it 15% like ten years ago? who decided to move it and why did we all just agree
i work at a coffee shop and honestly? i wish we just got paid $18/hr flat and no tip screen. the awkwardness of watching someone decline the tip while i pretend to look at the espresso machine is not worth the $40 a week i actually see from those tablets
as someone who spent years being broke and undertipping because i literally couldn't afford more i feel so much guilt reading threads like this. i always went back to places where i'd stiffed someone and overtipped the next time. not sure that helped but it was what i had
Here's what nobody talks about: restaurants in Europe pay fair wages AND have better food AND cheaper prices in some cases. The "we can't afford it" argument is just not proven.
Twenty percent of a $9 latte is $1.80. I will survive pressing the custom amount button and leaving a dollar. What I won't survive is people acting like I'm a monster for not doing the full suggested amount on an automated machine.
I think people are conflating two different things here. Tipping a skilled bartender who makes your $14 cocktail = fine. Tipping at a kiosk where a machine dispensed your item = insane. Not the same conversation.
my dad grew up leaving a quarter on the table and feeling like a king about it. now i leave 22% and feel guilty. progress i guess
my solution is to go to restaurants less often and cook more at home. not a political statement, just economics. eating out has gotten expensive enough that the tip on top pushes a lot of meals out of my budget. probably not what restaurant owners want to hear but its true
unpopular take incoming: i actually dont mind tipping at counter service IF the people there are genuinely friendly and do a good job. what i mind is the 30% default option on a $47 pizza order where someone slid a box into a bag and handed it to me through a window. context matters. interaction quality matters. the flat 'tip or youre a bad person' framing erases all of that nuance and honestly just makes me resentful rather than generous
lol at people acting like declining a tip is some brave act of principle. most of yall are just cheap and found an ideology to dress it up in
My grandfather called tipping an insult because it implied the worker couldn't negotiate a fair wage themselves. He was kind of ahead of his time honestly.
i have never once in my life not tipped at a sit down restaurant no matter the service and I never will. outside of that context i use judgment. this does not make me a bad person and I'm exhausted by the maximalist positions on both sides of this debate
Extortion is a strong word. Nobody is forcing you to tip. Press the no tip button and move on with your life. The drama around this is exhausting.
my sister manages a restaurant in Phoenix and she says the tip pooling laws in Arizona mean the kitchen actually sees a share now. which changes everything. im more willing to tip generously knowing the dishwasher gets some of it. we should be talking about tip pooling reform not abolition
Someone upthread said Europeans pay fair wages AND have better food. I've been to plenty of mediocre restaurants in France and Italy, thanks. The food quality thing is a completely separate variable and kind of an embarrassing argument to make in a debate about wage structure.
Actually European restaurant prices are significantly higher than American ones when you account for service charges being baked in. Do your research before spreading that.
I always tip 15% minimum because that's just what decent people do and if you disagree you've never worked in food service.
confidently stating that tips are tax free income for servers. they dont have to claim it. thats part of why cash tips especially are preferred. this is honestly a pretty significant benefit that changes the wage comparison
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments
Is judging someone by their height as shallow as judging by their weight?
108 comments