Where I live, there are plenty of restaurants with tipflation.

And then there are the worker-owned pizza joint and coffee shop, which do not even have a tip jar on the counter. They don’t ask for — or make room for — tips. They pay their worker-owners well enough that they don’t have to beg.

That’s what tipping culture is. It’s putting the worker in the position of begging from the customer instead of being assured a fair wage by the employer. And now, the management even wants to tax the receipts of this mandatory panhandling.

Now, I understand that authoritarians love this. When I was a kid, I was explicitly told that tips were necessary; otherwise the waiter might spit in your food. That is, as a child of the professional class, I was instructed that service workers must be appeased with donations to keep them from committing crimes against us.

Yeah. That’s pretty messed up.

But the worker-owned venues make it clear: the restaurant doesn’t need tips to attract capable & honest workers; they just need to give a fair deal.

I just don’t like tipping as an expectation. If you genuinely want to tip, you’ll know and you won’t need to be asked. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of giving someone a tenner if they go out of their way for you, but being guilted into making a voluntary donation because someone did their job is an example of completely losing the plot. Of course tipped minimum wage shouldn’t be lower either.

I also don’t like the recent trend of being asked to tip before even receiving the service. Uhh… I dunno how much to tip you, you haven’t done anything yet. In the context of delivery apps, it also incentivizes blackmail.

Last thing I’ll point out - tipping is associated with racial and sex-based discrimination, and managers often pocket tips even though it’s technically illegal in most places. So even if you don’t mind it for any other reason, that alone should be enough to discourage it.

I just wish jobs payed livable wages.

May be? I was at a sandwich place here that had the minimum tip option at 18%.

It’s getting fucking stupid

Yet another thing that has been eye opening about living in Europe is how fucked and terrible tipping is in the states. Twenty percent AS A MINIMUM? When I’m picking up food at the counter??? AYFKM?

I don’t really think it’s caused backlash in me - just the ending of feeling bad for not tipping. Do I want to tip for you handing me something? Do I want to tip for self checkout? Do I want to tip for you checking me out?

You make a normal wage and haven’t done anything outside of the norm. Why on earth do you deserve a tip?

Pretty soon there’s going to be tip options on the self checkouts.

Fucking Starbucks is asking for tips.

I’m curious how many of these POS (Point-of-Sale, not Piece of Shit) systems have the default settings to ask for tips. If so, I wonder how many of these places are committing wage theft by not actually paying tips out to the employees.

Tip culture is ridiculous. Places like self-serve froyo shops shouldn’t even have tips as an option. Unless the cashier is helping me make the froyo and holding it for me while I lick it, there’s no way to justify tipping.

I’ll tip for sit down service or delivery… Anything else you can fuck right off.

I’m fine with tipping in the places where it’s already expected. Wait staff and delivery and such. There those people live on the tips being given. Yeah the system is shit and we should pay them appropriately from the start, but refusing to tip doesn’t fight the system; it just stiffs a worker.

I don’t like it when a bakery or ice cream stand sale terminal prompts me to leave a tip. It makes me feel awkward for hitting no, even though not tipping for ice cream has been and still is standard.

The other day I went to a pub, and the machine at checkout suggested a 10%. You mean you expect me to tip 10% to this person whose contribution to my life was literally just putting my glass to a tap, pulling on the lever, then putting the price into the machine??

How about instead you just pay the person a proper wage to do that alongside all the other non-customer facing stuff they already have to do instead of making us top-up their wages.

Tipping culture was meant to be a bonus for exceptional service, not an expectation for all bloody services!

if a business cannot pay their workers a living wage without having customers subsidize their wage with tips, then that business shouldn’t exist.

I did takeout at a Dominos the other day, and it took the idiot a full minute to figure out how to bring my order up on the computer. He’s tap, tap, tapping away at the computer with no idea what he’s doing. Probably high as hell. And then he’s like, “It’s going to ask you a question”, and I was actually angry that it even gave me the option. WTF! And I still felt slightly guilty for hitting “no tip”. Fuck tipping!

If you don’t want to pay a tip, don’t do business at a place that underpays their staff.

If you go out to a restaurant and deprive the servers of tips, you aren’t hurting the restaurant. If you want to make a principled stance against tipping, then you have to stop giving those businesses your money.