Stop Turning Every Purchase into a Tip Request

Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.

Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.

IMHO, more people need to grow a spine and never tip via a screen.

I never tip at my local Starbucks counter. They ask for it before any service has been rendered. That’s not how a tip is supposed to work. And who knows how the tips are getting to the workers.

I tip in cash after a service is rendered. If it’s on a screen there are renter seekers between you and the person who helped you.

In my view, a drawback of tipping is that it's impossible to predict how much a job actually pays. This makes it harder for workers to compete for higher wages by changing jobs. Thus it probably has the net effect of depressing overall earnings.

Not knowing how much people get paid probably also frustrates collective bargaining.

It also leaves the price / performance relationship up in the air for customers. They're tipping, but they don't know how the tips are being split. Between people tipping habitually, and not knowing where your tip is going, I'm not sure that "reward for good service" is a meaningful incentive. It may be as much a reward for quality management.

Disclosure: Both of my kids are tipped workers. They both receive a split of the tips depending on what job they're doing. I also receive cash tip income as a musician, but it's not my main job.

Everyone -- including Fox -- seems to have missed the tax-avoidance game: Tips are deductible, wages are not. So one of the few employee and management mutual interests lies in short-circuiting a share of revenue directly from customer to employee, with no filtering through the IRS.

There is pretty much one way to stop this: stop patronizing carry-out and counter service establishments that throw a tip question into the checkout process. It's not enough to just elect zero tip. Stop giving them your money, period.

No problem tipping for good sit-down table service, or a good bartender at a bar. But at carry-out and self-service places, there's no service provided so nothing to earn a tip.

IMHO, if I paid for something, and the only “service” was just handing me the thing I paid for, it was a transaction, not service. The bare minimum is to hand it to me, or put it on the counter, which is REQUIRED to not count as theft, so ya, like other comments mentioned, if I’m waited on and have someone meet my additional needs, (extra this, or sauce me that, or a double Lagavulin, neat of course) then that different.

Someone else mentioned dental hygienists, bus drivers, and now I think of teachers, mechanics, lawyers, etc, what ARE the rules of tipping? Cuz apparently it’s not really that cut and dry

This reads to me (and pangram agrees) as almost entirely AI-written. I wonder if that matters anymore. Did someone express editorial judgment? Or did they just prompt “write column about tipping defaults, go”?

Anyway, the most egregious tip request I’ve ever seen was in a self-service airport kiosk. I chose my bag of nuts or whatever; no human even in the kiosk, completely unmonitored; I scanned and tapped my credit card and there it was — [15%] [18%] [20%]? So insulting.