Can someone more tech-savvy than me make a smartphone app for customers to request tips from servers? i.e., the customer inputs their own bill total and the app presents a 10%, 20%, custom, and no tip option and asks for the server’s payment details and then would forward money from the server’s bank account/credit card/PayPal to the customer’s bank account/credit card/PayPal. If enough customers swarm tip-screen stores with this as a response, the stores may find their tip-screens no longer worth the time to deal with.
We fight obnoxious tipping culture by showing it a mirror.
This punishes the lowest economic level of this power structure for simply trying to earn a living.
It’s the owners of restaurants (barely), the suppliers (kinda), the landlords (mhmm…), the banks (now we’re getting somewhere).
It’s not the servers or cashier’s that need to be doing something different. It’s literally everyone but them.
The servers and cashiers obviously won’t pay the customers (and surely not out of their own personal funds). The idea is to make the system less efficient for the storerunners such that they have to change how they operate. More time wasted per customer = lower rate of sales and less work done per employee. Customers en masse turning their frustration with tip screens into an issue for a business should lead to the business doing away with the tip screens. Hell, maybe it would even be a catalyst to paying the workers a stable non-tipped wage.
So your idea is to cost them man hours by frustrating annoying, humiliating, or otherwise making uncomfortable someone who is making less than minimum wage?
Your plan is to ask a waitress to give you money while she’s making $4/hr, and has other tables to serve to make tips?
I was being polite before. Your idea is bad. Like really bad.
While the servers are the ones getting most of the tips, they have no control over this. Its entirely the point of sale processor (clover, square, etc.) who push it. They get a ~3% cut of the total transaction; if you tip then it’s a bigger transaction and their cut is a little bigger too.
This plan makes servers lives worse but doesn’t incentivise the people actually in charge to change anything.
If I recall correctly, there was a bug in the McDonald’s order screens that allowed one to remove almost everything from a burger, and get enough negative money to buy another burger with it.
Everyone should get their personal tip app that we can show the person at the counter. “Would you like to give me some tip for buying your goods?”
The more we don’t tip the more it becomes normalized. I’ve stopped tipping all counter service other than bartenders. At first I felt guilty but the more I did it the more it became normal to me.
What a mindfuck. At one point you/I/we are blindly making assumptions about what the human on the other side of the counter is thinking - or being egotistical enough to believe the employee’s transaction with me (and the potential $1) was of any significance to them.
My guess is that the decision makers/consultants at that business are aware of these potential reactions - if they’re any good at being greedy, they’ve dug far deeper. They just play the game of guilt to get the patron to subsidize employee wages.
Because if the tips aren’t enough to make ends meet for the employee, it’s the customer’s fault.
Sometimes I disengage from my personal viewpoint and marvel at the complexity of it all. Using humanity against itself for personal profit without incurring a proportional amount of public disdain. Then I resume being disgusted.
We have sooooo much potential as a community. I would give literally anything (of myself - not of the ones I care about) for a star trek future. But I also like Dune, The Expanse, Foundation…
Final thought - I’m rewatching 2000’s battlestar atm and it made me wonder:
If humanity has an AI war and we won - how could we ever prevent someone/some thing creating a new homegrown AI later? We almost have to merge at some level?
Anyways, sorry if you read this. Be well
You tip if you like the service. It is rude to not tip.
However, I’m not tipping someone I’ve never met. I only tip after they have provided some service to me
Everyone should follow the tipping guidelines from the olden days of when I was a child (80’s). I was taught that you tip your server, your barber/stylist, your driver (taxi/delivery) and the bell boy/valet. For the most part this still works today.
- 10% meh
- 15% good
- 20% exceptional
- Bell boy / valet $5 flat rate
What service am I tipping for? Making the food and handing it to me isn’t a service, that’s the expectation. If they did any less I would be making the food.
Handing it to you is an exchange of goods, but making food is a service. Yes, even if they just microwave something for you. I don’t think tipping for that particular service is usually warranted either, but foodservice is kind of literally called that
it’s rude not to give people money in exchange for… checks notes … nothing?
yeah ok, let me send you my PayPal cause you don’t want to be rude to me
I only tip when they provide a service. If the service sucks I usually leave a small tip or nothing and if it is good service that makes my day I leave a bigger tip.
Put a button for $1 and I’ll hit it all day. And I know that ain’t the person behind the register deciding, but if I get ice cream for my family and it costs 35 fucking dollars because that’s how much fucking things cost these days, I’m not throwing you 15-25% in tip, let’s be realistic. Put a $1, $2 option and I honestly think you’ll have more luck.
Not to old man this shit, but I scooped ice cream at a restaurant/ice cream place for 5.25 back in 2004. You know how I earned tips? I played a game with customers, let me and the girl I’m working with guess questions about your life and we will give you a free size upgrade. People frequently played along, we had fun, fucked over the owners a bit (they sucked), it was really a win/win.
I was eventually fired.
So I got fired for threatening to report them for withholding employee checks. They had a bunch of 15-19 year olds closing one night, maybe five or six of us, and one of the ice cream freezers got turned off. Someone’s honest mistake, a bunch of ice cream melted, sucked, but they said okay, we’re just going to withhold all your paychecks, and I said fuck no you’re not, and proceeded to threaten reporting. In the end, me and my coworkers all got our $27 paychecks, but I lost my job. I am by no means a hero, was just a little belligerent as a kid, and it felt like a good opportunity to really dial in the belligerence.
Solution: ipad starts to swivel, do a 360 and walk away
You plan to walk into the counter? Daring strat, but I can see it freaking out the cashier enough to cancel the tip himself if you also maintain eye contact while walking, like an Oblivion NPC
The way they sneaked up on us was: during the pandemic, I started tipping a dollar or two for take-out because “we’re all in this together” and “these are extraordinary times.” Then those Clover bastards came through and turned that dollar or two into a baseline 15%.
I’ve seen some that have prefilled tip amounts at 40%? Are you fuckin kidding me? Do you want me to punch you in the face?
I can give you a tip: sell the ipad and pay your clerks more
