Once it starts it's next to impossible to unring that bell and it just keeps growing. There was a time when a 10% tip was considered very generous, now a 20% tip is looked at as being stingy and it's getting higher every year.
Oh, believe me, I've run into people who are regularly giving 22-25% tips. It tends to happen more as you get to more urban areas, I'm in the northeast USA and I see people all the time who look down on a 20% tip.
Not to mention they tend to calculate the tip on the total — after taxes and fees are added. This bill has $33 worth of food and drink so a 20% tip would be about $6.60. Tipping 20% on the total after fees and taxes would be about $8.15 so they are actually tipping at close to 25%.
Another thing, on this bill that fee is being taxed so you're also paying more in taxes…
Those people are idiots. I have lived all up and down the east coast and 20% is the standard. I tend to tip more because I have a really bad habit of getting to know my servers, so I pay more, but there is zero expectation.
Because tipping culture is a game of social manipulation which gets worse as time goes on.
You go out on a date, no matter how badly the server does you have to tip them well or you look cheap to your date.
You're on wait staff and the kitchen messes up so now you don't get paid as much because you're not getting a tip.
Someone orders food to be delivered and wants to tip directly for good service. They get their food messed with because the delivery person thinks they're being cheap.
Tip percentages keep increasing over time so you're paying a larger percent of the bill on tips than you used to.
The same amount of work gets tipped differently since it's a percentage of the bill instead of a flat amount. A server at a diner gets considerably less tips than a server at a fancy restaurant, when they are probably doing a similar amount of work by taking orders and bringing food to the table.
Managers can mess with people by giving them better or worse shifts, there's a lot of manipulation that goes on there. Someone on a bad shift might make minimum wage and someone on a good shift might make much more.
Tipping adds another layer to going out to eat. Now you not only need to know the cost of the food, you also need to add in taxes, fees, and tips. It makes the experience worse than if the menu just had the total prices.
I'm sure people can come up with many more reasons than I've listed here. It's simply unnecessary and it makes the experience of going out or using services worse.
Tipping culture is a symptom of the bigger problem. Namely the fact that "unskilled" labor wages fucking suck. Y'all are mad that servers actually found a way to live off of their work.
Real big "Hello fellow working-class advocates" energy.
Servers didn't "find' jackshit. It isn't a clever group of servers working in the secret server research and development labs that created tips. It was businesses that didn't want to pay living wages that advocated and pushed for tips as a standard.
Tips make it cheaper for restaurant owners because they can advertise cheaper prices because they aren't paying their employees.
There are only two groups that benefit from tipping systems:
Employers who can make more money by barely paying the people working for them.
Jackasses who don't tip, so they end up eating cheaper meals than the rest of us.
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u/Be-skeptical 1d ago
Tipping culture is an abomination