Tipping culture and tipping fatigue

Since the pandemic, businesses have gotten much more aggressive about attempting to extract tips from customers, primarily via touchscreen prompts. This is causing a lot of resentment:

As a negative sentiment takes hold, more business owners like James may scale back on suggested tip amounts or eliminate tip prompts entirely to appease customers, according to Molly Burke, senior analyst at Capterra, covering retail and restaurants. 

“Small businesses can deactivate the tip screen or customize the amounts they show on the tip screen or just ask customers to skip it,” she said.

Matt Vizcaino, owner of Tortugas Homemade Pizza in Birmingham, Alabama, said he and his staff voted to forgo tipping prompts. “I understand some people’s frustrations,” he said. “I do also understand tips are not ‘needed’ in all situations.”

Now diners leave an average of 25% when they dine in, he said, but only about a third tip on carry out, and when they do, the tips average 5% to 10%.

The reality here is that businesses are legally allowed to pay waitstaff vastly less than the minimum wage, as long as the difference is made up by “voluntary” customer tips.

But of course “voluntary” is very much a term of art in this circumstance.

Customers naturally resent being expected to make up the difference between what workers make and what workers are legally owed. Workers naturally resent working for peanuts, and then having to rely on the whims of fickle customers to provide something even vaguely approaching a decent wage (“I remember when a cheeseburger cost a dollar!”).

My preferred policy would be to require every service industry business that currently relies on the tipping culture to charge prices that would allow them to make a reasonable profit while paying their workers a decent wage. Our favorite Boulder restaurant does this, tacking 20% on to the listed menu price, as a “living wage” surcharge. We have gotten carryout ever since the pandemic, so we pay 20% extra without being waited on, but I’d rather do that than wrestle with the absurdities of the voluntary tip culture.

Basically, the tip culture is another way for sociopaths and Republicans — but I repeat myself — to free ride on the rest of society.