Why Tipping Prompts Are Suddenly Everywhere

"Liz Vayda, who owns Baltimore plant store B.Willow, says the tipping option she added to transactions during the pandemic generates about $1,000 every two weeks. Five employees split the money. She acknowledges the requests aren’t perfect.

“It makes me feel uncomfortable as a business owner to know people are like, ‘Why doesn’t she just pay them more?’ It’s just not that simple,” Vayda says. Ultimately, she says retaining staff is more important than the possibility of annoying some customers. "

She can't afford to pay her employees an extra 200 a pay check? Yet she is bringing in that much extra money through a tip screen. She can afford it.

Edit: some spitball math, if she's getting an extra %15 in revenue from a quarter of her sales (if 1-in-4 tip), she's taking in approximately $27k every 2 weeks. She could raise her prices by less than 4% to cover paying her employees more.

I was sympathetic and open to tipping in more situations during the height of the pandemic, but now it has become such an annoyance. Lately I've drawn a hard line in the sand and only tip full service wait staff and bartenders, with only a few other exceptions.

The whole idea in the first place was that those jobs are allowed to pay less than minimum wage because providing good service could earn the employee potentially far more money through tips. That's the social contract we agreed to, which is now being contorted to absurd extremes.

Sorry. I refuse to partake in this scam any longer. If there isn't a service where someone walks to me and takes effort to make my life easier, I am going to blatantly select 0% tip.

For a european this tipping thing just seems crazy, why not just pay them enough to live for?

Tipping is obviously a bad idea, and yet experiments with getting rid of it always seem to fail.

As dumb as it is, Americans are comfortable with it. They feel weird not doing it. Even the employees usually end up preferring it, because they can do quite well on it. Tip pooling smooths out some of the worst inequities, even though some days employees do indeed get boned.

I think if we could just wave a magic wand and make it all go away all at once, we'd settle into that and tipping would seem as weird to us as it does to everybody else in the world. If doing it piecemeal could work, it would already have succeeded. Instead, most attempts at it get reverted.

My major concern with this trend is that sooner or later this will become mandatory. Even now they make it so difficult to set the tip to zero, effectively making it mandatory.

My pro-tipping comment on Reddit broke my record for most down votes ever. It's kind of cute that, even in a highly polarized environment where every comment has high stakes, we still have issues where people can simply be disgruntled. It feels idyllic, like the kind of comforting, thoroughly canvassed arguments that we'll have in Heaven.

The odd thing to me was that this story was ‘everywhere’ about two years after the tipping prompts were ‘everywhere’. Or was this just something that happened first in the flyover states and later got picked up in the media hotbeds of NYC and Los Angeles.

Feel free to ask for tips but don’t be mad at me if I don’t give you one for doing literally just your job.

I consider a tip to be something I give to reward exceptional service, and I’m definitely not tipping you before you actually do anything other than take my money.

In Canada over COVID the tipping prompts showed up everywhere. Buying liquor or weed? Leave a tip. Buying a premade sandwich? Leave a tip. I went to a gas station last week, there was a tip option. Not seeing tip prompts is actually rare.

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/n7kjn