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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

As a privileged white collar tech worker who makes far more money than just about any service worker, I happily respond to requests to tip by tipping. It is a privilege to be able to!

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It's a privilege, you might leave with a sense of being generous but in the end you also feed into a culture of systemic abuse and exploitation.

I really dislike traveling to the USA and being forced to tip because employers don't pay enough, it feels really, really wrong.

It's absolutely true, especially compared to places like Japan that have incredible food, stellar service, yet crazy high costs of living -- all for no tips.

The US system is just so broken in so many ways.

But as everyday individuals, what are you gonna do? Our democracy isn't really functional and a normal person has zero say in policies.

If you don't tip, the system won't change. The person working there will just go home with less money. They're already making much much less than us, even if all their customers tipped 30%.

Some restaurant owners have taken away tips altogether, opting for an across the board wage increase. Of course that means their items are all priced higher in the menu.

It's just a no win situation.

Ability to afford to tip isn't the issue. Being strong-armed into it is. Screw them.

I see your point also. But to be fair, being prompted by a computer to add a tip isn't exactly "being strong-armed into it"

I think that characterizing it as strong-arming is appropriate when the UI makes it hard to choose anything but leaving a tip or when an employee is watching you as you're paying, or when the employee straight up asks for a tip.

Even being asked for a tip before services are rendered is bad. Maybe not "strong-armed" bad, but it's a close call.

The issue here is not even request to tip , but rather hostile behavior when not tipped to the satisfaction of the service worker.

I dine out way too much, date a service industry veteran, and know many other service industry workers. Never have I experienced that, seen that, nor heard of any of my friends saying they did that (even for no tippers). In fact, they’d all say doing that would be incredibly unprofessional.

So I am curious what region you are in that you experience such hostility.

If you ever do see it, you’ll notice an involuntary component to the reaction. Not easy to self-report and there’s no incentive to try to. Chicago area, both urban and suburbs.

I've seen the same thing and I'm in Colorado in HCOL area.

What?

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