What I would love is to use tech to be able to split the tips. In a restaurant I'd love to tip the guys in the kitchen who went to culinary school, the guy who worked in the fields to grow and collect the vegetables, the people who cleaned the restaurant. As for the person that wrote down your order and asked if "everything is OK", they can go jump.
You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
131–140 of 508 posts
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#132From the article: > In Connecticut, Mr. Dimyan, who says he feels his $3 coffee is pricey enough as it is, vented about the electronic tip prompts in a Twitter post earlier this month. > Square replied from its official Twitter account: “Tap `No Tip.’” Or.... Pay cash for a $3.00 item?
How about brew your own coffee and save $2.95 on that transaction.
1. The sort of beans used in the $3 cup of coffee are probably quite expensive. E.g., the espresso beans that my local coffee shop uses retail at about $1 per espresso drink ($20/lb of beans with 20 or so double shots in a pound). Plus electricity, amortized cost of the espresso machine, and cost of milk. In the end, a home-made cappuccino of equivalent quality costs about $1.20 - $1.25 to make at home.
2. It takes me about 10 minutes to make a cappuccino and clean up the mess. And I'm pretty experienced with a nice setup. I am paid a lot more than $6/hour. Hell, my college side gig paid a lot more than $6/hour.
3. Coffee shops are a nice place to get work down outside of work (eg side projects or self-learning). Especially relevant for those with kids at home.
So for a $3 drink, he's paying $1-$2 for an hour or more of shared work space and 10 minutes of saved labor time.
That seems like a fair deal.
And this is assuming that it's even possible for him to make the drink he wants when he wants it. If he works in an office without an espresso machine, it might just be straight up impossible for him to make the coffee he wants when he wants it.
Now, maybe Folgers from a drip machine should be good enough. But if we're going to be pragmatic robots, we should really just buy super cheap caffeine powder in bulk and mix it into our free water.... Folgers is for snobby suckers. Plus, I bet you have some hobbies/mini-luxuries I don't care about and could scoff at ;-)
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet strangely, the loudest voices AGAINST doing away with tipping in favor of a wage are often wait staff themselves.
That's because it would make it harder for them to continue committing tax fraud.
Part of it is the waitstaff avoiding tax on tips, the other part is that it allows the business to avoid payroll tax on the majority of waitstaff's earnings. In order to get a waiter to an effective $10/hr after-tax income you'd have to pay $15-16/hr versus $2+$8 in tips.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do. But I never tip. They get the price they ask, that I can see before I order. That should be enough or they should change their prices/wages so tipping is not necessary. And no, I don't feel the least guilty about that.
If you want to claim to be principled about this then you should inform the waitstaff at the start of the interaction that you don't intend to tip. The price they ask has expectation of tip built in implicitly - failing to disclose that you won't tip is therefore a lie of omission. I hope you're not that sort of person.
2 thoughts. #1 - I feel you are assuming requirements about the optionality of tipping. The gratuity is optional for whatever reason, regardless of social expectations. So in my opinion one can be moral and ethical without disclosing why they don't tip.
#2 - I waited tables, and a very good waiter once told me that he gives every table the same service whether they do or don't tip, and no matter how much they tip. I feel many servers lack this mentality; which leads to more people tipping less. When I waited tables, 10% was an okay tip, 15% was stellar. Now it seems like 20% is assumed and folks have a social signalling competition to tip 25-30%. Doesn't make sense.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#135Semirelated question: how do you feel about tipping for Uber/Lyft? A few informal polls awhile ago ( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/theres-stil... ) couldn't come to a consensus.
I really liked it when Uber started up and tips were not part of the experience. That was always an annoying part of taxis.
Now that it's standard for Uber and similar companies, well, it sucks but there we are. It's always been customary to tip taxi drivers, so it's not weird, just an unfortunate failure to change the culture.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#136If anyone here has been to Japan, tipping is handled much more elegantly and with a lot more business integrity. Instead of guilt-tripping customers into tipping, businesses in Japan up their prices if they need more money. I remember once when I was in Osaka I was at a really good sushi place that I had visited several times prior. There was no tip option on the receipt (didn't see it anywhere in Japan) and there wa…
No tipping policies in the US will never work as long as tips are untaxed. Otherwise, it is a lose-lose. Diners pay more than with tipping, servers' take-home pay is reduced. That is why most restaurants that have tried no-tipping have gone back to it.
...tips are taxable income: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/are-tips-taxable-irs-offers-tip... .
They're just hugely underreported because the kinds of people that work off tips are people making $2.15/hr instead of actual minimum wage (which is still criminally low). That's what needs to change in this equation - paying workers what they are due.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#137I dislike the tip-at-purchase-time paradigm. I haven't even seen my order yet, how am I supposed to evaluate how much of a tip it warranted? But that gets to the heart of it really: tipping is more about subsidizing payroll than rewarding good service.
Tipping on a digital device (iPad register) also doesn't make sense because the tip money is going straight to the bank account the owner connected to the point of sale software.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet strangely, the loudest voices AGAINST doing away with tipping in favor of a wage are often wait staff themselves.
Have you ever worked at a restaurant or in a tipped position? It constitutes a HUGE part of your take home pay for two reasons: - If you are a waiter, tips will be multiples of your hourly pay. - Tips will be under the table, saving you another ~25% easily. So if you make a tipped hourly wage in Ohio: - $4.15/hr * 7 hour shift (5pm open to 12pm close): 29.05 - Wait 6 tables, each with 3 seated parties, that tip you e…
> - $4.15/hr * 7 hour shift (5pm open to 12pm close): 29.05
Shouldn't you compare to the minimum wage at least? Or you could compare to a standard wage similar to what would be paid in other countries.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#139After all, those muffins just materialized in the display case, everything here functions so seamlessly that I don't really know why these self-styled 'employees' are cluttering up the place.
Shelving product labour is part of the original price and markup, same as buying an article of clothing off a rack.
And that's why you don't tip in the supermarket. Fresh food service is a bit different from that.
Re: You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet strangely, the loudest voices AGAINST doing away with tipping in favor of a wage are often wait staff themselves.
Have you ever worked at a restaurant or in a tipped position? It constitutes a HUGE part of your take home pay for two reasons: - If you are a waiter, tips will be multiples of your hourly pay. - Tips will be under the table, saving you another ~25% easily. So if you make a tipped hourly wage in Ohio: - $4.15/hr * 7 hour shift (5pm open to 12pm close): 29.05 - Wait 6 tables, each with 3 seated parties, that tip you e…
> If your job gave you an untaxed 400% bonus at the end of every day, would you vote against it?
I'd be rather more worried about getting caught by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.