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Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

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Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#611

Post by CaptainZapp »

robomartin wrote: post #589
4gotunameagain wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how one person opened a coffee shop which basically operates like every single coffee shop in the world apart from the US , and you guys need a detailed write up, charts, flow charts, tips for the secret sauce :)

> like every single coffee shop in the world apart from the US Well, context is important. Right? If someone opened a "tips required" coffee shop in Japan, it could be something to watch and learn from. I don't generally have a problem with tipping. Still, I would much rather people get paid well, with whatever that cost might be reflected in the price of what you are buying. If, on the other hand, tipping is on the…

> If someone opened a "tips required" coffee shop in Japan, it could be something to watch and learn from.

Not for a long time. It would likely fold within weeks.

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#612

Post by kelnos »

andirk wrote: post #462
expensive_news wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat of a meta-comment but I’m shocked at how many people are complaining about you not taking cash. Has anyone ever walked out of your coffee shop because they only had cash on them? I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything.

I prefer paying cash. It is also elitist to not accept cash because it means I need a credit card or an expensive phone, neither of which I have on me while jogging. I also don't jog, but you get the point. At my gym I had a keychain bar code that worked great. Now I need my phone, phone charged, brightness up, their stupid app, signed in, open it up, click check-in. It turned a 2 second 1 gram device in to this whol…

> It is also elitist to not accept cash

I think you're ascribing malice to something that is largely a function of cost, safety, and hassle.

Yes, credit card fees are not free, but:

1. Managing cash is not free either. At the end of the shift / end of the day, you need employees to count cash and reconcile the amounts with receipts. Cash in excess of what the business wants to keep on hand needs to be transported to the bank and deposited, which costs employee (or manager/owner) time.

2. Businesses that accept cash are bigger targets for (possibly violent) theft. Your minimum wage barista might appreciate not having to worry about someone coming in with a gun and ordering them to empty the register into a bag, if there is nothing to empty into said bag. Transporting cash to the bank is another point where you can get robbed.

3. Related, there's also the risk of being paid with counterfeit bills. Granted, there's also the risk of stolen credit cards being used, and the business is usually forced to eat the cost of that. So this might turn out to be a wash (or perhaps, I suspect, this is actually worse with credit cards).

Certainly, from the customer's perspective, credit cards are a privacy leak, and require a good credit score or at least a bank with debit cards, and some people don't have access to either. But I think the solution to the latter is to make banking more accessible to people (I think allowing the post office to be a bank to anyone who needs it is a great way to make that happen). Not sure how to solve the privacy leak, though. Even with (unlikely) strong legislation against data collection and sharing/selling, there's always going to be a purchase trail.

And your point about jogging (or not-jogging) just doesn't make sense; it's far more convenient to carry a credit card when jogging than to carry cash.

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#613

Post by foldr »

seanhandley wrote: post #504
tsmarsh wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.

No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness. It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode. If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some chan…

Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#615

Post by blahedo »

Important to add: in fields where tipping is standard (notably, restaurant waitstaff), in many areas of the US the minimum wage is much much lower. Nationally, $2.13/hour. That pays their taxes... For all intents and purposes, restaurant and bar staff are gig workers that are working for a variable rate determined entirely at the customers' discretion. If you don't tip them, they're essentially working for free, or rather, the rest of us are subsidising your service.

It is a mind-blowingly terrible system, but until we fix it, "tips" (in the US, in industries that are traditionally tipped) are not a bonus, they're part of the base wage, and if you don't pay them you are absolutely freeloading.

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#616

Post by TylerE »

kjellsbells wrote: post #510
harrisi wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say, please include some technical information if possible. I've spent time with and looked into developing for Clover and set up other POS systems. I've also tutored people pursuing their CS degree while bartending that want to make their own system. I'm very interested in this space since it seems impenetrable. Small businesses can't take too many risks and trying to sell a tailor-made POS seems impo…

As a consumer of both Square and Clover, I wonder if I am alone in finding the latter ridiculously clunky. I want to pay quickly, get a receipt texted or emailed or printed and move on. After I enter my details (eg phone number) once, I should not need to do it again at another merchant. Square gets this. Clover seems not to, and is forever trying to get me to install its dumpy little app to harvest my data in exchan…

How do you expect it to remember anything without “harvesting” data?

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#617

Post by conductr »

TylerE wrote: post #608
conductr wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in process of opening an all you can eat pancake shop and doing the same. I’m thinking of charging a small ~$x per table fee for bussing tables. Refundable if they self bus. Probably would always refund it unless they wreck the table. Not sure I want to administer it, or if it would be perceived as a punitive thing and get bad reviews. Just an idea I had while coding the self checkout app. Also, pancakes are made…

That would definitely mKe me not-a-customer. There’s a lot more to something BEING clean than LOOKING clean.

Oh yeah I’d still clean it. Syrup is too messy to trust them. But it discourages people completely trashing the place is my thought. Difference of wiping things down quickly and having to bring out the broom and mop and spend 10 minutes on it.

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#618

Post by hombre_fatal »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #524
dang wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should write a longer piece about your coffee shop! and the process behind it. If you do, you should submit it to HN - and if you do that you should email us (hn@ycombinator.com) because we might put it in the second-chance pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ).

I love how one person opened a coffee shop which basically operates like every single coffee shop in the world apart from the US , and you guys need a detailed write up, charts, flow charts, tips for the secret sauce :)

How many of those cafe owners are HNers willing to do a write up to give us insight into the experience though?

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#619

Post by kelnos »

unethical_ban wrote: post #428
expensive_news wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat of a meta-comment but I’m shocked at how many people are complaining about you not taking cash. Has anyone ever walked out of your coffee shop because they only had cash on them? I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything.

I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card). To play devil's advocate, credit cards are another way to get tracked, a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy, a way to be analyzed by the merchant, a way to get more explicitly prompted to pay a 20% tip, and more hassle than handing a $5 for a $4.73 coffee and…

> I go to a bar that is cashless and still see people have to leave because they only had cash (or didn't want to use their card).

And I see the same issue when I go to places that only take cash: people have to leave because they only have a credit card. Or they pony up some ridiculous fee to take cash from the ATM in the bar.

> credit cards are another way to get tracked

I personally don't care too much about this, but I can understand why some might.

> a great way for a duopoly of companies to skim 1-3% off the economy

Put another way: a way for a duopoly of companies to get paid for providing a useful service to both businesses and customers. Now, you can argue that if there was more competition, fees would be lower, and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that the card networks are just taking and not providing any value.

> a way to be analyzed by the merchant

Basically the same as your tracking argument. Some care, some don't.

> a way to get more explicitly prompted to pay a 20% tip

Shrug? That's life? I feel pressured to tip regardless of how I pay. At least with the POS terminal I don't have to do math.

> and more hassle than handing a $5 for a $4.73 coffee and walking off.

It's pretty rare that I see a bill for an even amount of money. It's way more hassle to have to dig through my pockets for exact change, which I never have, so in reality I'm passing over a larger amount and waiting for the cashier to make change for me. And then I have to decide how much of that I want to leave as a tip. That's certainly more hassle than just tapping a card and a tip amount, and walking off.

Re: Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes

#620

Post by forgetfreeman »

kelnos wrote: post #596
jryhdtjtdhy wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then those engineers will no longer be out of a job, but some other people with a smaller skillset will be! And all will be good, because we finally had a push towards real automation!

I'm sympathetic to this argument because people can't retrain for a different job instantly, and there's mostly no safety net that allows people to take the time to retrain and still be able to provide for themselves and family while they do it. But in the grand scheme of things, low-skill jobs should be automated to the greatest degree possible, freeing up people to work on more worthwhile things. And as automation…

The notion of retraining implies a waiting pool of unfilled jobs. The only industries in the US that are chronically understaffed and desperate for talent are construction and unskilled agricultural labor, neither of which (separately or together) are prepared to absorb the roughly 22 million individuals who work in the service industry in the US. You want automation, you then also have to choose between luxury space communism or open air refugee camps and massive civil unrest.
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