I've just opened a coffee shop in Los Angeles last month, and we don't take tips. We only use self-ordering iPads (I've custom coded an iOS app w/ Stripe Terminal for it), and we don't accept cash either.
We've had a few customers baffled by the no-tipping policy, and still insisting that they leave a tip. Some even left cash on the counter or on the table. We had to chase a few of them down to return their money. Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.
While it has been strange to see some customer's determination to leave a tip, I think overall it was well received by the great majority of people that just didn't say anything about it and made a mental note that the prices they see on the menu is what they'll actually end up paying.
We will probably need to highlight that we pay a higher wage for baristas & cooks to account for the lack of tips, and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
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).
If anyone is in the LA area and wants to check it out, it's Awakening Coffee in Inglewood. I'm there most days since we've just opened and there are many things to be sorted out. Come say hi.
I wonder if all these laid off engineers will end up opening small businesses and using their skill to cut one or two employees. Maybe we'll finally get a push toward real automation.
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 impossible. Obviously the situation is different, though.
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 :)
> and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
Please no. That's how it usually starts. It was with small change but now McDonalds harasses you every time you make an order to round up for some charity I never heard about. I'd donate to charities on my own.
Needless to say I avoid these places like the plague.
I know what you mean. When the cashier at Whole Foods asks you, it does feel somewhat petty to say no. I think there was a South Park episode on that.
But if the POS asks you, it doesn't feel as personal to turn down the option to donate, don't you think?
Anyway, not married to the idea, but I think there are some people that enjoy the endorphins that result from contributing to a charitable cause (especially when discretionary spending, like on a latte).
Nag-screens are awful but they do also need to explain their tipping because it creates customer confusion. They could simply put up a sign up that says "We pay our employees a living wage. We don't accept tips, but you can donate to our staff's preferred charity XYZ at URL."
> It was with small change but now McDonalds harasses you every time you make an order to round up for some charity I never heard about.
To be fair, the McDonalds charity is actually totally legit and really awesome and you should donate to it. It's one of the few exceptions to the general rule that these charity promotions are usually suspect tax laundering schemes.
But lots of people won't think to do so, and it can raise awareness too. And in terms of payment processing fees it is probably much more efficient to include a small amount extra in a larger preexisting transaction and pool it up across customers than if everyone were to go out and donate $0.50 or whatever on their own.
The review feedback program sounds like over engineered nonsense. You get metrics which you think represents customer experience which you can use to evaluate and motivate your employees to act a certain in this coffee fueled skinner box designed to train baristas. But the data won't represent that, the interaction with a barista is only a small fraction of what makes a coffee shop good (first should be good coffee, second probably a nice place to sit). And the obvious conclusion is that the barista tells the customer, "if you want to leave a tip please give me a 5 star rating, my salary is based on ratings." So now you just have tipping with extra steps.
If all you care about is rewarding employees who are good, Why not just do profit sharing for employees who been around longer then x months?
While profit sharing may work as an incentive for shift managers or store managers, in the absence of tips most baristas will expect some other immediate bonus pay, preferably based on a measurable metric that doesn't depend on factors beyond the barista's control, such as cost of goods sold, supply chain constraints, rent hikes, recessions, etc.
If you occasionally ask the customer in-app "how was your service today?" with a simple thumbs up/down option, and you associate the order's rating with the barista behind the counter, you can get a good metric on their interaction with customers. You'd probably want to use the median and not the mean in order to remove any outliers.
I tried this when I started my popup restaurant. I rolled taxes into my prices, and didn’t ask for tip when collecting with Square. I did this because I love the simplicity of dining in Europe, where you pay exactly the price you see, and don’t get guilt tripped at the register.
My customers complained that my prices were too high. So, I lowered my prices, added tax, then asked for a tip. About 50% of people tip, so my profits have actually gone up on average after this adjustment. People seem to be buying more, too.
I hate it, but this model seems to work better from a business perspective, despite it being a worse customer experience (subjective, I know).
How do you train your customers not to have sticker shock? Do I need to hang a banner that says “TAX AND TIP INCLUDED IN ALL PRICES” in comic sans?
It would be simple for me. I would refuse to go to your restaurant because dealing with multiple systems is too much work for my feeble mind. And my wife tells me I'm better with math than the common person.
Your system is better. But it's special. Special is bad because I don't like having to do things X different ways for X different restaraunts. I would rather pay a little more and not have to remember the quarks of your restaurant. I am also just trained to tip so I will feel icky leaving your restaurant no matter if you are paying them a fair amount already.
So if you charge more money to include the tip I will still feel obliged to tip anyway and I will leave with the experience your restaurant is too expensive and not come back. In short I think you've done the right thing. Don't fight the mob, embrace it.
Not accepting tips is one thing. But not accepting cash means you will never have me as a customer.
Edit: I've already walked away from a dozen different food places in airports because of this kind of trash: please install this app, can't pay in cash, can't see a menu without scanning a QR code, use an iPad with shitty touchscreen that I can barely see or use...
I just wanted to order some food and pay with legal tender.
It's also illegal if they give you the item before you pay. Cash is "legal for all debts.' So if they let you establish a debt (by, for example, drinking some coffee), they must let you settle it in cash,
Yea, basically this is a data collection front end. I too hate where you can't pay without cash though I'll bend if no other alternatives are avaialble.
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.
Cities are making it illegal, as they should. It's not always meant in bad faith, but it's also a form of gentrification that hurts the poor and unbanked by removing yet another service from them.
I personally never use anything but cards since I have many of the high reward credit cards. But I've also had family members with tax liens or other problems that didn't allow them to get a bank account, that relied on family to pay bills, order things online for them, etc.
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 walking off.
"Imagine these magical tokens with monetary value that I could instantly transfer to a merchant without waiting for my bill to come back!"
Going cashless only benefits the owner for not having to deal with counting cash, with potential worker theft, and (slim concern) robbery - things that, depending on the area and the market, are theoretical.
At the same time, I think it's neat that street performers and buskers have QR codes to Venmo. I think everyone should accept everything.
If a place doesn't accept cash, I leave. Cash is one of our last remaining bastions of freedom. I would gladly pay by card, if those cards were anonymous, refillable with cash. But these do not exist anymore, even for small amounts. They insist they must know your every last $0.50 transaction.
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 whole thing. Why?? What a waste of technology and time.
> I can’t remember the last time I paid or even saw someone pay cash for anything
For as long as not everyone has access to a bank account or credit card I'll be concerned about fueling divisions in society.
I'm not from the US, unlike the origins of this discussion, but also hear this statement and have no reason to doubt it is true. But if you step out of the wealthy areas or even just look a little closer then the users of cash are visible.
Remember: this is HN, where the bubble effect is strong. On Hacker News, everybody "knows" that Google Search is useless these days and that Amazon results are all counterfeit junk, even though in the real world I have never heard anyone bring this up and these services are still incredibly popular. It's the same thing with cash: I don't think I've seen anyone pay with cash in years. Even the old people at the grocery store use chip-and-PIN cards.
From what I've observed, a tiny fraction have left because of the no-cash policy, probably under 1%. We were expecting 5% to 10% in the first weeks, since customers that walked in for the very first time wouldn't have known of the policy.
From the ones that left, most said they didn't have a card on them at the time and they'd return another time, but we did get a couple of people that did leave because they didn't agree to the policy.
I sometimes did the opposite, when living in Germany. I'm not gonna bother hunting for ATM (and usually pay commission with that) just to have a privilege of spending money at your business.
That is a pretty fringe worry of tracking that places a major burden on the business. While I am no fan of the amount of tracking going on, I'd say this is pretty far down the list. You're still tracked when you pull out cash. Credit cards have quite a bit of protection on them.
Your cellphone is doing far, far more to profile you than any $5 spend at a local coffee shop would.
All a CC company would know is you like expensive lattes; your cellphone would know how long you stayed there, where you say in the joint, and how many memes you looked at before you left. And might overhear everything you say, including your order.
If you're using any sort of digital payment or points app on your phone it'll probably know your order, too.
Listen, most places should take cash, but this is silly.
There are only 39.8 billion US banknotes in circulation, it can easily tracked in a Postgres database, banknote numbers when it exits the ATM, banknote numbers when they are redeemed by the baker, or by your drug dealer of choice, banknotes are only in circulation for one or two exchanges before coming back to a bank, it’s very possible that they are tracked to identify curious loops in circulation.
In fact, if they weren’t, that would be unprofessional from the FBI.
Japan has been doing it like this for years. And it's much better. Pay people properly, and encourage them to be the best they can be (even for jobs that are so-called "unskilled") and then everyone's a winner.
Basically most of the world except Noth America pay their waiters wages that don't depend on tips. Sure some places allow additional tipping, but it's not a mandatory fee and the workers don't have to get it to make a living.
As someone who was in a service role and subject to an opt in post interaction survey, I don't believe systems like this are effective. They select for Karens with unreasonable demands. They use the survey to retaliate against the employee by leaving bad scores.
Yeah, I think the ridiculousness of the Uber/Lyft rating system (anything but a 5 means the driver should be fired) tells us that customer feedback of this sort is less than useless.
I find forced (or even strongly encouraged) rating even worse than tipping, especially given the inevitable anything less than 5 stars might as well be zero attitude.
Seriously. It's like if you had an insecure partner who incessantly asks you 10x a day "How do I look?" and if you say ANYTHING other than "FANTASTIC!" you know they're going to react really bad.
Except it's worse since if you ever give an honest answer it's not you they'll berate, the bosses will just flagellate their underlings who might not even be truly responsible for the "low" rating.
I try to almost always tip in cash which means I mark 0% tip, and I never give star reviews. One exception for a review is the smiley face vs sad face at airport restrooms. I've never marked sad face yet but if there was an issue I would gladly and that will simply let staff know there is something amiss in that spot.
Always rate negatively, and if possible supply that you are doing so because rudely getting asked to rate them at an inopportune moment sours your experience however great it may have been.
Review / feedback programs are terrible (5/5: would f*ck over soulless management again).
If the whole point of eliminating tips is to treat the workers fairly, why not institute some sort of profit share, or monthly bonus based on YoY revenue growth?
I think profit share is not a bad idea, but to make it fair, it should also involve some degree of risk sharing. Counting up the costs of opening a coffee establishment (is it a roaster as well?), it's not as high as some other businesses but there's rent, equipment, seats and tables, etc. If every employee and the owner was a member of something like a LLC, what would the buy-in be? I have no idea, maybe $10K each or something like that? Most of that would be lost if the business failed, so it would provide a nice incentive, and once cleared, a steady stream of income.
Of course a short-term employee (summer, tourist season, etc.) would probably not be interested in that arrangement, and would prefer a good steady wage.
Please accept cash. We don't need to encourage credit card companies to track our purchases and give them the tools to control who can and cannot do business.
I'm a big fan of card payments myself, but I agree that cash should be accepted universally, until unbanking/underbanking is completely solved and there is a cash-analogous private way to pay.
Besides the accessibility issue, not nearly all activities or situations making somebody want to transact anonymously are illegal (just consider e.g. people in unsafe domestic situations trying to get help/away but not having their own card).
I believe we could strike a pretty good balance with some research, engineering, and product development, avoiding both possibilities for tax evasion and financial crimes on one extreme, and creating a complete financial panopticon on the other.
I am really of two minds about this. On one hand, yes, the suggestion that I leave a tip and the amount suggested has ballooned to a ridiculous level in some businesses.
On the other hand, I recognize that there are plenty of businesses that still don't offer a way to tip at all (Starbucks until very recently), and more importantly, that none of these employees make anywhere near a living wage. Having worked service industry jobs and found my way out, I can't help but thinking that most of these jobs are merely dark patterns that take advantage of people who can't or won't demand what they actually should be paid.
The unfortunate conclusion I've arrived at is that US consumers simply aren't willing to pay the true price for many of the things they enjoy on a day to day basis. Just one example is that their daily coffee is subsidized through the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
You say you pay a "higher wage" - what does that actually equate to for someone working 40 hours a week?
> none of these employees make anywhere near a living wage
> the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
i don't know, TONS of people make way less than baristas and other counter-service workers. Lots of the customers of those baristas make similar wages as they do. Why does the barista deserve that money more? The maids at a hotel make less than a Starbucks barista, and there's no way they get significant tips especially at the cheaper places.
Tipping baristas and other counter-service workers who are NOT paid below minimum wage might make some progressives feel generous and virtuous, but it isn't solving any problems in a fair and equitable way. It's raising people's expectations -- in CERTAIN occupations only -- that they deserve $2 per customer for setting a cup on a counter and hollering your number.
> Just one example is that their daily coffee is subsidized through the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
Your everything is "subsidized" by low wages of people living in third world countries. US coffee shop employees aren't quite near the bottom of that hierarchy.
If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift.
As a customer, please just leave well enough alone. I'd really prefer to just leave a tip if I'm going to be gently shamed into leaving reviews to make sure your employees somehow get the wages they were led to believe they would earn.
I would go a bit out of my way to frequent any non-tipping coffee shop/restaurant. And I'm quite happy to pay a higher price in the menu items to reflect the fact that the business isn't shifting some of their payroll burden to me in lieu of realistic pricing.
I'm Australian, living in Canada for 10 years, just went back to Australia for 18 months, now back in Canada. I have some experience here.
I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada.
In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum.
In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious.
So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.
I am an American who has been living in Sydney for years and who stopped tipping here after getting used to it not being expected - but it has gotten a little weird/muddied of late. First it was Uber and the food delivery apps - and I did tip there because the app asked and I knew that in the gig economy the workers were not paid well (unlike others in Australia).
Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in).
I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?".
So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?
People do tip in Australia, it's just not expected. Tipping a genuine act of generosity to reciprocate exceptional service.
The correlation between service quality and tipping is an interesting one, why does anyone do a good job in any role without some kind of incremental reward for effort. Do office workers always revert to 'just enough to not get fired' or are they playing a longer game for promotions and bonuses?
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.
About 5.5% of Americans don't have bank accounts and pay primarily with cash. Most of these people are impoverished minorities, specifically blacks and Latinos. Not accepting cash is a pretty discriminatory practice.
Handling cash is a hassle. It carries risk in terms of losing it, and it takes time to count it and transport/deposit it into a bank. All things that eat into your profit margin, in an industry that has crazy low margin.
> We will probably need to highlight that we pay a higher wage for baristas & cooks to account for the lack of tips, and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
Yes, after the total confirmation (including tax if you can), where you'd normally be asked to tip, you should see if it's possible to display the no tip policy and higher wage explanation.
You could also tell customers that your business is donating to certain cause at this point. Just don't pass on the burden of deciding whether or not to donate to your customers. Another option is to dedicate certain profits from a specific product to a cause and note that on your menu.
> I've just opened a coffee shop in Los Angeles last month
You are brave. A friend opened a coffee shop elsewhere in LA County a few years ago. The LA County permit and inspection process was nothing less than a utopian nightmare. I have done lots of construction projects myself and have learned to absolutely detest that part of the experience (going to the DMV is actually better). The usual outcome is that projects end-up costing a ton more and take much longer to complete. The issues, in my experience, rarely have to do with actual safety concerns, etc. It's mostly about process and check-boxes. I hope your experience was better.
Here I thought it's nice that an American business does not force their employees to be over the top nice all the time to the customers even if they're having a bad day by making their wage depend on it, but then I read the last part...
"Yelp" is the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail. "Review" websites are, to a large portion of the population, complaint websites.
By all means, keep an eye on what's being said about you and look for red flags, but don't be that neurotic boss that rides your employees every time a review under 5 stars comes in. The best restaurants around that have stayed for more than a few years often are the ones with 3 stars -- 5 usually just means they're new, not particularly good, and people coming in are adventurous, rather than following what someone advised.
There is one like this in Ballard, WA. They have small signage about how it works. And also little pamphlets about both Fair Trade and Fair Wage policies.
I think this is cool and hope your location gets the HN effect today aka real world ddos :)
Just to dump an idea: Maybe instead of using a scale based rating, you could experiment with something that has not a clear maximum value to prevent the all 5-star rating effect described by others. The only thing that directly comes to my mind would be a button, that the user has to hold until the time matches the perceived rating.
I would be concerned about any sort of individual bonus directly linked to the service just rendered. That tends to work against cooperation and creativity and problem solving. Only when you are unencumbered by incentives can you afford to experiment and learn from your mistakes and get better at what you do. (See e.g. Pink's Drive for more details on motivation.)
It's especially bad if it's based on some variant of having scores "above average" or whatever, because that ends up being a lottery. At that point it's better to just establish a lottery among the employees. If you really have to do individual bonuses, I think it's better to take a leaf from Deming and only grant it for truly (statistically verified) outperformance.
Someone else suggested collective bonuses (e.g. profit sharing). That aligns incentives nicely: it is slightly lagged, meaning you can afford to experiment and learn. It's also not individual, so it fosters collaboration. It's still something of a lottery, of course, but one decided by the customers, not by a manager.
Can I ask why not?
I see the rise of CBDCs as a threat to democracy (governments able to monitor and control what you spend your money on) and cash as a vital tool in a fight against that.
Though as a European I always find American tipping culture quite insane. Nothing wrong with tipping for good service, but they way it seems expected in the US is very off putting
Continuing the geek vibe, I believe the best starting point to make sense of inner workings of incentive systems and rewards is SDT - Self-Determination Theory. It's 70+ yr old theory of motivation in psychology that originated in studies of how external rewards (i.e. tips or bonuses) crowd out intrinsic motivation.
In other words, if we want employees to act friendly to customers - should we design a system of external motivation (rewards and punishements) or design a system that boost intrinsic motivation for this behaviour. For example, SDT has many studies on how different rewards giving patterns affect motivation. As far as I remember, the least detrimental is task-noncontingent rewards (giving "reward" for just "showing up", basically). The most detrimental to motivation is competitive-contingent (give reward to those who outperform others).
It sounds insane that you need "rewards and punishments" for one human to be nice to another. Friendliness should be a natural by product of happy people in a good workplace.
I'd suggest a different tack, analyse what in the system has led to one person to be unfriendly to another, and solve it without assuming the buck stops with the individual as some type of perfectly free agent in a skinner box.
Proper pay, proper healthcare, leaders that lead by demonstration and treat colleagues with respect and a business that does not lead to angry customers by being scummy... are just table stakes for example.
There was a restaurant that opened near my old apartment (literally on my block) that started off with no tipping. It was a great fancy pizza place. Loved going there. Fast forward about 5 years, we've moved a few subway stops away so didn't go there as often (also the pandemic). We go back in 2021 and we come to find out as we pay that there is a tip line on their receipt. Never truly found out why but I wonder if it was hard to find or retain staff that can work at similar, or better, caliber restaurants and make more money via tips. From comments in their Yelp reviews it looks like they started taking tips before the pandemic so that wasn't the cause.
I hope you'll be able to continue not taking tips because I really wish we'd abolish this practice. Good luck with your cafe and I would love to try it out next time I'm in LA!
Cash will tie up an additional employee behind the counter. One of the reasons we are able to not accept tips and pay fair wages instead, is because we don't need a person at the register.
And while you can use that person for other tasks when there is no one in line, they do need to glove up each time they may handle a food item.
Also, in LA cash is a safety issue if you plan on staying open late when traffic is low.
To facilitate anonymous payments, we will accept crypto soon.
This is kind of anecdata. We've all had terrible service, and some of us live in economies which are no tip or no routine tip.
At scale, I continue to believe there isn't a strong relationship between tipping and service, as much as between salary and service or service culture and service.
Transition periods are always complex. If tipping was verboten there would still be a cohort complaining about it for years, about both income side, and service quality side issues.
Chick-fil-a usually makes franchise owners be hands on in the Restaurant, and you cannot own like 20 of them. I think most people own one. At least where I grew up they consistently paid the highest of any fast food place and I am pretty sure they offered tuition reimbursement. The other main benefit they have is the whole closed on Sunday’s thing which makes scheduling more favorable since you know you won’t have to work on sundays.
I think it depends on if the server gets a percentage of the total bill (basically auto-tipping if you think of it that way). Basically everything on the menu gets raised in price 20% and that's the tip portion, ideally shared with the kitchen.
This provides a strong incentive for good service (and good cooking) as an empty restaurant (fewer return customers) means less income. Otherwise, why bother providing excellent service, if you're paid the same hourly wage if the place is packed or if it's half-full?
I actually say this virtually snark free, but I've always thought of Chick-fil-A as a Christian religious group that happens to run a chicken sandwich restaurant. I've certainly had lots of experience eating their food and talking to the employees and a few owners. I suspect that's part of the atmosphere.
There is a brewery in my town that does the same thing. They do accept cash and any "tips" (which is any amount over the total) goes to their charity of the month. On their cc entry system, its never shown to the customer so there is never that awkward tipping part you see on a lot of POS systems now. If the customer asks, they say that they don't take tips and if they'd like to leave one in cash, it will all go towards their charity that month.
By doing this, they appease the customer who wants to leave one and don't get in a back and forth with them over tips.
> Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.
Haha, I think that's totally reasonable of them. As a consumer I would appreciate a notification informing me that I couldn't tip, no matter how much I thought they deserved it.
Edit: I wanted to add that there are a lot of places we're not expected to tip at whose employees deserve it just as much as the ones working at the places we are expected to tip at. Tipping culture may be out of control, but a lot of times people deserve a tip for providing exceptional service. That's our way of validating them and saying, "you're going to make it."
> I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
Might as well go full hog and add rating to food/drinks they ordered. Not to judge the person doing the service, just get a feel for what your customers enjoyed and what they didn't.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this? [0] It's a post from Eric Huang - he's a chef based out of NYC and recently wrote about why his restaurant has decided to accept tips (while acknowledging that it's a bad system). It's a long read, but his point about more established hospitality groups/restaurateurs trying and failing to adopt a non-tipping model resonated with me.
The issue is that I have to trust the proprietor. In my locale it has become common for restaurants to add ‘health & wellness’ surcharges which began as charity/Covid response and of course never went away.
It is almost never the case that the restaurant provides any of this to their employees and there is no transparency involved.
I honestly see it as a scam to charge higher prices without itemizing properly on the menu.
Even if you highlight the wage disparity in signage, I would have no way of knowing whether the information is accurate or just another piece of propaganda.
> If you show the full price with taxes upfront, that's an astonishing level of integrity.
It’s funny, what you see is what you pay doesn’t require an astonishing level of integrity in much (most?) of the world, it’s just standard practice; instead, tacking on hidden fees not on the price tag would be unthinkable.
We might do the QR for customers that did not order using the app on their phone. We're printing stickers anyway, using the Star Micronics SDK which makes QR code printing a breeze.
> the prices they see on the menu is what they'll actually end up paying
Is the sales tax included in the listed price?
One of my pet peeves is how "tax and tip" are not included in the displayed prices in Ontario, Canada. I hate having to do arithmetic on every purchase I make.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia where what you see is what you pay - tax incl. Tipping is generally not part of the culture because the minimum wage is a livable wage (in most areas).
We have 2 recurring customers that are vision impaired (there’s an apartment building for people with disabilities nearby). We help place their orders, as we would with any customer that needs help using the iPads for other reasons.
Vision impaired people require the same help reading the menu at any other coffee shop, so it’s not any different. In fact it might make it easier on them because they don’t feel like they’re holding up the line. If one of us guides them through the menu on one iPad, other customers can still use the other iPads to order.
On a related note, I did notice that our visually impaired customers have a phone app that I believe scans and reads the text from the screen out to them. Perhaps we should have our own text to speech option in some future version.
I think both of this comment is needlessly hostile.
Like, starting the conversation with an accusatory comment of "hey, btw, did you think of this very super rare situation, or are you the evil exclusionary guy?" is kind of an asshole thing to do. Most people with sight don't encounter blindness often, so making someone feel attacked for not thinking about is just a way to generate hostility.
Having said that, I actually appreciate the content (if not the form) of this comment – it's pretty easy to accidentally block people from using your software, and accessibility reminders are an important thing. Though in this case human solution (have the waiter come and help) is probably better than software one.
Compared to US tipped-staff service, non-tipped staff in Japan seem a lot more genuine in their desire to help. It seems a matter of culture and professional pride to be provide excellent service, which leads to a significantly more thorough experience -- being that nice in the context of a tip would seem pushy and awkward.
It's very interesting observing people use the app in person, as opposed to privately on their phone where you have no idea how they interact with it.
For instance the Stripe Terminal reader is immediately to the right of the iPad POS, but a good number of people don't know where to tap the card. I need to design an arrow on the checkout screen for that because I've seen many people tapping the card to the iPad screen. I think Square got them used to that.
This sounds great. I'm getting fed up with prompts for tips from places where tips are not customary (non-food) but also I am not a fan of seeking feedback from customers because they may over scrutinize their interactions with service workers --though presumably it averages out over time.
I agree with others that you should not introduce a rating system or suggest giving to charity. If no one complains about an employee and you don't notice anything bad, then just take that to be a rating of "satisfactory".
That is awesome! When you say: what the price on the menu is that is what the customer pays; does it include sales tax as well? If so, def a very happy development and pretty much revolutionary for being in the US.
If not, is it something you could consider doing? I think it would be the next natural step :)
Disclaimer: I’m Swedish, all prices in Sweden everywhere is always including everything, you’ll never pay more than what you see.
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.
If you want to go thay route, it might be better instead to add a % to all the prices, and then at the end give it back if someone left a clean table. Something like "as a small token of gratitude for leaving the place clean and saving us time, here's 1% of your price back!"
I'm not sure if they're taking a moral high ground exactly, but I do appreciate a business taking a stand against tipping. It's bad for everyone in the end - I'd love it if it died soon.
Keep in mind that a far more pernicious and rather evil system is that of the donation receiving “non-profit”. It has over time been exposed and highlighted at various points, but I don’t think it has really at all penetrated the consciousness of the general public as to what a vast majority of “non-profits are, borderline con-jobs; and that’s being generous.
I won’t go into explaining and outlining exactly why that is for the time being, but suffice it to say that I have personal knowledge of the extremely manipulative industry that “non-profits” are. But I get it, some will not want to believe me, I mean they’re called “non-profits” and profits are bad, right?
The point of my caution is essentially this, what you are trying to avoid by stopping tipping, you will only far undo by essentially making “non-profit” executives and their friends and family rich instead of that money going to your employees.
Generational divide here. I used to work at Cacao coffeehouse in west LA in the 90s. Only took cash. Also, basically made no money other than tips. I moved to NYC and waited tables where there was no pay whatsoever other than tips. That was around when standard tipping went from 15% to 20%.
Having worked in the service industry, I usually tip 25-30%, per drink or per meal. But here's the relevant point: When I encounter a place that doesn't allow tipping, I still want to tip, and make sure to tip, because it's for the worker. I absolutely loathe the new system that's come into trendy restaurants in Seattle where gratuity is supposedly included. That's a skinflint way for a restaurant to raise their prices and assure you that their workers are being paid, without you as the customer having any say (or direct contact) with the workers. You may put up QR code menus and try to isolate the service staff from the customers, and eliminate tipping, but does that make happier employees? Does it make happier customers?
Tipping serves several purposes. One of them is to get the employees to give customers who tip well better service. Sometimes at the expense of an extra ounce from a whisky bottle, sometimes just with more personal care. The insertion of the management into the situation - trying to say it's good for customers and employees - strikes me as a very false, self-serving line of bullshit. And from everyone I know in the service industry, it seems like it quickly turns into a racket against them as well.
My prediction is that by 2025, places that eliminated tipping will be seen as just as infamous as any of the scammy disruptors of the tech industry in the 2010s; the practice of banning tips will be seen as disreputable, and life will return to its natural equilibrium where customers pay extra for good service.
Why do you expect as a customer to have anything to say about a worker getting paid? Do you follow your shoes manufacturing process making sure everyone in the chain is paid properly? I expect the employer to pay properly, otherwise for the employee to take their case to their union/court. This concept/way of thinking seems so strange as a non-American.
> My prediction is that by 2025 [...]
You do know that for the rest of the world, the CURRENT system of needing tips to make up the pay that the employer does not pay is seen as disreputable, part of the infamous scammy lawless American low-pay healthcare-less work landscape, right? Employers are supposed to pay livable wages, not let random customers make up for it.
There has been a deplorable profusion of dark patterns in restaurant checkout UIs, such as offering preselected tip amounts set along a 18-20-25% scale (standard used to be 15%), making it quite difficult to leave a custom tip, etc.
Add to this various "surcharges" and other mandatory fees added for this or that (my favorite: mandatory "resort fees" for hotels - seriously why is that not just rolled into the price of the stay?), and the service industry in the US has a serious price transparency crisis. It is quite literally impossible to predict the final cost of service, so as a rule of thumb I have come to generally expect to be out of pocket about 50% - 80% more than the listed price.
- Asking for the payment including tip before you've received service, often via one of those stupid QR menus that does who knows what with your order data that is now tied to your phone
- Not having 20% as a tip option, but something like 18%, 23%, 27%
- Looming over your shoulder while you enter the tip
I want servers to make a livable wage. I'm willing to pay more. I want my prices transparent, and I don't want the mountain of guilt and social pressure.
> - Looming over your shoulder while you enter the tip
I'm with you on the rest, but I find this one dramatically exaggerated by a certain type of person. If you're paying by card, the server is going to be around, waiting for you to finish so they can give you a copy of the receipt.
I find that there is a certain type of person will always describe this as "looming" or "guilted" or feel "social pressure".
Your feelings are legitimate, but the logic behind them is not. While there is definitely pressure to tip (and tip more and more), I've never met a server who would actually act in any way outwardly disappointed by 1) tip of 15%, 2) no tip on takeout, 3) no tip on counter service.
While some people will say "you SHOULD tip 20%" (or more), the actual staff will consider anything beyond the old standard bonus.
Thinking about your comment on QR codes --
If memory serves its not difficult on iOS to set something up to display the QR code data as text instead of acting on it.
I assume it's similarly opaque to use a URL for the same purpose, which would almost certainly be a "enter your phone / email so we can send you your URL...".
In your opinion, assuming electronic ordering, what is the best alternative to a QR code when considering privacy + ease of use?
Some of these places will also auto add grauituity charges as well for larger parties, and auto select a tip so if you don't look at the bill you could be footing out as much as 40%. Super shady UI practices.
I don't want to be guilt tripped in tipping for a baked item for instance, or a chipotle style served food restaurant.
Adding a tip for large parties has been a common practice for decades—long before the current trend of adding tips for everything.
Whether you agree with the idea of tips or not, that’s the system we have, and in that system large parties very often take up far more resources at a restaurant than smaller ones. They take more time to leave, they clog up the kitchen (as all dishes need to come out at the same time), they often occupy multiple servers at the same time (when a normal table takes only one), and very often don’t tip at a level anywhere close to the standard 15% (with so many people, everyone thinks they can get away with a low tip and others at the table will make up for it). Servers get charged taxes as if they received those tips, so getting shorted actually costs them money (paying taxes on money they didn’t receive).
This practice is different than dark patterns, as it’s actually addressing a real problem with the customers that’s been known be restaurants for a long time. It’s not the same thing as trying to trick or guilt people into tipping.
Try taking a taxi in NYC. IIRC the preselected tip options are 20%, 25% and 30%, and this is on top of a base fare of $100 to Newark when an Uber is literally half price.
Given that even retail stores have added tipping prompts to their checkouts, I'd say yes.
Plus many restaurants with placeholder tip icons that start at 25%+
You also don't know what the tip is really going towards in many cases. In the classic restaurant/waitstaff case you can reasonably expect it to go to the workers, in the random knick knack or general goods stores ???
Tipping in general is a system to transfer wealth from the charitable to the uncharitable (high tippers pay more and subsidize the business, low tippers pay less).
I believe in the spirit of tipping rewarding better service, but by and large it doesn't actually function that way. Most tip ~20% on everything outside of extreme circumstances.
Much better for everything to be baked into the price of whatever good or service it is.
Tipping at best is a form of bribery and at worst a feudal practice of wealth transfer. I tip because it is the social norm (and bribery: don't want my food messed with), but I think we can also acknowledge that this practice is weird and has a shaky history.
If someone has the mentality that they are free to spoil your food because they won't get a (good) tip, then they don't deserve to be paid at all, let alone be tipped well.
There's a lot of things the US has that are extremely strange, and the tipping culture is amongst them.
I think tipping at its very best is an opportunity to give a stranger a small gift. I recognize your points -- sometimes it feels like an obligated payment and probably in nearly all cases the capital owning class could and/or should contribute more, but i think you're excluding some optional perspectives. Sometimes I just want to help someone have a nice day by giving them something they didn't expect, like a generous tip. The escalation of niceness and virtue signalling seems right now to be creating an expectation of that generosity, which undermines it, since it can feel non-optional, but sometimes it's still just a nice thing one human can do to recognize another human.
> Plus many restaurants with placeholder tip icons that start at 25%+
This is the most egregious part of it. Who ever invented that a percentage should inflate? The price is already inflating so a percentage of it goes up. You don't get to inflate both.
Tipping was always 10% to 15% if particularly exceptional. Although even that should be made illegal, just include all costs of doing business in the price like nearly every shop does.
Inflating restaurant price + inflating tip + tax are on the trend to make US restaurants the most expensive restaurants on earth. A simple Caesar salad is now starting at 16$ and more likely 20$ in a lot of "not that fancy" places. When you add tax and 30% tip, it almost 28$. This is almost or even more expensive than in Switzerland where you waiter earn at least 26$ per hour, and tipping is not expected.
Tipping are just here to profit business owner and not the workers (that’s why it’s almost inexistant in socialist country), and don’t get me started on the business adding "don’t forget to pay your staff" on your check.
No, tipping is in general a system that shifts some of the employer's costs to customers explicitly, rather than hiding them in prices and wages. It's an idiosyncratic system, but not an irrational one: wages and prices are stickier than tip levels.
Yes, thus higher tippers subsidize lower tippers by reducing the list price of goods.
If tipping didn’t exist and were instead embedded in wages, the employer would just raise the list prices commensurately.
There’s a fair argument to be made that restaurant wages would decline in aggregate without tipping though. Certainly there would be both winners and losers
All costs are borne by the customer because the employer, i.e. business owner, is charging the customer -- or they go out of business, which rarely helps the customer or the employee.
Not only that, but then they want to donate to some charity. Roundup for charity? (sometimes they don't even bother to tell you what charity it is) Roundup, Red-Nose day, etc. etc.
Likely not what the op meant, but food trucks and artist markets (square's bread and butter)
A food truck operator is providing no additional service than a McDonald's ignoring the choice of where to drive or park. They provide takeout with no delivery.
And then this started at food halls.
Similarly, for farmers markets, artists, and crafts; these are traditionally retail items, these items often retail on their website or at a gallery (there is an edge case of auction houses), but now there is at least a vendor option of having a tip screen.
I noticed the expected tipping percentage go up after most customers started tipping in credit.
Tipped workers had to up their game because they can no longer do tax evasion with everything on the record. Back in the days where most paid their restaurant with cash, tips were more like 15%. The move from 15 to more like 20 to 25% almost perfectly corresponds with the amount needed to make the same earnings after tax.
When I was a kid, Emily Post said always tip 10%. In college, the buzz around campus was that 15% was what the proletariat deserved. The past decade or so, I keep hearing you need to give 20% if you don't want to make enemies of the servers. Now, are you telling me it's become 25%?
I've always done 20% because it's easy to do in my head. Nowadays it's a low tip for those tip prompts and I punch it in manually if I tip at all.
When I delivered food my tip spread was funny. Many people wouldn't tip at all, many would just let you keep the change or give you a token amount (~5-10%), and a few people would give you over 50% tips. Not many gave me 15-25%.
One thing I've never understood is the argument for tipping. It has always been "because servers are being paid less than minimum wage." Which the issue with that is that that varies state by state. Most west coast states do not have a separate tipped wage[0]. So the question is, why do we tip at all on the west coast[1]? Worse, it seems to be expanding and increasing in size[2]
The followup argument is often "well they are still being under paid." While I can buy this argument, I do not think the solution is tipping. Because if they are underpaid so are non-tipped jobs like the fast food worker, janitor, grocery worker, or movie theater employee. All tipping does is divide these people and reduce the pool for a larger collective to bargain for a higher minimum wage.
I feel we have this collective belief that tipping is bad (it sure confuses my foreign friends, who sometimes get dirty looks because they didn't tip), but once we've effectively created the criteria necessary to abolish it[3], we still maintained the cultural aspect of it: that we __need__ to tip (often thinking we'll get our food spat in if we don't). I've had others get upset with me for these opinions (I do tip btw) but I don't understand how we can think tipping shouldn't exist but continue in this direction. It's also interesting that in early America we thought of tipping as akin to bribery (I still believe this and I think this is common). It also has a history with slavery[4]
[1] Obviously the argument no longer holds outside Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington
[2] When I was a kid (some 20 years ago) 10% was common for a standard tip. Now most places have an 18%/20%/25% option on screens. Some even higher! The second image in the article even shows a 30% tip
[3] I wouldn't completely abolish it, but I'd say it shouldn't be a standard.
Not saying it’s good or bad, but I used to know some people who made 6 figures a year on tips straight out of high school and stayed in the food business because of it. I never did… I’m not a particularly friendly or warm person. But, those people do actively defend tipping and they expressly do not want salary/wage systems.
You’ve just described my sister’s ex-husband. Friendly guy, knows how to work customers just right to get a tip and made good money for giving up his weekend nights. If I wanted to get a rant out of him, all I had to do was ask about tip pooling.
I'm not advocating for the abolishment of tipping (I explicitly stated this btw), but I am against its expansion and an economic system where bribery is required for an employee to take home a living wage. If we had a social standard where everyone was making at least a living wage then I have no problems with you wanting to depart with extra cash. No one here is really advocating for making tipping illegal, we just don't think it should be used to supplement income.
Stories like this make me think tipping should be abolished more. I feel bad for the other less charismatic servers. Just get rid of tips and pay them higher across the board.
I have a friend with no education who has been a server and bartender. When he is able to work as a server, the money flows in. He's currently working at a Brazilian steakhouse where the standard tip for a table of 4 is $36 before counting money spent on drinks, meaning that after splitting up the tips with other servers and the backroom staff, he's still making well over $70 an hour on a slow day.
Of course, when he was between serving jobs, he was working at a doggy day care for $12 an hour.
Tipping is a system in which customers explicitly, optionally, and variably share some of the cost of labor. It has the features of allowing individual patrons to modulate the labor subsidy they provide, based on their current price sensitivity, the value they place on warm fuzzies (don't dismiss this!), the relationship they want to build with the business, and the service they perceive themselves to be getting.
You can't do all these things with prices; prices apply universally across customers, and for the most part in the hospitality industry they can't float (see airline tickets as an example of a floating price, and the sheer loathing it creates in the customer base).
Later
I also should have added, and probably led with, the fact that tipping addresses a big agent-principal problem in hospitality: in restaurants where servers rely on tips, their incentives are strongly aligned with those of customers; without tips, virtually all the incentives are aligned with that of management.
I disagree with this. I'm reading your claim as "you should pay people so they become your friends." There's plenty of stores I've been regulars at that don't have a tipping system that I've become friendly with staff with. When I was a teenager and worked at movie theaters I became friendly with many regulars and tipping doesn't exist there. The warm fuzzies come from social interaction, face recognition, and being rememberable through your good/frequent business and friendliness. It feels wrong to suggest we should be buying them. That would just be confirming the bribery/feudal aspect of the system. I also don't think this helps those working non-tipped based jobs.
I don't want to abolish tipping, but instead I want to raise the minimum wage, make prices transparent (I am also a proponent of including tax in price listings), and making not tipping socially acceptable. If we have to supplement wages with tips then our economic system is broken (and akin to feudalism). If you want to provide an extra reward or explicitly bribe an employee for faster/better service (or to flex your wealth), I have no qualms.
Those same arguments apply to several other professions where it is not customary to tip. The reality is that tips are expected only for the lower social/economic classes, where it is acceptable that the price for labor is set based on the whims of the customer instead of being pre-agreed (which, personally, I find degrading).
Right-leaning people like it because it creates a power dynamic. Left-leaning people like it because they delude themselves that they're helping the working class. In both cases, it boils down to paternalism, and all other reasons are rationalization.
The existence of restaurants, barber shops, delivery services, all over the world in first world and developing countries indicates it's possible to run a business successfully without relying on charity or variable pricing models.
Friendliness or a general level of service is in a lot of industries considered a competitive factor that contributes to increased customer lifetime value through repeat sales, loyalty etc.
Why should the restaurants be any different? If I like the food and the service, I'll want to come again - the restaurant increases their earnings that way and both I and the business are happy.
The question then again comes down to how is that an incentive for the workers. The obvious answer is that their pay should be linked to the earnings of the business. The fact that it is not shows the fundamental problem with current state of capitalism, where the primary goal is to exploit the work of the workers below your financial level (as a business owner) and increase your wealth based on the ever-increasing difference between costs / wages and revenue.
The incentive of business is in conflict with incentive of workers, and the interest of customers - business will be motivated to use the workers willing to work for less, count tips towards salaries, but also use lower quality/cost ingredients etc.
A system where the worker salaries would be linked to revenue, with some nuance of course, would ensure top quality / service / products for the customers, fair reward and aligned incentives for the workers, and access to top tier employees (since they would want to work for businesses with higher revenue), happy customers and increased revenue to the business.
> I also should have added, and probably led with, the fact that tipping addresses a big agent-principal problem in hospitality: in restaurants where servers rely on tips, their incentives are strongly aligned with those of customers; without tips, virtually all the incentives are aligned with that of management.
Very astute of you to mention this, though “address” and “cause” could be used interchangeably.
When I was a bartender it was always in my interest to give away free alcohol to my highest tipping customers, who generally understood that it’s customary to add 50% of the cost they would have paid to their tip for each free drink.
At a very surface level, the tipping system incentivizes employees to steal product from the business to give to customers. But the game theory gets very complicated.
Sometimes this results in a great customer base that forms the core of a “social engine” that powers the popularity of a bar/restaurant and results in a win-win-win. Bar owners set various levels/thresholds/criteria for how much free sample can be given out and under what circumstances.
Tl;dr: the principal-agent problem can almost never be solved to align all parties in a system.
The argument is about harm reduction. You need to separate the ideal from stuff that improves the current situation.
The ideal all consumers should be pursuing for all forms of financial transaction is that all advertised prices are the out-the-door ceiling. Fees, taxes, surcharges, tips, etc may not be added, though discounts are ok. Tipping should not even be an option, though we've seen a lot of evidence that a visible percentage would much prefer to lord their power to tip over the heads of their servers, and get very upset when that's taken away. So this is a hard position to reach from where we are, even though it's clearly better than the current state.
But we don't live in that world. In the current world, many things are advertised at prices lower than are actually sustainable. And no, I'm not talking about loss-leaders. I mean the entire menu at a restaurant, for instance. If that is all their income, they can't afford to pay servers enough to be livable. So they underpay servers, and expect tips to sort of paper over the gap. And because that gap exists, I recognize tipping as sadly necessary, even though it is forbidden in my ideal world.
I don't like it, but of the options I have available when I choose to eat out, it's the least bad.
That's the law in Australia. We have a whole government department (https://www.accc.gov.au/) dedicated to defending consumers against companies, and they do pretty well at it.
Can I also recommend the Australian Electoral Commission (https://www.aec.gov.au) who are available for private events and functions as well as larger elections if you think you might have trouble running it yourself.
> The followup argument is often "well they are still being under paid." While I can buy this argument, I do not think the solution is tipping
The alternative is getting a restaurant to entirely change its identity.
Their POS system will always have a spot for tip on a receipt.
Their prices are based on the fact that they expect customers to tip the servers at least 15-25%.
It's a monumental change. It's not just "pay the servers at least $15/hr and turn off tipping". Nobody I've ever met who waits tables is happy with $120/night out the door pretax ($15/hr * 8)
For a restaurant to pay a server what they make now ($150-$300/night tips), their labor cost would be through the roof and they would have to raise the price of the food.
Tipping for service is a little different than the tipping thats been getting out of control imo. Places are signing up for these square readers and whatever else is sold to small businesses to scan a credit card, and the default settings seem to be to add a tip. These would be jobs where the worker would never expect a tip normally, maybe a tip jar with a buck or two in it a shift if that. Plus you are expected to tip before you even get whatever service when you do it at point of sale like this, unlike the traditional restaurant approach where you tip at the very end of the meal even after you've closed out the rest of the bill.
Perhaps we just need a quick break where customers realize that they're paying for the service, one way or another. Your hamburger costing $20 and you leaving $5 is no different from your hamburger costing $25. It's really only the poor tippers who shouldn't want this transition to a fixed wage with the costs added to the food. Currently, they're getting subsidized service from good tippers.
> For a restaurant to pay a server what they make now ($150-$300/night tips), their labor cost would be through the roof and they would have to raise the price of the food.
Is that every night or just weekends? Because everyone I've known that has cleared that kind of money has only done so on weekends (Friday/Saturday), and works at higher end or very popular restaurants. I agree that an extra $15-$30/hr would be an insane increase, but if that is spread out over the other 5 days a week then this is much closer to a $3-$6/hr increase. Large, but not obtuse considering a server is probably serving many meals an hour on average. I wouldn't expect food prices to go up very much to cover such a change. As a customer I'd be far happier with that version too. To be clear, I'm against abolishing tips, I just don't think it should be the social expectation for an average establishment.
I’m already paying that much. If you keep the same total price but put it on your menu instead of making it an end-of-meal surprise, that is much preferred thanks.
Honest question : how do you think it works literally anywhere outside of Canada and the US?
We have bar and restaurants, too.
People working there have kids, mortgage.
I would even say that it’s more a “real” job than in the US.
“Real”, in the sense that, in the US, I’ve seen friends in their 40’s switching industry because they want to have kids. While for instance in France their is actual school you go to before become a waiter in the higher end places.
Those are jobs were you are well compensated and that you can expect to keep for a while ( with a promotion path )
> One thing I've never understood is the argument for tipping
European here, from Italy, we don't tip much and it's not mandatory.
We do at dinner if it has been a long dinner usually as a way to show appreciation, but the tip is usually a modest amount (in the 5-10 euros ballpark for a table)
The argument for tipping here is that it is tax free money.
That's why here restaurants love American tourists and their very generous tips.
Yes, the effect of a tipped minimum wage is that until you make it up to minimum wage in tips, the tip makes no difference in your take home pay. It only makes a difference after that, and if it can be sustained on average over all hours worked.
Tipping is to incentivize personalized, special, service. The proliferation of it is because people forgot what it's for. Don't tip when you're a fungible customer.
No, it has for the most part been "because servers paid based on their performance will perform better". The effects are easily observable in nearly any restaurant in the country - the servers are better than their European counterparts, whether in a fancy establishment or a tiny sandwich shop. 'Because they're paid less than minimum wage' is a straw man - the law that allowed that to happen was created in a pre-existing tipping culture that justified it on the merits.
> When I was a kid (some 20 years ago) 10% was common for a standard tip. Now most places have an 18%/20%/25% option on screens. Some even higher! The second image in the article even shows a 30% tip
Restaurant prices generally ran behind inflation; that's why tipping percentages increased.
A few years back I attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco and stayed at an AirBnB in Haight-Ashbury district. I discovered a nearby restaurant, Zazie, that advertised on their web site they were "proud to be tip free" so I tried it. I had dinner there more than once over my week stay in SF and it was so nice to get a credit card receipt with no space for tip and a reminder from the server that no tip was wanted. The service was great and the prices did not seem excessive compared to other places.
Many of the comments here have discussed how without tips paying a living wage would compel higher prices. I ask, what's the difference between a higher up-front price on the menu for the item or a lower price with the expectation that at payment you'll pay 20% more? I prefer the simplicity and less pressure of a bill with no space for "tip", that the price you see on the menu is the price you will pay when finished eating.
> what's the difference between a higher up-front price on the menu for the item or a lower price with the expectation that at payment you'll pay 20% more?
Yes. If you business wants to collect a "tip" up front, before services rendered, it's not a tip (Doordash, Instacart, etc). If 100% of the proceeds don't get straight to the employees, but some end up in the pocket of the business, it's not a tip.
This last one is going to be to hear, but if you pay your employees below mimimum wage and allow for tips to make up the difference, well.....
I've faced that after moving to SF. Stopped eating out unless its a actually special high end place or something.
I was in a rush and didn't put a tip, I found a hair in my fried rice and the tofu was not fully cooked. I'd ordered from that place a couple times before and its like $22 with tip for just Thai red curry with rice..
The prices are insane. Even if I made 10x what I make, I wouldn't eat out unless its really special.
But you have no guarantee that your food won't be vandalized anyways when you tip before service. The bribe has no teeth. You're going to demand a refund if you notice the food has been damaged regardless if you tipped before or after.
In australia we have no tipping culture and I've always been very against it, but I've found if I don't tip the quality of delivery driver is just abysmal, but if I do tip, I get "regular" service - ie. they come to my door in my apartment building, not just leave it in the lobby, and they usually don't completely fuck it up (ie. squished pizza from holding the box vertically).
It sucks but I just view it as an extra cost for using uber eats.
Most places allow you to give specific instructions to the driver. It's intended for things like "gate locked, text ### when you arrive" or something to that effect. But I bet you could say something like "will tip cash upon arrival" and it would have the intended effect, maybe even better than a tip in advance.
I tip up front with Uber Eats and Rappi because it usually means I get my order faster. But I have reduced tipping recently because I can see other orders are taking priority over mine.
I absolutely do not use these services unless there's a substantial coupon involved, it's madness. You get a delivery surcharge, a service surcharge, and a 20% tip to top it all or risk the food be messed with. Last order was 25 eur food and 20 eur charges for two hamburger before I went in and reduced the tip %. If it weren't for the 15e coupon I'd never have completed such a predatory transaction.
I contacted my senators and representatives about how the IRS should classify tips made before service. I got a call back from my senator’s office. The reasoning I presented was: that automatic gratuity for large parties is taxed differently than actual gratuity in some jurisdictions (why those have disappeared in most places), and that since the tip is used to determine order priority it is not a tip but is instead a bid for preferential service.
I also went through a call to get back a tip I made on a Chipotle order (DoorDash I believe) up front after the driver failed to find the address and then chewed me out after driving through parking lots for 5 minutes.
Should the person greeting and seating customers get a tip? Should the people running food from kitchen to table? Cooks? If any of the above are a yes, then unless you want to tip each one in cash individually, you need them to split tips at the end of the night amongst themselves.
The fact that tips technically need to be reported to the IRS and thus your employer aside, I believe it is a legally fireable offense to pocket cash in order to avoid any policies on splitting it with others working the same shift.
A lot of restaurants do that? If it's agreed up by the employees BEFORE the transactions are taking place or even the employment decision is made, then whatever system they choose is fair (cooks or no cooks, etc). The key here is the the cooks know what they're getting into as well as the servers.
The problem is when the restaurant tries to change the rules in the middle of the game (Like the girl in Bentonville who's manager tried to confiscate a $2k tip) OR the restaurant owner sees this cash left on the table and gets a little greedy.
I recently saw a "3% cost of living" charge at a restaurant (in California). This same restaurant provided suggested tips of 18, 20, and (I think) 25%.
At a certain level I think this is just dishonesty. They want to raise prices, but they know some people will stop coming, so they try to hide it in extra fees instead. I don't mind tipping per se, but the hidden fees and tip inflation make me think that if this keeps going, we may need to pass some price transparency laws.
Went to this Mexican restaurant yesterday. On the payment handheld device, default selection for tip was 22% with buttons for 20% and 25% and a tiny "custom" button. Making a selection under pressure with the waitress staring at the handheld device was an uncomfortable interaction.
SF restaurants, when I last lived in CA, were rife with these hidden fees. (The restaurants were upset about a local mandate. I … don't care about your politics? I just want a burger. Be straight about how much that will cost me…)
SF restaurants are the worst about this of anywhere I’ve been. What’s next? A high rent surcharge? Toilet facilities fee? A business income tax reclamation charge?
I deduct 2x the added charges from the usual and customary tip and leave a note on the receipt. The goal is to incentivize the servers to agitate against the restaurant.
I particularly detest sneaky 'charges' that are not embedded in the prices.
I got asked for a tip at an automatic car wash, because the guy was there wouldn't let me put the card into it myself, he wanted to push the touch screen buttons. I looked at him and said no. I hate tips, they aren't tips any more, they are subsidized payroll. I almost never eat at sit down places any more. Pick up orders? No tip. I will tip for a pizza delivery though, it's the one time I feel like it's deserved due to the hell they go through, but it's the exception not the rule for me.
Readit News
We've had a few customers baffled by the no-tipping policy, and still insisting that they leave a tip. Some even left cash on the counter or on the table. We had to chase a few of them down to return their money. Also, some customers seem to think that the screen froze at the very end because it didn't ask for a tip.
While it has been strange to see some customer's determination to leave a tip, I think overall it was well received by the great majority of people that just didn't say anything about it and made a mental note that the prices they see on the menu is what they'll actually end up paying.
We will probably need to highlight that we pay a higher wage for baristas & cooks to account for the lack of tips, and give customers an option to donate to a charity if they still wish to part with additional money.
I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
If anyone is in the LA area and wants to check it out, it's Awakening Coffee in Inglewood. I'm there most days since we've just opened and there are many things to be sorted out. Come say hi.
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 impossible. Obviously the situation is different, though.
Please no. That's how it usually starts. It was with small change but now McDonalds harasses you every time you make an order to round up for some charity I never heard about. I'd donate to charities on my own.
Needless to say I avoid these places like the plague.
But if the POS asks you, it doesn't feel as personal to turn down the option to donate, don't you think?
Anyway, not married to the idea, but I think there are some people that enjoy the endorphins that result from contributing to a charitable cause (especially when discretionary spending, like on a latte).
To be fair, the McDonalds charity is actually totally legit and really awesome and you should donate to it. It's one of the few exceptions to the general rule that these charity promotions are usually suspect tax laundering schemes.
Dead Comment
But lots of people won't think to do so, and it can raise awareness too. And in terms of payment processing fees it is probably much more efficient to include a small amount extra in a larger preexisting transaction and pool it up across customers than if everyone were to go out and donate $0.50 or whatever on their own.
If all you care about is rewarding employees who are good, Why not just do profit sharing for employees who been around longer then x months?
If you occasionally ask the customer in-app "how was your service today?" with a simple thumbs up/down option, and you associate the order's rating with the barista behind the counter, you can get a good metric on their interaction with customers. You'd probably want to use the median and not the mean in order to remove any outliers.
My customers complained that my prices were too high. So, I lowered my prices, added tax, then asked for a tip. About 50% of people tip, so my profits have actually gone up on average after this adjustment. People seem to be buying more, too.
I hate it, but this model seems to work better from a business perspective, despite it being a worse customer experience (subjective, I know).
How do you train your customers not to have sticker shock? Do I need to hang a banner that says “TAX AND TIP INCLUDED IN ALL PRICES” in comic sans?
Your system is better. But it's special. Special is bad because I don't like having to do things X different ways for X different restaraunts. I would rather pay a little more and not have to remember the quarks of your restaurant. I am also just trained to tip so I will feel icky leaving your restaurant no matter if you are paying them a fair amount already.
So if you charge more money to include the tip I will still feel obliged to tip anyway and I will leave with the experience your restaurant is too expensive and not come back. In short I think you've done the right thing. Don't fight the mob, embrace it.
Not accepting tips is one thing. But not accepting cash means you will never have me as a customer.
Edit: I've already walked away from a dozen different food places in airports because of this kind of trash: please install this app, can't pay in cash, can't see a menu without scanning a QR code, use an iPad with shitty touchscreen that I can barely see or use...
I just wanted to order some food and pay with legal tender.
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.
https://www.nssh.com/2020/04/philadelphias-ban-on-cashless-s...
I personally never use anything but cards since I have many of the high reward credit cards. But I've also had family members with tax liens or other problems that didn't allow them to get a bank account, that relied on family to pay bills, order things online for them, etc.
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 walking off.
"Imagine these magical tokens with monetary value that I could instantly transfer to a merchant without waiting for my bill to come back!"
Going cashless only benefits the owner for not having to deal with counting cash, with potential worker theft, and (slim concern) robbery - things that, depending on the area and the market, are theoretical.
At the same time, I think it's neat that street performers and buskers have QR codes to Venmo. I think everyone should accept everything.
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 whole thing. Why?? What a waste of technology and time.
For as long as not everyone has access to a bank account or credit card I'll be concerned about fueling divisions in society.
I'm not from the US, unlike the origins of this discussion, but also hear this statement and have no reason to doubt it is true. But if you step out of the wealthy areas or even just look a little closer then the users of cash are visible.
From the ones that left, most said they didn't have a card on them at the time and they'd return another time, but we did get a couple of people that did leave because they didn't agree to the policy.
All a CC company would know is you like expensive lattes; your cellphone would know how long you stayed there, where you say in the joint, and how many memes you looked at before you left. And might overhear everything you say, including your order.
If you're using any sort of digital payment or points app on your phone it'll probably know your order, too.
Listen, most places should take cash, but this is silly.
In fact, if they weren’t, that would be unprofessional from the FBI.
Basically most of the world except Noth America pay their waiters wages that don't depend on tips. Sure some places allow additional tipping, but it's not a mandatory fee and the workers don't have to get it to make a living.
Except it's worse since if you ever give an honest answer it's not you they'll berate, the bosses will just flagellate their underlings who might not even be truly responsible for the "low" rating.
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If the whole point of eliminating tips is to treat the workers fairly, why not institute some sort of profit share, or monthly bonus based on YoY revenue growth?
Either way, you should accept cash.
Of course a short-term employee (summer, tourist season, etc.) would probably not be interested in that arrangement, and would prefer a good steady wage.
Besides the accessibility issue, not nearly all activities or situations making somebody want to transact anonymously are illegal (just consider e.g. people in unsafe domestic situations trying to get help/away but not having their own card).
I believe we could strike a pretty good balance with some research, engineering, and product development, avoiding both possibilities for tax evasion and financial crimes on one extreme, and creating a complete financial panopticon on the other.
On the other hand, I recognize that there are plenty of businesses that still don't offer a way to tip at all (Starbucks until very recently), and more importantly, that none of these employees make anywhere near a living wage. Having worked service industry jobs and found my way out, I can't help but thinking that most of these jobs are merely dark patterns that take advantage of people who can't or won't demand what they actually should be paid.
The unfortunate conclusion I've arrived at is that US consumers simply aren't willing to pay the true price for many of the things they enjoy on a day to day basis. Just one example is that their daily coffee is subsidized through the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
You say you pay a "higher wage" - what does that actually equate to for someone working 40 hours a week?
> the misery of minimum wage coffee shop employees.
i don't know, TONS of people make way less than baristas and other counter-service workers. Lots of the customers of those baristas make similar wages as they do. Why does the barista deserve that money more? The maids at a hotel make less than a Starbucks barista, and there's no way they get significant tips especially at the cheaper places.
Tipping baristas and other counter-service workers who are NOT paid below minimum wage might make some progressives feel generous and virtuous, but it isn't solving any problems in a fair and equitable way. It's raising people's expectations -- in CERTAIN occupations only -- that they deserve $2 per customer for setting a cup on a counter and hollering your number.
Your everything is "subsidized" by low wages of people living in third world countries. US coffee shop employees aren't quite near the bottom of that hierarchy.
As a customer, please just leave well enough alone. I'd really prefer to just leave a tip if I'm going to be gently shamed into leaving reviews to make sure your employees somehow get the wages they were led to believe they would earn.
I would go a bit out of my way to frequent any non-tipping coffee shop/restaurant. And I'm quite happy to pay a higher price in the menu items to reflect the fact that the business isn't shifting some of their payroll burden to me in lieu of realistic pricing.
I love not tipping, and for me personally, the service in Australia is perfectly fine. I took my (Canadian) partner to Australia (her first time there). For her, the service was nowhere even remotely close to that of Canada.
In Australia, someone might take your order (or you order yourself at the bar), then your food is brought (or you get it yourself, get your own cutlery), and that is all. Plenty enough for me, but that's utterly bare minimum of what you'd get in Canada. Almost below bare minimum.
In Australia nobody comes to ask how your meal is, nobody comes to top up your water, and nobody will pontificate with you for 10 minutes about the difference in hops between two beers on tap. When my partner asked for that kind of information, most people just shrugged and gave her a sample of both, then said "what do you want?". I found it hilarious.
So while I think the service in Australia is perfectly adequate and I personally like it, my Canadian partner found it lacking immensely from Canadian standards, but she did like the no-tipping.
Then I have been to a few restaurants lately that the card machine (often a US-based one like Square) asks for a tip as a mandatory thing (i.e. you have to say no or type 0 to get past it). And the waiter/waitress will stand behind you watching/waiting with the machine they bring to your table. This never happened before - and I do admit that I have started leaving $10-$20 or something if I was happy with the service when this has been forced on me (depending on the size of the bill and the mood I've been in).
I did this with a work drinks with a customer the other day and my Aussie boss called me out on it "what is this tip on here - we don't do this in Australia". And I was like "I was in front of a customer the machine asked me - did you want me to say zero and possibly look cheap/unkind?".
So it is somewhat creeping into things here. Curious the views of other Aussies on how they are dealing with it? Am I just slipping back into this because I am an American and was used to it being a thing?
The correlation between service quality and tipping is an interesting one, why does anyone do a good job in any role without some kind of incremental reward for effort. Do office workers always revert to 'just enough to not get fired' or are they playing a longer game for promotions and bonuses?
Dead Comment
You a hater.
Yes, after the total confirmation (including tax if you can), where you'd normally be asked to tip, you should see if it's possible to display the no tip policy and higher wage explanation.
You could also tell customers that your business is donating to certain cause at this point. Just don't pass on the burden of deciding whether or not to donate to your customers. Another option is to dedicate certain profits from a specific product to a cause and note that on your menu.
You are brave. A friend opened a coffee shop elsewhere in LA County a few years ago. The LA County permit and inspection process was nothing less than a utopian nightmare. I have done lots of construction projects myself and have learned to absolutely detest that part of the experience (going to the DMV is actually better). The usual outcome is that projects end-up costing a ton more and take much longer to complete. The issues, in my experience, rarely have to do with actual safety concerns, etc. It's mostly about process and check-boxes. I hope your experience was better.
By all means, keep an eye on what's being said about you and look for red flags, but don't be that neurotic boss that rides your employees every time a review under 5 stars comes in. The best restaurants around that have stayed for more than a few years often are the ones with 3 stars -- 5 usually just means they're new, not particularly good, and people coming in are adventurous, rather than following what someone advised.
Ballard Coffee Works, corner of Leary & Market.
Just to dump an idea: Maybe instead of using a scale based rating, you could experiment with something that has not a clear maximum value to prevent the all 5-star rating effect described by others. The only thing that directly comes to my mind would be a button, that the user has to hold until the time matches the perceived rating.
It's especially bad if it's based on some variant of having scores "above average" or whatever, because that ends up being a lottery. At that point it's better to just establish a lottery among the employees. If you really have to do individual bonuses, I think it's better to take a leaf from Deming and only grant it for truly (statistically verified) outperformance.
Someone else suggested collective bonuses (e.g. profit sharing). That aligns incentives nicely: it is slightly lagged, meaning you can afford to experiment and learn. It's also not individual, so it fosters collaboration. It's still something of a lottery, of course, but one decided by the customers, not by a manager.
Can I ask why not? I see the rise of CBDCs as a threat to democracy (governments able to monitor and control what you spend your money on) and cash as a vital tool in a fight against that.
Though as a European I always find American tipping culture quite insane. Nothing wrong with tipping for good service, but they way it seems expected in the US is very off putting
New York City has a law preventing businesses from refusing cash because only accepting cards is discriminatory.
Continuing the geek vibe, I believe the best starting point to make sense of inner workings of incentive systems and rewards is SDT - Self-Determination Theory. It's 70+ yr old theory of motivation in psychology that originated in studies of how external rewards (i.e. tips or bonuses) crowd out intrinsic motivation.
In other words, if we want employees to act friendly to customers - should we design a system of external motivation (rewards and punishements) or design a system that boost intrinsic motivation for this behaviour. For example, SDT has many studies on how different rewards giving patterns affect motivation. As far as I remember, the least detrimental is task-noncontingent rewards (giving "reward" for just "showing up", basically). The most detrimental to motivation is competitive-contingent (give reward to those who outperform others).
I'd suggest a different tack, analyse what in the system has led to one person to be unfriendly to another, and solve it without assuming the buck stops with the individual as some type of perfectly free agent in a skinner box.
Proper pay, proper healthcare, leaders that lead by demonstration and treat colleagues with respect and a business that does not lead to angry customers by being scummy... are just table stakes for example.
I hope you'll be able to continue not taking tips because I really wish we'd abolish this practice. Good luck with your cafe and I would love to try it out next time I'm in LA!
Hopefully the rating system will work but I’d say you do need some kind of system.
On the other hand Chick-fil-A is able to make their employees act friendly. I wonder how they do it.
Finally I do wish you’d accept cash just for people that want to preserve their privacy.
And while you can use that person for other tasks when there is no one in line, they do need to glove up each time they may handle a food item.
Also, in LA cash is a safety issue if you plan on staying open late when traffic is low.
To facilitate anonymous payments, we will accept crypto soon.
At scale, I continue to believe there isn't a strong relationship between tipping and service, as much as between salary and service or service culture and service.
Transition periods are always complex. If tipping was verboten there would still be a cohort complaining about it for years, about both income side, and service quality side issues.
I would assume they make them do it via management, training, treating them well, and firing for non-compliance.
This provides a strong incentive for good service (and good cooking) as an empty restaurant (fewer return customers) means less income. Otherwise, why bother providing excellent service, if you're paid the same hourly wage if the place is packed or if it's half-full?
By doing this, they appease the customer who wants to leave one and don't get in a back and forth with them over tips.
Haha, I think that's totally reasonable of them. As a consumer I would appreciate a notification informing me that I couldn't tip, no matter how much I thought they deserved it.
Edit: I wanted to add that there are a lot of places we're not expected to tip at whose employees deserve it just as much as the ones working at the places we are expected to tip at. Tipping culture may be out of control, but a lot of times people deserve a tip for providing exceptional service. That's our way of validating them and saying, "you're going to make it."
Dead Comment
Give your employees the same stress free and untransactional experience you are trying to provide to the customers.
> I do believe that the incentive tips provide for employees to "act" friendly to customers can be transferred over into a review/feedback program, which is what we will be testing out. If customers rate their order and interaction with the barista to be satisfactory, a bonus payment will be made to the baristas on shift. Once we introduce this, I'll share the results.
Might as well go full hog and add rating to food/drinks they ordered. Not to judge the person doing the service, just get a feel for what your customers enjoyed and what they didn't.
[0] https://www.instagram.com/p/CnozdBwu0pM/
It is almost never the case that the restaurant provides any of this to their employees and there is no transparency involved.
I honestly see it as a scam to charge higher prices without itemizing properly on the menu.
Even if you highlight the wage disparity in signage, I would have no way of knowing whether the information is accurate or just another piece of propaganda.
One idea is to print qr codes on coffee cups: customers can scan those and leave anonymous feedback later.
It’s funny, what you see is what you pay doesn’t require an astonishing level of integrity in much (most?) of the world, it’s just standard practice; instead, tacking on hidden fees not on the price tag would be unthinkable.
We might do the QR for customers that did not order using the app on their phone. We're printing stickers anyway, using the Star Micronics SDK which makes QR code printing a breeze.
This seems to go out of the way to fight tipping culture and seems to cause more confusion than necessary.
Is the sales tax included in the listed price?
One of my pet peeves is how "tax and tip" are not included in the displayed prices in Ontario, Canada. I hate having to do arithmetic on every purchase I make.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia where what you see is what you pay - tax incl. Tipping is generally not part of the culture because the minimum wage is a livable wage (in most areas).
Vision impaired people require the same help reading the menu at any other coffee shop, so it’s not any different. In fact it might make it easier on them because they don’t feel like they’re holding up the line. If one of us guides them through the menu on one iPad, other customers can still use the other iPads to order.
On a related note, I did notice that our visually impaired customers have a phone app that I believe scans and reads the text from the screen out to them. Perhaps we should have our own text to speech option in some future version.
Like, starting the conversation with an accusatory comment of "hey, btw, did you think of this very super rare situation, or are you the evil exclusionary guy?" is kind of an asshole thing to do. Most people with sight don't encounter blindness often, so making someone feel attacked for not thinking about is just a way to generate hostility.
Having said that, I actually appreciate the content (if not the form) of this comment – it's pretty easy to accidentally block people from using your software, and accessibility reminders are an important thing. Though in this case human solution (have the waiter come and help) is probably better than software one.
Dead Comment
For instance the Stripe Terminal reader is immediately to the right of the iPad POS, but a good number of people don't know where to tap the card. I need to design an arrow on the checkout screen for that because I've seen many people tapping the card to the iPad screen. I think Square got them used to that.
Most HN thing I've read all day. Sounds awesome.
Good luck!
That sounds like the end of transaction screen can be improved
Adding a message like "All Done" then "We're a tip free restaurant" go a long way
Even in Europe I tip servers and bartenders. It just seems nice. I've never had one turn it down.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
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 by a robot
One is punitive, other one is rewarding.
There’s a lot more to something BEING clean than LOOKING clean.
I would not patronize your business.
Dead Comment
You're part of the problem, not the solution.
I won’t go into explaining and outlining exactly why that is for the time being, but suffice it to say that I have personal knowledge of the extremely manipulative industry that “non-profits” are. But I get it, some will not want to believe me, I mean they’re called “non-profits” and profits are bad, right?
The point of my caution is essentially this, what you are trying to avoid by stopping tipping, you will only far undo by essentially making “non-profit” executives and their friends and family rich instead of that money going to your employees.
You're looking for Lines 15-17 in Part I of Form 990.
The information's trivially available, if you're concerned.
Having worked in the service industry, I usually tip 25-30%, per drink or per meal. But here's the relevant point: When I encounter a place that doesn't allow tipping, I still want to tip, and make sure to tip, because it's for the worker. I absolutely loathe the new system that's come into trendy restaurants in Seattle where gratuity is supposedly included. That's a skinflint way for a restaurant to raise their prices and assure you that their workers are being paid, without you as the customer having any say (or direct contact) with the workers. You may put up QR code menus and try to isolate the service staff from the customers, and eliminate tipping, but does that make happier employees? Does it make happier customers?
Tipping serves several purposes. One of them is to get the employees to give customers who tip well better service. Sometimes at the expense of an extra ounce from a whisky bottle, sometimes just with more personal care. The insertion of the management into the situation - trying to say it's good for customers and employees - strikes me as a very false, self-serving line of bullshit. And from everyone I know in the service industry, it seems like it quickly turns into a racket against them as well.
My prediction is that by 2025, places that eliminated tipping will be seen as just as infamous as any of the scammy disruptors of the tech industry in the 2010s; the practice of banning tips will be seen as disreputable, and life will return to its natural equilibrium where customers pay extra for good service.
> My prediction is that by 2025 [...]
You do know that for the rest of the world, the CURRENT system of needing tips to make up the pay that the employer does not pay is seen as disreputable, part of the infamous scammy lawless American low-pay healthcare-less work landscape, right? Employers are supposed to pay livable wages, not let random customers make up for it.
Add to this various "surcharges" and other mandatory fees added for this or that (my favorite: mandatory "resort fees" for hotels - seriously why is that not just rolled into the price of the stay?), and the service industry in the US has a serious price transparency crisis. It is quite literally impossible to predict the final cost of service, so as a rule of thumb I have come to generally expect to be out of pocket about 50% - 80% more than the listed price.
Any other country would call this fraud.
- Asking for a tip for takeout orders
- Asking for the payment including tip before you've received service, often via one of those stupid QR menus that does who knows what with your order data that is now tied to your phone
- Not having 20% as a tip option, but something like 18%, 23%, 27%
- Looming over your shoulder while you enter the tip
I want servers to make a livable wage. I'm willing to pay more. I want my prices transparent, and I don't want the mountain of guilt and social pressure.
(Shouldn't be tipping on tax, if you really want to send it to the IRS. :)
I'm with you on the rest, but I find this one dramatically exaggerated by a certain type of person. If you're paying by card, the server is going to be around, waiting for you to finish so they can give you a copy of the receipt.
I find that there is a certain type of person will always describe this as "looming" or "guilted" or feel "social pressure".
Your feelings are legitimate, but the logic behind them is not. While there is definitely pressure to tip (and tip more and more), I've never met a server who would actually act in any way outwardly disappointed by 1) tip of 15%, 2) no tip on takeout, 3) no tip on counter service.
While some people will say "you SHOULD tip 20%" (or more), the actual staff will consider anything beyond the old standard bonus.
I assume it's similarly opaque to use a URL for the same purpose, which would almost certainly be a "enter your phone / email so we can send you your URL...".
In your opinion, assuming electronic ordering, what is the best alternative to a QR code when considering privacy + ease of use?
Some of these places will also auto add grauituity charges as well for larger parties, and auto select a tip so if you don't look at the bill you could be footing out as much as 40%. Super shady UI practices.
I don't want to be guilt tripped in tipping for a baked item for instance, or a chipotle style served food restaurant.
Whether you agree with the idea of tips or not, that’s the system we have, and in that system large parties very often take up far more resources at a restaurant than smaller ones. They take more time to leave, they clog up the kitchen (as all dishes need to come out at the same time), they often occupy multiple servers at the same time (when a normal table takes only one), and very often don’t tip at a level anywhere close to the standard 15% (with so many people, everyone thinks they can get away with a low tip and others at the table will make up for it). Servers get charged taxes as if they received those tips, so getting shorted actually costs them money (paying taxes on money they didn’t receive).
This practice is different than dark patterns, as it’s actually addressing a real problem with the customers that’s been known be restaurants for a long time. It’s not the same thing as trying to trick or guilt people into tipping.
In particular, when it says your airline ticket is NNN€, you will pay than NNN€. No screwball fees up the wazoo.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/MEMO_1...
15/18/20 was in 2018
If they don't I do a custom $0 tip and tell the restaurant why I did it
Plus many restaurants with placeholder tip icons that start at 25%+
You also don't know what the tip is really going towards in many cases. In the classic restaurant/waitstaff case you can reasonably expect it to go to the workers, in the random knick knack or general goods stores ???
Tipping in general is a system to transfer wealth from the charitable to the uncharitable (high tippers pay more and subsidize the business, low tippers pay less).
I believe in the spirit of tipping rewarding better service, but by and large it doesn't actually function that way. Most tip ~20% on everything outside of extreme circumstances.
Much better for everything to be baked into the price of whatever good or service it is.
If someone has the mentality that they are free to spoil your food because they won't get a (good) tip, then they don't deserve to be paid at all, let alone be tipped well.
There's a lot of things the US has that are extremely strange, and the tipping culture is amongst them.
Quite fitting description. But since we are no feudal lords, I would also describe tipping as the daily power trip of the plebes.
The correct term is racket. Bribery is when you get something above normal.
This is the most egregious part of it. Who ever invented that a percentage should inflate? The price is already inflating so a percentage of it goes up. You don't get to inflate both.
Tipping was always 10% to 15% if particularly exceptional. Although even that should be made illegal, just include all costs of doing business in the price like nearly every shop does.
If tipping didn’t exist and were instead embedded in wages, the employer would just raise the list prices commensurately.
There’s a fair argument to be made that restaurant wages would decline in aggregate without tipping though. Certainly there would be both winners and losers
Really?! Which retail stores?
Big employers don’t do it as far as I know. Have seen it many times in convenience stores or small grocery
A food truck operator is providing no additional service than a McDonald's ignoring the choice of where to drive or park. They provide takeout with no delivery.
And then this started at food halls.
Similarly, for farmers markets, artists, and crafts; these are traditionally retail items, these items often retail on their website or at a gallery (there is an edge case of auction houses), but now there is at least a vendor option of having a tip screen.
Tipped workers had to up their game because they can no longer do tax evasion with everything on the record. Back in the days where most paid their restaurant with cash, tips were more like 15%. The move from 15 to more like 20 to 25% almost perfectly corresponds with the amount needed to make the same earnings after tax.
When I delivered food my tip spread was funny. Many people wouldn't tip at all, many would just let you keep the change or give you a token amount (~5-10%), and a few people would give you over 50% tips. Not many gave me 15-25%.
I held my tongue about exponential functions, and just said "ok", I'll choose my battles...
I guess that's why I'm an engineer and she's a server.
The followup argument is often "well they are still being under paid." While I can buy this argument, I do not think the solution is tipping. Because if they are underpaid so are non-tipped jobs like the fast food worker, janitor, grocery worker, or movie theater employee. All tipping does is divide these people and reduce the pool for a larger collective to bargain for a higher minimum wage.
I feel we have this collective belief that tipping is bad (it sure confuses my foreign friends, who sometimes get dirty looks because they didn't tip), but once we've effectively created the criteria necessary to abolish it[3], we still maintained the cultural aspect of it: that we __need__ to tip (often thinking we'll get our food spat in if we don't). I've had others get upset with me for these opinions (I do tip btw) but I don't understand how we can think tipping shouldn't exist but continue in this direction. It's also interesting that in early America we thought of tipping as akin to bribery (I still believe this and I think this is common). It also has a history with slavery[4]
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
[1] Obviously the argument no longer holds outside Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington
[2] When I was a kid (some 20 years ago) 10% was common for a standard tip. Now most places have an 18%/20%/25% option on screens. Some even higher! The second image in the article even shows a 30% tip
[3] I wouldn't completely abolish it, but I'd say it shouldn't be a standard.
[4] https://www.npr.org/2021/03/22/980047710/the-land-of-the-fee
Of course, when he was between serving jobs, he was working at a doggy day care for $12 an hour.
You can't do all these things with prices; prices apply universally across customers, and for the most part in the hospitality industry they can't float (see airline tickets as an example of a floating price, and the sheer loathing it creates in the customer base).
Later
I also should have added, and probably led with, the fact that tipping addresses a big agent-principal problem in hospitality: in restaurants where servers rely on tips, their incentives are strongly aligned with those of customers; without tips, virtually all the incentives are aligned with that of management.
I don't want to abolish tipping, but instead I want to raise the minimum wage, make prices transparent (I am also a proponent of including tax in price listings), and making not tipping socially acceptable. If we have to supplement wages with tips then our economic system is broken (and akin to feudalism). If you want to provide an extra reward or explicitly bribe an employee for faster/better service (or to flex your wealth), I have no qualms.
Right-leaning people like it because it creates a power dynamic. Left-leaning people like it because they delude themselves that they're helping the working class. In both cases, it boils down to paternalism, and all other reasons are rationalization.
Reinvest the savings and get rich off the stupidity of the system. Belligerence seems to be the only way to fix the system.
Why should the restaurants be any different? If I like the food and the service, I'll want to come again - the restaurant increases their earnings that way and both I and the business are happy.
The question then again comes down to how is that an incentive for the workers. The obvious answer is that their pay should be linked to the earnings of the business. The fact that it is not shows the fundamental problem with current state of capitalism, where the primary goal is to exploit the work of the workers below your financial level (as a business owner) and increase your wealth based on the ever-increasing difference between costs / wages and revenue.
The incentive of business is in conflict with incentive of workers, and the interest of customers - business will be motivated to use the workers willing to work for less, count tips towards salaries, but also use lower quality/cost ingredients etc.
A system where the worker salaries would be linked to revenue, with some nuance of course, would ensure top quality / service / products for the customers, fair reward and aligned incentives for the workers, and access to top tier employees (since they would want to work for businesses with higher revenue), happy customers and increased revenue to the business.
Very astute of you to mention this, though “address” and “cause” could be used interchangeably.
When I was a bartender it was always in my interest to give away free alcohol to my highest tipping customers, who generally understood that it’s customary to add 50% of the cost they would have paid to their tip for each free drink.
At a very surface level, the tipping system incentivizes employees to steal product from the business to give to customers. But the game theory gets very complicated. Sometimes this results in a great customer base that forms the core of a “social engine” that powers the popularity of a bar/restaurant and results in a win-win-win. Bar owners set various levels/thresholds/criteria for how much free sample can be given out and under what circumstances.
Tl;dr: the principal-agent problem can almost never be solved to align all parties in a system.
The ideal all consumers should be pursuing for all forms of financial transaction is that all advertised prices are the out-the-door ceiling. Fees, taxes, surcharges, tips, etc may not be added, though discounts are ok. Tipping should not even be an option, though we've seen a lot of evidence that a visible percentage would much prefer to lord their power to tip over the heads of their servers, and get very upset when that's taken away. So this is a hard position to reach from where we are, even though it's clearly better than the current state.
But we don't live in that world. In the current world, many things are advertised at prices lower than are actually sustainable. And no, I'm not talking about loss-leaders. I mean the entire menu at a restaurant, for instance. If that is all their income, they can't afford to pay servers enough to be livable. So they underpay servers, and expect tips to sort of paper over the gap. And because that gap exists, I recognize tipping as sadly necessary, even though it is forbidden in my ideal world.
I don't like it, but of the options I have available when I choose to eat out, it's the least bad.
That's the law in Australia. We have a whole government department (https://www.accc.gov.au/) dedicated to defending consumers against companies, and they do pretty well at it.
Can I also recommend the Australian Electoral Commission (https://www.aec.gov.au) who are available for private events and functions as well as larger elections if you think you might have trouble running it yourself.
The alternative is getting a restaurant to entirely change its identity.
Their POS system will always have a spot for tip on a receipt.
Their prices are based on the fact that they expect customers to tip the servers at least 15-25%.
It's a monumental change. It's not just "pay the servers at least $15/hr and turn off tipping". Nobody I've ever met who waits tables is happy with $120/night out the door pretax ($15/hr * 8)
For a restaurant to pay a server what they make now ($150-$300/night tips), their labor cost would be through the roof and they would have to raise the price of the food.
The customer wouldn't like that.
Lose lose lose.
Is that every night or just weekends? Because everyone I've known that has cleared that kind of money has only done so on weekends (Friday/Saturday), and works at higher end or very popular restaurants. I agree that an extra $15-$30/hr would be an insane increase, but if that is spread out over the other 5 days a week then this is much closer to a $3-$6/hr increase. Large, but not obtuse considering a server is probably serving many meals an hour on average. I wouldn't expect food prices to go up very much to cover such a change. As a customer I'd be far happier with that version too. To be clear, I'm against abolishing tips, I just don't think it should be the social expectation for an average establishment.
I’m already paying that much. If you keep the same total price but put it on your menu instead of making it an end-of-meal surprise, that is much preferred thanks.
We have bar and restaurants, too. People working there have kids, mortgage. I would even say that it’s more a “real” job than in the US.
“Real”, in the sense that, in the US, I’ve seen friends in their 40’s switching industry because they want to have kids. While for instance in France their is actual school you go to before become a waiter in the higher end places. Those are jobs were you are well compensated and that you can expect to keep for a while ( with a promotion path )
European here, from Italy, we don't tip much and it's not mandatory.
We do at dinner if it has been a long dinner usually as a way to show appreciation, but the tip is usually a modest amount (in the 5-10 euros ballpark for a table)
The argument for tipping here is that it is tax free money.
That's why here restaurants love American tourists and their very generous tips.
That's all there is to it.
Restaurant prices generally ran behind inflation; that's why tipping percentages increased.
Many of the comments here have discussed how without tips paying a living wage would compel higher prices. I ask, what's the difference between a higher up-front price on the menu for the item or a lower price with the expectation that at payment you'll pay 20% more? I prefer the simplicity and less pressure of a bill with no space for "tip", that the price you see on the menu is the price you will pay when finished eating.
Taxes.
This last one is going to be to hear, but if you pay your employees below mimimum wage and allow for tips to make up the difference, well.....
Always tip, in cash, direct to the employee.
I was in a rush and didn't put a tip, I found a hair in my fried rice and the tofu was not fully cooked. I'd ordered from that place a couple times before and its like $22 with tip for just Thai red curry with rice..
The prices are insane. Even if I made 10x what I make, I wouldn't eat out unless its really special.
It sucks but I just view it as an extra cost for using uber eats.
I also went through a call to get back a tip I made on a Chipotle order (DoorDash I believe) up front after the driver failed to find the address and then chewed me out after driving through parking lots for 5 minutes.
The fact that tips technically need to be reported to the IRS and thus your employer aside, I believe it is a legally fireable offense to pocket cash in order to avoid any policies on splitting it with others working the same shift.
The problem is when the restaurant tries to change the rules in the middle of the game (Like the girl in Bentonville who's manager tried to confiscate a $2k tip) OR the restaurant owner sees this cash left on the table and gets a little greedy.
At a certain level I think this is just dishonesty. They want to raise prices, but they know some people will stop coming, so they try to hide it in extra fees instead. I don't mind tipping per se, but the hidden fees and tip inflation make me think that if this keeps going, we may need to pass some price transparency laws.
Reminds me why I do all the cooking in my house.
I particularly detest sneaky 'charges' that are not embedded in the prices.
I'm not condoning it, just clarifying what strikes me as the central point.