Well, I said such a thing and I both understand it would affect prices and feel comfortable with that. Why should certain industries like food service be the only ones where prices don’t reflect the true cost of the product? Price it in. Works for most industries. For restaurants, it would also even the pay between front of house and back of house which is off kilter, for one thing. It would also result in more predictable income flow for workers who wouldn’t be at the whim and luck of the draw on whether their customers are feeling generous on a given day.
I tip wait staff, various drivers (Uber, Lyft, taxis, shuttles, etc.), hairdresser, dog groomer, valet, food delivery, hotel housekeeping, movers, AAA guys, and furniture delivery (if they do more than just dump the item inside the front door). I tip 20% for most services, with a minimum of $5 for things like food delivery, hotel housekeeping, valet, etc., and I generally give the mailman and UPS guy Starbucks cards at Christmas.
I don’t like the two-tiered system. In an ideal world, tips should be reserved for extraordinary services, not for giving employers excuses to underpay some employees.
I am embarrassed to say this out loud but I am probably the most crazy tipper I know. I have been called by different names too
I tip generously to just about everyone. The smaller the bill, the higher the percentage. I give 25% tips to bills > $500. %30 for lesser bills. 50-100% tips for less than $100.
The local bagel/coffees shop always get $20 bucks in the tip jar for a $22 bill and I go there twice a week for pick up.
Dog groomer got $40 for a $100 job.
Taxi driver usually gets 50-100% tips depending on the distance. Say it’s only $20 I would give them $40.
I don’t tip my cleaning lady every time she and her 2 helpers come bc I am not home. But whenever I run into them I give $20 for each person. But I gave the helper $100 each and the owner $200 at Christmas, plus she can buy shoes for herself and her kids on my credit card (yes I totally trust her, she kept the purchased to less than 100 each shoes and I didn’t even give her the limit).
I tip more for food delivered to my home than in the restaurant bc of the hard work to bring the food to the comfort of my home. The bill is usually small so they get 100% tip almost all the time. It always puzzled me when people said they don’t tip delivery people.
A $6 bubble tea I round up to $10.
The construction workers who worked in my neighborhood streets always get donuts and coffee or whatever they want at D&D. Sometimes I just stuck my head out of a car window and handed them the donuts. Other times If I had more time I even took their orders. They were complete strangers to me.
I didn’t tip but bought lunch everyday for the crew that built our new patio. It’s an 50K job I didn’t feel appropriate to tip.
When I travel to Europe on company’s dime, I tip 25%. On my personal trip I usually give 30%. And European wait staff do appreciate very much when you tip them even though it’s not in their culture. We talked to them often and one person jokingly told us to spread the words that they will NOT be offended with tips, quite the opposite.
I heard somewhere that white males usually give the most generous tips. I am a petite Asian woman and I usually get a shock look. I am generous in general and I can’t help it. I was the same way when I was dirt poor(obviously didn’t go out to eat or did anything that required tipping to begin with). But when I had $400 in a bank and a friend asked to borrow $500 and i was stressing out how to find the extra $100 that I didn’t have to give to my friend the full $500.
I’m not comfortable with the tipping culture at all. I find it hard to follow the constant increases in expected tips, and when I’m on vacation I don’t like to worry all the time if I should tip and how much. Plus I don’t like the undercurrents of master-servant relationships behind tipping. I’m a private tutor and nobody thinks about tipping me - if the did, I’d probably be offended. I prefer the same professional relationships with everybody who provides services to me. They should be paid a reasonable living wage and the prices should actually reflect this.
Moreover, this reminds me of my youth in Soviet Union, where prices were fixed by the state, and to get a good service you had to tip, bribe and cajole everybody from a hairdresser to hospital nurses. When I wanted to go to a very good hairdresser, I had to be introduced by a friend, and after the haircut I had to pay a fixed sum to the cashier, then discreetly put three times as much into the hairdresser’s pocket. When I came to the U.S., I was happy to finally participate in an open and straightforward form of economy - or so I thought.
My father in law was a huge tipper. He liked to “grease the palm” to get better service (his term). I don’t think anybody who provided a service left his house without a tip. He would even tip medical professionals by bringing a big tray of fancy cookies to their office.
I tip 20% in restaurants. I always dump my coins in the tip jars at fast food places or put in a buck.
My father used to deliver appliances, furniture etc when I was a little kid and it was hard work - I always tip such deliveries.
When I was in college I worked a lot of counter service jobs - no tip hard in those days. Someone saying “keep the change”could make my day.
It varies depending on location. When traveling internationally I make sure to be informed as to the practice and culture.
Here in CA. I tip based on location. For example, San Francisco has a $15.59 minimum wage. Another location has a minimum wage of $12.00. SF also adds a mandatory ‘healthy employee’ charge, sometimes itemized, sometimes bundled into the published cost. So, in SF I tip way less than in other nearby municipalities. That said, I tip wait staff, some delivery people (if they are on time then the chance increases), cash tips to Uber/Lyft as well as Door Dash etc.
I do not tip at my local coffee shop nor if I place an online order and do the pickup myself. It’s become an annoying new standard to hand the customer the iPad where one is immediately given the option of ‘Tip - 15%, 18%, 20%, 25% or other’. It’s a form of shaming and public pressure - to which the immediate reactions is ‘ha, no way’.
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This give me pause - because it sounds so super reasonable.
Try to tip really well when service person makes an effort and isn’t expecting anything and doesn’t usually get tips.
Tip well when it’s expected and service is good.
Tip basic when service isn’t good but it’s standard expectation and they don’t get paid well.
Don’t feel obliged to tip if service is really bad, consumers shouldn’t be obliged to pay gang tax.
I too would prefer this culture to end, if businesses are hiring people, they should charge accordingly and pay their employees themselves, not pass it on their responsibility to the customer.
Yes my husband and friends said exactly the same thing. Because even with bad survive I don’t “punished” the staff by not tipping. Most of the time it’s not the wait staff fault anyway.
I have a billionaire friend (yes with a B. ), who tip with an exact 20% BEFORE tax. He always took out his calculator and use the number before tax. It’s just so weird. It’s a group of us and We sometimes pay for the group except when he was with us. I refused to pay for a billionaire and he never offer to cover the entire bill either. Many of us have, not just me.
People tip for different reasons. Some because it’s expected in certain circumstances and the de facto standard, such as tipping 20% at a nice restaurant. Others tip because they think it gets them better service. Then, there’s tipping to make up the difference between whatever someone’s salary is and whatever you think they deserve to be paid or as another poster described it, giving gifts to strangers.
^^ both, inheriting old money and build upon the inheritance. Idk what’s up with the calculator, but he likes to be exact to the cents and not a dime more.
The standard for tips used to be 15 percent, and now it’s closer to 20 percent. Since food is already indexed for inflation, the 15 percent tip would also be inflation adjusted.
At high end restaurants, this Increase in the tip rate effectively means that servers are making 33 percent more after adjusting for inflation. And I suspect that most of that is untaxed.
I tip a very high percentage on small restaurant bills where an extra buck or three won’t make much of a difference to me but will make a person with a tough job feel good. I think I would be a big tipper overall if I had more money, but I try to at least give the expected amount if I know what that is (which I don’t always, as an unsophisticate LOL).
I give nice mailed local edible gifts to people who provide “above and beyond” service, like my distant lung doctors who will have prolonged appointments with me and answer my emails and help lead my care.
I have been resistant to increasing tipping to 20+ % but perhaps may revisit.