Tipping is now
officially out of control
By Tracy
Moore
November 15, 2023 at 6:30
a.m. EST
Tracy Moore is a writer in Los Angeles.
I was just leaving a new grab-and-go market in my
neighborhood last weekend when the checkout screen suggested I add a tip. With
an employee hovering about, I selected 10 percent. In my routine tipping fog,
it took a few seconds before I realized that I had handed over an extra $1.70
on a bag of already marked-up coffee beans.
The moment is a reminder that tipping is now out of
control. Gratuity prompts have become so widespread and indiscriminate that
a new study from the Pew Research Center shows it is causing mass
confusion and frustration. We’ve been prompted to tip for any counter service
for some time now, but nudges are now popping up at self-service kiosks at stadiums, airports and cafes. More is
coming: Having new windows installed in your home? Tip it up, America.
Before you call me a cheapskate, I’m not here to criticize
or diminish the hard-working folks behind the counter — or the internet’s
virtual service walls — or anywhere else. I blame the stingy employers that
profit by making customers responsible for their refusal to pay a decent wage.
Tipping has always been debated, but we broadly agreed on
its purpose: A gratuity one gives after a service is rendered
to reward the human effort and care demonstrably provided, in what is sometimes
thought of as low-wage or underpaid work. We tip after the sit-down meal, after
admiring our new haircut, after the bartender whips up a drink. We might tip a
valet up front to take care of our car, but it is not necessary to do so to
receive the service in the first place.
Or at least, it wasn’t. It now seems that I can’t buy
anything without being prompted to tip before service is
rendered, upending the traditional why of tipping. Case in
point: food delivery apps, where front-loading a tip is not only customary but
necessary for the order to even be picked up. It’s a practice now referred to
as no tip, no trip. To be clear, you might still receive the food late, cold,
wrong, or not at all. But, by then, the tip is out of your hands and in someone
else’s pocket.
Some ride-hailing apps routinely ask for a tip soon after
the trip begins. And some online purchases are turning our virtual carts into
tip jars, too. Last week, a friend in Pittsburgh sent me a screenshot of a tip
prompt from an Instagram shop after purchasing a cushion for
an office chair. The prompt had invited him to “show some support for the
team.”
I am a lifelong tipper, regardless of the quality of
service. I waited tables at Holiday Inn as a teenager and then at various
joints in Tennessee to put myself through college. I consider bad tipping a
good indicator of sociopathy. Servers are unfairly punished for mishaps far
beyond their control, usually the result of a poorly run kitchen.
The easy-to-tap buttons for 10, 15, 20 percent — in Los
Angeles, often 30 percent! — have put tipping on autopilot. It may spare us the
awkward math, but it also erases the pause for appreciation. The presence of a
watchful employee has turned the act of tipping, even for subpar or no service,
into a reflex rather than a reflection. We often tip simply to end the
transaction, and businesses bank on that.
Tipping has never been the right solution to unfair
compensation. It has a racist and sexist past in which women and marginalized people were long made
to bear the brunt of egregiously cheap employers. Studies show it offers little incentive to provide better service, and its continued practice
does nothing to encourage employers to pony up and pay a decent wage.
But let there be no confusion about who is at fault here.
It is the companies who are betting that hurried consumers will subsidize what
employers won’t pay themselves. It was the boss who paid me $2.13 an hour back
in the day, with no benefits, and who demanded I share my tips with others so
he could avoid paying my co-workers their fair wages, too.
We can thank the pandemic for compelling society to better
value the worker, but we will have gone backward if we’ve moved from tips for
service to tips for transactions. (Who gets my 10 percent self-checkout tip,
anyway, and for what?) One only need review what some companies say
when asked to explain themselves: They point out that the tip prompt is optional.
Well, here’s a better option. Employers: Pay your workers a
living wage, so that tips become what they should be, an extra thank you for a
service provided, not a stand-in for the lack of a fair paycheck itself.
