Blame the payment processors. If you are a store and you buy a point of sale machine, it comes preconfigured to 18%/20%/25% or whatever tips, and it is not well documented how to change it. Most small business owners give up and stop bothering.

Why do the payment companies do this? Because they get ~1% of the tip.

Maybe I am a chud but if I am driving to pick up my food and the cashier is just ringing me up, nobody's getting tipped and I have no problem hitting no tip.

IMHO, more people need to grow a spine and never tip via a screen.

I never tip at my local Starbucks counter. They ask for it before any service has been rendered. That’s not how a tip is supposed to work. And who knows how the tips are getting to the workers.

I tip in cash after a service is rendered. If it’s on a screen there are renter seekers between you and the person who helped you.

Everyone -- including Fox -- seems to have missed the tax-avoidance game: Tips are deductible, wages are not. So one of the few employee and management mutual interests lies in short-circuiting a share of revenue directly from customer to employee, with no filtering through the IRS.

There is pretty much one way to stop this: stop patronizing carry-out and counter service establishments that throw a tip question into the checkout process. It's not enough to just elect zero tip. Stop giving them your money, period.

No problem tipping for good sit-down table service, or a good bartender at a bar. But at carry-out and self-service places, there's no service provided so nothing to earn a tip.

This reads to me (and pangram agrees) as almost entirely AI-written. I wonder if that matters anymore. Did someone express editorial judgment? Or did they just prompt “write column about tipping defaults, go”?

Anyway, the most egregious tip request I’ve ever seen was in a self-service airport kiosk. I chose my bag of nuts or whatever; no human even in the kiosk, completely unmonitored; I scanned and tapped my credit card and there it was — [15%] [18%] [20%]? So insulting.

I like the way the payment processing systems give an option to leave a tip. It makes tipping really easy. I always tip generously for any service-oriented purchase (mostly restaurants).

Time to start the #NeverTipper movement!

This what I do. I learnt this from one of the HackerNews comments months ago.

Tip the person if they do a direct service to you, which may involve touching your body. Barbers, massage therapists (all kinds, you know!), Facials, nails etc.

Also (as per another comment in this thread), no tip if we pay before we use the service (or food).

If it isn't any of the above, say "Thank you, I enjoyed your great service. But at this time, I don't have money to spare. How do I get past this screen?"

Shamelessly AI generated articles on the front page of a national news site (albeit not a very good one). What has this world come to

I just wanna know how everyone thinks is acceptable to tip for a product that you did not even receive yet. How do I know if it’s even good? Can I take my tip back if it’s not?

My thought is that this doesn't shift the burden to those that can afford to pay (and choose to tip) it shifts the burden to many of those who (for a lack of a better way to put it) don't have the money but feel bad if they don't tip. Also I fully understand why businesses do this but it creates a negative feeling at the point of purchase in terms of rejecting and not tipping.

In my state, and I suppose other areas of the US, it is a win-win for a business to institute tips-plus wages.

Firstly, the business is permitted to pay below minimum wage and play accounting games with "tip credits" and having the employees pool/share their tips in common. So, the business contributes less to those wages overall, and therefore can hire/keep more staff than it would, ordinarily, and run on a slimmer margin, when food service is generally not very profitable.

Second, the business can advertise lower prices! If tipping pays wages, and tips don't need inclusion in the menu prices, then your $5 hamburger isn't going to cost $5 at checkout, but if you're the owner, you still get to print $5 on the menus and put $5 burgers on your website.

At this point, customers are being shamed and goaded into tipping, because if we don't, we're the bad guy: we're the wage thieves; we're the rude customers who can't afford to eat but do it anyway.

It is a valid strategy to boycott/avoid businesses that mandate tipping unjustly, but ultimately, that seems to be another way you're hurting the workers trying to make a living, where that includes being forced to accept a job in a "mandatory tipping" industry.

Americans are beggers because they don't have employee rights. Some people euphemistically call this "tipping culture"