I'm suspicious enough of the business model and mobile enough that I can get food myself, so I don't use Uber Eats or DoorDash or whatever.
Per the link, Germans may tip equally as often, but it's less money - average 10%, vs Americans 20%. All self-reported.
The worst part about the US is that tips are considered part of the wage (except on the Greater West Coast - California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho). It's ridiculous enough I don't fully blame foreign tourists for not following our norms, although if they were fully informed and sensible of the impact they ought to.
I also find something suspect in (not Chris's but broadly shared; I even just replicated it) the implication of tipping as a form of prosocial virtue, or in there being an obligation to calibrate generosity to precise need and effectiveness. Just get the wages up!
Tipping in the UK since everything switched over to contactless is so hard for me to navigate as a foreigner. I think you're supposed to ask for the tip to be added? But I'm never sure exactly when. It's just so awkward. There should be a time where I hit a button to add a tip, I don't want to talk about the tip with the server!
Germany's still all-cash, which makes tipping work very differently because it's all about rounding to reasonable dollar amounts. You also are supposed to tell the person either how much total or how much back you want as you pay them (rather than leaving the tip on the table). I find it a little awkward to understand for example what you do with a 17-Euro bill (give a 20 and ask for 1 Euro back? just give a 20?).
tipping as a form of prosocial virtue
Sometimes it is a form of prosocial virtue. We live in an atomized society where a lot of human contact across SES is transactional. My neighborhood is pretty central american, dropping something in the tip jar when somebody's grandmother has just made Birria for me is a genuine way of saying thanks for cooking for me, I like it here.
Like Heebie, if I eat somewhere inexpensive (usually), I round up a lot more.
3: When I visited in 2019 I wasn't used to contactless in the UK, nor did my card didn't handle it (made me really hold up the queue at a crowded pub). Now we've phased it in, but I haven't had trouble with when/how to tip despite a range of gizmos being used, and I wonder if part of the reason is that I can confidently expect it will be presented as an option without having to discuss it.
I really hate the spread of tipping to more contexts and I'd like to see it eliminated even in the areas where it's completely standard like food service. Prices and salaries should be higher, but fixed. There's a bit in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia where he's talking about what it's like visiting a revolutionary socialist society, and one of the things he mentions is having his attempts to tip refused as ignorantly insulting.
I'll tip 20%, but I'm pretty salty that the expect tip has risen to that from 15% in my adult lifetime. Will it be going to 25%? Why are we doing it this stupid way instead of just having service workers be paid better?
Why are we doing it this stupid way instead of just having service workers be paid better?
Ooh! Ooh! Is the answer "Calvinism" again?
Tipping gives us all an opportunity to decide which waiters are elect and which are not.
The separate minimum wage for tipped staff needs to be removed.
On my trips back to the US it, I loved it when they swing around the POS tablet and they give you the options of e.g. 25%, 30%, or 35%, that is, something trying to establish a new higher norm and two absurd choices. I don't have the social context to play this game any more. It's especially galling for takeaway. Too many unspoken rules, too many choice points, too much judging of all parties involved.
Ooh! Ooh! Is the answer "Calvinism" again?
This time, with progressive language.
On my trips back to the US it, I loved it when they swing around the POS tablet and they give you the options of e.g. 25%, 30%, or 35%, that is, something trying to establish a new higher norm and two absurd choices. I don't have the social context to play this game any more.
I'm pretty sure in the POS they use for the cafe in my office building we're getting A/B tested - sometimes the options are 10/15/20 and sometimes they/re 15/20/25. (For smaller purchases they're $1/$2/$3.)
Frankly, I think most things that involve one person being charitable to another in a visible social interaction are suspect virtue-wise. Social welfare and tzedekah are the ways to go.
I can't not read that as "piece of shit. "
Or at least, they should be thought of as neutral social interactions similar to "Hey, nice shoes" and not as some kind of bedrock of society-standing-together.
If I complement someone's shoes, I want credit for being nice.
For the sake of argument: if tips of 25 - 30% became normalized at, say, restaurants, ride sharing, counter service of various kinds, etc. (you can give differentiated answers), how much would all of you reduce your consumption of these services?
Also for the sake of argument: how much has your attitude towards money changed over a) the past 20-30 years of skyrocketing inequality and/or b) your whole life? Tip inflation seems so much like part of a general process of derangement that it doesn't actually stand out for me, I admit. At least I'm not directly paying 30% to a private equity firm every time I eat out (yet).
When my parents lived overseas and I traveled a lot, I gave up on knowing how to tip and just asked someone what I should do for each individual instance. At least one time (I think somewhere in southern Africa but I don't remember) I was alone, so I just quizzed the waiter who eventually got over what an awkward and embarrassing conversation it was and told me the local norms.
In some places, (France?) tipping more than the local norm was very insulting, but so is not tipping at all, and the amount you're supposed to tip is very small but can't be TOO small and also can't have too small of denominations. I found this very stressful.
In the US I tip at least 20% everywhere and more for lower-end places or if the group has been particularly demanding or difficult or chaotic. But I also don't go anywhere very often.
Do people not tip for ride shares? Why are those excluded?
Separately, are there cases you can think of where tipping is expected for services that aren't optional? You don't have to tip EMTs*, for example; I can't think of cases off the top of my head where there's a gratuity line for a service you can't just opt not to buy.
The compulsory-generosity expectation that drives me insane is surveys, ratings and reviews. In some cases those are quite materially significant too.
* ...right?
Do people not tip for ride shares? Why are those excluded?
Looks like that was a separate question and the Grauniad cut it for brevity.
Americans tip rideshare drivers as frequently as they do taxi drivers (respectively 54% / 55% always, 27% / 27% sometimes) but Germans do so less (30% / 56% always, 27% / 21% sometimes). Although I wouldn't be surprised to find the wage laws are shaking out differently there.
During COVID some of the drive-through coffee stands here (which are everywhere) started asking if you want to leave a tip when you give them your card, so as to avoid having to give you back the tablet to sign. It's kind of jarring to have that tacit norm expressed so explicitly. I usually tip a dollar, which is pretty generous for a cup of coffee but makes the process easy.
I basically don't consume any tippable services other than (in-person) food & drink, where I've always tipped 20% since I dated BOGF, who worked a lot of waitressing jobs and insisted that 20% was the minimum. AFAIC, tipping counter personnel* was an innovation of the lockdown era when we were supposed to be grateful that anybody was leaving the house to serve us, and I've made my piece with saying "fuck that." Nobody's getting paid minimum wage anymore.
*beyond, like, dropping some change in a jar
The annoying thing about the tipped minimum wage is that if the worker doesn't get enough tips to make it up to standard minimum wage the employer has to make up the difference. So a lot of the tipping of low wage service workers is just subsidizing the employer.
I think when ride shares started they didn't allow tipping of drivers which was a nice preview of the wonderful tipless future but then the VC money dried up and they cut the share of fares going to the drives.
Germany is still heavily cash? That's good to know, we're going there this summer. Iceland was almost entirely cash free except our first ride from the airport where our scheduled ride never showed so we took a regular cab that didn't have a card payment set up. But I had minimal cash so I stiffed the driver the tip, if it was expected in that country.
Germany is still heavily cash. "Nur Bares ist Wahres." Because I have a Stupid Foreigner bank account, I get charged €0.30 for most card transactions, so I try to minimize those. Kid Two likes a particular shop's fancy schmancy donut but they don't take cash, and I'm not paying an extra 10% because they want customers to use cards. Like JRoth, I am making my peace with saying "Fuck that."
Our nearby grocery store seems to have switched over exclusively self-service checkouts as closing time approaches. That means that two guys are mostly standing around while customers do the work of checking out. I've done it twice now because I was getting things for other family members, but no more. Because fuck that, too.
Germans may tip as often as USians, but it's definitely more round toward an aesthetically pleasing number than it is add some significant share to the bill. Separate checks are also practically expected, as far as I know. For the €17 conundrum, you could definitely ask for €1 back. Restaurant staff are also not getting some weird sub-minimum wage, so a gratuity really is over and above. (If I understand the history correctly, the reason that the sub-minimum exists in America is the same reason that many seeming anomalies exist in American law/policy. And it's not Calvinism.)
Many small shops in Germany will insist on a minimum purchase (often €10 though I have seen €5 and €20) before you can pay with a card. The retailer doesn't want to eat the card network costs.
The sub shop I go to after I finish at the gym now takes cards. There are fewer holdouts among the small merchants. I still pay cash for almost everything under $50.
I absolutely hate how new technology regularly gets used to scam people and reduce trust, in this case by making you question where your non-cash tip really goes.
I started tipping counter service some places (tbh, mostly if they already made it easy) in the Bay Area because of the cost of living vs actual wages. I didn't tip takeout until the pandemic and I guess I could stop now.
The compulsory-generosity expectation that drives me insane is surveys, ratings and reviews. In some cases those are quite materially significant too.
Oh lord, this. I'll hang in for a few questions and rate the person I dealt with at the top of the scale unless they were willfully awful, but I balk at the "how likely are you to recommend" questions. I don't know who decided that net promoter score is a thing, but I'd sure like to punch him (and it's gotta be a him) in the nuts if I ever got the opportunity.
a particular shop's fancy schmancy donut
"Eat Ben's Fine Berliners"
The rating thing is so vexing I wonder if it's only going to be solvable by labor legislation: only ones or twos can contribute to adverse employment actions and only if there are more than some number or percent of either; required to disclose this to customers; etc.
31
I'll hang in for a few questions and rate the person I dealt with at the top of the scale unless they were willfully awful
Ugh. I hate the expectation that 5 out of 5 is standard and anything else will get a perfectly competent employee in trouble. 3 our 4 out of 5 should be perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of interactions, no further comment needed. I wish average meant average. 5 out of 5 should be reserved for a cab driver getting me to the hospital faster than an ambulance, a waiter giving me useful advice on cooking or my diet, a barber giving me a new haircut that gets me noticed by someone I have a crush in.
35: Absolutely, which is what makes the whole thing so disgusting.
I filled out a survey once where I gave only the highest scores and the very last question was, "What did they do that was so exceptional to merit the highest scores?" At which point I either decided to say fuck it and closed the survey or wrote something about how evaluating their employees isn't actually a thing I'm going to do in detail.
We had some happiness survey at work that I wanted to fill out because I'm unhappy with a bunch of work stuff, but the survey was just so long and baroque that I gave up. I was complaining about all this survey stuff on the "data" thread, but these surveys just illustrate all the problems with how data is used by the executive class. You need a high response rate or it's worthless data! So you gotta make some tough cuts and only ask a few questions! And they can't all have so many options. And then they don't even use the plies of data, they simplify it down to "should we punish the worker or not?" You only need one question for that!
Strangely enough, there never seems to be a way of delivering feedback like "your representative was fine, but deliver decent service because your IT sucks/your policies suck/you refuse to empower frontline CS people to do anything that isn't spelled out in their training manual." And all of the NPS-related questions could be reduced to "how badly do we suck as compared to our major competitors?"
26: I used to give an extra big tip to my hair stylist. We had an understanding that he wouldn't try to sell me hair products unless I asked for something,
Post pandemic I tip for takeout orders that I pick up myself, but I do a custom amount and it's usually less than 10%.
39 is the truth.
Also 38 makes me want to cry.
I was in Naples last week, and left tips whenever I had a meal somewhere, which seemed welcome. But at the hole in the wall coffee bar near the "hotel"* I was staying at, I left a tip in the change plate at the till when I was getting my espresso, and the guy walked over to the bar to give me it back. He very clearly didn't want or expect to be tipped.
* serviced apartment up a sketchy Napoli tenement stairwell.
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My same-unit-tenant has his own bedroom and bathroom, and the door is closed most of the time. I happened to stand in the threshold some yesterday, and it felt extraordinarily hot - like he never opens the windows. The wireless thermometer I put in read 76 when the rest of the apartment was 69. It also seemed quite humid.
Recently when the new AC kicked at an odd time he asked if it could be turned off, so I assume he's fine the way things are, though I don't know why. (The HVAC is set to automatically keep the temperature below 74, but its only sensor is in a shared area.)
I might ask him his comfort levels to double-check, but are there reasons I might need to be concerned even if he's not? Mold, or something I'm not thinking of? (Do I need a hygrometer?)
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What about haircuts?
For 20 years I got my hair cut by a guy who owned his own shop. Tipping in that context never made any sense to me. He retired at the start of COVID, and I've only gotten I think 3 haircuts since then. I know I should tip, but they jacked their price up by 33%, so I feel like I'm already paying the tip.
Is he running a growing operation?
47: I think making that distinction (their own business vs. being employed at or renting space from a bigger business) is common with massages, but not unfortunately with barbers.
76 doesn't seem very warm to me.
That's a point, it's not that different from the maximum I'm looking for, but given the differential with the rest of the apartment, it might be 81 for him when it's 74 for me. (The circulation is crummy - double-loaded corridors! - hence my deciding to install the AC unit in a relatively mild climate.)
Interesting, on the OP: the USPSTF's research review that resulted in the current recommendations had to bundle studies on colonoscopy, stool tests, and other types of test together to find the statistical validity needed. So it seems there's no official recommendation on which of those test types is preferable. (Doctors may say colonoscopy because it detects more earlier, but that's not necessarily a positive.)
Too late. I'm already drinking a metric ton of miralax, at age 45.
Miralax Pictures crapped out a whole lot of movies.
56 because it had a shithead as chairman
Speaking of drinks, I just bought my first bubble tea.
58: Did you like it? I enjoyed the tea, but the "bubbles" were too freaky for me.
I didn't drink it. I bought it for my son. He didn't like it.
All this talk of varying payment customs has me a little worried about my upcoming trip to Portugal (first trip to Europe for me since the Carter administration). Back in the day I would literally have bought a book in a bookstore to answer questions about how to pay for things in Portugal, how much Portuguese I need to get by, whether I should rent a car, and so forth. The web seems so scammified and scattered now - where would y'all go for a reference on touristy stuff like that?* I know from googling that my phone service carrier has no add-on plan to allow me to use it in Europe. I can buy a sim card, but can I just buy a cheap phone when I get there, and if so where and for how much? That kind of thing I am having poor success in finding out and I very much wish I had something more comprehensive than scattered web hits.
*Just append "reddit" to every search?
Also, if my congressperson is an election-denying MAGA type, what are the ethics of calling him to make sure I get my passport back in time (locals say he can and will do that).
Definitely call him. Constituent service stuff like that is basic congressional staff work and there's no reason to boycott it for ideological reasons.