> when you are given the option to give a tip before any service has been given [...] why would I give a reward for good service
Are there still customers giving tips as "a reward for good service"?
I'm trying to imagine a curve representing the distribution of "quality of service".
What shape is the curve, and where on it would a 20% tip and a 0% tip be?
>Are there still customers giving tips as "a reward for good service"?
As in any tip at all? No, from me. I don’t think I’ve never _not_ tipped when the situation expects it (sit down restaurant being served). I know the person there is being paid less than minimum wage (where I live), which is already too low in my opinion, so they get something.
The amount of the tip certainly is highly dependent on level of service. That could be a significant difference at the end. I’ve tipped over 100% when the staff has done someone that stood out to me.
(Having been a server in the past and now in tech, I feel guilty about the work-level/salary imbalance, so I am generally generous with my tips.)
> I know the person there is being paid less than minimum wage (where I live)
The restaurants I worked at (a variety of family places and bars) everyone was paid $2.13/hr or something like that. And after taxes, you would get a paycheck for $0.00.
but
The same people who jumped to tell you that they got paid less than minimum wage (especially when customers inquired about it), were making $40-80K year in reality. The service industry is all about hours worked, and which hours you work. A lot of young workers refuse to work the busy shifts (weekends), and hate dinner shifts (could be out with friends) so they only work the slow shifts and make ~$20/hr * 18 hours or something like that.
But the people there to make money? They work all the busy shifts and slow shifts to fill the gap (they work a full 40 hours), and the money is insane for what the work is. Meanwhile they will happily tell you they get paychecks for $0.00 and only made $50 on Monday at lunch.
In my country, which does have a tipping culture, the norm is to give a 10% tip in restaurants as a default, for competent service, decent food, etc. If the service is worse than normal (rude server, cold food, huge wait times, mistaken orders etc) you'd live a lower tip, possibly none at all. If the service is great, you might leave a higher tip - though 20% would be considered huge, 12-15% might be quite normal for very good service.
> Are there still customers giving tips as "a reward for good service"?
Sad if this is no longer the case.
In the UK at least (and the rest of Europe too, as far as I can tell), this is still very much the case. The curve varies with the individuals tipping. I would be quite happy to give 20% if the service was outstanding. I’m equally happy to not tip at all if the service was very poor.
France here - no tip is the norm, tip is for service above & beyond... But, contrary to the USA, everyone gets a proper living wage !
Depends on when you are. Making minimum wage while living in Paris isn't exactly a "proper living wage".
Still it's not the scam that passes for wage in the US (especially considering cost of living and other expenses). And Paris can be anything, from expensive neighborhoods to project suburbs.
That isn't the customers problem though nor should it be.
The only issue with restaurants in France is that they close up early, or only open within strict lunch hours.
If you're paying a relatively high hourly wage to all of the staff, it seems unsurprising that you'd not want to be open during times of low customer traffic.
Honestly, this seems good overall; there's no more sense in having low-paid waitstaff hanging around hoping to get a customer table that will tip than in having a restaurant owner keep the restaurant open while paying the staff a reasonable hourly wage.
In France, I always thought it was customary to leave the change from l'addition. (I'm not French though, so perhaps I was commiting a faux pas)
I can confirm in Italy almost no one will even accept a tip. (Taxi drivers, wait-staff, hotel staff)
> leave the change from l'addition
Yes, that is the basic tip if you expect to come back to that restaurant and get an upgraded welcome.
But even with no tip, being a regular counts - tip or no tip, you are good business and worth cultivating.
> In the UK at least this is still very much the case.
Except for the very pervasive 12.5% "discretionary" service charge the you would have to request to be removed. Which is a genius piece of social engineering.
I live in the UK, and I personally have never given a tip, I don't think I've even seen it as an option other than physically giving the other person some cash, but AFAIK its generally seen as something you do if the service was excellent, but as I say I've never done it myself. I'm not generally in situations where it could be warranted, like I don't really eat out much or anything like that
As someone who also lives in the UK this surprises me. Almost every restaurant I eat at now takes the liberty of adding a 10% service charge onto every bill. I assume the idea of which is to make it awkward/embarrassing for you to request to have it taken off.
I may have had this happen without realising, but in my head, a tip is something you choose to add on extra, whether for good service or because the workers aren't getting paid properly. If I get a service charge, that's more like just part of the bill that I would pay, though I've only really noticed it as part of online stuff, for example my bank has a £25 service change to send money overseas (for some reason, I can't imagine that the process isn't fully automatic by now)
> for example my bank has a £25 service change to send money overseas
OT but the kind of bank that charges £25 for something like that is almost certainly robbing you blind on the exchange rate, too.
You've never had excellent service for something?
Yes, in countries outside the US I don't tip unless I got especially good service. Servers get paid (at least) minimum wage here and if they want more they should take it up with their employer like the rest of us.
In the US I usually tip but have refused to do so when the service was especially bad - although even then its a hard decision because you often don't know who is actually responsible for the bad service.
In my country the norm is for tips to be rounding based rather than percentage. So if your bill is 327.5, you would pay 350, effectively a "keep the change" sort of gesture.
I have certainly starred them in the eye and waited for them to ostentatiously count out every last penny when the service was truly abominable. It's a fairly effective way to give feedback.
You can also of course round up higher, so in the previous example for exceeding expectations you could round up to 400.
In 30+ years I’ve given exactly two restaurant servers 0% tip - it takes a lot for me to give someone nothing, but somehow they met the challenge.
In some scenarios, 1% tip can be informative to humans and data mining algorithms.
>Are there still customers giving tips as "a reward for good service"?
That's the only way people give tips here (not US tho)
Hehe, in here (US) tip for a bad hair cut in 15 dollars is 5 dollars. For better haircut maybe go for fancy salon if one is so particular about hairs.
> Are there still customers giving tips as "a reward for good service"?
Are there customers giving tips for other reasons? Any examples?
In the US, the tip is an expected part of the expense of eating out (and increasingly having any human in the loop). I hate it, and I really wish it wasn’t the case, but it pretty much is. If you say “I didn’t tip because the service was what I expected”, you’re pretty much considered an asshole.
(Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why the costs of eating out in the US and seem so much lower. Most people who come from non-tipping cultures don’t understand that Americans actually tend to pay significantly more than sticker price, especially after you include taxes, which are also often excluded).
Relative numbers (e.g. 1% above or below an average) can ferry signals to both humans and data mining algorithms.
https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise
> Shannon wanted to measure the amount of information you could transmit via various media. There are many ways of sending messages: you could produce smoke signals, use Morse code, the telephone, or (in today's world) send an email. To treat them all on equal terms, Shannon decided to forget about exactly how each of these methods transmits a message and simply thought of them as ways of producing strings of symbols. How do you measure the information contained in such a string?
>If you say “I didn’t tip because the service was what I expected”, you’re pretty much considered an asshole
Sorry, this is definitely not the case. Many times the worker is doing exactly what is needed and nothing more (eg: pour a beer in a glass, handing me a pizza). Why would I be considered an asshole if I didn't tip? That is ridiculous.
As other people have said, tipping in the US has really become obnoxious. I definitely tip while seated for a meal, but asking for a tip to hand me a cup of coffee, pour a beer, etc only makes the system worse.
Why does sitting down cause you to tip?
Why would employees in front of a counter be more deserving than employees behind a counter?
Or perhaps I should put it like: Why would a business need to pay a predictable market rate salary for employees behind the counter, but not for employees in front of the counter (because you step in and provide it instead)?
Because the person serving a beer at a bar simply poured me a beer. I walked up to the bar where I ordered from the menu. The level of interaction with staff = 1. Effort from staff = 1.
The the waiter/waitress had to come to my table, discuss the menu, provide feedback on questions, submitted order to kitchen, delivered order, checked back on us to see if we need anything else, etc. Level of interaction with staff > 1, level of effort from staff > 1. Tip appropriately if level of effort > 1 for helpfulness, politeness, attentiveness, etc. Stop making this so hard.
So how many hours is the walking waiter working in a day, and how many hours is the standing waiter working?
If anything it seems to me that it would be more logical to tip the person doing the more boring and repetitive work.
(My personal opinion is that tipping in general is a blight on a modern society and something that belong in primitive third-world economies. The way to fix this is via legislation: we simply make all forms of both receiving and giving tips illegal. It probably won't take much enforcement to quickly shift the social norms and economic practices once the wheels get rolling).
I 100% agree with your value judgement. Nevertheless, the social pressure exists.
The OP above you is guaranteed to have had their food spat in or otherwise tortured as punishment for not tipping.
Tipping isn't just a social thing, there are real physical punishments for not doing it!
Non-technical solution: move to a location with high social trust, e.g. neighbors and workers know and support each other socially and economically.
I feel like you’re making their point. If the “punishment“ for paying sticker price is you getting actually hurt, then it’s not a tip, it’s extortion. A social custom that the customary price of something is 30% more expensive than what the sticker says is unfortunate. A social custom of extortion is abominable.
>The OP above you is guaranteed to have had their food spat in or otherwise tortured as punishment for not tipping.
Wait, what??? Do you honestly believe the worker pours a cup of coffee in a to-go cup, hands it to me, checks the receipt for a tip, then grabs it back to spit in it? What kind of delusional thinking is this? How does the food delivery person even know the tip amount before the receipt? This kind of thinking is exactly why the system is so out of hand.
In my personal experience, the belief that “you should tip no matter what” is surprisingly pervasive. Anecdotally, I once had a situation where a restaurant completely dropped the ball—they brought me a cup of coffee, then never returned to take my order, even after I asked. After wasting my time, I had to leave and eat elsewhere. I didn’t leave a tip, yet many of my peers insisted I still should have. I disagree. The idea of tipping someone for poor service—especially when they’re clearly not even trying—is, frankly, sickening. If that makes me the a-hole in these situations, so be it—I’d rather be that than reward apathy.
If you’re asked for a 20/25/30% tip before they even start preparing your food, and you need to make extra clicks while the tip recipient is looking at you if you want to tip lower, theres a small fear that the food you ordered wont be prepared as well as someone who left the tip
On a gig delivery app, you give a tip so that someone will be happy to deliver it and not mess up your food, I think. a 0% tip is risking stuff. You can't really say it's a reward for the service though, more of a payment to secure better service?
Lots of places will now ask for tips before the food comes out even in person now - lunch sandwich shops, etc. I don't think they'd be unprofessional enough to mess up your order if you didn't tip, but maybe they'll be happier with you or be more generous if you tip now too.
On some delivery apps, tips can be increased after service delivery, e.g. baseline at time of order, bonus after good service.
> 0% tip is risking stuff
There are more numbers between zero and good! Markets depend on information. Price has been information for centuries.
The insurance industry has actuarial lessons for managing risk. The delivery app industry has a range of policy measures for managing delivery performance, including but not limited to refunds and blacklisting workers from serving specific clients.
I don't think they know you tipped until the delivery is complete, to avoid that precisely.
That's traditionally what's called a protection racket rather than a tip.
At least where I am from tipping is more done to round out the bill to a nice number.
Well I am giving tip because of fucking nag screen on payment terminal.
Can the screen be ignored, e.g. when tipping with cash?
Are there still customers giving tips as "a reward for good service"?
Yes.