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I don’t really get why the expected percentage went up. 15% was the standard for a LONG time. 20% meant you thought they were great. Now 15 is considered shitty, like an insult, and we’re supposed to do 18 or 25 or 30. Meanwhile prices also went up. Why am I supposed to tip 25% now? Service hasn’t changed.
Service has gotten worse at many places.The servers are still great, but quite a few places have adopted the model of having you scan a QR code, you order online, pay with your credit card plus tip, they have you pick it up at a window, you eat, and at the end you bus your own table. Then they have options like 18, 25 and 30% to guilt you into the middle one. It's like, damn I haven't even talked to anyone yet, you're jumping to the end first
15% is standard, great even. It's this one weird trick I do. See: how this works is I'm the one with the money which means I'm also the owner of the yardstick that measures average, good and great.
I'm baffled by comments like this. One ought to be empowered to decide if someone has met or exceeded your standards, and to what degree. Letting social pressure dictate that is nonsensical.
I thought 10% was standard.
It was, and I still tip 10% unless the service was truly exceptional.
It was in the 1970s.
Non American so bear with me.why the % would go up? Prives have gone up considerably, 10% now should be like or better than 10% then or am I missing something? Is there a point in the future where someone says 113% was okay in the 2040s but not now?
It's basically an artifact of how pay is set. The USA has a system where pay for certain professions is adjusted only by a new law. Since in capitalism the capital class has power over policy and the working class does not, the tendency is to resist increasing salary.
Now for most workers this would simply be untenable, but for jobs that get part of their income through tips the workers can make up the difference by increasing the portion of their income they receive through tips.
So over time the tip rate has increased. It's actually an interesting proxy for how fucked capitalism has become in the USA. The higher the percentage of cost that workers need to receive semi-formally through tipping, the more the imbalance between capital and labor.
Still doesn't make any sense. We all know how the tipping system works, it's fucked but that's not the point here.
A fixed % of a restaurant bill in the 70s, 80s or 90s should give hospo workers the same amount of money adjusted to inflation so if 10% was good enough money then, it should be now too.
Hell, I could argue that prices have gone up at inflation rates (that's pretty much the definition ofvinflation) while salaries have remained stagnant, so a fixed % of an inflated restaurant bill makes hospo workers the only ones that actually have their income adjusted to inflation. Everyone else (salaried) gets a well below merit increase year on year. And that's even before you take the socially accepted tip from 10% to 25 or 30%
Imagine in 1979 that 30% of the cost of a meal went to server salaries. Imagine that now it is 15%. Either the server takes a 15% pay cut or that money gets paid directly by the customer as extra tip.
Honest question, are servers paid a fixed amount of the cost of a meal by their employer, or you are just implying that their fixed amount went down adjusted to inflation like it happened to all other industries?
Most people who get a tip are paid by the hour by their employers in the US (and everywhere else that I know). Tips are a portion of the cost of the meal, usually.
So where your saying, in your previous comment that the hour pay hasn't gone up at all, or it has gone up bit not at the same rate as inflation? That sucks (but then again all workers seem to be impacted by that problem lately, agree that servers might be more impacted due to low wages)
The federal wage for tipped workers in the USA has not changed since 1991. It remains at $2.13 per hour.
Most states have a higher minimum, but 15 states use the federal value:
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
The population of those states is about 107 million people, so this is for about a third of the overall US population.
So at what point do we stop increasing the percentage? 50%, 75%, 100%?
Yup. The effect for me has been that I simply go out much less often.
I've always tipped 20% for good service and 15% for average or below. I usually don't tip less that 15% unless it's just abysmal or I'm picking up a to go order in which case I usually do 8-10%. Several of the restaurants around me have changed from 15% / 20% on the suggested tip to 20% / 25% and a few have even added 30%. And I've also noticed the suggested tips are calculated on the after tax amount, and some restaurants that charge a credit card processing fee calculate the suggested tip on that amount. I tip on pretax and pre-fee totals and cap at 20%. If it get worse, my eating at restaurants will start becoming less and less.
Why on gods green earth would you tip when you’re picking up a to-go order? Insanity! Stay strong - don’t do it!
Because minimum wage for servers stayed dirt cheap while inflation skyrocketed, and now businesses are fighting to keep servers employed (but still aren't willing to pay a living wage).
It's all fueled by cyclical logic where the business refuses to accept that they're immoral for requiring tipping. Might be legal- it's still a concious failure of responsibility to short your staff and expect someone else to make up that difference.
They went up because customers (on average) agreed to them and approved the higher suggested tip. It's not anymore complex than that.
If every place that raised those default options instead received lower tips as a result, it would stop. It's not rocket surgery.
So ya, why do you tip 25% now? Great question. That seems fucking crazy to me.
It didn't. You're just online too much. There is no "expected" amount. Anything you've heard to the contrary is just people bitching online.
Why would you assume I got this impression from talking to people online?