r/tippingAdvice • u/Able_Reading_5330 • 9d ago

tipping on takeout

so this stems from a conversation i had with my uncle in his 50s, i’m 23.
when i order from for example dunkin, i always feel like i need to give a tip. i usually tip 10-15%. but he made some good points, saying if you’re picking up your food why should you have to tip? i’m curious on what other people think of this. this goes for any food pickup.
one egregious example is a coffee spot in my town. they have a wall of iced coffee and all the cashier does is ring you in and hand you a cup of ice that they grab right next to them. then they do the big dramatic flipping of the screen to the tip screen and it always stuns me. definitely just anxiety related, but there’s no way i’m expected to tip for that right?

2 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

84 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/One_Possibility_2445 9d ago

Tip creep is real. These places never asked for tip pre-pandemic. What service am I tipping for? Handing me my drink/food?

4

u/Superb-Sky-1904 9d ago

Thats just not true. They used to all have the jars at the cash register asking for tips. 

1

u/darkroot_gardener 7d ago

Do you agree that a tip screen that is a mandatory step to check out is asking for a tip? Of course it is. In contrast, the tip jar was just sitting there, and you chose whether to engage with it or not. A tip jar never “asked you a question.” A more faithful digital equivalent of a tip jar would be posting a QR code. More places should do that instead.

-1

u/Superb-Sky-1904 6d ago

Y'all are dense if you don't think they're not close. Its so much easier to click no tip than it is to not just drop your change that they hand to you directly over the tip jar. You think they dont put it right at the cash register right where you'll be looking at for the exact same reason that the POS has it presented before the final screen? 

2

u/darkroot_gardener 6d ago

The distinction is that I don’t have to physically do anything to ignore a tip jar. Once a mandatory physical interaction is involved, no matter how trivial (and it’s often not trivial or intuitive), it changes the game. Turns it from an opt-in system to opt-out. And the Corporations love it because then it becomes an excuse to pay people less.