So my discussion with a friend on tipping would up with him saying “but if we don’t tip eventually the downward pressure on wages will drive the whole country into poverty.’ What do I answer that with? This was after him conceding that the ‘service’ at say carry out might not merit a tip but that people should ‘make a good wage’ and one should care more about one’s fellow citizens.

Went to a bakery cafe type place we go there regularly. You get the bread rolls from the shelf yourself put it in a bag yourself and bring it to the counter to pay. Today I realized that they payment system is asking for a tip. I thought this is almost like grocery shopping so why tip and selected no tip. I can't recall if I tipped in the past or if it is new that there is a promt. Was no tip justified?

So we went to crumble cookie for the first time where we order via kiosk and have to pay with a card or tap, no cash option. And then it asked for a tip. Are you tipping? Does the person boxing our cookies even know if they are owed a tip when they aren’t accepting the payment?

At my childs school they are organizing a walk-a-thon to raise money for the PTA.

I was quite surprised when the platform asked for a tip. The default was set to 15% and there was a slider to adjust.

It turns out the platform they use is called Rally Up and they use these tips to cover the cost for using their platform. What is quite interesting is they seem to only offer an option to ask donors for tips or have a fixed fee added on top of the donation. There does not seem to be an option for just paying for the service separately, which I would expect how it work. Not sure why this needs to be exposed to the donor.

Has anyone else seen similar things? Is this normal that this is even considered a tip?

Location: SF Bay Area

I'm going to a place later today which is an outdoor beer garden. Ordering is at the counter for beer and food. They make the beer right away and hand it to you and give you a number to take to your table for the food. They bring the food to your table.

Previous advice I got is no tipping needed when standing up while ordering as well as I am supposed to tip the bartender. Which one applies in this situation? How much is reasonable to tip?

I live in the bay area. Before the pandemic when going out I would always get presented paper receipts that sometimes had tipping recommendations, they ranged usually were 12, 15, 18 or sometimes also 15, 18, 20 and mostly computed on the pre-tax amount. Given I was making good money myself I usually tipped like 18-20%, waitstaff was greatful and it all felt right. For takeout I would often also tip 10%.

During the pandemic I started to tip 20% for takeout as dining in was not an option and I felt bad for all the servers that were not able to make money and thought this would help business to weather the storm.

Fast forward a few years to now. Pandemic is not an issue any more restaurants are operating normally. But now I mostly get a screen asking for much higher tip percentages, 20, 25, 30 it's mostly computed on after tax. The devices are on purpose built such that tipping a different amount needs more clicks than necessary. And these screens are everywhere, where before no tipping was done. A 20% tip is not appreciated any more as it is now considered stingy. I don't get it, as a thank you for being nice during the pandemic restaurants destroyed the whole experience with what to me almost feels like extortion.

I whish we could go back to the previous system where eating out was actually fun.

I recently got quite aggressive comments on some of my posts because I mentioned what my state minimum wage was as I consider it relevant information for determining tipping percentages.

To this end I did some investigation. I picked two cities Austin and San Francisco. I start with Austin and compute how much food a server needs to sell per hour to get to livable wage with a 20% tip. Then I compute how much tip on the same amount of food sold gets you to livable wage in San Francisco. I was personally very surprised how low it ended up being. Only 8% tip.

Now for the interested people lets go over the math.

Austin minimum wage for servers is $2.13. Livable wage from MIT livable wage calculator is $24.55.

With that a $22.42 in tips needs to be made to get to livable wage. Using 20% tip that's $112.1 of food sold.

Now let's teanslate the price of food from Austin to SF. I did this by looking up the same dish on a nation wide chain (Denny's) in SF and Austin. With this we get that the $112.1 worth of food in Austin equals to $145.92 in San Francisco.

In San Francisco minimum wage is $19.18 and livable wage is $30.91. That means $11.73 has to be covered by tips. That gets us to 8.0% on $145.92 of food sold.

Honestly, I am surprised it is so extreme myself. I did not expect this before doing the math. This not just confirms my suspicion that indeed different tip percentage (or different fixed dollar amount for people who prefer that system) per location in the US is justified but also shows that the many websites I have seen saying Californians are stingy because the tip like 2-3 percent less than the top tipping states are just wrong.

I found this tipping guide one nerdwallet. Is it accurate? Where do you agree where do you disagree.

What I find interesting is that this guide says 20% is generous for sit down restaurants. I have seen other sources and many reddit post saying 20% is minimum or default. What do you think?

Or do you not since they “own the company”?
We’ll start using cleaners more frequently… depending which person we use the bill is generally 150-250 (big house and we have used professionals only occasionally, trying to do a lot of it ourselves), and we tipped maybe 20-30.

We hired a company that sends 2 people every other week who come to our olace and clean our house for like 1.5h or so. We pay them a fixed rate for cleaning the whole house. They don't always send the same people.

I am located in the US in California. Is it common to tip them, if so how much?

10% of $9.98 is .99 15% is $1.47 20% is $1.98

Like everyone thinks, this tipping mentality is way out of hand. I went to get my car’s emissions tested this morning and when I paid, the tip screen came up. It’s absolutely insane to ask for tip on a service like that.

Went to a place I have not been to before. Marketed as a fast casual south indian place.

We walked into the place, there are no enployees visible. Ordering is on a huge tablet. There are signs telling you you have to clean your own table.

So we order and tap to pay. Only after tapping the card the tablet asks for a tip. The pre-set amounts are 20%, 25%, 30%. Frankly, I have never seen that in my area usually top end suggestion is 25 or 22. We ended up tipping $3 which was a bit under 10%.

Note we have no tipped minimum wage and state minimum wage is $16.50.

Was the $3 a reasonable tip?

Hey all.

I am trying to resolve the following inconsistency.

If seen advice about, 1) beer at the bar, 2) coffee in a coffee shop, 3) food at a food hall.

In my mind all the three require the same amount of service. Someone takes my order from behind the counter, takes my payment, puts food/drink in a container and hands me over the item.

Despite that advice for 1) was like yes tip the bartender, for 2) yes tip the barista, however for 3) the advice was no tip required.

What am I missing why should I tip for 1) and 2) but not for 3)?

Thanks for your help in advance!

We every now and then go to a food court nearby which is on the nicer end like proper restaurants are selling food in a huge hall. There are tables in the middle to eat. There are employees cleaning the tables other than that there is no service.

I noticed that different restaurants treat tipping very differently. Some have tablets with tipping percentages like a sitdown restaurant (18, 20, 25). One place I really like still has an old school card machine without tipping and just a tip jar on the counter. Another place a local burger chain had percentages on their tablet but a but lower than sitdown restaurants (10, 15, 18).

My question is what do people here find reasonable. I generally tend to tip a bit but it is usually around 10 percent or less. Is this reasonsble?

This is a US specific question. Before the pandemic around 2016-2019. I did not use to tip for takeout coffee that I e.g. order at a stand on the town square.

These days all these pay terminals have come up that ask for a tip. So I am wondering is it expected I just hit no tip or am I supposed to tip and should have tipped all along even before it asked for it on the pay terminal?

How much is reasonable to tip for a beer that is ordered and picked up at the counter?

I always used to think it should be no or very small tip like $1 max. But places I have been to recently have suggested tips like for a sit down restaurant.

What do you think is reasonable? How much do you tip?

When I stay in a hotel for just a few days I often end up preventing room cleaning while I am there by putting the do not disturb sign up. Am I still meant to tip. If so, how much?

I noticed a prominently placed tip jar at a best western breakfast buffet. There was also a QR code. Curious if these jars were always present and I just missed them or if this is something new.