I'm fine with objecting to tip inflation, but I have no doubt that the tablet Westneat used offered an "other amount" option, where you can add a normal 15% tip. or nothing.

I typically see 10/15/20 and "other amount".

@1 -- They had a "custom tip" option and he tipped 18%. Mostly it was just his musing about tipping, and he definitely has a point. It is really a sign of a dysfunctional society. Tipping should not be expected, which means people should be paid a living wage (and not be dependent on tips). It makes sense for something extraordinary, or if you just want to round up (which doesn't apply to cashless transactions) but not for a typical experience. https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping

What @2 said. Tipping is awful, a left over practice from the south side of the Civil War, and unions tried to ban the practice. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2016/04/restaurants-tipping-racist-origins-saru-jayaraman-forked/

Strange for the Stranger to be on the pro-tip side. Don't confuse it with pro-worker.

I thought Westneat's piece raised good points. It is pretty crazy to solicit a tip in excess of 25% in a convenience store or whatever.

I think the real takeaway from Westneat's experience is that wages are too damn low if they're having to ask for tips at convenience stores and/or ask for 30% tips at restaurants. And that's assuming that the workers even get the tips.

I am far more disturbed by Charles implying articles he doesn't agree with should not be written or published, but that "someone" should stop them.

Now that we have over $16 min wage the tipping should be done like in Europe where tip is calculated by rounding the total up to the nearest Euro (here round up to nearest dollar).

Tips are too damn high.

Pay your employees and let's stop tipping. Tipping is mostly an American thing. Most of the world does not.

I remember when the generally accepted norm was to tip 15% for personal service by waitstaff at a restaurant, and up it to 20% if the service was exceptional and/or you recognized that your table was particularly needy.

Now I'm seeing tipping options of 18% / 20% / 22% on countertop tablets where the service being provided is minimal - like at a bakery where all they're doing is putting my croissant in a to-go bag.

I tip my local barista because we have a 'relationship'- we see each other almost daily, we know each other's names, they know what I drink and start mixing it as soon as they see me come in, we chit-chat a bit as they work to fill my order. But seeing options to tip at a fast food place where they're just filling an order is nuts, and the tip amounts being prompted are insane.

Then again, maybe Charles should come to my house and stop me from offering my opinion.

Mudede had a chicken
Mudede had a cow
Dad was proud, he didn’t care how.

Gee, if only employers had to pay real wages that allowed workers to pay rent instead of using customers ( and their totally arbitrary decisions) to do it.

Mudedes piece seems to be nothing more than extended conjecture. He should have just put the pen down...

@10: Charles is a Marxist at a web site which loves to crow about “Worker Conquests,” but does not recall the world’s first General Strike was in St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of the 1905 Revolution. As their part of the strike, the city’s waiters and waitresses demanded an end to tipping. Their logic was sound: servants in mansions received tips at the whims of their employers, whilst workers in factories earned set wages. Thus, the wait staffers wanted the dignity of the laborers.

One hundred ten years later, a city which also had a General Strike, Seattle, was poised to eliminate tipping, via a high minimum wage. But CM Sawant sold out Seattle’s workers to their bosses for her own political gain, inserting a “tip credit” into the wage in return for her taking credit for getting the $15 (minus tip credit, but no one admitted this) per hour minimum wage enacted. So tipping continues in Seattle.

Like tipping? Thank CM Sawant!

(Hey, maybe there are some good reasons Charles forgot all of this — reasons which don’t even involve breakfast cocktails…)

Although I sympathize with some of Charles’ Marxian sentiment – the rich should be expected to pay more without grumbling, although the assertion that he is “upper-middle-class” could use some evidence – I also sympathize with Westneat. I am definitely not “upper-middle-class.” And we should remember that he is writing for an economically varied audience. Yes, servers should be paid more (and are now, but maybe not enough). But some forms of tipping are a little out of control. I ate at a spot in Portland where I ordered at the bar and someone brought me my food later. But I was expected to pay upfront, and the same thing happened to me: they turned the screen around but the tip options were 25%, 30% and 35%; for a minimum of expected service I was being asked to tip handsomely in advance. I am generally a 20% tipper or more, but this was a little egregious. I also didn’t see the choose-your-own option although I am guessing it was there, but then what? I tip 20% and that’s not enough and I get spit in my food? I tell them I’ll tip after I’ve been served?

@7 Tipping in Europe is certainly not calculated by rounding up to the next Euro. “That’ll be 16.99” “Oh great, keep the .01 as a tip.” Even on a 16.01 bill, .99 isn’t enough.

As for tipping around the world, people who assert it’s not done elsewhere are mostly wrong and this whataboutism of course ignores poor pay and the high cost of living in the US.

I used to do restaurant work. Don't think I've ever work so hard for so little. As much as I generally don't agree with Danny Westneat he's right in this case.

He walked up, placed his order and had to pick it up. No extra work was done however the request for a tip exceeded the normal 15%,

I have a better idea. Why doesn't the fucking restaurant pay their employees a decent wage?

I knew it wasn't just me. Tipping has become "psychological warfare." Perhaps for that writer but I have no shame. I will tip or not tip, to your face, and it's always a max of 15%. No, Papa Murphy's Pizza I am not going to supplement your worker's salaries because you refuse to pay a living wage. If I pick my pizza up AT THE STORE, I am not tipping. Period.

Percentage tipping is stupid. Pouring a $10 beer takes no more energy than pouring a $5 one.

I know Stranger writers can't make mention of former Stranger writers like Erica, but of interest is the fact that apparently the Seattle Times threatened her with legal action when she posted a screenshot from Danny's article:

https://twitter.com/ericacbarnett/status/1573392392363061248

Charles Mudede is probably a millionaire from his film royalties and investments. A rich capitalist indeed.

It's interesting everyone thinks the reason those machines ask for tips is because the owners won't pay a "living wage" or whatever that is. I just always assumed those card readers came built in with a tip function and when someone like a bodega owner buys ones they just keep it in vs asking for a customized version without the tip request. I don't think there is anything nefarious going on or they are trying to guilt customers.

AI is not an under-rated film. It has very high ratings from rotten tomatoes etc. In my opinion it is one of the worst movies of all time, simpering saccharine, BS. It takes a great director to make a movie so bad. Tipping is an unfortunate necessity, though I will agree mostly with the columnist from the big time newspaper, though he comes off as insensitive.

"I just always assumed those card readers came built in with a tip function and when someone like a bodega owner buys ones they just keep it in vs asking for a customized version without the tip request."

Hmmm just remembered something. My old hairdresser was a sole proprietor of her business. I was tipping HER via such a platform. Now why would a sole proprietor ask for tips instead of just raising their prices?

And Charles thinks Westneat shouldn't have written his article. Did Charles have another point other than that Westneat's article rubbed him the wrong way? Did he present any argument to support his stance? (No, he did not.) Why did you write this, Charles? Why didn't someone stop you from publishing this utterly pointless piece? Oh yeah, you're the one that's supposed to have that judgement and you don't apply it to your own stuff.

On what day does Mudede decide to not write articles, and why couldn't he do that every day?

When I see tip requests set that high automatically, I don't try to figure out how to do less, I just hit no tip.

We need to scrap the whole system. No one has ever been able to give me a good argument as to why we shouldn't other than some vague nod to wanting servers to be paid well, or a desire to virtue signal by "always tipping over 20%". Servers should be paid what it takes to get them to work there and not go somewhere else. Prices should be raised to what is needed to pay those wages. Customers will go to places with the best prices intersecting with the best food, atmosphere, and service. It will be, oh, I don't know, just like every other business in the world. Some say customers will balk at the higher prices and not go, but I don't see why. We already know we are paying 20% on top of the prices anyway.

But, the dirty little secret of the industry is that servers and waitstaff and bartenders wish the whole minimum wage, higher wages thing would just go away and leave them out of it because they know that it will be the beginning of the end for tipping, and they make more with tips than with regular wages. Just ask any server candidly and they will tell you they make more than if they earned an hourly wage.

On Capital Hill, there is a huge beer hall I went to once. They have no tipping, pay their servers a good wage, and the service was great. Their prices were about the same as anywhere else or maybe a little higher. They also have a bunch of single user bathrooms with one big sink to wash hands in the middle. two problems solved by a simple solution.

Let's just scrap the whole thing.

One more thing. The higher minimum wage for servers is a mess because if restaurants and bars have to raise their prices to pay it, plus traditional tip, that just gets to be too much, but the business owner certainly can not go around suggesting customers tip less but pay the higher price as that would not be too cool and would piss off both customers and servers, but business owners should not try taking a cut of the tips or using them to pay kitchen staff or anything like that because again, that will piss of both servers and customers. basically, raising minimum wage while not doing anything about tipping structure is just a big mess.

What a typically neurotic Seattle thing to fret over.

Tip if you want. Or don't. I tip at sit-down restaurants, my hairdressers, my hotel maid, and cab/uber/lyft drivers if I feel that they did a nice job.

It's as simple as that. Just because the little cc machine thing offers the option to tip, or there's a tip jar, that doesn't mean I'm obligated.

@6 @8 @11 you guys either suffer from serious reading comprehension problems or you're being deliberately obtuse. Charles said that the man himself should have had to sense not to write this article. Take your pearl-clutching mischaracterization back to the Daily Mail comments board and let the adults have a rational discussion.

There are for sure greedy bosses and owners in the food biz, just like any other, but a great many restaurants and the like famously/barely scrape by. You may from a moral standpoint want to be the first to raise your prices to what they ought to be to actually make a reasonable profit and pay your personnel better, but then your customers bolt (to places playing the game as it has existed for several decades, at least).

The powers that be designed this economy for big profits/prices in housing, services (health care, legal, higher ed, et al, esp), and tech, and for cheap food, tv sets, clothes, and so on. And since you can't offshore the cook (at least not yet) the perversity of all this hits you in eating out.

Basically, any reasonable response to this hole we've dug is going to be beat back by certain self-interested parties. So, you could, for instance, allow people who have bought homes in the past decade to refinance at a lower principle and then set about building lots of new places to live, thereby lowering the median cost of housing across the board, but the people who bought prior to that want the giant-*ss returns (even if they'd still make quite the nest egg in having to sell for a more rational price, and of course this is to say nothing about all the stakeholders who don't because racism, largely, want multi-family housing in their hood).

So we'll probably end up with perverse solutions and byzantine formulas for things like rent control which to the average extraterrestrial might look like insanity, but that's only because politics on planet earth are insane.

@3 Then do what I do -- tip people of color extra. Be the change you wish to see!

Everyone here is right about the many ways the tip system is broken, racist, sexist, ageist, sizeist, looksist, arbitrary and otherwise unjust, and that it's creeping into unfamiliar places. No argument from me about any of that. But unless and until this changes, the workers who are risking their health and safety on the daily to show up to a public-facing, soul-sucking job NEED YOUR TIPS! Ignore anyone who suggests you're being virtuous by withholding them or who otherwise gives you tacit permission to say no, which I think was Westneat's intention.

In my personal opinion it's fine to choose the smallest tip option on the screen, but lowering it further via the "custom tip" option strikes me as petty. If even the lowest pre-programmed amount seems unreasonably high to you (and it sometimes does to me), my suggestion would be to suck it up just this once, and then take your business elsewhere next time.

Dear old people:
Tipping and restaurant work is far different from when you were a student in the Northeast in the 1980’s. Wages are much higher, for one. Still not high enough, but much higher than they used to be, here in the Socialist Republic of Washington.
I spent all summer in Europe (Iceland, Netherlands, Belgium, France). Tipping is gone. I was never once offered a credit card slip with a tip line. Not once. I occasionally put some money on the table if the service was exceptional. In most EU countries, it is illegal for the server to take this money, because it is tax avoidance. So they give it to the manager/owner. Just so you know.
Tipping precedes the Civil war. (What an incredible story!). Tipping came to the US in the late 18th century, early 19th century, when restaurants first appeared. At that time, no waiters (they were all men) were paid at all and depended entirely on ‘tips.’
Washngton state does not permit tips to be deducted from wages, and never has. Some people came here from the filthy, disgusting eastern or southern states where workers have always been treated as shit. We are different, and always have been. Did you know tipping used to be illegal in Washington?
I recently tried to buy a take-out pizza from a popular and excellent local place. The phone app doesn’t permit the customer to provide no tip. Tips are required. First time I’ve seen this.

I tip myself if I do a great job at self-checkout.

"I spent all summer in Europe (Iceland, Netherlands, Belgium, France). Tipping is gone. I was never once offered a credit card slip with a tip line"
Let me guess, you are a cheap f***er, on 2 continents.
If service was decent in Europe, in most countries you pay a few % as thanks. Not 15%, but not nothing.

Well the question here is whether you'd like to follow the socialist model in Europe as it relates to the hospitality industry.... Higher wage and lower tips

-or-

We could pretend we live in the USA which is a capitalist country and pay a lower wage and have higher tips. Under this system the server works hard to provide good service in anticipation of getting higher tips.

Golly a system where productivity and effort is rewarded -vs- the socialist model where one does the minimum required to suckle at the teats of a indolent and broken economic system.

Not a real hard one to figure out... if you have any imitative