Happy Labor Day, Now F*ck Off Begging For Tip

I should start with this: I made my living for more than a decade behind the bar. Most of those years were in one of Philadelphia’s most high volume Irish pubs.

I spent more than a decade pouring drinks, hauling kegs, hustling doubles until 3AM, breaking up fights between Flyers and Rangers fans, cleaning up vomit, listening to horrible karaoke, helping Mummers too drunk to stand up at noon, serving soccer hooligans at 10am that hadn’t gone to bed from the night before and, even in one case, administering the Heimlich maneuver to save someone clearly choking to death in the men’s room.

I know exactly how brutal hospitality can be — the aching feet, the shifts where you work 8 hours to make $20, the perpetually angry and/or drunk chefs and the entitled customers who talk to you like they’re 18th century French royalty and expect you to be feeding them grapes, cheese and wine. On St. Patricks Day or New Years Day in Philadelphia, I would often fall asleep sitting at the bar after the night was over, in front of my shift drink, before I could even take a sip.

Which is to say, I have enormous respect for the people who make their living in restaurants and bars. They hustle, they take abuse, and they keep smiling because that’s the job. They deserve better than what they get. And that’s exactly why America’s tipping culture infuriates me: it doesn’t help workers, it exploits them while guilting customers into footing the bill for a broken system.

Tipping used to be a gesture of appreciation. Now it’s a shakedown that has metastasized far beyond restaurants — to coffee shops, car washes, airport kiosks, food trucks, even self-checkout machines. You buy a muffin and before you even touch the bag, the screen flips around and stares you down: 20%, 25%, 30%.

“The machine is just going to ask you a question,” some passive aggressive, angst-ridden teenage employee will say to you, unable to find the courage to admit they’re even asking for a tip because they know it’s a shakedown and they’re ashamed to even speak it into existence.

And now, screens don’t even bother with 10%, 15%, or 20% anymore — they start at 25% and go up to 30%, sometimes even 40%. That’s not tipping; that’s Tony Soprano selling you life insurance, looking you dead in the eye and saying something like “it would really be unfortunate if something terrible happened to you”.

Payment platforms have hardwired guilt into every transaction, training people to think that pressing “no tip” — while their barista Shiloh peers at them or their waiter holds the POS machine in front of your face and pretends to look the other way to give you “privacy”, before immediately turning the machine back around and looking at it — makes them cheap or immoral.

And don’t kid yourself: businesses love this. Tipping culture is the perfect smokescreen. Why raise wages when you can outsource payroll to guilt-ridden customers? Why cover labor costs when an iPad can do the dirty work? It’s like I said yesterday — why raise prices when you can just add a $0.05 charge for a bag at the very end of a transaction, right when the customer just wants to get out of the store the most?

Restaurants are one thing. Getting paid $3/hour means that waiters and bartenders truly do rely on tips, which should in turn motivate them to give great service. I understand this. But now, even industries that never relied on tips — bakeries, juice bars, fast casual chains — expect them.

It’s just corporate cost-cutting dressed up as worker support.

I just got back from Europe, and the contrast was staggering. There, you can sit down for a cappuccino without a digital ransom note being pushed under your nose. You can eat dinner without being told you’ve got 90 minutes before they flip your table for the next sucker eager to attend your “trendy” East Village restaurant.

I mean, New York has restaurants where the clock starts the second you sit down — 1.5 hours, that’s it, and then you’re out. Last month, I had a waiter tell us we couldn’t order dessert because we were over our time (obviously, I didn’t pick the restaurant). Hey — fucking snobs — we’re trying to order more food!

In Paris, Madrid, Rome? A meal is an experience, not a transaction. You linger, you talk, you enjoy. The check comes at the end, clean and clear, not padded with moral posturing about whether you’re generous enough — and when you ask for it.

That seems so foreign being back in the United States. And outside of restaurants, the fallout from America’s tipping insanity is predictable: customers now resent being shaken down, workers are still underpaid, and foreigners look at us like we’re insane — the richest country on Earth, yet we have become nothing but beggars every time we offer a product or a service.

And here’s the thing: the free market has a way of correcting this kind of crap. Just like people got fed up with nickel-and-diming airlines and endless junk fees for worse and worse service, there will be pushback here too. Customers aren’t stupid — they know when they’re being hustled — and eventually they’ll revolt against $7 lattes with a mandatory 30% “suggested” tip. And eventually, companies will offer actual customer service again.

This piece is hopefully part of that pushback, part of the snapback to reality. At some point, businesses will either have to pay their workers fairly or watch as people take their wallets elsewhere. I’m done being infantilized, judged, chastised and shaken down everywhere I go and, as I said a couple days ago, when companies begin to open that promise real customer service and no begging for tips — but maybe charge a premium for it — sign me up, I’m first in line for that idea. Hell, I might even tip if the service really is that good.

By Quoth the Raven