Perhaps you’ve noticed. We have reached a tipping point in the country over tipping.
To tip or not to tip has led to Shakespearean soliloquies by customers explaining why they refuse to tip for certain things.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers were grateful for those who seemingly risked their safety so we could get groceries, order dinner or anything that made our lives feel normal. A nice tip was the least we could do to show gratitude.
But now that we are out about and back to normal, the custom of tipping for just about everything has somehow remained; and customers are upset.
A new study from Pew Research shows most American adults say tipping is expected in more places than it was five years ago, and there’s no real consensus about how tipping should work.
The thing that made me want to eliminate tipping is the abuse servers have to suffer in order to justify it. I was front of house for 18 years, and in that time I’ve seen servers sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, regular assaulted, food thrown at them and I’ve even heard customers flat out say they base their tipping decisions on the race of their server. The attitude among servers is that you can either tolerate being treated like a second class citizen, or you can go to bed hungry that night.