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.
Wtf is the point of this. Even if they wanted to save on labor costs of wait staff and everything why not just use your own card instead of trading it for a temporary card.
It’s like this pizza place I went to recently. They had a little arcade so I went to put some quarters in and realized I had to go buy tokens at a machine first. It wasn’t Dave and Busters or anything, just a hole in the wall with a few games in a corner. I didn’t buy any tokens. Same with laundromats that now want you to buy tokens ahead of time.
There isn’t a single business anymore that isn’t trying to just blatantly scam you out of your money. They used to at least be more subtle about it.
Instead of 7 small transactions (and higher fees) it’s one big transaction.
it divorces the act of spending from actual money, so you spend more. like buying gems in a mobile game. also saves on credit card transaction fees.
That’s among the reasons why I carry cash for small purchases.
It feels more real when I can see actual physical money going out of my wallet.
It’s the same on cruise ships. What it does is turn everything into a microtransaction so you’re all “oh, that’s not so much” at every decision point and therefore spending more than you would normally.
It doesn’t work on me, because oh holy shit the first time was a hard lesson. I went on a cruise back in the early 90s when this was a thing, and the balance I thought I had at the end of the cruise was nothing compared to the balance I did have. It took me months to pay off.
So now whenever a place pulls that card swap I end up tightening the sphincter and spending next to nothing. I won’t even go if I know they’re going to do that, because honestly it’s just no fun.
Give me a fucking menu with the correct fucking prices, pay your staff a fucking liveable wage, bill me at the end, I will pay and then tip my servers in cash because that’s the only way I can be sure MY waitstaff actually got any of it, and let’s call it a day.
You’re comparing weeks of spending to a couple hours at a bar though, I’m not sure if that’s really comparable.
There’s a couple other reasons that apply as well:
They don’t want to handle coins essentially. Going to the bank to exchange coins for cash every day is a huge part of the labor cost, so they make you use tokens that not only allows them to get rid of that but also essentially charge you seignorage.
Because they get charged less by the bank for lower quantity of bigger transactions, instead of high number of small transactions. Also allows for people who have cash but no card to use the system.