“Tip creep” has been a pervasive issue in American culture for some time now. Many businesses, faced with rising costs or insurmountable greed, have increasingly turned to tip encouragement as a means of underpaying their employees while simultaneously being reasonably assured malnutrition will not sap worker productivity.
Personally, when faced with a new tip line on the receipt where formerly there was none, sometimes I don’t mind at all, and sometimes I do. A tip for the woman at my local bakery who indulges me as I point out the most desirable Bismarcks behind the glass? Absolutely. She is always nice. On the other hand, a tip for assembling the take-and-bake pizza that I ordered online and already have to cook myself? Boy, that seems like a bit of a stretch.
From a tax perspective, it is a better time than ever to be a tipped worker. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” exempts the first $25,000 of a qualifying worker’s annual tips from income taxes (tips will still be subject to the 7.65% payroll tax meant to fund Medicare and Social Security). Given the new tax treatment, employers are probably going to try to slip even more tips into our lives. So, let’s take a look at each end of the spectrum when it comes to tipping culture to better gauge where this actually makes sense and where it is just another shameless cash-grab.
I go on a lot of tours, and occasionally, for the past two summers, even give them on the weekends. Most recently, I toured the historic Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, Missouri (please don’t email me criticisms if you’re a beer snob, read this instead). Our tour guide, Grace, was friendly, energetic, knowledgeable, and a good sport about making the distance covered easier on my mother, who has a mobility impairment. At the end of the tour, I asked Grace whether she could accept tips. Then I handed her a crisp bill.
Tipping your tour guide is the purest essence of what tipping culture should be. Tipping is not required — I have almost never even seen a sign up indicating that tips were encouraged. You get to wait until the end to decide whether and how much you want to tip, theoretically incentivizing better service for you, the guidee. Plus, tipping is rare. I didn’t see anyone else tip Grace, and in my experience, generally less than 10% of people on a tour bother to tip their guide (I have been on only one after which the guide said she was not allowed to take tips, so that policy is itself rare, though still worth asking about). The scarcity of tips in the guiding role makes tipping an unexpected delight for the guide, rather than a default expectation like it is at sit-down restaurants. Look up the original definition of what a “gratuity” is actually supposed to be and try to tell me that the tour guide version I’ve described fails to meet it.
On the other hand, we also ate at The Biergarten restaurant while we were there, which was a new addition to the Anheuser-Busch brewery site since the last time I’d visited when I was in college nearly 20 years ago. Although the food was pretty good, the tipping experience was awful, the absolute antithesis of what offering a tip should be for the consumer.
It is one of those places where you scan the QR code at your table and then view the menu and order directly on your smartphone, which is already a nightmare when you have older people with you. You had to enter your tip right there onscreen in advance (at least if you wanted to tip via the credit card you were using to order without going through some other ordeal to figure out an alternative). This was, of course, long prior to tasting or even seeing your food.
The tip line defaulted to 20%. I nudged it down a bit, as I was kind of doing the work of an absent server right there on my phone.
When our food was ready, a youngish guy dashed out and deposited it on our table, which was the only momentary human interaction outside our own little group that we had during the whole meal. Did the tip go to him, for a solidly performed dash? To the chefs? To Anheuser-Busch’s parent company ABInBev? Unclear. Equally unclear was how we were supposed to have any agency in leaving this tip, given that we had no idea how fast or good our service would be at the time we were forced to leave it.
There we have it, located conveniently at the very same brewery: the Aristotelian ideal of the concept of tipping that is tipping your tour guide, and the dystopian techno-hell that is being forced to leave a tip to a QR code in advance. The good news is that you, the consumer, have the power to gently influence either the proliferation or the slow withering of either type of tipping culture.
Maybe question a bit who you are really helping when you are herded into blindly leaving a certain tip in a certain way like so many steers in a cattle chute. Equally as important, if you are pleased with a service you just received, especially if you don’t see anyone around you already reaching into their pockets, perhaps try to be a little more generous. The outcome of the tipping culture war is depending on you.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].