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

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

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...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN, 100% FREE, HERE).