[creepydata]

>I can only assume that you have never worked in any industry in a customer service capacity

Lol wut? Yes, I certainly have. I've worked no less than 4 customer service jobs.

>Tipping is a totally normal thing, that you are free to engage in or abstain from.

Only in the strictly legal sense, not the social sense.

>If you are especially pleased with a service on a particular occasion, then you should tip.

First off, tips for many service employees in the US are not "for exception service," they are "expected for any service."

I'd prefer to live in a society where employees give a pleasing service without expecting a bribe. I would prefer to live in a society where some customers are not snubbed because of the assumption they won't leave a tip, or will leave a small one. I also don't care to turn every single interaction I have throughout the day into a business transaction.

Not only that but you start with "you are free to engage in or abstain from [tips]" then say "you should tip." Which was is it? Completely optional or expected? You claim it's both.

>If you are the type of person who is never pleased with anything

Wow, way to project. I am pleased by pretty much any service as long as the job gets done semi-competently . I don't need anything "extra," or small talk, or even smiles. I have a massive amount of empathy for service employees who aren't property trained and if I have a bad experience I usually blame poor management, not the customer service employee personally. If the place is crowded I understand I'm going to have to wait, through nobody's fault, crowds can't always be anticipated.

Disliking tips is hardly the same thing as being a miserable person who is always unhappy. That's quite the stretch.

>you should certainly feel no obligation to tip, ever.

I am not such an asshole to believe that someone who doesn't smile or is working short staffed deserves to have their pay docked. That's cruel.

The thing about introducing tips is they become "mandatory," because employees and management come to expect tips. This brings down salaries then everyone is guilted into leaving tips. It's no secret that Uber is ruthlessly cutting fairs and now they are basically saying "we expect customers to make up the difference."

Anyways, my comments were not about tipping in general, they were about tip jars, specially. Tip jars are begging and are no different than panhandling. It's a form of guilt tipping(1) and are always distasteful. A business is no place for employees to beg - save that for the streets.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/advice/2016/05/01/tipp...

"If you don't pay up, you're shamed for your lack of generosity, at best — or at worst, for stealing someone's salary."

And, of course,

"He started rattling about how far the cab ride was and how he needed more," she says. "It turned me off. I use Uber now."

[yebyen]

> you start with "you are free to engage in or abstain from [tips]" then say "you should tip." Which was is it? Completely optional or expected? You claim it's both.

I think this was clear, until you removed the context. I think you should tip, I expect to leave a tip. I expect service employees to get a tip. I would tend to avoid service establishments altogether, if I thought I could not afford to leave a tip.

But! I'm not going to report you to someone if I noticed you used a service and you don't tip! It will go into my mental calculus of who you are. Generosity begets generosity. You've explained your principled stance and I respect that belief that tipping depresses service wages overall.

I'm not sure I agree. I'm sure it's a fact, but I'm not sure it's a step forward to simply eschew tipping. I'm certainly not going to go as far as to say that it is your moral obligation to tip, or even to generally be charitable to people of "lower standing" (not only because I don't like the implication that people with certain job types must have a lower standing, but also because it is a principled stance that I understand on some level, and I can respect that.)

If your main issue is with tip jars and the fact that you find them distasteful though, then certainly I think it's going to be true that you would see fewer of them if the infrastructure is built to support tipping. I want a way to tip my driver, and I will be looking for the jar if the infrastructure is not in place to support it.

If it causes you some degree of anguish to disregard a physical tip jar, surely it will be easier to disregard a digital notification prompting you for feedback and/or tips. I would be off-put if I had to go through an awkward exchange asking whether the driver can accept a cash tip, whenever I feel like rewarding exceptional service. Because, to me, it just sounds like you don't want to look at the tip jar and you don't want to look at the tip button.

[kelnos]

So basically you're saying "tipping is optional, but if you don't, I'm going to think less of you as a person". Which is the same thing as saying "if you want to live in 'polite' society, tipping is required".

The problem is that when you see someone not tipping, you have no idea why. Perhaps that person received horrifyingly bad service. Perhaps that person is morally opposed to the practice. Or perhaps that person is just a cheapskate. You don't know, and putting that into your "mental calculus" is just you projecting your own feelings onto a situation for which you have very little factual information.

I'm not picking on you in particular; the majority of people in the US behave exactly the same way. And that's why tipping is mandatory, never optional.

[yebyen]

> "mental calculus" is just you projecting your own feelings onto a situation for which you have very little factual information

That's exactly what mental calculus is. When I'm in a normal state of mind, "was the service any good" and "does this person have the money to tip" are also part of the mental calculus applied when I notice you didn't tip.

> I'm going to think less of you as a person

Maybe so. Vanishingly so (that's why it's calculus) depending on the scope of our interaction. If you are a person on the street who I noticed didn't tip the hot dog vendor, I'm likely not even doing this mental calculus at all, unless you've done something else to attract my attention.

If you're my boss, and I casually observe you not tipping on a regular basis, sure it's going to affect my opinion of you.

(If you are the owner of the company where I work and I notice you suddenly have a habit of not tipping, I'm likely to take it as a signal that maybe business is not so good!)

[yebyen]

I don't know man, it seems clearer and clearer that we just come from different places. Nothing against you or wherever you come from.

I was raised to tip service employees in general, if you can, if they have to bring you something... and to tip more if they keep my glass of water full (I tend to drink a lot of water), so it just seems natural to me to tip.

I don't think it's just (though it is a fact) that wages are reduced because "wages don't need to be so high, because of tips." I have worked service industry jobs where I was not tipped, and I'm so glad I don't have to do that kind of work anymore. I would not be any more enthusiastic about those jobs if I was tipped. It wasn't satisfying work for me, and I have a hard time believing it would be for anyone else, but I try not to wear that on my sleeve.

Not everyone gets the chances I got! Not everyone would like my job as much as I do, either. I am very sympathetic to the idea that you shouldn't make every interaction into a business transaction, but in this case you have to recognize that it is what it is.

You are getting into someone's car and they are taking your pittance, minus their service broker's fee, to bring you where you need to go. That is a business transaction, and it's in the class of transactions that I would expect to involve a tip. That's just how I was raised. I understand if you do this five or six times a week, you may not want to interact with these people any more than you have to so you can get where you need to be and get on with your life, but I do it less frequently and I am just as happy not to ride in silence!

If you do this job in your off hours, and you work in maintenance at a corndog factory for your regular job, I actually want to hear about that. I will strike up a conversation if the driver seems willing.

I don't come from a place where people routinely complain about not getting tipped though. (If you hear someone complain about a tip, I tend to assume the service was also poor, and they earned exactly the tip they got! Some people are assholes, but not most people.)

I think of Uber and Lyft as an exceedingly cheap way to get around. In bigger cities I've visited, it seems like it's more of "a somewhat competitively priced way to get around that's marginally more convenient than public transit options, sometimes. And often cheaper than parking if you were thinking about driving yourself." Where I live and where I come from, parking is almost always free, and public transit is almost never an option. (Buses are the only public option, unless you're going out of town -- then there's Amtrak -- and the buses are significantly less convenient than they once were, since schedules and routes have been drastically reduced in recent years. There is no subway. Cabs-for-hire tend to be outrageously priced.)

Where I lived before Northern Indiana (now), was in Western New York, we didn't even have Uber at all and you couldn't really get a cab ride for under $30. Get on the bus. I don't know if it was an economic decision for Uber or a regulatory issue, but I don't know how anyone honestly can live there without a car. I did it for a few years of college and a year after that which I spent mostly too broke to afford a car or insurance payments, and it wasn't easy. (On the other hand I will admit I was in much better shape then!)

[creepydata]

I tip the same even if they don't keep my water glass full. I don't believe such a minor "annoyance" as asking for more water (which its not an annoyance) requires a dock in pay. Also, in California they are required by law to wait until you ask for water due to the drought!

>You are getting into someone's car and they are taking your pittance, minus their service broker's fee, to bring you where you need to go. That is a business transaction, and it's in the class of transactions that I would expect to involve a tip.

My transaction is between Uber and I and should not be between Uber's employees and I. Do you tip your bus driver? Do you tip the train conductor?

Do you also tip your mechanic if they get your car fixed before schedule? How about the pulmonologist when you get blood drawn? Or is it only if they don't leave a bruise? How about the person who stocked the shelves so the thing you want to buy is in stock? What if an employee goes in the stockroom for you? Do you pull out a $5? What about the person who makes your sandwich at a deli, I mean, making custom sandwiches are labor intensive.

>That's just how I was raised

Sure but...

You can (and should) acknowledge that it is completely arbitrary and cultural. If I go to the bar and order a soda I tip. If I go to McDs and order a soda I don't. That's silly. The thing that really kills me is, I've been to a few wineries. When I pay there's never a line to put my tip on the credit card receipt, so I don't tip. I guess you don't tip in wineries even though they provide you basically the same service as a restaurant or bar and you tip there. The best part though is I also go to breweries and breweries always have a tip line on the receipt! Serving beer where you make it = tip, serving wine where you make it = no tip. MADNESS!

>I tend to assume the service was also poor, and they earned exactly the tip they got!

99.9% of the time poor service is not personally the customer service employee's fault.

I actually really enjoyed my job in fast food. The pay sucked but the work was fine, my coworkers were pleasant, and the restaurant was very well run. The customers were pleasant too because we provided good service. We provided good service because the management gave us the tools to provide good service and expected us to provide good service.

[yebyen]

> >I tend to assume the service was also poor, and they earned exactly the tip they got!

> 99.9% of the time poor service is not personally the customer service employee's fault.

"If you hear someone complain about a tip" is the important context that you removed. Maybe the employer is responsible to train the CSR that you should not complain about tips, or lack of tips... I don't think so. I think your parents should teach you that. I think it's common sense. If you got a tip, you should not complain about it. I don't think that 0.01% of people _complaining about_ their tips to the customers are responsible for it. That's nonsense.

If you did not get a tip, you should not complain about it to the customers! If you are regularly complaining about your tips, or lack of tips, it is a sign that you are providing bad service, and you should improve. If there is a systematic issue, you are understaffed, the kitchen staff sucks, etc... I can concede it's not your fault, but it is going to result in a statistically significant hit to your tips, and you should see if you can get them to improve.

If I ask for a sandwich without tomato and you bring me a sandwich with tomato, the same person who complains about having to make the sandwich again because they got the order wrong, is the person who complains about their tips. The one whose service is habitually bad, because of their attitude.

[yebyen]

> Also, in California they are required by law to wait until you ask for water due to the drought!

The more you know... I assumed you were in California, but not because of my perception of your attitudes, just because this is HN and a vanishing proportion of people here I think are not from Bay area.

Thanks for engaging me here. I certainly don't tip my mechanic or my nurse's aide, but next time I'm getting blood drawn, I'm going to remember this conversation.

It is absolutely cultural, and it is arbitrary. I also don't know why I would tip more if the beer simply costs more. I tend to tip bartenders somewhere between $1/trip and $1/drink. This is a completely arbitrary standard, that I set with no review by anyone, and adhere to sometimes, depending on the number of "ones" I happen to have on my person at the time.

> I tip the same even if they don't keep my water glass full. I don't believe such a minor "annoyance" as asking for more water (which its not an annoyance) requires a dock in pay.

I don't mind having to ask for water, but I do notice when a server has a habit of showing up at my table just as my glass has been emptied. I consider it exceptional service when I can see there's also a lot of traffic, and yet my glass remains filled. I also notice if a long time passes and I don't see my server, and doubly so when my glass has already been empty for a while. You have to set the bar somehow!

> My transaction is between Uber and I and should not be between Uber's employees and I

That's a principled stance that I understand on some level, however I could not make this distinction in my own personal life. If it is factually true that Uber treats the drivers as full employees, then it is a fact that has only recently been settled as a matter of law. The bus driver and the train conductor are equally worthy of my gratitude, but they don't have a tip jar. The mechanic and the nurse's aide are great examples of how arbitrarily we draw the line, too. Thanks again for engaging.