Why You Are Tipping Everywhere Now

You might have noticed that whenever you buy anything with a card now, the screen includes the option to tip, and you have to opt out of it. This is relatively new—it used to be that you would just tip a waiter at a restaurant, or a delivery guy, and so on. Now it’s part of almost every in-person purchase you make with a card. It’s the new default setting.

People have started to notice. There’s been a lot of complaining about it. This piece is by someone who makes a big deal out of being a former waiter, so they have the right to say that this new tipping trend is bad. This is kind of a subgenre now—former service workers who use that status like it gives them a moral license to openly say that over-tipping is bad. But “the consumer” in general is being portrayed as against it.

There is a lot of psychological complexity to all of this. Being asked to tip in every transaction forces people to confront reality in a way that many find uncomfortable. People don’t like this new ubiquity of tipping because it makes them have to think about why they don’t want to give money to people.

It sometimes makes them feel guilty about being cheap. Then they get mad that they are being made to feel guilty. Sometimes it ends there. But sometimes they feel good about how they feel guilty about being cheap, because the guilt lets them know that they are still a “good person” deep down. That’s a quick overview of the psychological dynamics going on with all this.

It would be easy to get bogged down in the psychological nuance of this, especially with respect to guilt. But I think the more interesting thing is why this has happened at all—why is everyone expected to tip everywhere now? What does this mean, from the standpoint of economy and society.

It means that what happened in the 2010s—having a job but still not making enough money to make ends meet—is permanent and is part of every job now. You have to have a “side hustle” in addition to your main job—something you do on the side to make extra money, because simply having a job isn’t enough now. But on top of this, you also need tips. These dynamics were part of the post-recession economy in the early 2010s—the Great Recession was really fucking bad, and its consequences were never fully dealt with. It permanently changed the economy for a whole generation of people. We were expected to just work multiple gigs, side hustles, and permanently never make ends meet—and to be grateful and optimistic the whole time! (No wonder our generation ended up being a bunch of opioid addicts).

The assumption underlying tipping waiters was that waiters are paid a low hourly wage, so if you don’t tip, you’re screwing them over. Now that same logic applies to all jobs—that nobody gets paid enough to make ends meet anymore, especially because of how bad inflation is. But part of the deal with waiters was always that they had to be charming and exceptional to “deserve” the tip—even though they made like two bucks an hour and needed tips to survive, they still had to go above and beyond, be charming, personable, etc., to get it. So now that tipping is part of every transaction—even when charm and other intangibles aren’t part of the equation—consumers feel like something is wrong. Why tip without that magical experience of the server somehow earning it in an unquantifiable way?

So what is being revealed with tipping being part of everything now is that tipping was mostly not done for the mere fact that waiters made like two bucks an hour and relied on tips to survive—it was that tipping was done as a reward for being a good smiley servant in some subjective way. The economic necessity of tipping wasn’t the main part of it—it was as a reward for the waiter somehow doing something that proved they “deserved” it.