A few months ago, food writer Mackenzie Filson said “we’ve reached tipping max capacity.”

“It’s the year 2023: a flip of an iPad causes your palms to sweat like the condensation forming on your $6.49 iced chai. The iPad screen prompts you to choose a tip percentage before you can safely leave Starbucks with your drink. You hit the middle button, 20 percent, making the total cost for one beverage almost eight actual dollars,” Filson wrote. “Days later, you start to notice the same iPad prompt at a pet-supply store, your butcher shop, and maybe even your weed dispensary.”

Her piece went out in February. But now that a few months have passed, the situation appears to have gotten even worse. We are no longer just asked to express our gratitude in cash. We’re also given attitude if we don’t.

Last week, content creator Sydney Littlefield, who goes online by the nickname @poorandhungry, uploaded a TikTok, describing the time a cashier at Ben & Jerry’s made their interaction really uncomfortable after noticing that Sydney wasn’t going to give her a tip for a single cone, sparking a heated discussion on the service industry and its workers’ compensation.

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This woman walked into a Ben & Jerry’s to get just a single cone, so she didn’t leave a tip for her $2 order

Image credits: poorandhungry

So I go to Ben & Jerry’s yesterday and I just wanted a cone, just wanted a nice, fresh, warm cone. So I walk over to the counter and I was like, ‘Hi can I just have a waffle cone?’ and she was like, ‘Yes, sure. Here you go. That’d be $2.’ So I said ‘Okay.’ I go to put my card in. And of course, the tipping screen comes up, and I was like, I didn’t say this out loud, but in my head I was like, I’m not tipping you on a cone.

But the cashier reacted with so much sass

Image credits: poorandhungry

You literally just handed me a cone. And I’m also like, the percentages were insane. I was like, I’m not tipping you $1 on a $2 cone that you just handed me, I’m not. So she hands me my cone, I put my card in, it gives me like how much you want to tip, I hit ‘no tip.’ And the cashier goes:

Image credits: poorandhungry

to my face, to my actual face. Like on no planet, is that ever appropriate, even if I got $100 worth of ice cream and I don’t tip you, you can’t do that to the customer. On top of that, Miss Girl, what were you expecting I tipped you to hand me a cone?

Image credits: poorandhungry

There wasn’t even a service being exchanged. There was an exchange as a transaction. It wasn’t even an act of service.

Sydney’s TikTok has gone viral

@poorandhungry Those tip screens are OUT OF CONTROL #tip #tipping #cringe #customerservice ♬ original sound – $yd

There really are more stores that offer customers the option to tip than there were a few years ago.

Around 48% of purchases at US fast food restaurants, as well as coffee shops, included a tip during the final quarter of 2022, according to data released by Toast, a restaurant management software company. (That’s up 11% from pre-Covid levels.)

Unlike tip jars that shoppers can easily ignore if they don’t have spare change, experts say that digital requests can produce social pressure and are more difficult to bypass. And, as we can see, their generosity, or lack thereof, can be laid bare for anyone close enough to glance at the screen, including the workers themselves.

Image credits: Sam Dan Truong (not the actual photo)

Tipflation and tip creep — when tipping spreads to more types of workers — are creating tip fatigue, Michael von Massow, associate professor of food economics at the University of Guelph, wrote. “Nudging works, but it can backfire.”

In fact, one Harvard study found higher default options lead to higher average tips, but when the defaults are too high, a whiplash effect leads to lower tips and negative feelings about the restaurant.

So businesses and workers need to be careful not to alienate their customers when doing this.

As Mackenzie Filson pointed out in her piece, it turns out that tipping used to be considered a pretty rude practice in the U.S., and very common in Europe. In the early 1900s, several states passed laws to ban tipping, with the main criticism being that tipping creates an imbalance between customers and workers. This was partially rooted in unjust post-Civil War efforts to keep down the wages of newly freed enslaved people. However, a perfect storm of Prohibition profit losses, the expanding hospitality industry, and new, high standards for service in the early 20th century led to tipping becoming widespread in the U.S. too. Now, the expectation is between 15 and 20 percent.

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Image credits: Karolina Grabowska (not the actual photo)

But according to von Massow, no one should feel pressured to tip more than the standard percentage, if at all.

“If a business is prompting you with a tip percentage higher than you are comfortable with, you can always enter a custom amount that you feel is appropriate instead,” he said.

Prompting a discussion on the current state of the tipping culture

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