MountingSuspicion comments on Outrage after airport self-service checkout asks for 18% tip

[–] MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com -5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Tipping requests have gotten out of control, but the percent has gone up because inflation happened. Costs have risen in the last 20 years and not at the same rate across the board. The increase in base prices for restaurant food has not changed fast enough for 10% of it to still be a livable wage. I don't love it either, but if I can't afford 20% at a place then I don't go there.

We should do away with tipped wage, and we should increase the minimum wage, but being shocked that wages have changed over 20 years is not a tipping issue.

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[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Tipping requests have gotten out of control, but the percent has gone up because inflation happened.

That makes no sense. Inflation also increases the price of the goods and services. Tipping the same percentage means it scales with that inflation 1:1. The only way that would make sense is if, say, food had been somewhat resistant to inflationary pressures, but the restaurant owner wanted to make sure that their personnel were getting paid more to cover other costs of living that were affected more by inflation. But that is not the case. This new standard is across the board on every card reader for every business type I have seen. Restaurant, gas stations, mechanics, electronics, etc. That isn't how this works.

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[–] MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 4 points 1 week ago

I addressed that already:

not at the same rate across the board. The increase in base prices for restaurant food has not changed fast enough for 10% of it to still be a livable wage.

Cursury searches result in the following: The rate of inflation for housing (6-7% yoy) and education (4-7% yoy depending on institution type) have increased dramatically in comparison to food (3% yoy) over the past 10 years.

It seems like restaurant inflation has been about double food inflation (though a lot of that is weighted towards the low and high end restaurants with McDs having increased more than most middle class restaurants for example), so that would still lag behind housing which makes up increasingly large portions of middle-low earner income. I am surprised that it's so close honestly, but overall expenses have risen more than just inflation would lead you to believe. Admittedly the data was harder to find going back 20 years, so i took the easy route and went with 10. It's very possible that the data 20-10 years ago really skews things one way or another. I stand by the initial statement that inflation was not consistent and that means that the % should change, but would probably need more time to sit down with the numbers to definitively say what exactly % makes most sense.

I again agree that the propagation of tipping on POS is a plague, but that's a separate issue to the acceptable tipping percent.

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[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 5 points 1 week ago (1 child)

I'd love to see the stats on that. Restaurant food seemed to shoot up among the fastest. I don't think the CPI is tgat granular.

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[–] MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 1 point 1 week ago

I did some extremely cursury searching and back of the napkin math. The short of it is that restaurant food outpaced inflation, but not all sectors. Doubling to 20% from 10% over 20 years may indeed be overdoing it, but I believe 10% would not be sufficient. The biggest contributor is probably housing in my opinion, but again I didn't actually do too much digging. Clicked around and annualized averages from sources, but it wasn't rigorous. If someone wants to actually do the math I'd be really keen to see it.

If I had to take a stab in the dark 15% would probably be a good minimum. If I say $20 is the minimum I find acceptable to be a part of and 2.13 is their minimum wage then they need to be making 17.87 an hour from just tips. If we make some assumptions of an 8 hr shift and 15 tables a shift (not how it works but I needed to make some assumptions), that's $9.5+ a table needed. That would be fine for an average of 15%+ tip for an average of $60 a table, where realistically it's probably going to be more per table on average. Someone can sanity check because that was a bit to keep in my head.