Tipping Point

 

In the US NRI /PIO community, there is a term called Tipping point. It is the point in time when a person spends more years in the US than he has grown up in India to reach the US. At this point you think like an American and accept all American ways of life. One of the aspects of American Culture is Tips you pay for services consume.  Maybe for someone who has not reached the Tipping point, Tip is something one fails to rationalize. This issue is now even prevalent in India.

Sometimes it seems as though everywhere you go, you’re asked to chip in a little something extra, even for things that weren’t tipped services just a few years ago. Tips are requested at all service outlets, usually through those touchscreen tablets a lot of businesses use as their point of sale (POS) systems. Thanks to a combination of technology, social pressure, and a pandemic those tablets have become ubiquitous, and so have the tip requests. At a time when the prices of many goods and services are already far higher than they used to be due to inflation, we’re paying even more again to the workers who provide them. 

Call it tipflation. We do know that in the United States, people are generally asked or expected to tip far more and for more types of services than anywhere else in the world, so tipflation is going to be especially bad here. Tipping is a largely underground (and lucrative) economy, especially when those tips are left in hard-to-track cash. While those digital payment systems give us a new data source, that data is controlled by the companies that provide them.   

 A study at Cornell University finds that Tablet tipping data is hard to come by and harder still to compare to whatever pre-tablet tipping data is out there. There is a lot of data on how those suggested tips affect the tips customers leave. The higher those suggested tip amounts are, he says, the higher the overall tip revenue tends to be. Tipping is supposed to be a reward for excellent service, but studies have shown that the vast majority of people are motivated more by social pressure. Tipping is expected of them, and they don’t want to deviate from a long-established norm — especially if other people are watching and possibly judging them. 

Digital POS systems aren’t the only way a business will request tips, but it’s one of the newest as well as one of the hardest to refuse. Unlike tip jars on a counter, which are easy to ignore, or writing a tip on a receipt, tip-by-tablet becomes a public affair. You’re forced to declare your level of generosity or cheapness to anyone within eyesight, including your server. It’s easy to cross the line from honest persuasion to harmful manipulation” Just the act of asking people to leave a tip can be enough to push some people into doing so, especially when they’ve already initiated a business transaction.   

The tip prompts are also designed to push the customer into not just leaving a tip, but leaving an amount that the business “suggests.” Businesses can set those suggested amounts, which is why one place might go with something like 10, 15, and 20 percent, while another might do 20, 25, and 30 percent. They can also request dollar amounts instead of percentages, or enable “smart tipping,” which switches from percentages to dollar amounts if a purchase is under a certain threshold  

On some interfaces, custom and no-tip buttons are smaller and harder to find than the suggested amounts. Having to make a tip choice in order to complete an order forces the customer to opt out of a process that used to be opt-in. Touchscreens, tend to emphasize the buttons to give big tips and de-emphasize the button to give no tip at all. And if there’s a line behind the customer, they might feel pressure to move as quickly as possible.  Some people will be so flustered they might end up hitting the most prominent button not because they want to, but because they can’t find the option that they’re looking for  It feels like they’ve been forced.”As opposed to the traditional tip jar method, having a ‘no tip’ button on a payment interface exploits a sense of guilt that the guest may not have otherwise felt and makes them more likely to leave a tip  

Tips may also be a way for some businesses, already struggling with pandemic-related expenses, difficulty finding staff, and now inflation, to keep their costs down and attract more workers. With tips, workers effectively get a pay raise even if their base pay stays the same. They don’t have the budget to actually increase wages. And for that reason, they’re asking more on the side of the consumer by increasing the accessibility of being able to pay tips electronically. Even if a business doesn’t want to enable tips, it might feel forced to do so if a competitor does before it loses employees to the business that pays them more, with that extra pay coming from the customers.  

Barring a nationwide rebuke of tipping culture or laws forbidding the practice — both of which are highly unlikely considering how ingrained in American culture tipping is and how some high-profile attempts to end restaurant tipping have failed: What should one do?  If you’re asked to tip for a service that doesn’t traditionally ask for tips, there’s nothing wrong with saying no. For services that are traditionally tipped,   people should leave at least what’s considered an appropriate amount. They can leave more if they can afford it, but shouldn’t feel guilty if they can’t. And, she added, businesses should practice good etiquette, too. That means making customers feel welcome and comfortable, not ‘guilting’ them into leaving surprise tips. 

It should be a happier experience for tipping for quality services you consumed than being forced into tipping. Maybe I have not reached my Tipping point.