Tip screens have been aggravating restaurant patrons since they same into common use about a year ago. Some ‘suggest’ percentages up to 30 percent. Now, Québec is floating the idea of imposing at least some regulations on electronic tipping systems…
The idea was originally to encourage cust-omers to tip, tip more and tip via their digital payments. Rather than going the traditional route and leaving cash at the table. But thanks to the desperation of struggling bar ad resto operators, tipping screens have gotten completely out of control…
Missing the point
Tipping screens have had a dark feel since they first arose, in the world’s biggest cities, at higher-end eateries. The new ‘custom’ is actually a brash departure from the original tipping tradition. The idea was to reward table servers and other functionaries for a job well-done.
But now, resto operators and servers alike consider tips to be an important secondary revenue stream. And the operators, in par-ticular, have pushed tipping percentages up by 300 percent or more.
What’s happening
Most resto and bar cash registers and mobile wireless credit card machines now insert a ‘Tips’ screen between your ‘total’ bill display and the payment confirmation screen.
The very concept of such screens clashes harshly with the original notion behind tipping, which was to leave a small ‘Thank you’ for your server. That custom was counterbalanced by every experienced diner’s knowledge that servers were among the lowest paid, though hardest working employees in the establishment.
Jaskaran Singh, now manager at restaurant Arriba Burrito in Montréal, is disappointed. “It’s never been actually a law to tip to a server, and I’ve been a server for a while. [But] it’s always been hard that our minimum wage is very low,” he told Yahoo! Finance.
Percentages rising anyway
The amount was originally left up to the customer’s discretion. And it wasn’t always a standard 10 percent, as some folks will tell you, either. It varied according to how happy you were with your dining experience. And how ritzy the resto was. A diner waitress might get a handful of pocket change. A server at a sit-down, white tablecloth resto might get a couple of dollars.
As dining-out prices rose over the past 5 or 6 decades, so did tips. Diner servers began getting a dollar or two. And servers in fancier eateries routinely received the 10 percent that somebody decided was appropriate for such venues. The top end was generally accepted to be 15 per-cent. Unless you were a celebrity of some sort who wanted to flaunt your millions and/or gen-erate some positive ‘press’ by dropping a $50 or $100 bill… Or, on special occasions, even more!
A tip too far
In just the past year or so, however, the whole tipping culture has been warped out of shape by tipping screens. Ten or 15 percent is now the bottom end of a scale that has blown up out of all proportion to the underlying concept.
And some screens are ‘suggesting’ multiple, set tipping levels, rather than letting diners specify their own. A typical tipping screen one diner encountered recently offered ‘options’ of 10, 18 and 28 per-cent. Some don’t even offer an ‘Other’ or ‘No, thank you’ button, either. That’s outright extortion. But, so far at least, I haven’t heard that any restro has been charged.
The Gov. steps in
Recognising the ills and injustices that beset both diners and servers under the current tipping screen-ocracy, the Québec government has announced it’s poised to regular tipping.
And that’s enraged eatery owners – especially bar operators. Why? The overarching reason the gov-ernment is clamping down is, many eatery owners have programmed their tipping screens to calcu-late the tip based on the bill’s after-tax total, not the basic, pre-taxes and ‘fees’ total. That’s not illegal, but folks increasingly say it should be.
Operators can live with it
Most eatery operators say they ‘can live with’ the proposed tipping regulations – if they have to. But servers are even more unhappy than they were before.
The main reason is, many resto workers have decided to make their ‘jobs’ into ‘careers’. Previously, only servers and front-of house types in the ritziest restos could hope to make a decent, comfortable living wage from their resto-related activities. In many cases, resto workers were only ‘waiting table’ as a bridging job until they could find something ‘better’.
Since the end of the COVID era, more and more resto workers have demanded sharply higher mini-mum wages, both from employers and government. And many of them have sat quietly by, enjoying the fruits of their employers’ tip-flation schemes.
My take
The Québec proposal is a good start. But it doesn’t go far enough, by far. Governments also need to step in and outlaw bogus and incomprehensible ‘fees’ and ‘charges’ added to resto bills to pad the final total.
Furthermore, someone has to decide, once and for all, what a tip really is – and how high the ceiling should be.
As we reported previously in this space, tipping fatigue is taking hold among resto fans. And they’re increasingly refusing to tip ‘suggested amounts’, or refusing to tip at all.
The whole thing is a proverbial powder keg… And tipping screens are a lit match.
~ Maggie J.