Crazy Tipping

Tipping is much different here in Euroland from how it works in the USA.  The biggest difference is that service works in Euroland don't live off of their tips.  European employees provide an actual salary, with health benefits, to their staff which is required by law.  Customers here don't need to subsidise the employees so that they don't have to provide a living wage.  As someone who used to live off of tips, I have strong opinions about tipping but after almost 15 years of living in Europe I see how flawed the American system is.

While we were on holiday I saw just how out of control tipping has become in the United States.  It seemed that wherever we went, there was a request to tip.  I ordered a bubble tea at a food stall in Atlanta and tried to pay by card.  The system prompted me to enter a tip amount in order to complete the payment.  Why the hell am I being asked to tip for a bubble tea?  And the system required me to swipe to a second page to confirm that I did not want to tip.  We bought hot dogs at the Braves game and the again, I had to enter a tip amount in order to pay for our food at the game.  

During Covid time, I think a lot of people were more generous with tipping in order to help out service workers during all of the lock downs.  Yet, it seems that once the lock downs ended the expectation for higher tips didn't.

I had explained the whole tipping thing to Kája.  He didn't understand why the customer is responsible to pay an extra +20% because employers don't pay better.  Why don't people just get better jobs?  Not easy to explain.  Here's an interesting video I found on YouTube about tipping having gotten out of control.

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