What's up with the US tipping culture?
I live in Romania and I only tip restaurants a standard of 10% (not fast food, not coffee, just restaurants). Also delivery people when they help bring heavy stuff into my appartment (theoretically they are only paid to bring it to the block entrance).
Back when I used taxis we would tip those. But I have never tipped an Uber. Or a Glovo (our Door Dash) deliveryman.
> Started off as a way to pay people less, especially for odd jobs.
Kind of. American tipping came out of the post-slavery south as a form of exploitation where people weren't guaranteed a wage.
This is why tipping was common in historically black jobs like hospitality, food service workers and railroad porters.
There still a federal "tipped" minimum wage at $2.13 - which some states still abide by, roughly corresponding to the historic south https://www.epi.org/publication/waiting-for-change-tipped-mi...
These also seem to be some of the worst tipping states according to most sources, https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/the-united-states-of-tipping...
Which kind of makes sense - if people in those states invented tipping to pay people less, then those states paying tipped people less isn't that surprising ...
Cultural behavior patterns last decades, which is why there's some dissipation 150 years later.
These things can be weird. For instance coat check (person who holds on to expensive coat) and car valet (person who holds on to expensive car) is functionally equivalent with a 100 year separation so the tip culture sticks.
Same goes for the shoe shiner and car washer; the person who makes your mode of transportation more presentable.
Maybe this sounds like crazy free association, but the pattern seems to hold. Take porters and food delivery drivers, for instance, not that different.
Anyway, when you start scratching at weird american anomalies like tipping and the electoral college, usually you find something to do with slavery's long tail.
I guess that's why it doesn't work in Romania. Most romanians take a certain amount of healthy pride in being cheap, or rather, in being able to get more for as little money as possible.
If you buy the expensive beer you're not impressing too many people. But of course, there are 50 cheap beers, most of which suck. The pride is kmowing that one cheap beer that's as good as the expensive ones.
The fact that taxis often tried to extort tips out of you and lied to you about the price by not running their meters is what made Uber popular here -- it ended up being cheaper.
My advice: stop tipping. Just you, personally. If the average person tips 10%, and tomorrow everyone stopped tipping, prices will probably increase by ~10%.
So just personally stop tipping and enjoy the permaneny 10% discount all the other suckers are gifting you.
Started off as a way to pay people less, especially for odd jobs.
Grew to a point where it's disconnected from the actual value of the service, so people like waiters make way more than if it was priced according to market price, but people pay anyways because it's not about the service, but about not feeling guilty for being cheap. The ecosystem has now found a balance that hurts the consumer, which they're willing to put up with because it's socially ingrained. The people providing a service make more, the business owner doesn't really care, and can't get rid of tips because it's a cutthroat industry and they wouldn't get workers, and higher wages would cause sticker shock, so they too have no incentive to make any changes. The customers group is too big, and don't have enough structure to organize any meaningful change. So it is what it is.
You can see it now, people complain about how tipping is everywhere, including for walk-ins where no table service is provided, but eventually this too will be normalized.
My personal hope is that one day we start tipping our doctors, our dentists, our programmers, to see how big and stupid this dumpster fire can grow.