Country differences
I was reminded of the tipping culture in many places, the US particularly in my case as I have a close friend who moved there and I used to visit regularly. To my shame, I have often forgot*,
realising hours or days later. I should change my phone background to "Remember to tip!" text when there.
What differences have you noticed when travelling?
* tipping not being a thing here as it is there for instance; people here do tip, there are jars and when paying by card occasionally I've seen a tip option, but I think our minimum wage is $24.10/hour currently. Not to say people on that aren't struggling with high prices today... Australia is expensive to live in, comparatively, as my friend and his wife say when they visit.
realising hours or days later. I should change my phone background to "Remember to tip!" text when there.
What differences have you noticed when travelling?
* tipping not being a thing here as it is there for instance; people here do tip, there are jars and when paying by card occasionally I've seen a tip option, but I think our minimum wage is $24.10/hour currently. Not to say people on that aren't struggling with high prices today... Australia is expensive to live in, comparatively, as my friend and his wife say when they visit.
Comments
I for one often find it difficult to know what's best and fair to do about tipping, here in the UK. Mr Nen and I have never been in the habit of it, but when Nenlet2 is here he will often leave some cash on the table of the establishment after the bill is paid. He now lives in the north of England and I wonder whether the ethos there is different? Nenlet1, on the other hand, will examine the bill at the end of the meal and check if a service charge has been added. If she doesn't feel the experience has been worth it she asks them to take the charge off. If I see a tip option on a card reader I refuse it if I have to pay on ordering and may or may not say yes at the end, depending on the experience.
The problem with the service charge being added to the bill is that I am not really convinced it goes to the people who have actually waited at the table; I suspect it simply goes into the general running of the place, even though we did ask once and were told that the staff do get it. (I suspect they'd been told to say so...)
I was out with some friends recently and one of them, who had worked in hospitality in the past, insisted that we add 10% to the bill to help the staff. The rest of us didn't like that much as neither the food nor the service had been particularly great, but it sounded so cheapskate to make a fuss.
For some years Mr Nen and I went to a favourite hotel of ours (in the UK) and there was one waitress who was absolutely lovely and very attentive - and we never thought to tip her. I so wish we had now. On our last visit to the place a lot of the staff had changed and she had left, and the checkout on that occasion made us really angry as charges had been put on our bill which we didn't understand. It turned out it was things like the bartender bringing a pre-dinner drink to our table (rather than us waiting at the bar for it to be ready), and we thought he was just being nice in offering to do so, and something else that they actually couldn't tell us what it was ("It will have been something you had." "Ok - but what?") and did eventually agree to take off the bill. We wrote to the manager but had a long delayed, brief and unsatisfactory reply. It's a big hotel that does a lot of very large events so I don't suppose they care whether Mr and Mrs Nen go back or not.
Years ago we had an all-inclusive holiday in Bulgaria with our fairly young children. It was awful - the food was awful, the service was awful, the hotel staff were rude. We learned long afterwards that there is (or was) a strong tipping culture there, and the staff would have been getting the absolute minimum from an all-inclusive booking, so things could have been different had we known. Not that we plan to go back there either!
This kind of thread is ripe for Pond War material. Could we not? It's one thing to say, "They do things differently there," as a kind of neutral observation. This quickly degenerates into opinions about the difference, usually negative.
It's much easier and you know what the service is going to cost. 🙂
The constant calculations are a pain in the ass, and I hate feeling like I'm giving out report cards every time I go somewhere to eat. Our current budget crunch has at least prevented that
I'm going to read up on tipping in France before we go there for a couple weeks this summer. A cursory look suggests that it's usually just a euro or two at restaurants, as servers are paid a living wage.
When visiting the US we tipped at about 15% as I understood that was a big proportion of the wait staff income, and they were taxed on the assumption that they received that level of tipping.
In Japan you don't tip at all. To do so creates an embarrassing situation. I have heard of staff running after customers because they "mistakenly" left some money behind.
I’m another American who wishes we’d just pay proper wages, had universal healthcare, etc.
Thanks! I kept reading things along these lines, followed by explanations of how much to tip if you do tip, which was confusing.
@Caissa, the minimum wage for employees who get tips is as low as $2.13 in some parts of the US. The employer is supposed to make up the difference between that and the federal ($7.25) or state minimum wage (can be higher) if the tips aren't big enough, which means employees have to report their tips to employers and employers have to believe them. With tipping on credit cards, I can see how this would work. With cash tips, I can see employees not accurately reporting tips and/or employers accusing them of that.
Anyway, the standard in the US is 20%, even in places like California with a higher minimum wage. The minimum wage is still not enough. It's a fucked up system, but it's not gonna get fixed anytime soon. I frequent just one place that doesn't accept tips because they've adjusted their prices and pay their employees accordingly. If you don't see the signs, or if you just look at them online, their prices seem really high in comparison with others.
Having said that, I never quite got used to the need to add roughly 30% to a restaurant bill in Canada - 15% for the tax* and 15% for the tip.
I'm also sufficiently rubbish at maths that I generally over-tip for fear of appearing mean!
* it may not always have been 15%, but I think it hovered around that mark.
Tipping culture varies a lot. In the US, I have noticed that post-COVID, tip prompts seem to show up in all sorts of places where I would not expect to tip, and I cheerfully ignore those. I would infinitely rather have no tipping, and have the costs necessary to pay employees properly incorporated in to the price. On a related front, the US practice of quoting prices before tax is bonkers. I don't actually care how much of the price I pay goes to the store vs how much goes to the government. I care about "how much will it cost me to get this stuff".
Other things that vary a lot from place to place include typical food and drink portions. The amount of food or drink you get for a "normal order" varies significantly.
And then there are a bunch of local norms to do with shopping - normal opening hours, for example. 20 years ago, it was rare for stores in Switzerland to accept credit cards. I remember vividly one electronics store that had an ATM in the corner (inside the store) - the norm was to go to the ATM, acquire a pile of Swiss Francs, and then to hand your pile of cash to the cashier in exchange for your electronics. Japan has vending machines that sell, well, almost anything.
I rarely go anywhere put when I do I pay in advance. I will give about 10% for good service direct to the person who dealt with me.
This means that if you're out shopping in a 20 mile radius with several stops, you may find yourself paying sales tax at a different rate at every stop. And if you retrace your steps the next day, a tax holiday or the fact that you're now buying for church will make those costs different yet again.
Under the circs, it would be utterly mad for anyone to try to set an all-in price on anything. Even if you produced and sold something within a single block radius (and thus stayed in the exact same tax districts at all times), the tax holidays and exempt purchasers would throw you for a loop--leaving out the regular tax hikes that come up yearly, or so it seems. You'd have to resticker everything in the store almost constantly.
In Australia, and I would have thought everywhere else since Uber is a global platform, a "rider" (silly word, why can't they say passenger?) has the option to tip $3, $5, or $10 (or a custom amount) at the same time as s/he gives the star review at the end of a trip.
While in Australia, it is illegal to post a price which doesn't include GST (Goods and Services Tax, analogous to State Sales Taxes in USA, and VAT - Value Added Tax - in UK).
In Canada unfortunately it’s the provinces that determine the law on this point, and none of them to include taxes in the display price. Which means the federal GST has to be on top of the display price too.
Tipping has been creeping up in Canada. It used to be perfectly acceptable to tip 15% on the pre-tax bill, which back in the day could be done by matching the tax (which used to add up to 15% in Ontario). Now the general standard is 18% on top of the post-tax tab.
We had this discussion a while back (in a Purg thread that unusually was started by me) and I seem to recall some saying that restaurant prices are not really keeping up with inflation. I’d rather pay a marked price that results in everyone getting paid a reasonable salary without having to rely on tips, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards anytime soon.
I was surprised when buying a $50 bunch of flowers in MA to be charged $55.
Tax exempt purchasers really aren't a problem. It seems better to me for a small number of purchasers to pay less than the sticker price than for almost all purchasers to pay more.
Tax holidays and frequently-changing tax rates are more of an issue, I'd agree. And I know there are a very large number of taxing authorities, and they all like to tinker - I'm just skeptical that this tinkering fundamentally serves the public good in any way. Give me a big stick embossed with "stop doing that", and I'd be happy to start hitting people with it.
In any case, your assumption that this tinkering is intended to serve the public good is at fault. It isn't. It's the result of a lot of people making decisions for entirely unrelated reasons that results in a clusterfuck only handle-able by keeping base price and sales tax separated out. Nobody likes it, but it beats restickering everything every five minutes.
Many eating establishments will also pool the total tip income of staff and then split it evenly among staff. The idea there is that it is not only the waiter, but the cooks, and the bussers and the custodian on the shift are as important as the wait staff.
While Uber does not accept tips, traditional taxi drivers appreciate a tip.
I am finding more eating establishments in my community will not allow for tips. Of course, Washington State has some of the highest minimum wages in the country. and even more in the West Side areas.
Trying to figure out tip income for tax purposes is very complcated. If Trump had any good idea, it was his promise to eliminate income tases on tips.
I think they were Europeans, but I was at a picnic in Sydney's Botanic Gardens and that female group near us went topless and sunbathed. To add to the amusement, they were laid out by the path the kiddies' train went by!
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On taxis and ride shares. Like here, in the US I get in the front. It is usually several minutes in when I recall American TV programmes and films where people get in the back and think, "Bugger!" Thankfully I'm awkward and have an odd accent so the drivers probably think, correctly, I'm an uneducated sort who doesn't know how to behave in polite society.
That’s what I tend to do, though now I’m seeing more and more of these gadgets where it automatically gives you options to click on for exactly 20% etc., so I wind up clicking on that, rather than the extra clicks to round up.
I imagine the accent tells drivers you're not from around here and things are different where you're from. Especially around airports, where drivers will have picked up plenty of tourists from other parts.
Depends on the vehicle. Hereabouts they're usually the classic black cab with the driver's area divided by a screen from the passenger seating. But in plenty of places, it's a saloon car. In fact, the one we got back from an outlying village to Edinburgh the other night was one such. Mr F in the front seat, me in the back.
Everywhere. Unless it's a black cab.
Never, unless the rest of it is full.