I love the audacity of food places still asking for a tip on a pickup order when I'm ordering online. Like wtf. This stupid tipping culture needs to die and people who work in the industry just need to be paid fairly. This is insane.

A lot of people in the comments are remarking on the tip culture in America. Friendly reminder that it's not the culture that necessitates tipping here. We have a tipping economy when it comes to a lot of service work. $2.13 is the minimum wage for servers in the states. This is less than what could rightfully be called a starvation wage, so tipping is a social necessity. You might think that's crazy and we should change it, and you would be correct.

If you can’t afford to pay your employees a living wage, do better.

Ok

I tip 0% at places where I go to the counter, order, wait, pay, and retrieve my food. That is a base level expectation, not a service or a favour.

It helps that we don't have a 'tipping wage' anymore.

We don't have the tip culture here lol

40% is an obvious strawman, but it's a shitpost so that's ok.

No one likes tipping culture. But regardless of what we want to happen, the reality is in the US there are jobs that depend significantly on tips for living wage. It is a well-understood social convention, and by making a purchase you are implicitly accepting the expectations associated with the customer. By taking the worker's time and refusing to pay that part of their wage, you are underpaying them. Your protest against tips in no way inconveniences their shitty employer or otherwise incentivises them to do better. The only one worse off is the service worker you stiffed, and nothing improves.

If you do want to actually change things, you can become politically involved to try to improve their wage so they aren't actually dependent on tips. Or you can boycott them by taking your business to places that don't rely on tips. That way the shitty employer actually loses business to places with better practices. But don't be a dick to an underpaid worker while pretending to have the moral high ground.

Man, actual restaurant resraurants, non chain / non franchise... are just... largely not going to be a thing in a year or two, in the US, at this rate.

10% is standard. Always has been and always will be (at least for me). Can go higher, but only if service is exemplary. "Just doing their job" level service gets 10%.

And don't give me shit about inflation and the cost of living. The meal is twice as expensive now, which means a 10% tip is already twice as big as it used to be.