OPINION:
The dog days of August are a good time for a nonpolitical rant, so let’s do one.
There’s a mythical acronym tale — dubbed a “backronym” — that says the term “tip” was derived from the phrase “To Ensure Promptness” (think a dusty cowboy strolling into a saloon and clanking a hefty coin into a cup as he demands a bottle of whiskey).
But that’s not real. The word is not an acronym. Actually, it derives from 17th-century English thieves’ slang meaning “to give or hand over.” And that explains … a lot.
America has a tipping problem. And no, the solution is not to tip more. It’s time that we consumers band together to tip less, and eventually not at all. Hey, they do it in Japan, and that place is light-years ahead of America.
What started as a simple, voluntary gesture of gratitude has morphed into a full-blown shakedown. You can’t order a coffee, pick up a sandwich or apparently even check yourself out at a grocery store without a screen spinning around and silently judging you for not handing over an extra 30%.
Thirty percent! For a cup of drip coffee! I’ve had dental procedures that felt less invasive.
Let me set the scene. You walk up to a counter. A bored employee taps a few buttons, slides a tablet toward you and suddenly you’re staring down three preset options: 20%, 25% or 30%.
The old-faithful 15%? Gone. Disappeared. Retired to the same graveyard as $1.99 gas and the idea that a run-of-the-mill restaurant meal is affordable.
An April 2026 Popmenu study found that when customers are shown preset tip amounts, 32% choose the middle option — essentially guilt-tripping their way into giving a bigger tip than they planned. Only 9% manage to tip nothing at all.
And according to a July 2026 Omni Calculator survey, 66% of customers feel intense pressure when an employee watches them after flipping that screen around (“It’s going to ask you a question.” Oh, is it?!) Who knows where that “tip” even goes?
Forty percent are now actively avoiding certain businesses entirely just to dodge the anxiety. We, as a nation, are rerouting our lives to avoid a tablet screen. This is where we are.
A March WalletHub survey found that more than 80% of Americans think tipping has gotten out of control and more than 2 in 5 believe the practice should be banned outright. Meanwhile, over on Reddit’s r/tipping — a community that is exactly what it sounds like and absolutely worth a visit — users share daily horror stories of tip prompts appearing at self-checkout machines, vending-adjacent kiosks and, I can only assume, ATMs that charge you $4.50 for the privilege of accessing your own money and then ask if you’d like to leave a little something extra.
Here’s the part that really gets me: Restaurants are already obscenely expensive. A casual dinner for two will run you $80 before you’ve touched the wine list. A steakhouse? I love Capital Grille — genuinely, truly, the steak is magnificent — but when I’m paying $60 for a single cut of beef, I’m not tipping $12 on top of that just so someone can carry it 12 feet from the kitchen to my table.
It does not cost $60 to buy that steak or make that steak. Somebody in that building is pocketing a hefty profit, and it is not the server.
So here’s a thought, workers: Get your employer to cut you in on some of that profit. Unite. Organize. Stop waiting for me to fund your retirement one guilt-ridden screen flip at a time.
Which brings me to the real villain of this story: restaurant owners who simply do not want to pay their employees a living wage.
Tipping culture is, at its core, a labor subsidy disguised as generosity. Owners get to advertise low menu prices, pay tipped workers a federal minimum of $2.13 an hour in some states (yes, really) and pass the bill for their entire payroll on to you, the customer, who already paid for the food.
We are collectively bankrolling someone else’s business while they make bank. That’s not a gratuity. That’s a shakedown with a smile.
But I’m not really done tipping. I don’t tip if I don’t sit down, so takeout and sandwich orders go untipped. For everything else, I’ve a new system. Simple. Fair. Nonnegotiable. Under $50? I tip $5. Over $50? I tip $10. That’s it. That’s the policy.
Is it scientific? No. Is it generous? No again (but it’s something). Does it hold regardless of whether I’m at a diner or a steakhouse? Absolutely. Because the size of my check should not determine the size of my contribution to a broken labor system that I did not design and refuse to fully fund.
Tip fatigue is real. Enough guilt. Pay your workers, raise your prices honestly, and let me eat my steak in peace.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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