WSJ: Tipping at Self-Checkout Has Customers Crying ‘Emotional Blackmail’

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Zero in­ter­ac­tion with em­ploy­ees dur­ing a trans­ac­tion no longer guar­an­tees free­dom from the moral quandary of how much to tip.

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Prompts to leave 20% at self-check­out ma­chines at air­ports, sta­di­ums, cookie shops and cafes across the coun­try are rankling con­sumers al­ready in­un­dated by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of tip screens. Busi­ness own­ers say the au­to­mated cues can sig­nif­i­cantly in­crease gra­tu­ities and boost staff pay. But the un­manned prompts are lead­ing more cus­tomers to ques­tion what, ex­actly, the tips are for.   

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Tip­ping re­searchers and la­bor ad­vo­cates say so-called tip creep is a way for em­ploy­ers to put the onus for em­ployee pay onto con­sumers, rather than rais­ing wages them­selves. Com­pa­nies say tips are an op­tional thanks for a job well done.

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Square, whose tech­nol­ogy pow­ers many iPad point-of-sale ma­chines, says tipped trans­ac­tions were up 17% year-over-year at full-ser­vice restau­rants and 16% at quick-ser­vice restau­rants in the fourth quar­ter of 2022.  

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Gar­rett Be­miller en­joyed not re­mov­ing his Air­Pods or mak­ing eye con­tact with any­one when buy­ing an early-morn­ing bot­tle of wa­ter at an OTG gift shop at New Jer­sey’s Newark Lib­erty In­ternational Air­port a few weeks ago. See­ing the op­tion on the self-check­out screen to add 10% to 20% to his $6 bot­tle of wa­ter caught him off-guard.

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“Just the prompt in gen­eral is a bit of emo­tional black­mail,” says the 26-year-old, who works in pub­lic re­la­tions in New York City. He skipped the tip.

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A la­bel af­fixed to the bot­tom of the do-it-your­self check­out screen at the Metairie, La., lo­ca­tion of cookie chain Crumbl has a clear di­rec­tive: “Con­sider leav­ing a tip if we made you smile.” 

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Emily Clulee and Gra­cie Shep­pard, 20-year-old col­lege stu­dents, ac­cepted the sug­ges­tion to spend ex­tra on their cook­ies, which cost about $5 each. Their only in­ter­ac­tions with em­ploy­ees, they say, was when they were told to step to the side to wait, and then re­ceived their or­der.  

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Some tip­ping re­searchers say that tips given to a ma­chine may not reach hu­man em­ploy­ees, be­cause pro­tec­tions to tipped work­ers in the fed­eral Fair La­bor Stan­dards Act don’t ex­tend to ma­chines. Lehigh Uni­ver­sity as­sociate pro­fes­sor Holona Ochs, who co-wrote a book on tip­ping, says that the prac­tice in self-ser­vice set­tings “ex­ploits the high ad­her­ence to tip­ping norms as a way to gen­er­ate more rev­enue for the com­pany.”

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Saru Ja­yara­man, di­rec­tor of the Food La­bor Re­search Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and an ad­vo­cate for higher wages for restau­rant work­ers says, “some em­ploy­ers are try­ing to use in­creas­ing tip­ping as a way to not have to pay peo­ple more.” 

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Corey Gary, 28, who works at a cy­ber­se­cu­rity startup, ini­tially thought it was fun to walk right into a beer fridge at San Diego’s Petco Park and help him­self to what­ever he wanted dur­ing a Padres base­ball game. Then the check­out pinged him for a tip. “I was con­fused, be­cause it wasn’t en­tirely clear who I was tip­ping,” says Mr. Gary. He still left 20%.

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