People often don’t know if they should or should not tip or if they should how much they should. If they’re paying by credit card or check, should they add the tip to that or give the person cash on the side etc. Setting a clear policy of ‘no tipping’ gets rid of all that. The price on the bill is the amount you pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about getting bad service next time because you didn’t tip the guy last time without even realizing you were supposed to do it. Also, as long as the person doing the delivery or providing the service isn’t expecting a tip, they don’t stand around ‘finishing up’ for an extra 5 or 10 minutes in hopes that you’ll tip them (think Bellhop or room service guy in just about every movie waiting for a tip).
It just makes everything easier.
I do the surveys for Noodles (and a few other places) because they give free stuff out w/o requiring any personal information at all. They just give you a code to redeem in the store. Once or twice I had an issue at the restaurant and emailed or facebook messaged them about it and they (snail) mailed me a paper coupon for a few bucks off, but the last time I did that, I got an email right from the manager at the store a few hours later. She told me to bring the email in and she’d comp me an appetizer or something. All I could think is ‘yeah, so you can spit in it?’.
That sounds like a kid with a really good work ethic (or maybe he just took an extra Adderall).
Personally I think tipping should be done away with in the majority of industries. Pay the workers what they should be paid for what they’re doing, charge the customers appropriately and it should just about balance out. I don’t like going to a place of business and having to be the one to decide how much your employees should get paid, I do enough of that at my job.
In Sri Lanka, I stayed in a simple hotel for ten days, many days I was the only guest. The manager “mother henned” over me, drove me all on his motorcycle, brought me meals gratis. I tried to give him $20 before I left, he refused several insistences. I knew he was a Buddhist, and tithed much of his income, so I held out the 20 and said “for alms”. He quickly grabbed it and said Thank you. I believe he actually did give it to the temple.
Last night my taxi meter came to P282 (about $5.50). I gave my driver 300, he said he had nothing smaller than a 50, nor did I, so if I had no smaller change, he would just charge me 250. Of course, I gave him the whole 300. It was from the airport, where meters are set P30 higher, so the same trip if not from the airport still would have been 252.
Well, I’m going to continue tipping the dude who cuts my hair. I drive close to 90 minutes to get to his shop, so I let myself get kind of scraggly between haircuts. He then works extra hard at making me look spiffy, using a straight razor for edging and all. If I catch him on a slow day (which is rare) we will step outside for a tuneup before he gets to work, which is nice.