No. Tipping at restaurants is for waitstaff. You don’t tip the cook in the back or person at the register who rings you up. It’s always just the waiters/waitresses.
I quibble (also) with the OP’s definition on FF. One of my breakfast haunts, you order at the counter but they bring your (freshly cooked) food to your table, ask if you need anything, keep your coffee refilled and bus your table at the end. I usually leave a buck or two - assuming it is split between cashier/busser/cook. If they are lacking in coffee refills I may adjust down the tip.
For normal ordering at the counter or take away - no
ShitDonalds used to have TV commercials that emphasized no tipping.
Seeing I haven’t been inside one for decades I have no idea if that is still SOP.
Normal fast food, no. Food trucks, yes. There’s gotta be some “above and beyond” element to warrant a tip. Sweating in a food truck while a loud generator drones away qualifies. Throwing together buns and patties doesn’t.
I fail to see how one is more deserving of a tip than the other. Noise and heat are just as likely inside any busy hot food establishment. You have an arbitrary view on what constitutes “normal” but that is tipping in nutshell.
I inquired about this during the height of COVID “lockdowns” by calling the feedback line of the one I frequent. I got a call back from the Customer Service Manager of a multi-unit franchisee and was told that any tips had to be donated to the Ronald McDonald House.
Talking to the drive through attendant once, she said that if anyone just trousered a tip they’d be fired if discovered. It’s considered theft by the company/franchisee. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t legally be theft, but I’m not enough of a legal eagle.
I asked what would happen if I gave them $20 gift cards to a grocery store. She called the manager over who said the cards would be appropriated by the franchise owner and an equivalent amount donated to RMH.
At least McDonalds in this area is locked down pretty tight on the No Tipping front.
No. And the proliferation of tip jars has driven me almost exclusively to Chick-fil-A. There’s never a jar or any hint at tipping there.
My local Barbecue joint is the latest on board with this crap – a tip question in the order screen which I view as “Wanna give the guy handling your food a tip? Or do you feel lucky, punk?”. I despise the implied threat of dunning me for a tip before I get my food. So they lost a customer. FTR: It’s counter only, no table service. I have no problem tipping at actual sit-down restaurants, or the pizza guy. Also FTR: I tip with cash, not on the card.
I dread going to my remaining favorite, Jersey Mike’s. I’d hate to find a tip jar there, but if they do it’s farewell for me.
Where are you people finding an opportunity to tip all these people? Around my area, every single fast food place that had a drive-through closed their dining room when the pandemic started – you couldn’t walk in even to order food to go. And many of those dining rooms remain closed to this day.
Are you people tipping at the drive-through window?
That depends on where you live - in my area , there are hardly any drive-throughs. Places like Panera, Subway, Dunkin don’t have drive-thrus and even when you are talking about McDonald’s, Burger King etc, only 10-20% have drive thrus. Most don’t even have parking lots. " Dining room closed" meant you couldn’t sit down and eat, but orders were still taken inside the building.
Tipping is just extra price inflation by the business where they can pretend the price is lower and then gouge the public via guilt. It is never the case that I am stiffing the employees no matter what I do; if there is stiffing happening it’s entirely on the part of the employers who are paying employees only part of their promised/expected wages. I am not flexible on that opinion, and consider the entire tipping culture despicable and corrupt.
I pay tips at regular restaurants because custom demands and I deem enduring the gouging a necessary part of arranging evenings out with friends. I don’t need to get fast food, so if it reaches the point where I feel threatened for not tipping (as happened to pullin) I am super out.
I do at Starbucks
This.
Tip pooling is increasingly common and often the stated objective is to share with back of the restaurant staff.
Yeah you can tip a pizza delivery man 18% and you’ll still get “called out” on a viral TikTok for being “cheap”.
cite?
Plus, how would you ever know? Stay off tick tock and you’ll be fine.
I’m not citing it because there’s some racist language in it but it went pretty viral a few years ago.
At least that’s how it was, or was “supposed” to be. The pooled tips that also go to busboys and the cooks is BS. They’re supposed to be getting “normal” wages, so pooling the tips hurts the waitstaff and I’m sure also hurts the rest of the staff because their base pay is being reduced as if they’re tipped.
The point is/was to reward good personal service, because the waitstaff is directly interacting with you and taking care of you in ways that may not be reflected in the price of the meal you’re ordering. For instance, refilling drinks, bringing extra condiments, telling you which dishes may better fit your dietary needs, getting crayons and placemats for the kids, that sort of thing. That’s why you tip your hairdresser, cab driver, and delivery person. They are providing a service, not just a product, and they can make it more or less pleasant for you independent of how well they do the actual job at hand. Busboys, cooks, and cashiers don’t really do any of that.
Now, if you order at a counter but they bring out your food, or you have a particularly complicated or large order, then sure, throw them something extra. The person in a food truck is generally the owner and entire staff, maybe plus one or two other people, so while you aren’t getting table service they’re going to be more knowledgable and helpful. If they give you some of that extra attention then a small tip would be warranted (round up to the nearest dollar, keep the change sort of thing), but not much else.
I generally tip people whose work allows for at least the possibility of going an extra step or two for the quality of my purchase. A waiter in a restaurant submits my order and works (sometimes) with the kitchen staff to make it as nice as practical. They make sure my visit goes well. I am not ignored once the food arrives. etc. Same for the Subway sandwich assembler. There is no extra effort possible at a McDonald’s or similar store. The cashier at a grocery isn’t going to go the extra mile to check me out. All that said, I do like to leave 10% at small stores where the people (usually the owners) are working close to the edge and may not be able to pay the staff as much as they deserve. It may all be wasted money when the owner treats the tips as part of the salary, but at small independent stores I do like to leave something in the tip jar.
In California tip credit is illegal so wait staff get paid “normal wages”, not below minimum wage as in many other states.
In all the Pacific Coast states, as well as Nevada and a few others. Yet there have still been cases of servers in those states complaining of management trying to screw them over, which is much easier through the CC tip line, so I always tip my server in cash.