• Squorlple@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Can someone more tech-savvy than me make a smartphone app for customers to request tips from servers? i.e., the customer inputs their own bill total and the app presents a 10%, 20%, custom, and no tip option and asks for the server’s payment details and then would forward money from the server’s bank account/credit card/PayPal to the customer’s bank account/credit card/PayPal. If enough customers swarm tip-screen stores with this as a response, the stores may find their tip-screens no longer worth the time to deal with.

    We fight obnoxious tipping culture by showing it a mirror.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      This punishes the lowest economic level of this power structure for simply trying to earn a living.

      It’s the owners of restaurants (barely), the suppliers (kinda), the landlords (mhmm…), the banks (now we’re getting somewhere).

      It’s not the servers or cashier’s that need to be doing something different. It’s literally everyone but them.

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I don’t see how the landlord, back, or supplier have anything to do with the PoS system the business used. That’s all on the restaurant owner. Now, the maker of the PoS system for having things like that as a default? Hell yea, fuck them.

      • Squorlple@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The servers and cashiers obviously won’t pay the customers (and surely not out of their own personal funds). The idea is to make the system less efficient for the storerunners such that they have to change how they operate. More time wasted per customer = lower rate of sales and less work done per employee. Customers en masse turning their frustration with tip screens into an issue for a business should lead to the business doing away with the tip screens. Hell, maybe it would even be a catalyst to paying the workers a stable non-tipped wage.

        • foggy@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          So your idea is to cost them man hours by frustrating annoying, humiliating, or otherwise making uncomfortable someone who is making less than minimum wage?

          Your plan is to ask a waitress to give you money while she’s making $4/hr, and has other tables to serve to make tips?

          I was being polite before. Your idea is bad. Like really bad.

          • Squorlple@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            frustrating annoying, humiliating, or otherwise making uncomfortable someone

            I’d be presenting them a screen with an equivalent offer to the screen that they have presented me. If tip solicitation makes people feel that way, then obviously the customers simply telling businesses as much isn’t changing the system. Through the employees’ voices, the storerunner can identify the tip screen as the root of the problem and remove it.

            who is making less than minimum wage

            Many, but not all, of businesses with tip screens are not minimum wage.

            Your plan is to ask a waitress to give you money

            I’m not asking a waitress. I’m asking someone whose job is to present a monitor. Their manager or corporate overlords can decide if they want to give me money for being such a good customer.

                • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Yes. The solution to your bad idea is to not implement it.

                  The solution to servers currently relying on tips is to raise their guaranteed wage to a living wage.

                  The solution for multi billion businesses soliciting tips for using a machine that replaced a worker? Burn it all to the ground.

                  • Squorlple@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1dbe34a2-ce59-407b-9bef-54c757386963.jpeg

                    Yes, but how is that actionable? What can the average person do that they haven’t already been doing to try to induce that? That’s clearly the end goal, but you need a plan to actually execute it. If I was stuck on a desert island with finite resources and I asked you how to solve the problem of not being on the mainland, I’d need more direction than just “Duh, just get back on the mainland”.

                • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Yeah. Just stop going there and write a review somewhere people can see it letting them know why. Would be a lot easier than writing an app just to bother some underpaid barista.

                  This is like those boomers who yell at the customer service rep because they were asked to press 1 for Spanish.

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You expect bosses to care if their employees have to put up with shit from customers for decisions the employees didn’t make?

    • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      While the servers are the ones getting most of the tips, they have no control over this. Its entirely the point of sale processor (clover, square, etc.) who push it. They get a ~3% cut of the total transaction; if you tip then it’s a bigger transaction and their cut is a little bigger too.

      This plan makes servers lives worse but doesn’t incentivise the people actually in charge to change anything.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      Well sometimes there are tip pools. The server gets a large percent but the host and the other support staff get a little as well.