USA tipping allowance anyone?

[PickwickPaperFile]

Does Anyone have any idea how much to budget for a couple of weeks travelling round in the US? Mix of staying in national parks and LA, mid range hotels will be eating and drinking at mid range bars, cafes and restaurants. Is 20% the norm? Don’t want to stiff people and equally don’t want to pay over the top unnecessarily. TIA.

Yep 20% and that includes for getting a takeaway coffee etc. And as others have mentioned you then have sales tax and so on. We live in an expensive part of the world (Dublin) and on a recent trip to Florida found eating out even worse value for money than here. Equally expensive but the variety and quality is worse.

But the customer didn’t decide not to pay you, your employer decided not to fairly pay you! I think that’s what most Brits can’t get their heads round.

I think they are more like contractors than employees.

Why go there at all, these days?

Exactly.

It’s reprehensible to take one’s ire out on people who need the money and aren’t responsible for the system.

Don’t want to tip? Go elsewhere.

Good advice to go elsewhere.

I personally find US tip culture a bit alien and don’t really “get” it. However, when I visit anywhere in the world I make an effort to learn and follow the cultural norms. If 20% is what service costs in the US then that’s what I would be paying. The system isn’t going to change because a few British tourists underpay. Your server shouldn’t lose out because you have decided that your cultural norm is superior to theirs.

Because the national parks are stunning and mind blowing.

@TheHerboriste because it’s a big world out there? Because a country is made up of individuals not a homogeneous whole?

@PoppyBaxter- 100% agree on the National Parks + also the State Parks. So much variation/choice whichever part of the US you visit.

Canada also has a great selection too - we're leaning to spending more time visiting there in the next 5 years than the US

Never experienced long queues at US pre clearance at DUB - usually in and through in less than 10 minutes.

And yes, 3 hours is what I always give for an a long haul flight which, if you're flying Delta will usually become 5-6 hours 😂 - especially so for the Minneapolis plane

I've always paid 20% in restaurants. You're telling me people are paying $5 on top of their drink in Starbucks just to be handed their drink? Why?

Go to Germany, there is hardly any tipping.

Bingo. It may be a very flawed system but it’s extremely rude to inflict your own cultural practices on local people when visiting a foreign country, especially when it affects their income.

No tipping in Japan either.
TBH I find the detectably fake, cheesy, service culture in USA extremely cringe. Makes it worse to know they hate European tourists.

I'll give a tip to the server in a coffee shop in the US if they've made me a coffee (but not if I'm just paying for something from the fridge) - thats the same as tipping a bar tender for me.

Usually only 1-2 USD though, which probably won't go down well with the US posters on this thread.

You don't fix the system by refusing to tip. You screw the employee and you reward the employer by giving them the labour for free.

Yes, it's an annoying system. It also benefits the servers in better off restaurants. There are restaurants that abolished tips and had to allow them again because they couldn't get staff.

in any case, if we went to a no tip system and they raised all the prices 20%, yes it would be simpler: but you'd be paying the 20%. It seems like a bit of a roundabout justification: you'd pay it if they forced you to, but if they give a choice, you'll decide what's adequate?

You'd be wrong! That's quite right for coffee unless you have one of those ridiculous Starbucks orders that people mock online (in which you really ought to give the barista a bit extra for their trouble)

But you are forced to! It’s not a choice as many posts here emphasise.

The whole American tipping culture is mean and disingenuous, it’s a tax pretending to be an etiquette, and in the richest country in the world which has and is forcing its political and cultural standards and norms on so many other places, it sticks in the throat.

The thing I find difficult is that I often find I get appalling service in restaurants in the US - perhaps because they are expecting me not to tip anyway?

But if I wait 20 mins for my order to be taken, 30 mins later not even my drinks have appeared, I have to go and look for the server, eventually only half my food order turns up, no I am not bloody tipping whatever the cultural norm is because I haven't had the service. This is a factual account of one dining experience in the US. The place wasn't even busy!

Not tipping is not rewarding the employer though? They don’t care if you tip or not, won’t affect their bottom line. The only way to move to a no mandatory tipping culture is to actually pay serving staff better wages - if that means the prices go up by 20% I wouldn’t have a problem with that if I knew it was facilitating a decent living wage for the staff? That has to be by law in order that greedy employers don’t just pocket all of the extra income.

It’s all well and good announcing that the British restaurant culture is superior to the US restaurant culture where the restaurants don’t pay the staff, and they should therefore change it—it’s not that easy.

Just as there is the National Rifle Association, which is a powerful gun lobby with its claws in Congress, there is also
a National Restaurant Association. The National Restaurant Association is very wealthy and very powerful—it’s members are all of the big companies in US food service. They have pushed back, hard, against restaurants paying their employees, and always win. Those asking for the laws to be changed are naïve. If you’re wait staff, you’re:

• more likely to be female
• more likely to be young
• if a parent, more likely to be a single parent

Hardly the big and powerful in the eyes of Congress, and certainly no match for the sway of the National Restaurant Association.

Having an axe to grind against the people who find themselves at the bottom if this hierarchy by withholding or reducing their payment is cruel.

Yes we're into hiking and trail running and the parks blew us away. We're definitely keen to check out Canada too soon!

The employer benefits because they got away with not paying. You didn't harm them at all. Withholding or shorting tips is the worst form of protest. I'm not militant about this because I love the tip system; I'm militant because of who takes the hit. I've met British visitors who think they're making some brave strike against the system by refusing to tip, but all they did was make an employee lose out on wages and have to pay tax on money they never got.

@YankTank it's an awful mess. Yes the restaurant association is powerful. But even if you require the minimum wage, as several states do, the servers aren't going to work for just that anywhere better than a coffee shop. Danny Meyer tried going no tip and had to go back. It's both customer resistance and the fact that servers at higher end places make really large tips that they don't want to give up. There's stories of New York waiters who put their kids through university on tips.

there's just no point in coming into these threads and announcing how wrong tips, or any other foreign cultural practice, is. You can't change it as a tourist. If anything will change it, it's going to be something structural, like the backlash at being asked for tips at registers.

With a 20% tip things cost similar to London, in US tourist areas. That has always been my way of controlling costs out there.