Customer Wasn't Allowed To Purchase Frozen Yogurt Without Leaving A Tip First Despite Making The Bowl Herself
She pointed out that it's unreasonable to ask for a tip if it was a self-service experience.
PR Image Factory | Shutterstock In recent years, it has become more common for establishments to request tips in places where the customer mostly does all the work instead of having a server.
Such was the case for a woman named Leilani, who was stunned after going to a froyo shop where she was responsible for building her own sundae. When she tried to purchase her frozen yogurt, Leilani was met with a bizarre request that she had to complete if she wanted to walk out of the store with her dessert.
She wasn't allowed to purchase her frozen yogurt without leaving a tip first.
"I just went to get froyo, where you make it yourself. I'm sitting there with my little bowl and I put my ice cream in, and I move over to my favorite section — the toppings," Leilani recalled in her TikTok video.
She explained that after putting all of her favorites on her froyo, she weighed the cup so that the total could be calculated. Trying to check out, Leilani kept tapping her card, but the machine was not allowing her to pay.
Thinking the machine wanted her to swipe her card, Leilani did just that, but the payment was still not working.
Eventually, a worker approached her and informed her that the reason the payment wasn't going through was that it wanted her to leave a tip first.
The froyo worker told her to just press 'no tip' because they didn't receive the money anyway.
"He goes, 'Yeah, we don’t get those tips anyway. The owner keeps them,'" Leilani continued in disbelief.
Arina P Habich | Shutterstock
She expressed shock that not only were "self-service" places asking customers to leave tips even though they weren't being helped but that the tips weren't even going to the employees but that the owners were keeping it for themselves.
While it differs from state to state when it comes to tipping in restaurants and how servers distribute their tips amongst themselves, managers and business owners aren't allowed to keep tips for themselves.
It's especially concerning considering waitstaff depend on their tips to make a living and supplement their incomes because they often make more in tips than their hourly wages.
Researchers have pointed out that they worry tips are being used as an excuse for owners not to pay their restaurant staff.
Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Wolfe told CBS News that the issue with self-checkout kiosks asking for tips is that there's zero proof the money actually goes to the employee. Wolfe claimed that "companies are using tips as a way to put the onus on consumers for paying their employees rather than raising wages themselves."
"Machines don't have the same protections as tipping human employees, so while the law requires that something called a 'tip' has to go to employees when you're tipping a machine, you can't be quite so sure," Wolfe told the news outlet.
PeopleImages.com - Yuri A | Shutterstock
As it stands, many consumers are simply tired of leaving tips for servers altogether. Nearly three in four people think tipping culture has gotten out of control, and more than half think businesses are replacing employee salaries with customer tips, according to a survey conducted by WalletHub.
The survey also found that 78% of respondents believed that automatic service charges should be banned and that half of respondents left tips due to social pressure. This has led to tip burnout amongst many individuals, and while there can be an argument made against having tips for services that didn't require help from waitstaff, like in Leilani's case, if you are going to a sit-down restaurant where someone is taking your order, bringing you food, and checking to make sure your experience is more than satisfactory, then there shouldn't be an excuse about tipping or not.
However, the out-of-control tipping culture does bring up the valid observation that restaurant owners should be paying their employees fair wages instead of depending on the average consumer to do it for them. But the answer from a consumer shouldn't be just to forgo the tip altogether.
If you truly have an issue with the way waitstaff are being paid in a certain restaurant, then morally, you should consider not supporting that restaurant anymore instead of taking out your frustration on the servers who work there by not tipping.
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.