Americans are fed-up, consumers reaching ‘tipping fatigue’ over out of control gratuities

Tipping is down across America as consumers have grown increasingly “fatigued” from high menu prices and being pressured to leave a tip.

“People have become increasingly grumpy about dining out,” the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. “Many have recoiled at menu prices that have risen sharply in recent years, and are going out less and ordering less when they do.”

It doesn’t help, according to the Journal, that a number of “restaurants have added mandatory gratuities and service fees to bills, driving up bills and resulting in some diners tipping less.”

These gratuity requests are now even popping up at unconventional places such as airports and gas stations.

“Instead of that second or third drink, people will go home,” Andrea Hill of the HMC Hospitality Group told the Journal. “Our servers are making less per table.”

“I can see tipping culture in the U.S. cracking,” Jenni Emmons, a server at an upscale Chicago restaurant, said. “People are being pressured to tip for things they didn’t used to, and I feel my income is under threat because of this.”

According to Ted Jenkin, the co-founder of oXYGen Financial, Americans have officially reached “tipping fatigue.”

“Americans do want to tip a job well done, but they don’t want to be told what they should tip while someone watches them enter their tip,” he told Fox Business Network. “It’s that tipping pressure of the automated systems that is creating this counterculture of people wanting to tip less.”

How down is tipping? The overall tipping average came in around 18.8 percent for the third quarter of 2024, down from a high of 19.9 percent recorded in 2021 — right around the time the COVID lockdowns began to end in some blue jurisdictions.

Moreover, roughly 38 percent of consumers reported tipping up to 20 percent or more in 2024, down from a high of 56 percent in 2021.

Leftists have been trying to combat this downtrend by lobbying for the elimination of the tipping system altogether on the grounds that it provides an easy out for employers to pay low wages to their servers.

“New York-based One Fair Wage is one of the groups arguing that the system forces customers to subsidize restaurants that pay waitstaff low wages,” the Journal notes. “Tip-earning workers, they said, deserve the same minimum wage paid to other employees, plus any gratuities customers might offer.”

The campaign has already notched victories in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and is now eyeing more upcoming victories in New York, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and Maryland.

But according to the Journal, the restaurant industry is pushing back mightily by warning that these minimum wage increases are predictably going to backfire if they haven’t already.

“In Washington, D.C., around 70% of restaurants have raised prices since voters struck down the tipped wage system through a ballot initiative in 2022,” the Journal notes.

Fritz Brogan, a bar and restaurant co-owner, told the Journal that the minimum wage increase in D.C. led him to raise prices by 10 percent AND also trim employee working hours.

“His Mission Navy Yard now charges $15 for an espresso martini,” according to the Journal. “He is considering adding service charges next July when the minimum wage for service staff rises to $12 an hour. That would add some $400,000 in costs across his 350 hourly staff.”

It’s not just waiters and waitresses who are bearing the brunt of the Democrats’ bad policies. So are “hairstylists, food delivery people, baristas and certain other service workers,” Fox Business notes, citing a Bankrate survey.

For baristas, the tipping rate dropped from 23 percent in 2021 to just 20 percent last year. Similarly, whereas 48 percent of rideshare users (think Uber/Lyft) “always” tripped their driver in 2021, only 41 percent did in 2024.

Vivek Saxena

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

Latest Articles