Illustration: Ulises Mendicutty/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Illustration: Ulises Mendicutty/The Guardian Saved for Sunday Life and style How Australia’s tipping culture got awkward – and what to do about it Ten per cent, 20%, 25%? If you’ve made a cashless payment at a cafe or pub lately there’s a reasonable chance you’ve been prompted to tip. Isabella Lee looks into the arrival of US-style tip requests and where that money really goes
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Alyx: You’ve been thinking about tipping for a few months now, and wrote about it this week . What first sparked your interest? Isabella: I came across a post in a bartenders’ Facebook group from someone asking if their experience of having tips withheld was normal. The comments shocked me! There were more than 30 responses, with the majority of them calling out venues where they’d also been denied their tips. It made me think, if this practice was so common, why hadn’t anything been done about it?
Alyx: When you did some more digging, what did you find out? Isabella: I reached out to Fair Work to ask what legislation there was around paying out tips to staff. They told me there is none. So the original poster hadn’t experienced wage theft because the employers weren’t actually breaking any rules. It’s not just management who can dip their hand in the tip jar. Cashless payment systems take a percentage from every transaction made too. It’s pretty cheeky that the systems that allow a business to ask for tips – which changes customers’ decision-making behaviour – also get a cut.
Alyx: Now we’re being encouraged to tip seemingly everywhere. How do people feel about it? Isabella: Patrons seem to hate it. To get a feel for the general consensus I looked on Reddit. It was one of the few subjects where more people were agreeing, rather than arguing in the comments. One of the biggest reasons for this is that Australians think tipping is a US import and not many people want to be associated with those practices. For people in jobs where tipping has become more common, it’s a bit more complicated. While they say it is nice when they do receive tips, the logistics around paying it out and uncertainty about who will actually receive it make tipping difficult to fully get behind. Certainly, tipping isn’t applicable to every situation where you’re prompted to do it – like getting a beer, or after a $600 hair appointment.
Alyx: Did working on this story change your own attitude to tipping? Isabella: I’ll be honest, Alyx, I rarely tip. One, because I don’t really go out and two, if it does come up it’s never appropriate to do so – am I really going to pay an extra 5% on a meal I ordered myself via a QR code? So my attitude didn’t change too much. In some ways I feel more validated in my behaviour, considering tips don’t always make their way back to staff. The main thing that has changed though is that if I want to tip, I would probably tip cash.
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