KATHRYN KNIGHT: It's infuriating: Why ARE we all suddenly being asked to tip staff who pull us a pint or serve takeaway coffee?
Last December, former GQ magazine editor Dylan Jones enjoyed a convivial lunch with a friend at the fashionable London restaurant, the Chiltern Firehouse.
Convivial – that is – until the waitress arrived with the card machine.
At this point, he discovered that – on top of the standard service charge of up to 12.5 per cent – there was a suggested ‘additional’ tip of 15 per cent.
When he queried this, the response was derisive. While the service charge on the bill was shared by all the staff, the waitress explained, his additional payment would be ‘just for me’.
Jones recalls: ‘The subtext was loud and clear: if you don’t leave me with an additional tip, then you are a mean, cruel, snivelling excuse for a human being, and the person you’re taking for lunch now thinks so, too.’
He is not the only Briton to be taken aback by this new and unwelcome phenomenon that has become increasingly widespread on these shores in recent years.
I refer to an American-style ‘tipping’ culture, in which venues from B&Bs to hair salons are asking customers to stump up a gratuity as high as 20 per cent on top of their bill.
Two areas of this new trend are proving particularly contentious. The first is that customers are being asked to pay a double tip – initially for the standard service and then an additional gratuity for the individual actually serving you.
The second infuriating development is that some pubs and cafes are demanding tips for serving drinks and coffees.
Earlier this year, a string of pubs in Scotland, owned by The Scotsman Group, started to levy an automatic 2 per cent charge on drinks, for example.
Elsewhere, drinkers claim bar staff have given them the option of paying a 5, 10 or 15 per cent tip on a card machine after being served a pint.
Over the pond, of course, this is nothing new: from giving bar staff a couple of dollars for a drink to 20 per cent or so to taxi drivers.
In the US, tipping is so culturally ingrained that even some pharmacists have been known to request tips via their payment machines.
And visitors to the States have noted how these suggested gratuities have continued to surge in recent months – with 25 per cent now standard on purchases including even takeaway coffees and burgers.
Now, it seems that similar demands are starting to creep in here, too. While automatically added service charges have become common in restaurants in recent years, we are not compelled by law to pay them.
Generally, tipping has tended to be informal, from offering ‘one for yourself’ to a bartender to rounding up a cab fare to the nearest five or ten pounds.
But now contactless payment firm, SumUp, says such transactions have risen by nearly 40 per cent in the past two years nationwide. In cafes and restaurants alone, the number of customers paying a ‘suggested tip’ has increased by a huge 78 per cent.
But it is not just food venues. Beauty businesses are also encouraging customers to tip – with a 6 per cent rise in the use of card-machine gratuity prompts at the nation’s salons and spas.
Hotels and B&Bs, meanwhile, have seen a 112 per cent increase in the use of these prompts – while some restaurants have taken to adding another optional service charge on top of the standard sum on the bill, as Jones found.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy about it.
The practice has attracted outrage on social media, with many users labelling the shift from voluntary tipping as ‘naked opportunism’ and ‘service charges by stealth’.
Many have pointed out that there seems to be little reason – other than shameless profiteering – to add a 15 per cent tip to a service that previously didn’t feature such an option.
That’s certainly the verdict of one mum of three after being prompted to pay a 15 per cent tip at her new local cafe in north London for two takeaway cappuccinos.
‘Save going behind the counter and making my own cappuccino, I always assumed that the extortionate price of my morning coffee covered the fact it was being made for me by a barista.
Apparently not,’ she posted on the internet forum Reddit.
Pointing out that the suggested tip amount would mean paying an extra £1.17, she grumbled: ‘It would take the cost of two coffees to not far off a tenner.’
Another Reddit user expressed his disgust at being given an extra service prompt at the chain restaurant Bill’s after visiting one of its branches in south London.
‘The 12 per cent service was on the bill, and then there was another spot to add a 5/10/15 per cent tip,’ they wrote.
‘I didn’t read the bill closely and was about to add 10 per cent when my friend pointed this out. I imagine they expect this, and the system is structured that way to get more money. It puts me off eating there again.’
It is a sentiment repeated time and again in hundreds of posts, with many pointing out the ‘mission creep’ nature of tipping in Britain at a time when the cost of living is already forcing people to rethink their spending habits.
‘It seems like every new generation adopts more and more rubbish American culture. I wish we would just stop,’ one Reddit user wrote. ‘Do you tip your car washer, does your grandma tip her carer? Do you run outside to tip the bin men, the milkman, your mechanic, the newsagent? It’s ridiculous.’
The decline of cash means serving staff can now miss out on extra tips
Such practices are certainly a marked cultural change, as Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, the trade body that represents pubs, hotels and restaurants, told the Mail.
‘While the UK has a strong culture of voluntarily rewarding staff for good service through the form of tips, we are not used to being told what to pay,’ she said.
‘The difference in the UK from other countries like the US is that there is not necessarily a going rate or set amount for a tip. Rather, it is left in the hands of the customer to tip what they feel is acceptable when they have received excellent service.’
Perhaps it is little surprise, then, that even customers who do accept tip prompts are sticking to the same amount: that is a gratuity of between 10.2 per cent and 10.6 per cent – the average tip size over the past three years.
‘The data shows a clear trend,’ Corin Camenisch, from SumUp, told the Mail. ‘More businesses across various sectors are enabling digital tipping features. However, the amount customers are tipping has not followed the same upward trajectory.
‘Unlike the US – where tipping is the norm – British customers have historically been more reserved about gratuities.
‘Even as digital tipping simplifies the process, it seems this cultural reticence persists.’
It must be said that not everyone is against the practice.
At The Dorothy Pax, an independent pub and concert hall in Sheffield, owner Richard Henderson says the idea of suggested tips to help performers has largely gone down well with punters.
‘Most of our programme is free events because we’re in one of the most culturally deprived areas in the UK, but we guarantee the artists a small appearance fee,’ he says.
‘We use the tipping function to ask people if they can give the performers a couple of extra quid.’
Ms Nicholls also points out that the decline of cash means serving staff can now miss out on extra tips. ‘Venues have been faced with customers paying by credit card and then not having an ability to reward staff,’ she adds.
Many would say this is a matter for the owners, not the customer, who are left with the option of resentfully coughing up a second tip on their bill or pressing ‘no tip’ right in front of the server.
Grinch-like though this may seem, we are quite within our rights to do so, as etiquette coach John-Paul Stuthridge points out.
‘Whether you should ask to remove it may depend on how charitable you feel, or if the service genuinely deserved it,’ he adds. ‘It is your call.’
Or, of course, you can always vote with your feet.
