It’s gotten rather absurd. If my interaction is with a kiosk short of being handed something, it’s an insulting extra step. I’m already paying the price for my employer’s pay scale … I can’t take on someone else’s stinginess.
It’s gotten rather absurd. If my interaction is with a kiosk short of being handed something, it’s an insulting extra step. I’m already paying the price for my employer’s pay scale … I can’t take on someone else’s stinginess.
It tells me that businesses have decided it’s okay to be obtrusive and rude.
I’ve had jobs where my income was heavily dependent on tips, so I keep that in mind when leaving a tip myself. I understood that tipping could be a sensitive subject, so I was careful to never make guests feel like it was mandatory or expected.
I certainly never asked for a tip before any service had been rendered - but that’s what has become normal for many businesses. The employees aren’t the problem. The owners/managers who choose the POS software are.
“What do we owe to each other in general?” is an excellent question. I’m not being shown the same degree of courtesy that I worked hard to show others, and that bothers me.
I don’t think this is ever a measure that we can really use constructively. If you do the right thing in some category of behavior, you’re going to find that often people don’t do the right thing.
Think about it like driving. A competent driver is going to notice how terrible a lot of people on the road are at driving safely. People do some wild shit. The question, though, is what are you going to do with that? Are you going to use it to make yourself frustrated and potentially make your own driving worse as your focus shifts to it? Or are you going to be someone on the road who’s paying attention, reacting to their environment, and not letting their sense of entitlement to a clear road get in the way?
We can’t be good at everything and we can’t make everything our focus; as humans we prioritize what we think is important. If something isn’t on our radar, we probably aren’t thinking about it at all.
So, like, the effort you put in to make sure that customers don’t feel pressured is based on your morals and ethics, your outlook, and your feeling of what people want and should be able to expect. That’s you living your values, but those aren’t everyone’s values. People won’t even know that you’re internalizing that value unless you tell them.
If you look at your values as some sort of transaction, where you do others the ‘courtesy’ of following your values in regard to your interactions with them, you’re going to continuously be disappointed when they fail to have the same values as you in return.
The reality, though, is that you’re doing your values for yourself, because you believe in them. You feel they ought to be done, so you do them. But they’re not my values. It’s not a favor to me for you to do your values, it’s a favor to you. You can’t expect that just by you doing them I’ll suddenly possess them. I value different things because my experiences have very likely been very different.
We can talk about how they differ, but I feel like if you set out a path for yourself where you end up resentful of a world that doesn’t share your values, which is just statisically incredibly likely to be the world you live in a vast majority of the time that you interact with other humans, it’s probably going to be kind of frustrating.
Obviously the stakes matter here. Like, if by values we’re talking about not killing one another, that’s pretty dire. But if it’s like what the best way to be a service worker is? Ehh, probably less so.
Honestly, framing it this way works pretty well when people don’t tip, too. To my values, if people ask for a ride and don’t tip they’re essentially asking me to pay for part of their ride. But that’s not how everyone feels. I’m not going to charge myself extra in the form of cortisol for the trouble if I can help it.