Don’t Be Surprised If You’re Prompted To Tip A Machine When You Use Self-Serve Checkout

ACROSS AMERICA — What’s this? Tip the self-checkout machine?

Here’s a tip: Customers feel like they’re being “emotionally blackmailed” by this new example of so-called tip creep, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Increasingly at airports, sports stadiums, bakeries, coffee shops and other businesses and venues, customers using the self-checkout option are invited to tip the customary 20 percent.

Many are drawing the line at adding on a 20 percent gratuity when they do the work themselves. Businesses cut labor costs with self-checkout options, leaving consumers to question where the tip is going, Ishita Jamar, a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., told The Journal.

In one example cited by The Journal, the prompt was a tipping point for Garrett Bemiller, who skipped the gratuity when he was buying a $6 bottle of water from a shop at Newark Liberty International Airport.

“Just the prompt in general is a bit of emotional blackmail,” the 26-year-old told the newspaper.

• Who Do You Tip And How Much? Block Talk, Patch’s exclusive neighborhood etiquette column, surveyed readers on whether they’re tipping more since the beginning of the pandemic, and who they’re tipping. Many reported “tip fatigue.”

Consumers are already chafed over the growing use of tip screens that prompt them to tip at different levels. People tend to leave bigger gratuities, according to a previous Journal report.

About half (51 percent) of the 1,006 U.S. adults surveyed last year by the gambling news site Play USA said they upped their tips when prompted by the touch screen, and slightly more (54 percent) said they felt pressured to tip.

Tipping screens predated but proliferated during the pandemic. Etiquette expert Thomas Farley considers that “an invasion.”

“Suddenly, these screens are at every establishment we encounter,” he told The Associated Press for a report in January. “They’re popping up online as well for online orders. And I fear that there is no end.”

Consumers are accustomed to the people who wait on them in restaurants and bars, as well as others in the service industry, but requests for tips can come from unusual and unexpected places.

Clarissa Moore, a 35-year-old supervisor at a Pennsylvania utility company, told the AP in January that even her mortgage company was asking for tips. She’s happy to tip at restaurants and sometimes coffee shops if the service is good, but doesn’t think a gratuity should be an expectation.

“It makes you feel bad. You feel like you have to do it because they’re asking you to do it,” Moore told the AP. “But then you have to think about the position that puts people in. They’re paying for something that they really don’t want to pay for, or they’re tipping when they really don’t want to tip — or can’t afford to tip — because they don’t want to feel bad.”

The self-checkout tip prompts do take human interaction, and thus some of the guilt, out of the equation. But the question remains: Who gets the tip?

Protections for tipped workers in the Fair Labor Standards Act don’t extend to machines, and that “exploits the high adherence to tipping norms as a way to generate more revenue for the company,” Lehigh University associate professor Holona Ochs, the co-author of a book on tipping, told The Wall Street Journal.