Another pro tip is to make your own coffee. You shouldn't have to pay more than a couple of bucks for coffee with perhaps some milk in it. An espresso machine and a grinder will quickly pay for themselves.
While you are at it, cancel all those streaming subscriptions, and stream for free in the high seas or YT ad-free with uBlock.
The above "tips" will literally save your thousands of dollars each year, and most likely also save you time.
Then when you spend down the credit to $2 any attempt to buy something that costs more refills the credit.
Starbucks app btw. You have to specifically pay with card on the payment screen to avoid buying credit and paying as above.
Having the knowledge which dark patterns even work well for technically affine users while still being "socially acceptable" can be worth a lot of money to specific companies.
I drop it down a bit and pay it on my credit card for him, but what's the right way to deal with this situation?
Summary: if I didn't tip in a situation 10 years ago, I'm not going to start now.
That's it. I cut my own hair.
She charges me $15! I tip +$25 and it’s still a cheap haircut.
My haircut has to be one of the simplest around, but 9 out of 10 stylists will leave me fixing it myself later. Once I paid $50+tip for the same cut at a swanky joint and STILL went home and fixed it. She doesn’t know what she’s worth.
As a practical example let's say you take a date to your local trendy sushi place. You both get gold-leafed deep fried Wagyu fatback tuna rolls and some Yuzu duck fat-washed 50-year-old whiskey highballs. The final bill is $100 (I'll use round-ish numbers for this example). The bartender comps you 30% because you all are cool and discuss your shared experience bartending or jetskiing or whatever. Ordinarily your tip would have been 20% for a total of $120. In this case your bill is now $70 plus your newly selected gratuity. Take the difference between the original bill with tip and your current bill without tip and divide it in two. This is the floor for your new tip, in this case (120-70)/2 = $25. This is indeed something like a 35% gratuity but they hooked you up and made that custom drink for your charming new beau. As a matter of fact you should round up from this number because they have side work to do and you make pretty decent money as a software engineer/LLM tickler/product sorcerer. Just make it $30 for a nice round hundo.
If you're friends with the manager and they comp your dinner to do you a solid and impress your date then you should tip 50% of what the bill would have been minimum. This is why you should keep cash in your pocket - shake the waiter's hand on your way out and palm it to them. If that's not possible then go to use the restroom and talk to them on your way back so they can run your card through the POS on a blank check to give them said tip.
This is how you do things with class. This is what I wish somebody had explained to me when I was 20 and kinda broke (i.e. eager to save money that I would have spent anyway) before I embarrassed myself by failing to do such. If you are similarly unaware then now you know too :-)
As an addendum this also applies to coffee and pizza places but the numbers become coarser. Buying them the equivalent of a beer at your local dive ($3ish) is customary.
I always thought that was a casino thing (to keep you drinking so that you gamble more) but I've never been to a casino. I live in Canada though, so we might have laws against that sort of thing.
I tipped on the full amount but we had to get the manager again to figure out how. I was going to Venmo her but the manager just sent the $0.00 bill to the table.
If a waiter is comping something in exchange for a higher tip, that's not generosity or goodwill at all, it's a dishonest scam.
I will tip what I want to tip (often 0) without remorse and move on with my life.
Unfortunately this cancerous American system leeched into Canada, but we can still stop it, one $0 tip at a time.
Creating a good guest experience is how you get repeat business. Comps are part of that. You are talking about theft and I mentioned nothing of the sort. If you choose to engage in such behavior then that's your business - don't accuse me of it.
Mobile offers a speed boost for taps but heavy nerf to text entry tasks.
"Just the tip"
Is bill-paying UI also a guilt machine? If you don't pay, you feel guilty! How about holding the door for elderly people? Going to your kid's event? Not running people over in the crosswalk? Saying please and thank you? Buying birthday presents? It's all so unfair - to me!
Or maybe it's not, who knows? It's sometimes hard to tell with comments.
It's just the times we live in, uncertainty is a given, most of the time we don't know. I guess we'll have to make do.
If the bot owner happens to waste their time reading the responses to the dozens of comments one of their many spambots made, and improves the bots as a result, so be it. They're already winning the war as it stands, not like things can get much worse. I'd like to at least try to make an effort to make things better.
Maybe the actual answer is that I just need to stop using HN, though, since the spambots are taking over the site and yet people are more concerned with the people pointing that out than the actual problem.
You don't have to email us, of course! But please understand that we're on the same side. We don't want to see HN overrun by generated comments (a form of spam) any more than you, or other users do. Remember that tomhow and I were avid users of HN for many years before we became mods.
All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you notice an account that appears to be consistently pattern-matching to this, and have a minute to let us know, we'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, but we do monitor the inbox closely (including fishing through the spam bin for real users) and we take these reports seriously.
Karmafarming and then astroturfing?
There should be a way to specify a negative tip.
If enough of us start doing this, it has a chance of applying some back pressure, although unfortunately that force acts through the poorly-paid checkout operator who doesn't directly have the option to influence decisions.
0% is easy to calculate.