A most entertaining epistle 
and right on the money (I’m here all week….
).
But I’ve got this thing about tipping. I like to tip, be it hairdresser, bar-staff or actually a chap who’s done me a solid and who would welcome some walking around money admin-free.
When all the sensible stuff has been said - I want the option to do this.
Also, as bank branches close and take their free cash machines with them, it will make more sense for users of cash to withdraw larger amounts for a fixed fee.
And I get that and in some cases, it’s entirely appropriate. I notice though, tipping is becoming a subject for many whereby people have drastically reduced the amount they give for service, or they’re not bothering. I’ve fallen, sadly I guess, into the latter, whereby I now tend not to bother. Partly, National Minimum Wage is probably responsible because I know that clearly when one goes to a pub or restaurant, the staff are being paid properly anyway, well they are if it’s a national chain and some of those national chains are paying above NMW.
The other times I’ll never bother tipping, is when there’s a service charge on the table. For me, tipping then is never ever going to happen.
I’ve noticed the rather excellent local small coffee shop that my Wife and I frequent, well they’ve combatted negative tipping by simply raising the price of their coffee/food etc. People still go there and they’re usually very busy.
And clearly make them a huge target at the ATM for would be muggers. I haven’t used an ATM now for at least 3 months I think and I was nervous the last time I was using one. I may be 50 odd, but I can look after myself very well thank you, trouble is, people carry things these days they definitely shouldn’t and if in that situation, I’d just hand over what I had anyway.
I’d prefer this across the board, really.
Everybody gets paid a decent amount, payment is easy for the customer and merchant, and the feudal concept of tipping (which, when you think about it, originated as a kind of demeaning bribery to service staff - who couldn’t live off their woeful basic pay and were forced to always “go the extra mile” to “earn” a tip) could be consigned to history.
I know a lot of people don’t think of tipping negatively in that way, but ever since I read an article on the Atlantic website which equated tipping to the foundation of the American class system and fairly sinister “customer service” focus in the way it was ingrained in society it’s stuck with me. I think there’s something in it and it’s not fair to the people who you are tipping. The culture of it survives, though, because to be the one doing the tipping feels good. There is also evidence from Uber that the amount of a tip doesn’t correlate to service quality, so it’s not really a reward for good service either.
I don’t want to feel, as a consumer, obligated to pay a tip but I do also want the people who work in low-paid jobs to be fairly paid for hard work. A pay increase, with list prices simply higher to cover it, would be better.
And it would be fairer.
To take a restaurant as an example, there is a whole team of workers who contribute to a good customer experience. From the pot washer, trainee chefs etc. The only fair way to ensure that all are adequately recompensed is to pay them all a decent wage and to give them decent conditions of work.
I recently visited Germany and card acceptance is definitely on the rise in travel, supermarkets and (some) restaurants.
Interesting, that sounds like a much more manageable situation if you don’t routinely carry large amounts of Euros, but you are still going to need a fair amount of backup cash if restaurants don’t always take cards.
However, it still sounds like a massive change.
The barbers is the only time I use cash now, because they don’t take cards. I’d be quite happy if they did, to tell them to stick an extra quid or whatever on top as a tip, just as I add a tip when paying for a meal in a restaurant. Paying by card doesn’t preclude you from tipping.
You’re quite right, of course.
But I like the handing over of cash - it’s a personal thing and nothing to do with subservience.
I get that and, by the way, my comments before were in no way intended to be a criticism of people that like to tip in cash.
I just found the history of where tipping comes from and what it represents in a sense quite fascinating, and haven’t forgotten it since.
The whole US notion (which you flagged) of tipping being mandatory - because the poor sods serving you are on an artificially reduced wage because the tips are supposed to make it up - is hideous.
Agreed, and thankfully we don’t have that here so it’s a much more innocuous “something extra” rather than a fundamental unlisted part of the bill.
I also dislike how they deal with sales tax, as an aside, for similar reasons. Just make the list price what it actually costs!
I know PayM has never really caught on properly here, but in Sweden (which we keep hearing about as an exemplar almost-cashless country) they use their local version, Swish, all the time. I wonder if that could actually be the answer in the longer term, as cash goes away?
Certainly it would ensure the money went directly to the person you wanted it to, which can be an issue with card tips.
I don’t generally go to restaurants where you need a lot of cash euros 
and it is certainly a bit of a generational thing, and a “we don’t trust foreigners” thing. I went to a Bosnian cafe and the young-ish bloke running it took €20 on a machine for 2 meals, but the Greek restaurant up the road run by an old bloke, only took cash for a €50 bill for the same. Quite frequently you will be told the machine “only accepts EC-Karte” - their equivalent of Maestro/V-Pay and it is rubbish. The card machine will accept any card, they just fret about having the recompense someone for a stolen card.
As I pointed out above with the Netherlands, you get a shop that only accepts a Dutch issued Maestro card. No cash, no credit cards, not even Belgian or German issued Maestro cards either.
“Swish” is the same, there’s no way that a non-Swede can set up a Swish account presently (as the funds sent need to be sourced from a Swedish bank account). Swish users must have a second mobile application called Mobilt BankID Säkerhetsapp , which is an electronic identification issued only by banks in Sweden. This requires that the user has a bank account in a Swedish bank participating in the system, and also a national ID number. They need to search for a shop that accepts more than that. I am not a cardphobe - far from it, but I can see a situation developing where - on cost grounds alone. countries will develop a closed financial ecosystem that only allows non-nationals to do a limited amount of transactions, expensively, in a small range of costly establishments.
So if you quickly paid contactlessly or via Apple Pay, and it went through (perhaps by claiming to have an EC-Karte) you could actually pay by card. Difficult when they don’t default to turning on the card machine as is often the case here though.
Yes, and the Dutch online payment system iDEAL is also only available to a limited set of Dutch banks. It’s like an extremely limited version of Open Banking.
We are no better here, either, with PayM requiring a UK mobile number so you couldn’t register without both a British bank account and a British mobile number.
Things like PayPal offer a more international version of a similar thing, but nobody has quite cracked it yet.
I was quite surprised to see the stickers in my local barbers the other day when I passed.
Not only do they take cards, they take Amex too 
You’ll have to get a haircut next time Shop Small is on then!
If only I had hair, to take advantage of that deal 
I haven’t been for a haircut since the start of the first lockdown. Bought some decent Wahl clippers that were on offer at the time and have become quite proficient at cutting my own hair. Can even do fades 