More than a fifth of British restaurant diners are refusing to pay optional service charges as the country hits a “tipping point” when it comes to tipping. The “national penchant for avoiding fuss” has “finally met its match” in the form of a “sneaky” 12.5% that is now “routinely added to the bill”, wrote Hannah Twiggs in the Independent.
Ethical gymnastics
This has become “literally the tipping point” at which eating out in the UK becomes an “exercise in ethical gymnastics” and a growing number of restaurant guests – 34% in the South West – are “courageously” turning against paying optional service charges.
Although the rising cost of living “may be the reason for this new-found frugality”, the tipping culture in the UK “has always been a bit like Marmite” and almost half of us would prefer to “tip at our own discretion” without being pressured into a “mandatory but supposedly optional task”, as the proposed fee puts it.
“I would prefer that restaurants where the service was poor did not automatically charge a service charge,” Sathnam Sanghera said in the Times. The tipping culture in Britain has become “as crazy as America,” where baristas ask for tips “even if you’ve ordered a takeaway coffee.” In one case, a patient in a private British hospital was asked “if he wanted to tip the nurse who had just done a blood test on him.”
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“The UK’s service charge and its implementation are mired in confusion and controversy,” wrote Clare Finney for The Telegraph. And unlike Americans, who “typically pay 20 percent,” many Britons are “less comfortable” with it.
But customers across the pond are also becoming “a little stingier,” according to NBC News. The number of American adults who say they always tip has dropped by eight percentage points since 2021.
Guilty obligation
“The reality is that most – in fact almost all – restaurants” use the service charge “to top up wages to a reasonable salary,” Kitty Slydell-Cooper of Countertalk, a UK-based community and recruitment platform for hospitality workers, told Finney.
So if customers “try to save money by eliminating the fee, then the hard-working people who provided their food would simply not be paid enough.”
There is often confusion about whether tips go to staff or are kept by management. In October, new laws come into effect that will make it legally mandatory that all service charges go directly to staff.
But will restaurant owners find loopholes in the reform? “I tip even though I know the person serving me is on a low wage” and because I “can’t stand confrontation,” Sophie Morris wrote for i news. But now there’s a fee she may “not want to pay.”
A few months ago, dim sum chain Ping Pong abolished its service charge and replaced it with a 15 percent “brand fee,” which Morris said was “invented so that customers could continue to fund their wages through the service charge.” However, Ping Pong pointed out that it pays its employees a pound more than the national minimum wage.
If the trend of customers withholding service charges continues, hospitality staff, who “will be taking home more money once the new tipping law comes into force,” may find their increase “is less than expected as some consumers retain tips and service charges for exceptional service,” said Saxon Mosely, head of leisure and hospitality at RSM UK.
Eating out “should be a pleasure, not a guilt-ridden obligation,” Twigg wrote, and so “perhaps one day we will all look back on the service charge as a quaint relic of a bygone era” – like “smoking in restaurants or eel in aspic.”
