You just wanted a bagel. Now you're in an ethical standoff with a teenager and an iPad asking for 25%. How did it come to this?
In Reader’s Digest’s new series “Is It Really Rude to…,” Charlotte Hilton Andersen tackles low-stakes etiquette questions from everyday life using a combination of her common sense and vast knowledge from writing 50-plus etiquette stories for this site. Have a situation you can’t stop ruminating on? Email us at [email protected], or message Charlotte on Instagram at @charlottehiltonandersen.
It was my friend Jill’s birthday, and I wanted to treat her to her favorite thing in the world: shaved ice. In the middle of January. In Colorado. (I don’t question it anymore.) She ordered the piña colada Hawaiian-style, which, for the uninitiated, means someone shovels crushed ice into a cup, drowns it in artificial food coloring and pours sweetened condensed milk on top while you watch. At the counter, I tapped my card to pay, and then the inevitable happened: The worker spun the screen around, flashed me a bright smile and waited. The options stared back at me: 18%, 20%, 25%.
For pouring syrup on snow.
Was I really expected to tip a worker 25% just for, you know, doing their job? But then again, their job does involve shoving their hands into ice multiple times a day while reciting ingredient lists like some weird reality-show contest—for minimum wage. Also, it was Jill’s birthday, and if I was being generous with her, shouldn’t I just … be generous?
I decided to tip. I located the little “custom amount” button, put in $1 and spent the entire drive home wondering if that made me generous, stingy or just hopelessly confused about what tipping is even for anymore. It used to be so simple: Toss your change in the jar, feel good about yourself, move on. But somewhere between the pandemic and the invention of the iPad payment system, the whole thing went completely sideways. Now tip screens are everywhere—coffee shops, bagel counters, food trucks, gas stations—and every single one of them wants 20%. There’s actually a word for it now: tipflation. Which sounds made up but is unfortunately very real. It is everywhere, and it has made otherwise normal people (hi, it’s me) spiral into a genuine ethical crisis while just trying to get morning coffee.
So let’s settle this once and for all: Is it actually rude to skip the tip screen? Or have we all just been quietly guilt-tripped into tipping for things that never required a tip in the first place?
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The case against tipping at the counter
Look, I am a good tipper at sit-down restaurants. Like, embarrassingly good. I was a server for a decade—everywhere from fancy steakhouses to a Wild West–themed restaurant where I had to wear an itchy costume—and that kind of tipping makes total sense to me. Your server memorized the specials, refilled your water glass six times without being asked and diplomatically handled the moment my son announced he going vegan immediately, at a steakhouse (true story). More important, they get paid a tipped minimum wage (also known as minimum food wage) that in many states is still sitting at $2.13 an hour. They earn that tip.
But here’s where I start to lose the plot (and my patience): the bagel place.
I have a deeply complicated relationship with tipping at my local bagel spot, and I know I’m not alone because I have complained about it to literally every person I know. The worker picks up a bagel with tongs. They slice it. They scoop cream cheese out of a tub and spread it on said bagel. This takes approximately 45 seconds and requires the skill level of, and I say this with love, a reasonably coordinated third grader. And yet there it sits: the tip jar, gaping at me like a little guilt hole, waiting to swallow my dollar bills and my dignity.
Which brings me to the tip screen specifically—and yes, it is worse than the jar. With a tip jar, there’s beautiful anonymity. You simply don’t reach into your wallet, and nobody knows what happened. But the screen is a confrontation. It’s theater. You have to actively select “No Tip”—which might as well say “I am a bad person and I know it”—or hunt for the custom-amount button as the worker pretends to look somewhere else but is absolutely watching, the line behind you grows, now your blood pressure is up, and is the coffee even worth it anymore?
The case for tipping anyway
OK. Deep breath. Because my friends Meg and Sarah, who both worked in food service for years, would like to have a word.
“The wages are not what people think they are,” Meg told me when I ranted about this. And she’s right. Yes, counter workers at coffee shops and bagel places are generally paid above the tipped minimum wage—sometimes they’re making $15 or $16 an hour. But that is not, in most American cities, a living wage. It is barely a surviving wage. These workers are on their feet for hours, dealing with rushed morning crowds, complicated orders (“Oat milk, extra hot, one pump of vanilla, can you make sure it’s actually extra hot this time?”) and customers who are, let’s face it, often not their best selves before their first cup of coffee.
And some of these jobs are genuinely harder than they look. A skilled barista who can pull a perfect espresso shot and steam milk to exactly the right temperature while managing a six-deep line during the 8 a.m. rush has honed a real craft. That is different from the person who slapped cream cheese on my everything bagel (again, still not over it), but it’s worth acknowledging that “counter service” covers a pretty wide spectrum of actual effort.
Do workers notice when you don’t tip? I asked around, and the honest answer is: yes, sometimes. “You remember the regulars who tip and the regulars who don’t,” Sarah told me. “I don’t treat them differently. But I notice.” Which is fine! That’s human! Nobody is obligated to be a robot about money. But it’s also worth knowing that pressing “No Tip” is not the invisible act we might wish it to be.
The backlash against the tip screen
For some people, pressing “No Tip” isn’t rudeness—it’s a political statement. And I get it. According to a 2023 Pew Research survey, 72% of Americans said tipping was now expected in more places than it was five years ago, and the frustration has only grown since. A 2024 Talker Research survey found the average American was spending $453 a year in what researchers delightfully termed “guilt-induced gratuity,” tipping more than they wanted to on an average of 6.3 occasions per month. The good news (if you can call it that) is that by 2025, that number had dropped to $283, meaning that Americans are finally, albeit quietly, getting braver about saying no. That’s progress, I guess? But perhaps the most telling stat from the 2025 survey is that 78% of us now think businesses should just pay their employees a living wage instead of passing on the moral and economic burden to whoever’s standing across from the register.
“It’s not about the employees—of course they deserve a real livable wage,” says my friend Jacob. “It’s about the fact that we, the customers, are funding those wages instead of the ones who are supposed to be paying them: the employers. I can tip, but I’m not going to, because ultimately I’m just subsidizing a second vacation home for some multimillionaire CEO.”
Jacob has a point. Tipping was originally designed to reward exceptional service, not to quietly paper over the gap between what employers pay and what workers actually need to survive. When businesses adopted iPad payment systems en masse—especially after COVID, when “tip generously, these workers are heroes” became a genuine cultural norm—many of them never walked it back. The hardware stayed. The tip prompts stayed. The expectation stayed. And now, with everyone watching their spending more carefully thanks to inflation and economic anxiety at a rolling boil, that little screen asking for 25% on your bagel starts to feel less like a friendly suggestion and more like straight-up extortion.
So what are the rules about tip screens, really?
Here’s where I land after way too much time thinking about this (occupational hazard of writing an etiquette column, truly). In a poll of my social media followers, half said they tip sometimes depending on the day, the worker and their bank account, while the other half said they never tip at casual places (echoing Jacob’s thoughts about the ultra-wealthy). Literally zero people said they just tip every time. Here’s the consensus:
- Context matters enormously. There is a real difference between a locally owned craft coffee shop where a skilled barista is making you a genuinely complex drink and a chain deli where someone handed you a pre-made sandwich from a case. Both may have tip screens. They do not both necessarily warrant the same response.
- What you ordered matters. If someone made you a beautiful, elaborate, custom drink, tip them. They earned it. If you bought a bottle of water and a bag of chips at a convenience store and the checkout screen asks for a tip, you are under no moral obligation to comply.
- Peak hours matter. If you’re the ninth person in line on a Monday morning and the staff is moving at the speed of light to keep up, acknowledging that hustle with a dollar or two is a genuinely kind thing to do.
- Whether they went out of their way matters. Did they remember your order? Spell your name right without asking? Throw in an extra cookie? Tip them more. Did they ring you up while staring at their phone? Tip them less, or not at all, and feel fine about it.
- The jar vs. the screen doesn’t matter. Morally, they’re the same thing. Don’t let the theatrical guilt of an audience-facing button bully you into tipping when the situation genuinely doesn’t call for it.
The verdict
No, it is not rude to skip the tip screen at a coffee counter—with some very important asterisks. Skilled barista, complex drink, small local shop? Tip them, even just a dollar or two. Pre-packaged item, transaction requiring no real labor, convenience store checkout prompt? Press “No Tip” without conducting a full moral inventory of your soul.
The real villain here isn’t the customer who skips the tip jar. It’s a system that has decided that individual consumer guilt is a reasonable substitute for paying workers a living wage. We shouldn’t need to make up the difference at the bagel counter. Workers shouldn’t have to depend on the charity of customers for basic financial stability. And none of us should have to spend this much mental energy on a transaction that takes less than a minute, but yet, here we all are. Until the system changes—and I am not holding my breath—tip generously when it’s earned, tip modestly when it’s ambiguous and skip it guilt-free when it’s clearly a cash grab.
Yet, I still think about that $1 tip sometimes—whether it was too little, too much or just the wrong move. And that, more than anything, is the real problem with the tip screen: It has turned a minor financial transaction into an identity crisis. You deserve better. So do I. So does Jill, frankly, who just wanted some shaved ice and ended up as the centerpiece of an etiquette column.
(Jill, if you’re reading this: Happy birthday. I tipped. That’s love.)
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Source:
- Pew Research Center: “Tipping Culture in America: Public Sees a Changed Landscape”
- Talker Research: “Americans are guilt tipping much less in 2025”
- Talker Research: “Tipflation: Americans spend nearly $500 a year tipping more than they’d like to”
