Cash decision: Is the American tipping system out of control? (photo credit: Sam Dan Truong)
Just tell me how much it costs – America’s pricing curse
By David Whitley
America – land of Edison and Ford, Gates and Jobs – is an undeniably incredible place of invention and innovation. The nation has given countless gifts to the world, whether the GPS, the microwave or Levi 501s.
There is, however, a dark secret behind its love of the new - that it will only embrace homegrown innovation. Anything from overseas is treated with the utmost suspicion, and rarely adopted. Hence the US still uses feet, miles and fluid ounces, while everywhere else has correctly decided that the metric system makes much more sense.
This very much applies to the shopping experience, where visitors to the US are still expected to sign for credit card purchases nearly two decades after Chip and PIN technology was rolled out elsewhere. More infuriating, however, is the stubbornly insane American approach to pricing.
In the UK, and indeed much of the world, if the price next to a bottle of water is £1, you’ll pay £1 for it. In the States, you need a perfect memory of all state, county and city sales taxes wherever you’re standing, then mentally add it to the price on the sticker. Advocates of this utterly needless faff, usually the sort who’ll curiously not mention slavery when saying the Civil War was about states’ rights, insist that this is a good thing. It’s apparently important for everyone to know how much of the cost is taxation.
This may be the case for people who abhor public spending on anything except the military, but for most of us, just knowing how much something costs probably takes precedence. Make the price tax-inclusive, and list the amount of tax in a smaller font if it helps the libertarian manbabies. Adding the taxes, however, is merely part one of what is becoming a merciless barrage of extra payments. Tip creep has got to the point where we can expect to be gaslighted into tipping an automated check-out machine.
The part of the world that doesn’t think metres are a communist plot generally accepts that wages are between employee and employer. It’s a cost of business. The customer really shouldn’t have to worry about how much the person serving them is getting paid. Customers pay a business for a service. The business pays the employees providing that service.
Not in the US which, as ever, knows best in the face of all available evidence. Here, the customer should pay the employee directly, and at an ever-increasing rate. 10% has crept to 15% then 20%, while the number of the army of people and inanimate objects that require tipping has expanded like a burst dam across a floodplain.
In bars, the old standard of a dollar per drink is now seen as an insult, while hotels are a minefield of flying banknotes. All guides to how much you should give bellhops, concierges, maids and valet parkers are rendered untrustworthy by those strange people who turn up in comment sections boasting about how large a tip they always leave. These rampant overpayers are, without fail, the sorts who would normally boast about knowing how to get a good deal and secretly think the homeless should be shot.
The tipping system, and eternal fear of looking cheap, has conned Americans into accepting ever more ludicrous additions to the advertised price. Mandatory hotel resort fees, ostensibly for providing a package of stuff that should come as standard, are a blatant scam. The same applies to restaurants adding extra charges to cover employees’ healthcare. Just put the price up, you chancers.
The most powerful nation on earth has been gulled into coming up with ever-more convoluted justifications for this obviously mendacious nonsense. And for the visitor, it is so, so tiresome. The hapless European just wants to know how much something costs, without having to do the mental arithmetic or end up whacking another 30-40% on the supposed price tag. Alas, this sort of bold innovation is not American. It is essential, therefore, that it is rejected in the strongest possible terms.
David Whitley is a UK-based travel writer who works for whoever pays him. He also runs road trip planning site Best3Stops and Down Under travel advice site Australia Travel Questions. Twitter: @mrdavidwhitley
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