Americans Say Tipping Has Become Too Much To Keep Up With, New Survey Finds A Growing Backlash

There is a tiny moment in the checkout process that has somehow become one of the most awkward parts of buying something in America. You have your coffee, your food, your haircut, or whatever else you came for. The transaction should be over, but ironically, the screen turns toward you and asks how much you would like to tip. Now a perfectly ordinary purchase comes with a decision attached. There are buttons to press, percentages to consider, and sometimes a conspicuously small option for saying no. It can feel like the machine itself is waiting for an answer. And because the whole thing happens in a matter of seconds, there is barely enough time to decide what feels reasonable before the payment needs to go through. Tipping was never supposed to be this complicated. In the traditional version of the arrangement, the idea was that someone provided a service, you decided whether their work deserved something extra, and you left a gratuity accordingly. But somewhere along the way, tipping stopped being confined to a handful of familiar situations and became a much more visible part of everyday spending. Now, something interesting is happening. The conversation around tipping is changing, and the people on the other side of those screens are starting to look at the practice differently. A new survey offers a glimpse into just how much that relationship may have shifted, and why the seemingly harmless tip prompt has become such a surprisingly loaded part of paying for things. SpotOn POS / Pexels (not the actual photo) Ian Mikraz / Unsplash It is easy to assume that tipping has simply always been part of American life. Restaurants have menus, servers have tip jars, and payment terminals have little screens asking whether you'd like to leave 18%, 20% or 25%. It can seem as though the system has existed forever. However, it hasn't. Tipping has a much more complicated history in the United States, and its development is closely connected to America's history of race, labor, and inequality. Tipping practices existed in Europe before they became widespread in the United States, and Americans initially had a strange relationship with the custom. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tipping was controversial in some parts of the country, with critics arguing that it encouraged a servant-like relationship between customers and workers. The broader legacy is important because it shows that tipping was never simply a cheerful tradition of rewarding good service. It developed alongside complicated ideas about who performed service work, how much that work was worth and who was responsible for paying for it. And just like that, it was normalized that the customer is often expected to participate in the worker's compensation. In much of the economy, the price of a service is supposed to cover the cost of providing it. You pay a plumber, mechanic or lawyer an agreed-upon amount. The employee's wage is the employer's responsibility. Tipping creates a different arrangement in which part of the final amount can depend on a customer's decision after, or sometimes before, the service. And that is the system Americans are now reconsidering. Most-Significance910 / Reddit The modern tipping debate might look very different without one small piece of technology: the digital payment terminal. A tip jar requires a customer to make an active decision to put money into it. A digital checkout screen can make tipping a built-in stage of the transaction. Think about it. A customer buys something, the employee turns around the screen, the screen asks for a tip, suggested percentages appear, then the customer chooses one, or hunts around for the button that says no tip. That may sound like a minor technological change, but research suggests that the way those options are presented can affect what people actually do. A 2026 study in the International Journal of Hospitality Management examined more than 5,000 transactions and found that showing suggested tip percentages alongside their dollar equivalents increased both the likelihood of tipping and the amount customers left. Other research into digital tipping has found that suggested defaults can influence customer behavior as well. A study using New York City taxi transactions found that changing the suggested default percentages affected customers' choices, including how often they selected the suggested amount versus entering their own. This creates a peculiar situation. A tip is technically voluntary, but the customer can still feel as though they are being asked to justify not leaving one. That feeling has become particularly noticeable as tip prompts have spread beyond traditional tipped jobs. And once customers started seeing the same percentages everywhere, an old question became much harder to avoid: what exactly are we tipping for? Jason Rojas / Unsplash (not the actual photo) This is where the new Popmenu survey becomes especially revealing. The study, conducted among 1,000 American consumers aged 18 and older, found that nearly 80% describe modern tipping practices as ridiculous, while 44% say they are tipping less than they did the previous year. In fact, the pullback is particularly visible in restaurants as thirty-five percent of consumers say they have reduced their restaurant tips. Grocery delivery comes next at 24%, while hotel staff, taxi and ride services, and auto repair each stand at 19%. Hair salons and barbers come in at 18%. That list is revealing because it shows that consumers aren't thinking about tipping as one single thing anymore. A restaurant server and a grocery delivery driver provide very different services. A hotel housekeeper has a different relationship with a guest than a taxi driver does. An auto mechanic is paid for skilled technical work that traditionally has not been structured around gratuities in the same way restaurant service has. Yet the customer can encounter a tip request in all of these situations. queencitymotors The survey also found that 36% of diners now choose a custom tip instead of one of the suggested amounts. When a digital screen asks for a tip, 59% say they feel compelled to leave one, down from 66% in September 2025. That decline is worth paying attention to as it suggests that the discomfort isn't necessarily about generosity itself. People may still want to reward good service, however, what seems to be changing is the assumption that the customer should automatically participate. The other Popmenu findings tell a similar story. 39% of consumers say they tip at coffee shops, down from 46% in September 2025. 41% say they tip restaurant servers 20% or more, down from 45%. Tipping at food trucks fell from 32% to 27%, while fast-food tipping declined from 27% to 22%. The share tipping restaurant delivery drivers 20% or more fell from 23% to 15%. Meanwhile, suggested tip screens can start at 18% or 20%, making the old idea of leaving a modest amount feel increasingly distant. There is an important distinction here, though. The survey does not show that Americans have stopped tipping. Far from it. It shows people becoming more selective, and that may ultimately be more consequential than a simple collapse in average tip percentages. i_mouth_my_platypus / Reddit One of the easiest ways to understand how unusual the American system can feel is to leave the United States. In Japan, tipping is generally not part of ordinary restaurant and service culture. A customer is normally expected to pay the stated price rather than calculate an additional gratuity for the person who served them. In Australia and New Zealand, tipping exists, but it is not generally as deeply embedded in everyday restaurant transactions as it is in the United States. Workers' wages and service prices operate differently, meaning customers are not routinely expected to supplement a worker's income with a percentage of every bill. Parts of Europe have their own systems. In France, for example, restaurant prices generally include service, although customers may still leave something extra. In Italy, diners may encounter a coperto or service-related charge on a bill, which is another example of how restaurants can incorporate service costs without relying entirely on the American model of voluntary gratuity. South Korea is another interesting case. Tipping has not traditionally been an expected part of ordinary transactions, although practices can vary and international tourism has introduced new influences. None of this means that these countries have solved the question of how service workers should be compensated. They simply demonstrate that there is no universal tipping system. Different societies have simply made different decisions about who pays for service, how workers are compensated, and whether gratuity should be expected or optional. That makes America's current tipping debate less about whether tipping is inherently good or bad and more about whether the system Americans have built still makes sense for the way people actually buy things. Brett Wharton / Unsplash (not the actual photo) Tipping culture becomes even more interesting when you look at the small rules that exist around it. In some places, the safest assumption is to leave nothing unless a tip is explicitly appropriate. In others, rounding up a bill is common. Even within countries, expectations can change depending on the industry. The United States has effectively created its own complicated collection of these customs. There are rules about how much to leave a server, whether to tip a bartender per drink, what to give a hotel housekeeper, how much to add for delivery, and whether a salon appointment warrants a percentage. lexixon212 / Reddit Then there are the modern gray areas. Should you tip when you order at a counter but take the food yourself? What about a self-service kiosk? What about a food truck? What about picking up an order that someone else prepared? What about an expensive bottle of wine? What about a mechanic? There is no single answer because the culture is changing faster than the etiquette rules can keep up. The result is what might be called tip ambiguity. Customers aren't necessarily opposed to rewarding people. They simply don't know where the old boundaries are anymore, and that uncertainty is part of why the little digital screen can feel so loaded. RDNE Stock project / Pexels (not the actual photo) A customer can appreciate a server's work and still question a 25% default. Someone can value a delivery worker and still decide that the amount suggested by an app is too high. Someone can enjoy their coffee and still wonder why buying it now requires a gratuity. That distinction could shape what happens next. Businesses have several options. They can continue using traditional tipping and allow customers to decide, or they can make tip prompts less aggressive. They can introduce service charges and explain exactly where the money goes, or they can raise wages and prices while eliminating gratuities. They can also experiment with combinations of these approaches. Technology could also play a role in making the system more transparent. Instead of simply asking if customers would like to tip, payment systems could make it clearer whether a business already includes a service charge, whether workers receive the gratuity and what the suggested amount is based on. naomicolquhoun / Reddit That would not eliminate the disagreement over tipping, but perhaps it could eliminate some of the uncertainty. And maybe that is what Americans are really asking for. After years of increasingly sophisticated payment screens, higher suggested percentages and tip requests appearing in places where customers never expected them, people may not necessarily want a world without gratuity. They may simply want to know when it is expected, why it is expected, and who really benefits from it. America's tipping culture began as part of a much larger story about labor and compensation. It evolved into a deeply established part of restaurants and hospitality, then expanded into countless everyday transactions as technology made tip requests easier to present. Now the system has come full circle, and the question is no longer whether Americans know how to tip. They certainly do. The question is whether they still agree on when they should have to.