Slate - Cabs in New York City used to accept payment exclusively in cash, and tipping was governed by informal norms. Then they installed touchscreens that display advertorial content and also facilitate credit card payment. When you pay with a card, you can manually enter a tip number or you can select one of three default options, and Joshua Gross notes that the defaults make an enormous difference: During payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%. Those three buttons resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips. Per year. Those are some very valuable buttons.
This tipping of cab-drivers thing has always driven me nuts. You know what my tip for the cab driver is? Rounding to the nearest $5 in whatever I'm paying him. If I owe $22.15, he gets $25...that's it. Yea, on occasion if its like $24 and change, I'll toss in a couple of singles, but otherwise, what am I tipping for? I don't tip bus drivers and subway conductors, do I?
I hired this guy to drive me from point A to Point B. You've agreed to charge me a set rate...that's what you're getting paid. If that's not enough then work to raise the rates. Plain and simple. Short of defying the laws of time and space and teleporting me to my destination, there's not much a cab driver can do to make me go out of my way to tip them extra...they're certainly not making up for it with their conversation skills.
In fact, I think that'd be a good rule for our society as a whole going forward, just charge me what you think is fair. Don't make me sit here and think about how much the service I just bought from you should cost, I'm already paying you, you do the work. And don't hide or re categorize charges as fees or whatever bullshit term you want to come up with, just tell me the frigen price. Bottom line it for me.
Like I stayed at Foxwoods a couple months back...the listed room price was one price, the final bill was another entirely, with random tax charges, and something called a resort fee! Honestly guys, what the fuck is that?! How is that not part of the room fee? Is it optional? If I agree not to go to the pool or get massage or something because I'll be spending the next 24 hours drinking and gambling can I get out of it? No. No, I can't. So put it up front in the original charge. Fucking crooks.
There's plenty more. Delivery charges for takeout food...safe to say if you're charging me for delivery, I'm not tipping your driver more than $2, and that's just because I feel like a dick when I go to the door and don't give him anything. But to me the delivery charge is the tip. I don't feel so much as I'm being taken here, as this needs to get more publicity and become a social norm. I feel like not enough people pay attention to this. People, if you're charged a delivery charge, its the same thing as when a restaurant automatically includes 20% gratuity for large parties. You're under no obligation from that point forward.
Lets keep going. Meals tax on snacks. What the hell guys. If I buy a snickers bar downstairs at our cafe, I shouldn't be charged 6.25% more than if I buy it upstairs in the vending machine. Same goes for my Vitamin Water-Zero. This is just asinine. Same company, same building, different room, different charges.
Rolling right along...Convenience charges when buying tickets online, when I PRINT THE TICKETS MYSELF...my ink, my paper, your convenience. I get it if I'm having them mailed to me, hell, I'd get it if I picked them up at the box office since that requires you have staff present. I will never for the life of me understand how the fuck these guys get away with charging me for printing my own tickets. This is the most confounding racket going today. And they get you both ways, coming and going! Because if you decide you're going to turn around sell your ticket, say on stub-hub, you get hit with a selling charge. A percentage of your profits...So not only did you pay above face value for your tickets, but now, when you go to sell them, you have virtually no chance of recouping your money, because even if you charge the $10 or so above face value that you paid for your tickets (because of the fucking inconvenience fee), you've still go to give back a portion of those profits for stub hub acting as your broker. IT'S ALL A SCAM...You cannot win when it comes to buying event tickets.
That's all I got for now, but this could easily become a regular installment. Bottom line, all I want is for places to just start pricing things for what they actually cost, no more hidden fees, no more service charges after the fact, and make those goddamn convenience fees illegal. I'm not cheap, I'm perfectly happy paying what I owe, I just like to know what that is.
