Put the screen down and no one gets hurt. | Photo: Shutterstock
We’ve all been there. You just paid for a sandwich, a coffee or a cup of soup at a restaurant counter, and the employee flips the ordering tablet around to face you.
“It’s just going to ask you a few questions,” they say. Your heart sinks a little.
What had been a perfectly pleasant, frictionless interaction has suddenly become a mini moral crisis: To tip or not to tip? For the customer, there is often no right answer.
Add a tip, and you compound a bill that already felt a little too high, in exchange for something that, at times, required little to no effort on the worker’s part. Decline, and you feel cheap and judged, both by the employee and anyone else in eyeshot, including your own dining companions.
This is exactly the sort of friction that restaurants constantly say they are trying to remove from the ordering process. It’s become gospel that transactions should be fast, seamless, pain-free. And yet the digital tip screen has been allowed to run rampant at checkouts across the industry.
Once reserved for cafes, bars and full-service restaurants, tipping is now an expectation at almost every kind of establishment, from large fast-food chains to farmers market stands.
This is in part due to rapidly rising labor costs in the wake of the pandemic. Getting pushier with tips was a way for operators to boost wages without any additional investment on their part. And the latest technology allowed them to do this almost without thinking. Before the proliferation of credit card payment and digital POS systems, the ability for non-full-service restaurants to even ask for a tip was more limited. Touchscreen tablets changed all that.
Five years removed from the COVID tipping point (see what I did there?), consumers have had enough. According to a survey from tech provider Popmenu, 65% of consumers say they’re fed up with tipping, up from 60% last year and 53% in 2023.
It comes as restaurants are searching for ways to improve the customer experience, in part by easing up on technology that stands between them and their guests. This has led to widespread backlash against QR codes, for insance. But digital tip screens should have been the first thing to go.
While QR codes are just annoying, the problems with digital tip screens are more insidious. There’s the implicit moral test, as outlined above, which often means that an otherwise positive interaction will end on an awkward or sour note.
There’s also the pressure on the customer to make a quick decision, lest they hold up the line. Often, this has the intended effect: The person acquiesces with a tip just to get the whole thing over with. But consider a situation in which the customer would like to tip, but feels too rushed to calculate the desired amount—for instance, if they’ve used a coupon or gift card to get a discount, but want to tip based on the original subtotal. Who has time, in that scenario, to do that kind of math?
Here’s the bigger problem: Automatically prompting a customer to tip undercuts the very purpose of tipping, which is to incentivize employees to provide good service. Why should a worker go above and beyond when consumers now feel almost obligated to tip them?
Indeed, it’s not difficult to understand why restaurants are doing this: It works. According to the PopMenu study, 44% of consumers tip at places where they don’t think it’s warranted at least once a week, and 66% feel pressure to tip when digital screens suggest an amount, especially in front of employees. Another 64% said they’d tipped a worker even when they received bad service.
At the same time, those very numbers make it abundantly clear that tipping has overstepped its bounds within the social contract, in part due to those ubiquitous screens.
But I’m not just here to complain. I have a few solutions. The first one is simple: Bring back the tip jar.
The tip jar is a beautiful thing. It upholds the concept that tipping is voluntary. The act of putting money in the tip jar allows the customer to exercise their generosity in a highly visible way. And in a world of screens, it’s charmingly analog.
Sure, the jar only accepts cash. And someone does have to count and distribute that cash at the end of the shift. But that doesn’t mean there can’t also be a digital element. Slap a QR code on that thing and allow people to tip at their leisure. (How ironic that the death of one piece of restaurant tech should lead to the resurrection of another.)
Better yet, put a QR code at the table or on the receipt that allows customers to tip in private and at their own pace. That will do a better job of ensuring that employees are actually earning their tips rather than trafficking in customer guilt.
Another obvious fix: Raise prices and use the extra margin to pay employees more. But restaurants don’t deserve to be browbeat on that point. Restaurant wages rose 40% from March 2020 to March 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That, combined with skyrocketing food cost inflation, has already led to significant menu price increases that are causing major traffic problems.
The industry is in a very tough spot, and there are no easy answers here. But for many restaurants, the winning formula has been to simplify their operations and improve their value proposition. This makes employees happier and gives customers a better overall experience. Customers will keep returning to restaurants that do those things, even if they have to spend a little more.
I can think of one small way to move that strategy forward: Sending those digital tip screens to the scrap heap.
