By Jessica Dickler -
CNBC
At Sweetly Bakery & Cafe in Battle Ground, near Portland, Oregon, customers seem less generous.
With inflation at record highs, and consumers increasingly strapped for cash,
tipping is no longer what it used to be.
"Since everything is more expensive, we have seen a decrease in tips," said owner Irina Sirotkina.
"We encourage people to tip, but it's not required, obviously," she added.
Like many other businesses, it uses a digital payment method that asks the customer to leave a tip when paying.
There are default options ranging from 15% to 25% for each transaction.
Although the average transaction is less than $20, and the tip would be a few dollars, fewer and fewer people are leaving anything.
"
Only one in five people leaves a tip
," Sirotkina calculates.
Don Ryan / AP
Although many citizens promised to tip more once business resumed after the COVID-19 pandemic, consumption habits have not changed much.
Etiquette experts say that tipping 20% in a restaurant is still the norm.
But there is less consensus when it comes to a coffee to go or a snack to go.
Tips, in general, have been roughly flat at quick-service restaurants, according to a recent Toast report on restaurant trends.
The average tip is 17%
, almost unchanged from a year ago.
Restaurant employees suffer reduction in their tips after almost two years of pandemic
March 2, 202201:40
When it comes to takeout, however, customers tip less, with an average 14.5% tip after rising early in the pandemic, this restaurant software provider found.
Other payment providers have also reported that
these tips fell in the last year.
Toast's rival Square, for example, found that the average tip at quick-service restaurants, which includes cafes and coffee shops, fell from 17.2% to 15.2% from March 2021 to the end of February, According to The Wall Street Journal.
"Part of it is tipping
fatigue
," said Eric Plam, CEO of San Francisco-based
startup
Uptip, which aims to make tipping easier without cash.
[Hispanic Restaurant Employees Rewarded $61,000 for Their Bosses Stealing Tips]
"During [the] COVID-19 [pandemic], everyone was shocked and generous," Plam said.
Now "you're starting to see
people backing off a little bit
," he said, especially at points of sale that encourage customers to tip before they've even received the product or service.
"This tip is what people resist the most. It forces you to tip right there," Plam said.
Workers need tips
Transactions are increasingly done electronically, but workers earn minimum wage or less, so having a method of tipping is critical, Plam added.
In fact,
the median wage for fast food and counter workers is $14.34 an hour
for full-time staff and $12.14 for part-time employees (including tips), according to the most recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A landmark bill in California seeks to raise the minimum wage to as much as $22 an hour for workers at fast-food and quick-service chains with more than 100 locations across the country.
The current minimum wage in California is $15.50 per hour.
[Seven out of 10 tipped workers are women. Raising the minimum wage would protect them]
President Joe Biden and many congressional Democrats have pushed for a wage floor of $15 an hour across the United States.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour
and has not changed since 2009.
"We're understanding, but it doesn't feel right," Plam said of point-of-sale tipping.
"Now that the pandemic is essentially over, it's starting to shake out," he added, "the good news is we're rethinking it."