The Tipping Backlash Has Begun

US: People are cutting back on tipping, frustrated by ubiquitous requests for gratuities.

As of November, service-sector workers in non restaurant leisure and hospitality jobs made $1.28 an hour in tips, on average, down 7% from the $1.38 an hour they made a year prior. The data is according to an analysis of 300,000 small and medium-size businesses by payroll provider Gusto.

The tipping slowdown is a gloomy development for all types of workers who rely on holiday tips as a chunk of their annual income. It reflects a broad frustration with the proliferation of tip requests at dry cleaners and bridal boutiques and even self-checkout machines that have sprung up since the pandemic.

Mary Medley, a Denver retiree who described herself to The Wall Street Journal in July as a unilaterally prolific tipper, is one of those who has become more discerning in recent months.

“It feels not as good to tip now that it’s popping up everywhere,” says Medley, 70 years old. “What started out to be a way to acknowledge excellent personal service feels like it’s become a way to help supplement worker compensation.”

There is a cost to the tipping slowdown, however, say economists and business owners. When people tip less, workers suffer, says Jonathan Morduch, a professor of public policy and economics at New York University.

“We’re in a situation where workers still want and expect and need tips to some degree,” Morduch says.

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Some businesses are raising worker pay in part as a response to lower gratuities.

Dan Moreno, founder of Miami-based Flamingo Appliance Service, says he has noticed a slowdown in customers leaving tips for their repair people since the Journal spoke with him in July. The average base wages for his techs have gone up about 10% since then, though he hasn’t eliminated the prompt from point-of-sale machines.

“I don’t know if that’s because customers are just over it. I’ll tell you, personally, I’m a little bit over it,” Moreno says of how his own tipping habits have changed over the past year.

Meanwhile, governments have started to get involved.

In October, Chicago became the second-largest U.S. city to vote to require tipped workers to make the full minimum wage. The full federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, while the federal tipped minimum wage many bar and restaurant workers earn is $2.13 an hour. Legislation to get rid of tipped minimums is moving in eight states and measures are on the ballot in an additional four, according to worker-advocacy organisation One Fair Wage.

“There’s an ongoing rejection of the whole system by both workers and consumers who have been increasingly pissed about it,” says Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley and president of One Fair Wage, an advocate for higher wages for restaurant workers.

Restaurant workers earned an average of $3.83 an hour in tips and overtime in November, according to technology company Square, up 8% from the previous year. Between November 2020 and November 2022, that amount rose 50% from $2.36 to $3.54 an hour.

While governments, workers and owners wrestle with what to do about tipping, consumers have embraced the humor in tipping’s massive expansion into so many parts of life. Jokes mocking tipping’s proliferation have spread on social-media sites. In one image, a police officer holds out a tablet with different tip options after giving someone a speeding ticket. In another, someone pretends to ask for a tip for letting a stranger pet her dog.

Garrett Bemiller, a 26-year-old who works in communications, started to question his standard practice of always leaving 20% after being asked for a tip at a self-serve checkout station at an OTG gift shop in New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport in April.

“We all know how absurd it is that it almost relieves some of that guilt in saying no,” he says.

He now always hits “No Tip” when he’s buying a black coffee—even when friends are watching.

Holiday tips

One area people might not cut back is tipping for the holidays.

Of the 2,413 U.S. adults surveyed by financial services company Bankrate, 15% said they planned to leave more-generous tips for workers including housekeepers, child-care workers, landscapers and mail carriers this year. About 13% said they planned to leave less.

Median amounts are so far up from last year across the six types of service providers Bankrate asked about.

“It seems that people view holiday tipping differently, perhaps because of the holiday spirit and also because of the regular interaction with many of these service providers,” Bankrate analyst Ted Rossman says.

Bemiller plans to give the super in his New York City building $100—not because he feels like he has to, but because he wants to.

“She helps me so much throughout the year and that tip seems genuinely justified,” he says.

It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.

On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.

The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.

Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.

“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.

“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”

Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Photo: NASA’s Artemis II SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft being rolled out at night. Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images

What are the goals for Artemis II?

The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.

The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.

Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.

SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .

How is the mission expected to unfold?

Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.

The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.

After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.

Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.

Water photo: NASA’s Orion capsule after its splash-down in the Pacific Ocean in 2022 for the Artemis I mission. Mario Tama/Press Pool

Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?

Yes.

For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.

Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?

The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.

Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.

Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.

Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.

What will the astronauts do during the flight?

The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.

Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.

On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.

There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.

Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.

The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.

What happens after Artemis II?

Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.

NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.

The Tipping Backlash Has Begun

As of November, service-sector workers in non restaurant jobs made 7% less in tips than a year ago

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Holiday tips

The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.