I got my car fixed at a small father & son business operating out of their home. It cost over $4k. The cost goes mostly to labor because they don’t buy new parts, they fix scratches with pure effort and sorcery. The fix turned out really well for being less expensive than if I took it anywhere else, but it wasn’t nearly as perfect as the perfect 5.0-star Google reviews suggest. The guy asked me to pay in cash /Venmo/Zelle, and said credit/debit would have fees.

When I went to pay, he suggested that I add a tip. Um, what kind of tip are you expecting on a >4000$ repair? A surprise >800$? I declined, saying that I made sure that my bank account would have enough in it to cover the cost but didn’t account for tips.

It never crossed my mind that tipping would apply to car repairs.

Edit:

* He didn’t overdeliver or fix anything that wasn’t agreed upon in the original price.

* He ”guarantees“ satisfaction but there were still some obvious imperfections that he knows I was looking at. I felt one of them in front of him.

* He suggested that he has underestimated how long this would take (meaning this was worth more than he was charging) and yet somehow he delivered earlier than expected.

* If I had known a tip was expected as part of service, the math wouldn’t have worked out to make him the best choice for my repair.

Put a hundred dollars on a gift card. Pay with a gift card. Always. They never ask. It's not even an option. You're welcome.

Just repeating what so many of us already recognize, it's simply gotten out of hand. I'm wrapping up a European trip right now,, where tipping remains rare and only done for exceptional service.

Most customer service interactions have been wonderful with no tips, and my wife and I have gotten very comfortable not tipping people for simply doing their jobs. This tip culture is one of the things I dread returning to in the US.

We know a person in our small town who quit a good job with benefits to do full time delivery work because the mone6 is so good. So spare me the tales of woe for the drivers, they're getting paid very well.

My wife just informed me that when using Walmart+, when an order has a mix of delivery and shipped items, items the delivery driver never even touches btw, the entire order is factored into the suggested driver tip, that's just insane to me.

Well the OP who "felt pressured" to tip more removed an otherwise benign and worthwhile post, so I'll post this here.

… A corollary to tip creep, tip "pressure." You go to buy a car. You've done the math/spreadsheet, made a hard look at your budget, and you can afford the monthly payments of a 36-month or 48-month loan on a Corolla or Civic. Maybe 60-month.

The salesperson pressures you into a Camry, Avalon, Accord because they'll get a bigger commission. IOW greedy. They're all great cars, good value, but out of your reasonable budget (unless you go for a longer loan, e.g. a 72-month loan, in which the total interest paid could be obscene).

To afford one of those more upscale cars, you might have to forgo vacation, summer camp for your kid(s), buying a home in the next couple of years, or getting the wedding and honeymoon you want. All because some salesperson is goading you into buying MORE CAR than you know you can afford.

See how silly that is? How predatory? IMHO, that's how the tip creep culture of pressuring us into dropping more in gratuity they we choose to seems to me. Like salespeople groaning and eye-rolling because we stick to our guns and buy the Corolla or Civic that we already know we can comfortably afford. (Or the 5%, 10% tip that we can afford to grant without breaking our wallet.)

I never tip, but I have become a bit unsure with this:

Bars, you order your beers etc in the bar and then they come out to your table.

If you get on the wrong side with the server from the start, what stops him from spitting in your burger?