The Yoco card terminal has turned a routine purchase into a decision machine. An iced coffee costing R46 now arrives with a built-in prompt: a suggested tip of 10, 15 or 20 percent, or a custom amount, and a bar at the bottom that must be actively pressed to cancel the tip altogether.
The operational wrinkle is what happens when the customer does nothing. Wave a card or phone over the terminal without making a choice, and the system rounds the bill up to R50, an increase of 8.7 percent. The technology, in effect, awards itself a tip on the customer’s behalf. The writer behind this week’s column, a self-described tea drinker who orders an iced coffee every couple of weeks while waiting at a car wash, has learned to hit the blue “No Tip” button, a control designed, in the writer’s view, to make declining feel like wrenching coins from a starving person’s dying grasp.
The column, published under The Citizen’s #TwoBits banner and originating with The North Coast Courier, asks whether tipping culture has gone too far. The practical trigger is the checkout flow itself: order at the counter, wait a few minutes, receive the coffee, then face the terminal and its pre-loaded choices.
Public opinion on the practice is divided. Last week the Courier posed the question on Facebook, asking what people think about tipping and how much they give. The majority of respondents support tipping of 10 to 20 percent. Some said they tip only for good service, while a minority objected to tipping altogether. Others argued that employers should pay a decent wage and that customers should not be expected to subsidise them.
The legal framework matters here too. In the United States, it is the writer’s understanding that restaurant owners are not obliged to pay a minimum wage, and tips are expected to make up waiters’ wages. South African labour law stipulates the opposite: restaurant owners should pay at least minimum wage, and tips cannot be counted towards that minimum. The writer argues that the South African debate is heavily influenced by social media and its bias toward American values.
By contrast, tipping customs vary widely across the world. In Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Scandinavia, tips are not expected, though not rejected. In the US and Canada, 15 to 20 percent is common, and an American bill can swell with city and state taxes on top, sometimes plus a service charge.
The economics of tipping do not hold up cleanly under scrutiny. One study found a positive but relatively weak relationship between service quality and tip size, weak enough to question tips as a dependable measure of staff performance. Percentage-based tipping also produces inconsistencies: carrying a R1 000 bottle of wine does not necessarily require five times the work of carrying a R200 bottle, yet a fixed-percentage tip is five times as large. Tipping customs, in other words, do not form a consistent scale of how hard people work or how valuable their service is.
The central distinction the writer draws is between explaining the custom and justifying it. A waiter can reasonably anticipate tips where they are established practice, while a customer can reasonably question why staff remuneration is not fully reflected in the advertised price. Economically, customers fund staff costs either way, whether through the restaurant’s prices, a service charge, a tip, or some combination. The disagreement is largely about whether that payment should be transparent and predictable, or discretionary and dependent on each customer.
There are practical frictions on the cash side as well. The writer tips car guards R5, but in an increasingly cashless society, who carries cash? That leaves notes, and while parting with a rhino or an elephant might be acceptable, a lion or a buffalo is out of the question.
For the writer, the delivery standard remains personal and simple: a smile and cheerful service will earn a decent tip, while a grumpy waitron can go fish. Whether the terminal’s pre-loaded prompts will reshape that standard, or simply train customers to press the blue button faster, remains to be seen.