Feelings will be hurt, people will talk over each other, and no one goes on doing anything different than they did before.
Might as well as be debating tabs vs. spaces while we're at it.
Tipping is being fundamentally exploited as a way to make everything look cheaper.
You're free to calculate the tip however you like. Just because some junior programmer took the easy way out to make the math easier doesn't mean you have to along with it. I don't recall a digitized tip screen that didn't let me enter a custom amount.
For example, Square's documentation: https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5069-accept-tips-wit...
>You will need to select if you would like your tips to be added before or after your taxes have been applied to the sale.
I have kids, and I know they can be a pain for servers. If they handle my kids well (e.g. sitting us in a booth near a wall is better than a table in the middle of the room) and/or my kids make a mess, I'll leave a bigger tip. If they ignore is for more affluent looking customers, I'll leave a smaller tip. When I bring my kids, I'm not paying a sitter, so that money is up for grabs.
My wife and I will often order and give some to the kids instead of them having their own meal (they only pick at it anyway), so basing the tip on the bill isn't a very good way to do it. I also don't like to buy drinks (I don't drink alcohol and I prefer to avoid sugar), so my bill will always be way less than someone who goes all out.
The convention in the US is to compute the tip on the pre-tax amount. If the pre-tax price is $10, a 20% tip is $2 and 8% tax is $0.80, for a total of $12.80.
Now, some of this software has come along and tried to sneak in a change to the formula where the tip is computed on the post-tax amount. They take $10, add 8% tax to get $10.80, and then compute 20% of that for the tip, for a total of $12.96.
They have deceptively changed the tip rate from 20% to 21.6%.
Whether prices are listed tax inclusive or tax exclusive isn't the issue. Even with tax-inclusive pricing like Europe has, it still would have been possible to sneak in a change to the formula for computing the tip.
It's simply a bug. I got a suggested tip amount on a bar bill, the other day and it was clearly derived from the total of all the food and beverage, before taxes. It was all there in writing, and the figures were easy for me to check in my head.
Obviously this would indeed increase tip amount, but it would definitely decrease confusion and probably fix itself over the long run if the new tip amount was too big.
Minimum wage laws also applies to the pre-tip salary so it's not really expected most places unless you get exceptional service. I've never seen "pre-calculated" tips either here or elsewhere in Europe.
At the bottom of the menu it says something like "A discretionary service charge of 10% will be added to your bill [for groups of (4|5|6) or more]"
Then it ends up like this: https://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/28hfOrBSZ1SYPD--tlNU...
I don't like it; it makes the prices on the menu appear smaller than a competing restaurant.
On the middle one, you can see there are two different tax rates ("MOMS" = VAT), depending on the category of goods.
Here's one from Germany: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Aldi-Qui...
It also has two VAT rates (MwSt A and B), and each item is marked according to the rate. The yoghurt and müsli has a lower rate than the soft drinks and electronics.
Capitalism only work if both side of the transaction have the same information, that's how Stiglitz got his Nobel prize. (another US trope: collecting the Nobel prizes and never reading the papers)