You want to feel real great? Here's a question: do you always tip your hotel housekeeping? It's gotten harder over the last 10 years since we're carrying so much less cash, and there's no tip line on the hotel bill. But you are hella expected to tip housekeeping: that is a rough job, and a very poorly treated workforce.

I'm terrible at tipping and this is the one thing I do know. But –

It's next to impossible to get enough small bills to cover all the tipping you need to do on a vacation, between hotels and taxis, and other incidentals. ATMs typically spit out the local equivalent of USD$20s if you're lucky; US$100s if you're not. Who's going to make change for that?

At home this is less of a problem because (a) I don't have as many things to tip for, and (b) I have had time to save up small bills for tipping. But when first thrust into a foreign country you need to be PREPARED.

For your benefit, tipping is not as big a thing in other countries as it is in the US. For example, in Brazil it is regulated by consumer protection laws and you can either tip 10% or nothing, and this tip can only be added in places with table service (so not on fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, etc).

I know! It's a giant pain in the ass.

"Today I learned", except it was about a year ago when this discussion was last on HN.

I've spent about six months in the USA, mostly on family holidays and business travel, and never knew it was expected to tip housekeeping.

Pay the staff a decent wage, or at least a fair wage, then charge me accordingly.

How do I put a tip on my work expenses?

My employer's expense policy allows tipping 'in line with local customs', but I imagine the accounting department would roll over laughing before they'd consider reimbursing a cash tip with no receipt.

I don't understand how "_hella_ expected to tip" translates to "you ought to tip". Further, I don't understand why I should take seriously the ethical claim that "one should tip service workers". Why? Why shouldn't we expect the business owner to properly price goods and services such that what I pay reflects the true cost of the labor performed? From where does my ethical commitment to an individual based solely on their occupational sector arise? Why service workers over customer support staff at a call center in India? These ethical claims seem to arise from arbitrary cultural norms.

Because you know before you partake of the service what the expectations and the normed obligations are, and if you defect by availing yourself of the service and not tipping, you're just harming the worker.

"Industrywide, about a third of hotel guests leave tips for housekeepers."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/business/hotel-housekeepe...

Yes, and that sucks.

Yes, it most certainly does suck for an assertion claiming it's a norm and "hella [sic] expected".

This brings up a somewhat related question in my mind... how is my %20 iPad tip at the coffee shop treated differently than the amount I paid? Conventionally a tip was something you could physically separate from the amount you paid for the product/service... but now you're trusting the establishment to make sure it gets to the employee? This obviously sucks for the employee bc taxes, but I have a hard time imagining that Dunkin' (!Donuts) employees are getting the full post tax amount of my tip. I could be wrong.

EDIT: I was wrong

Pretty much any modern point of sale system (e.g., anything on a tablet) is going to be separating out the tips correctly for accounting purposes. If anything, you should be _more_ sure that the employees are getting their full tip amounts when there's a stronger paper trail for it. It's the cash tips at some mom and pop joint with handwritten receipts that have some chance of getting intercepted.

There are both federal and state laws governing disbursement of tips to employees.

> do you always tip your hotel housekeeping?

Being UKian I didn't even know that this was a concept.

The hotel advertises a per-night fee, I pay it on departure.

Being a USian, I didn't even know this was a concept. And I remember googling how much to tip when I started travelling as an adult. I'm pretty sure all the advice was to consider leaving a tip for housekeeping if you make an unusual mess or get great service. Not that it was hella expected or the norm.

I recently stayed in a hotel where I realized I didn't have any cash on me. I just hung the DND sign on the door and handled my own housekeeping.

Still felt bad when I checked out and still didn't have anything to leave.

Since when is tipping the housekeeping staff expected. I have never heard of that before. They are employees of the hotel (or third party contractor) to do work in a hotel. They are paid money for that.

> They are employees of the hotel (or third party contractor) to do work in a hotel. They are paid money for that.

That’s not any different than pizza delivery drivers, waiters, or car wash employees.

In any case, yeah, tipping your housekeeper is a common thing. Maybe not as common as I thought.

While I don't mind tipping a waiter for great service I don't see delivery drivers and car wash employees are included. A tip is just that, "great job, here is a little something extra for yourself" it should not be expected. I give a gratuity to my door man at Christmas because he goes the extra mile and is awesome. I don't necessarily give the same to the others. Tips/gratuities are for going above and beyond, not just providing the service they are paid to do.

Tips for housekeeping are often most of my physical-cash outlay when I travel, because I pay for practically everything else by card. The percentage is even greater considering how often I make a small purchase using cash precisely so I can use the bills I get back for tips. If hotels provided a way to use my card for tips I might use it, though that would deny me the enjoyment I get from the exchange of notes that often occurs over the course of a week's stay.

Even worse - do you tip every day? Since you can't be sure it's the same housekeeper every morning, how do you distribute the cash fairly?

Yeah. $2-5 a day.

I dunno, I never tip on take-out. If I’m not sitting down and taking up a turn at a table, but still paying the price on the menu for the food, the tip is already there just in another form.

> the tip is already there just in another form.

That is making a lot of mistaken assumptions about how restaurant service works. I can only speak for myself and former colleagues, but very often increases in takeout orders correlated with fewer in-house patrons. Whether that was because Foodler was running a promotion, people who came in to sit down got discouraged by the sight of all the takeout business or what, I don't know.

Even if that correlation is invalid, it's not like restaurant workers are able to go and get tips from a thronging mass of people when you pick up takeout--we might be sitting on our hands earning nothing while we wait for tables to turn up. We're definitely not making the money "back" in some other way when you order takeout.

Even if take out orders are canibalizing dine-in orders, how does that have any bearing on my tipping strategy?

The front of the house should be staffed appropriately based on the dine-in load, and the back of house should be staffed appropriately for the full cooking load. I don’t tip the front of house to hand me a bag. The hostess probably isn’t sharing the tips at most places anyway!

If your manager is running a take-out only promo that bombs the dine-in business, they should be running dine-in only promos to balance it out. I think your gripe is with the manager not the customers!

I was not commenting on or proposing changes to anyone’s strategy. I was pointing out the inaccuracy of the idea that tips are compensated in other ways when people order takeout. No restaurant is run well enough that there is not occasional idle or overworked time for staff.

I also used to not tip on takeout orders for the same reason until someone who used to work at a restaurant told me I should.

The explanation made sense to me though: The same waiter that waits tables has to package your food for you. Obviously it doesn't take as much of their time as people who sit down to eat so you tip less, but you're still using their time that would otherwise have been spent on people sitting at the restaurant.

Of course I wish we could just get rid of tipping by increasing the costs of the goods and paying them higher.

Let's complicate things more. Sometimes the tips are split between the front and back of the house, so not tipping on takeout is still impacting service worker's income.