But now, tips are given with cards, and a record is kept of how much, and where it goes, and it is recorded!
So be wary, because you can be 100% sure they are taxable, and if you get audited...
It is tax evasion, but it was commonplace.
Edit: and while per the other replies many people don't claim (all of) their cash tips, you are supposed to claim them as income.
This would earn you the reputation of being especially expensive, even if customers aren't actually paying you more.
When did coffee shops in the US start asking for tips? It most be a relatively thing. Never saw tips asked for at coffee shops when visiting until the ipad checkout thing (square?) appeared. Is it a nationwide thing now or just confined to certain regions (coastal metro areas?)?
It took the form of a tip jar. It was my main source of gas money when a barista.
Tipping at nicer coffee places (i.e. where they offer espresso-based drinks to order) has been a thing for a very, very long time. I can't recall ever not seeing a tip jar and have been going to places like that for probably 25 years, although if you told me the expectation was stronger nowadays that wouldn't surprise me.
The low end places (Tim Horton's up here, I guess Dunkin Donuts would be the comparison), don't expect tips or put out jars / enable them on their terminals, but Tim Horton's has always had a charity jar at the counter anyway so I would think most people would prefer that one.
The Pulp Fiction shake quote always comes to mind for me:
Vincent: "I gotta know what a five dollar shake tastes like"
The same simple credit card machines are used at Qdoba, but there they ask for a tip, even when coming in to get a bowl and doing takeout. Not unreasonable, but the difference in experience and expectation is pretty wild: coffee sometimes takes as long as it does to put a burrito bowl together, yet one expects a tip and one does not.
Order, pay, pickup, done. No tip expected (though nobody stops you).
One of the first things I remember as a kid in the 1970s was reading the "no tipping" sign at Dunkin's and asking my parents about it. So it has been a policy there for a long, long time.
(Funny they put a Dunkin's in on my side of town a few years ago, I don't know how many people know the supermarket across the street makes better donuts, which is truly unusual.)
We had a Starbucks in Collegetown which went to only taking mobile orders during the pandemic which meant I pretty much quit drinking coffee there. Not long after Starbucks closed the location to bust the union that was forming there. In my mind that area is a "coffee desert", I mean you can get coffee but so far as I can tell the best coffee is at 7-11 and everything else is much worse.
It is kind of like how, if a company was trying to tackle health care in the United States, they might attempt to build a system which reconciles many different hospital systems across the country. In other countries, with Universal Single Payer healthcare, this might not be interesting, but in the context of the United States, a system like this could have huge implications.
The market itself is inseparable from what makes a venture like this interesting. It is interesting precisely because of where it is located.