To tip or not to tip? That is the question, and honestly, if you live someplace where tipping culture is a thing, the answer is usually "to tip."
Of course, there's a bigger debate here: why are employers allowed to pay less than minimum wage to certain positions, and why is the general public expected to make up for this deficit?
These questions have come into sharp focus after a TikToker's video about tipping drama went viral.
Workers who rely on tips really rely on tips. Many of them say that the bulk of their earnings, or more than half, comes from the tips they receive on the job.
TikToker @africanbarb put out a video where she puts it bluntly: "Nobody is obligated to tip nobody."
This apparently happened after she got bad service at a restaurant and decided not to tip her server.
She points out that some, but not all, services ask for tips and asks why some do and some don't. At the end of the day, she's just defending her decision not to give her server a couple of dollars.
While some were sympathetic to her position and others questioned tipping culture in general, plenty of commenters chimed in to patiently explain why it's good to leave tips. It's possible to think tipping culture is dumb, but also understand why servers need tips.
Bueli, who uses the handle @buelistic, stitched @africanbarb's video together with some comments of her own. In her video, Bueli defends @africanbarb.
"I definitely acknowledge that [tipping] is not a requirement," she said. "And if I do get just my price [as a tattoo artist], then I should be fine with that as well."
This commenter points out that Bueli works as a tattoo artist, which is a job that generally pays more than a server would make at a restaurant. In other words, the expectation of tips generally correlates with how little a person makes.
While there are rules of thumb for how much you should tip, most people are likely willing to give a little more (or, conversely, a little less) depending on how they're treated during their experience.
In an ideal world, every server would make a living wage and no one would need to tip them, ever. But this isn't an ideal world, and unless there's a major societal shift, tipping culture is here to stay.
Should you always tip? Should you never tip? Does the fairest answer lie somewhere in between? Be sure to check out Bueli's video above and then let us know what you think of all this tipping culture drama in the comments.
