You order a coffee. You’re picking it up yourself, carrying it to your own table, maybe even making your own oat milk situation happen at the counter. And before your card finishes processing, a screen swivels toward you with three tip options starting at 18%.
If this moment has started to feel both constant and a little absurd, you’re not imagining it. And no, it’s not because society suddenly decided baristas deserve more money for ringing up a latte. It’s because of two things that have nothing to do with gratitude: cheap software, and a wage system most other countries don’t even use.
This Didn’t Happen by Accident
Tip screens spread because point-of-sale technology made them effortless to add. Square, Toast, Clover, and similar systems made it simple for any business to bolt a suggested-tip screen onto checkout. Once the feature existed, plenty of businesses turned it on by default, including places that never had a tipping culture before. Nobody surveyed customers and decided coffee shops needed tipping. A software default did that.
Pew Research, which surveyed nearly 12,000 US adults on the topic, found that 72% feel they’re being asked to tip in more places today than five years ago. The same survey found people are more likely to oppose suggested tip amounts on a screen than favor them, and 72% oppose automatic service charges added to a bill altogether.
Do People Actually Tip at These Screens?
Less and less, according to the data. A 2025 Popmenu survey of 1,000 consumers found that pickup orders with a digital tip prompt declined from 78% in 2022 to 62% by 2025, suggesting people aren’t just complaining, they’re actively changing their behavior. The same survey found 74% of consumers have noticed businesses raising the minimum suggested tip on these screens, and 36% said they now bypass the preset options entirely to enter a smaller custom amount.
Bankrate’s 2025 survey backs this up: 63% of Americans hold at least one negative view about tipping, up from 59% the year before, with the most common complaints being that businesses should pay workers better instead of relying on tips, and that prompted tip screens specifically have gotten out of hand.
Researchers have also looked at why these prompts feel bad even when people do tip. A 2025 study from Washington State University, in collaboration with researchers at Auburn and Temple, found that asking for a tip before any service has actually happened tends to trigger discomfort and a negative emotional response, especially when the customer can’t see what they’re paying for or senses they’re being watched while deciding.
Is This Just an American Thing?
Largely, yes. The tip-prompt explosion is closely tied to the US tipping system itself, where many service workers are legally paid a lower base wage with tips expected to close the gap. That structure doesn’t really exist in most other countries, which removes much of the incentive for software vendors to push a tip screen by default.
In the UK, Australia, and most of Europe, self-checkout and counter-service kiosks have spread just as fast as in the US, but they’re built around the payment itself, not a tipping decision. A self-checkout machine in a UK supermarket scans your groceries and takes your card. It doesn’t ask if you’d like to leave 20% for the privilege of bagging your own shopping. Service workers in these countries are paid a standard wage regardless of tips, so there’s little reason for a tip screen to exist there in the first place.
Canada sits somewhere in between. Tipping culture closely resembles the US in full-service restaurants, and tip screens have become common at cafes and counter-service spots in major cities, though the backlash hasn’t reached quite the same volume as south of the border. See our full guide to tipping in Canada for the details.
So What Are You Actually Supposed to Do?
The honest answer is simpler than the screen makes it feel. The amount you tip should depend on the situation, not on the percentage the software suggests. If someone serves you at a table, 18-20% remains the norm. If you’re ordering at a counter and carrying your own food, a tip is a nice gesture for good service, not an obligation, and zero is a completely normal answer. If a kiosk asks you to tip for a transaction where no human did anything beyond ringing you up, you’re allowed to say no without a second thought.
The Bigger Picture
None of this means tipping is going away, or that people working counter-service jobs don’t appreciate a tip when it’s earned. But there’s a real difference between tipping because someone went out of their way for you and tipping because a tablet defaulted to a 25% suggestion before you’d even picked up your bag. Most people seem to sense that difference already, even if the screen keeps pretending otherwise.