Somewhere in the Bay Area, a restaurant has achieved peak Silicon Valley: they've replaced most of their waitstaff with robots, kept one human around to take orders and occasionally refill water, and then — with a straight face — presented diners with a check suggesting 18%, 20%, or 22% gratuity.
Let that sink in. Twenty-two percent. For a robot.
Look, we've written before about tip creep in San Francisco, where every iPad checkout screen guilt-trips you into tipping 25% for a cashier who handed you a bag. But this takes the absurdity to a new level. The entire premise of tipping is that it compensates human workers for attentive, personalized service. When the "service" is a wheeled machine rolling a plate to your table on a preprogrammed path, who exactly is that 22% going to? The restaurant's robotics budget?
As one local put it bluntly: "If the restaurant is not paying staff wages, why would I tip? Perhaps if they suggested reasonable numbers like 2, 4, and 6% to cover the usual server tipout for other human staff, I would consider it. But asking for a regular tip with machine service? Heck no."
Another Bay Area diner had a more creative take: "10% for the waiter, shot of oil for the clanker."
Here's the real issue: restaurants adopting automation are slashing their biggest operating cost — labor — while still expecting customers to subsidize wages that increasingly don't exist. That's not tipping. That's a surcharge dressed up as generosity.
We're not anti-robot. Automation can lower prices, improve consistency, and make restaurants more efficient. Great! But if you're cutting staff and pocketing the savings, have the decency to lower prices or at least stop pretending a gratuity prompt is anything other than a pure profit grab.
The honest move? Price your food to reflect your actual costs, pay your one remaining human fairly, and ditch the guilt-trip checkout screen. If your robot wants a tip, it can learn to laugh at my jokes and remember that I like extra sriracha.
Until then? Zero percent. Beep boop.