A boba shop customer says the tip screen had no ‘skip’ button, but they found one way to leave $0: ‘That won’t stop me’

A customer who picked up a drink for their husband at a local boba shop said the checkout screen did not give them a plain way to refuse a tip. The shopper, who posted on Reddit as u/oatmilkcappucino_ in r/EndTipping, wrote that the cashier said, “And it’ll just ask you a question,” and then the tip screen appeared.

The customer said the screen had no “No Tip” or “Skip” button. They wrote that the only choices were 18%, 25%, 30%, and “Custom Tip.” They added a string of question and exclamation marks after the 30% option in the post.

They said they pressed “Custom Tip” to enter 0 while the cashier watched, but a plain zero did not go through. They wrote that they had to type “0.00” before the payment would finish. “I am so tired of the entitlement with tipping culture where now they try to take away your options. They purposefully make it awkward, but that won’t stop me,” the customer wrote.

Surveys and shopper accounts describe a wider pullback on tip screens

People who replied on the thread treated the missing skip button as a familiar setup on newer registers. One commenter wrote, “Thats pretty much the standard on these modern terminals. Everything to make it inconvenient as much as possible.”

Another person said they were done with card screens. “Back to cash it is,” they wrote. A different commenter said they would slow the line on purpose, writing, “I’m going to go back to taking my time and writing a check.”

One reply said the screen is a choice made by the business, not a fixed setting. “No. The terminals are customizable. Management chooses to make ‘no tip’ hard to do,” that commenter wrote. Another person said leaving was the response they wanted owners to notice: “Turn and walk out. That’s the only way these businesses will rethink their s–tty behavior.”

A May 6, 2025, Guardian report described tip prompts showing up beyond sit-down service. People who answered a Guardian callout said they had been asked for tips at self-checkouts, drive-throughs, hotdog stands, drug stores, a bottled water stall at a jazz festival, an airport vending machine, a used bookstore, a cinema box office, and a children’s arcade.

Garrett Petters, a 29-year-old architect in Dallas, told The Guardian that tipping in the U.S. felt “out of control” after a trip to Paris, where he said servers are paid and diners do not have to add a tip. “Before, tipping was considered generosity,” Petters said. “Now, it’s about guilt.” He said he has been adding less, and that some service workers he knows got angry when he asked why they were not mad at their boss for the pay.

Toast figures cited in that article put average full-service restaurant tips at 19.3% in the fourth quarter of 2024. The report described that figure as a six-year U.S. low, down from 19.9% in the first quarter of 2021. Tip prompts keep showing up in more places, such as when a shopper scanned his own Perrier with no cashier in sight and the machine asked him to tip.

A Popmenu survey reported by Yahoo Finance found that 78% of people said they believed tipping practices have become ridiculous, and 44% said they are tipping less this year than last year. Brendan Sweeney, CEO of Popmenu, told USA TODAY that people feel tipping has become “maybe ubiquitous” and that they are being asked to tip “even for things that we didn’t feel were customary or normal.”

Popmenu also reported that 74% of consumers said they have noticed restaurants raising the minimum suggested tip on digital screens. Of those shoppers, 36% said they typically leave a custom tip, 17% choose the lowest suggested tip, 32% choose the mid-tier tip, 7% choose the highest, and 9% said they do not typically tip. If given a choice, 56% said they are willing to pay more for meals and drinks so workers can be paid higher wages and gratuities can be dropped.

Some of the Reddit replies stayed on cash and exact change. One commenter wrote, “This is the way. Hold up the lines with cash and wait for your exact change.” Another said, “Sounds like a good company to boycott!” A third wrote, “The more I see tip begging, the less inclined I am to tip anybody.” The pushback against tip prompts keeps growing, as when a tiktoker says she has gotten good at pressing the no tip button for cafe workers who don’t even greet her.