What's wrong with this picture
Caption
This is a pretty common occurrence in the USA in 2025, and perhaps in the post COVID era.
It is a payment bill for some food we purchased at a restaurant. The food cost $16.99, which was pretty excessive for what we purchased, but that is another story
But we were expected to pay at least $21.41 _+ a tip, which wаs 15, 18 ор 20%. And if you didn’t want to tip for poor service or any other reason, you would have to go through an indiscreet and perhaps an embarrassing process of asking the waiter that you did not want to tip and have them go thru some extra steps to allow you to do that or maybe as in this case you just assume that the default is 0% and pay this amount. In many cases the default is not 0% and doesn't even exist as an option and has to be especially requested.
While to the younger generation, which has been conditioned accordingly, this may seem perfectly normal; in fact to us old Babyboomers this is an affront and highlights what is happening to America, a great country that we help build an which is being hijacked by the 1% for their individual gain and amassing enormous wealth at the expense of the other 99%. Perhaps this proportion is not 1/99 but 5/99 or thereabouts, but a huge gap nevertheless.
To the boomers a restaurant was an enterprise created to facilitate the acquisition of food & drinks (nourishment) to its customers, us, in return for fair value for providing that service, which included the food as well as the service for delivery of the food, which included target wages of the cooks, servers waiters etc. as well as the owners (fair) profit.
What's wrong with this picture is that the owners are shifting their cost of the service onto us, the consumers, in the name of service charge, gratuity, tips etc. etc.. and thus, unfairly and often fraudulently, increasing their profits.
