To tip or not to tip? A question that encroaches many broke college students’ minds as they venture their way out into the world. Even if someone is adamant on tipping and always does the bare minimum of 20%, where is it appropriate?
The art of tipping has advanced over the past decade, with restaurants not being the only place where it is considered normal to ask for a tip and to receive one. Part of this expansion in the market has been the introduction of digital tipping screens. These often come alongside a worker saying that there will be one more question before the transaction can finish and flipping the screen around. They are present in retailers, coffee shops and even movie theaters.
Following the trend, over the spring holiday break Elizabethtown College went around installing tipping opportunities in various locations around campus.
Etown has revolutionized the ability to scrounge every single penny they can get out of the campus communities with the innovative screens. In the Dining Services locations, icons like Pizza Dave and Willie will spin the screens around as you pass. When going to the library, if someone has a question for the librarian, the quality of the answer may depend on the percentage of tip that the librarian gets that day.
Yet it will not only be in places where students would traditionally be making a transaction or sitting down to relax. The college hung the screens on the door of the classrooms where students can reward their favorite professors. All of the places that the community may take for granted day after day can now present the fact that they deserve compensation and care beyond what the college is able to provide. Clearly, even the College can recognize that and wants everyone else to chip in a little.
This, in part, lessens the pressure on the College to give a competitive wage and growth opportunities for their staff and faculty. Instead, it introduces a different kind of competitiveness into the idea of being properly compensated. No longer can anyone get by through dry lecture and little interaction alone, that is, if they want a tip. The difference between getting a snack that day and not could be a student sitting there and learning or a kind interaction that shows that the higher up person seems to actually care.
“Oh no, that’s kind of scary. I feel like I’m never going to get a tip,” Dr. Michael Roy, professor of Psychology, said in a possible plea for the future of his financial state.
Even students will not be able to get by on the bare minimum if they want to be making the most they can out of their college careers. In addition to the typical ability to rate one’s group members, people can tip their group members who did not just watch paint dry and come to the presentation with a smile. Those who do more can be recognized more in their everyday academic careers, as long as they are willing to do a little bit of panhandling and pass around their financial information.
Although the effort is meant to incentivize the College to be better and match the higher attentiveness of other colleges, not everyone agrees that this is the correct decision moving forward. Firstly, it may encourage a layer of fakeness and make criticism hard to come by for anyone who wants to get paid that week. Not to mention that it increases the financial burden put on students when it is already very high for most.
“Awful. It’s a terrible decision, their employers should simply pay them more, why is it my job? Pass,” Lindsey McCommons, fourth-year business major said.
Despite the mixed reception, the screens are going to be more expensive to take down then to just leave there, so most likely students will have to deal with them until at least the summer. Given that, this change may cause students to consider giving to that pleading-eyed professor that always treats others with kindness, or not and saying no every time and living with that guilt.
