What to Know:
- Tipping fatigue is changing consumer behavior.
- Picking up your own food, choosing self-service, or skipping delivery can reduce the final cost of a purchase.
- What you think you know about the history of tipping is more folklore than factual.
ORLANDO, Fla. – Have you ever ordered takeout instead of delivery, not because you wanted to pick it up, but because you didn’t want to tip?
You’re not alone.
From tip cups at fast-food counters, to checkout screens asking for 20% on a cup of coffee, to ride-share drivers rating their customers – tipping has exploded well beyond what you leave for the server at your local restaurant.
And with that explosion comes the backlash: people are tired of tipping.
The pushback: some are picking up their own food instead of having it delivered. Others are choosing self-service over full service. And then there are those who simply avoid businesses or transactions where they know they’ll be asked to tip.
Call it tip avoidance – changing how, where, or what you buy to avoid the tip altogether.
Some consumers are tipping less
It’s one thing to say it feels like people are tipping less – it’s another when the data backs it up.
A January 2026 survey from restaurant technology company Popmenu offers some evidence of just how frustrated consumers have become with tipping. Among the 1,000 U.S. consumers surveyed by the company, 60% said they were fed up with being asked to tip for different services, up from 53% a year earlier.
The Popmenu survey also revealed just 38% of respondents said they tip restaurant servers 20% or more, down from 43% two years earlier. At the other end of the spectrum, 30% said they tip servers 10% or less, compared with 19% two years earlier.
The change was even more pronounced for delivery drivers: 19% said they tip drivers 20% or more, down from 32% two years earlier.
So, are people starting to avoid tipping altogether?
That depends on the data you plug in. The Popmenu survey says people are pulling back on tipping. Other surveys show a change in consumer behavior that results in ditching tipping altogether.
Let’s start with perhaps the simplest example: delivery versus pickup.
A 2023 PYMNTS survey of 2,168 U.S. consumers found 42% of restaurant customers who chose pickup said avoiding a tip for the delivery driver was an important reason for doing so. Another 58% pointed to the delivery fee.
Actual restaurant transactions show just how different those two choices can be. An analysis published by Hospitality Technology of 2.4 million restaurant orders from November 2025 found 88.6% of delivery orders included a tip, compared with just 16.1% of pickup orders.
And consumers aren’t just changing how they order – they’re sometimes opting not to order at all. A separate PYMNTS study found 31% of restaurant customers said pressure to leave a tip had persuaded them to eat at home more frequently rather than dine at restaurants. Among millennials, that number climbed to 44%.
More evidence of tipping’s influence on consumer spending can be found in a 2026 Omni Calculator survey which asked consumers directly whether they specifically avoid certain businesses to avoid being prompted to tip. About 7% said very often, 19% sometimes, and 14% occasionally. Another 23% said they rarely did, while 36% said they never did. The remaining 1% said the question didn’t apply to them.
Taken together, the numbers suggest tip avoidance isn’t necessarily about refusing to tip someone who provided a service – instead, some consumers are changing the transaction itself by picking up instead of ordering delivery, eating at home instead of dining out, or avoiding a business where they expect to encounter a tip prompt.
But there’s an important distinction: Americans don’t appear to be abandoning tipping altogether.
Tipping fatigue hasn’t killed tipping
For traditional sit-down restaurant service, tipping remains deeply ingrained in American behavior. Toast’s restaurant transaction data show average tips at full-service restaurants in the U.S. have remained remarkably steady. In the first quarter of 2026, the average tip was 19.3%, after hovering between 19.1% and 19.4% over the previous two years.
And the Pew Research Center found a dramatic difference depending on the service being provided. Among Americans who use each service, 92% said they always or often tip when eating at a sit-down restaurant and 76% said the same about food delivery. But only 25% regularly tipped at coffee shops and 12% did so at fast-casual restaurants without servers.
A 2026 WalletHub survey found 81% of respondents think tipping has gotten out of control, while 55% said they often leave a tip because of social pressure rather than good service. More than two in five – 42% – said the U.S. should ban tipping altogether.
But here’s the contradiction: 83% of those surveyed also said tipping is good for workers.
The takeaway may not be that Americans have stopped tipping. They may simply be getting more selective about when they’re willing to put themselves in a situation where a tip is expected – while becoming increasingly frustrated with the system itself.
The Myth of “To Insure Prompt Service”
I hate to break it to you, but TIPS is not an acronym.
I know: you’ve probably heard it stands for “To Insure Prompt Service,” or “To Insure Promptness” – and the story has its roots in 18th-century Europe where aristocrats would slip workers a little extra money beforehand to make sure they received good service.
For starters, if that were really the origin, we’d probably be talking about TEPS – the word you want is ensure, not insure. More importantly, there’s no evidence that “tip” originated as an acronym at all.
The word was being used as slang meaning “to give, hand, or pass” by the early 1600s. Its use specifically for giving someone a gratuity is documented by 1706 – while the story that “tip” was an acronym for “To Insure Promptitude” doesn’t appear in print until 1909.
That’s the story behind the word – the practice of tipping has a different and much longer origin.
Historians have traced the roots of tipping back to the Middle Ages. By the 16th century, wealthy travelers in England were giving “vails” to servants in the homes where they stayed. Fast-forward a century or so and what began as a voluntary reward had become something many servants expected – and something wealthy guests increasingly resented. Some British nobles reportedly traveled less because of the mounting cost of vails, while others tried unsuccessfully to abolish the practice.
Sound familiar?
As for the U.S., tipping didn’t become widespread here until after the Civil War, when wealthy Americans returning from Europe helped bring the custom home. But in America, tipping also took on a much more troubling dimension: businesses employing formerly enslaved Black workers, particularly in hospitality and railroad service, used gratuities to supplement low wages. The Economic Policy Institute called tipping “a racist relic and a modern tool of economic oppression in the South.”
The Pullman Company became one of the most prominent examples of this. Its sleeping-car porters were overwhelmingly Black men, many from the South, who received relatively low base wages while white passengers were expected to supplement their income with tips.
How much does tip avoidance actually save?
Skipping a tip might save you 15% or 20%, but changing the transaction that comes with the tip can save considerably more.
- The average pickup order? $11.71.
- The average cost of that same food with delivery? $21.
- The result? $9.30 more – or nearly 80% – for essentially the same food.
To be clear, that entire difference isn’t the tip, as orders can also come with service fees, delivery fees, and sometimes even higher menu prices. But that’s precisely the point: when you pick up your own food instead of having someone deliver it, you aren’t simply avoiding the tip – you’re potentially eliminating several of the costs associated with the service.
And relatively small differences can add up.
Let’s say you spend that extra $9.30 having food delivered once a week? Spread that out over a year and you’re spending about $484. Twice a week and you’re at $967. At that point, convenience isn’t just costing you a few extra bucks – it’s a line item in your budget.
And by the way, the title of that LendingTree article starts off with these words: The Price of Lazy.
Yep.
How to avoid a tip without stiffing anyone
There’s a pretty simple rule of thumb for tip avoidance: avoid the service, not the tip.
And here’s the economic reason for that distinction: unlike most workers, federal law allows employers to pay tipped workers a lower cash wage, provided their wages and tips together reach at least the regular minimum wage. In other words, for many tipped workers, the system is designed around the expectation that customers will provide part of their compensation.
That makes avoiding a tipped service economically different from accepting the service and then withholding the tip.
If you sit down at a full-service restaurant, have food delivered to your door, get your hair cut, or take a taxi or ride-share, tipping remains customary. Deciding after the service has been provided that you simply don’t want to tip isn’t really tip avoidance – it’s just not tipping.
So, instead of changing the action, change the transaction before it happens.
Order at the counter instead of sitting down for table service. Carry your own bags instead of using a bellhop. Park your own car instead of using the valet.
And don’t assume that every tip screen creates an obligation to tip.
The Emily Post Institute’s general tipping guide recommends tipping 15% to 20% for sit-down restaurant service and 10% to 15% for food delivery. But for takeout? It says there is “no obligation” to tip unless extra service is involved, such as curbside delivery or a large, complicated order. The same goes for the tip jar on the counter: no obligation.
That means tapping “No Tip” when buying a muffin from a counter isn’t necessarily the same thing as leaving nothing for the server who waited on your table for an hour. The tip prompt tells you that you can leave a tip – it doesn’t tell you that you should.
Tip avoidance doesn’t have to mean paying someone less for the service they provided – it can instead mean deciding how much service you’re willing to pay for in the first place. Sometimes convenience is worth the extra money.
And sometimes you should maybe pick up the pizza yourself.