Bride-to-be asked to tip while buying her wedding dress purchase: ‘This is getting out of hand’
Wedding bells weren’t ringing yet, but the cash register certainly was.
The sister of a bride-to-be blasted a dress shop that insisted she tip an absurdly high amount while leaving a deposit for her wedding dress.
“The options were 20%, 25% 30% or other,” TikToker Avery Brynn ranted on the platform.
“They had the audacity — there wasn’t even a 0 [percent] option,” she added.
Brynn conceded the tablet-based register did have the option to leave no tip, but it was buried beneath several screens.
She griped that the tactic made it obvious and embarrassing that a customer wasn’t adding any gratuity.
“Whatever the budget of your dress is now you have to tip 20% on top of that? This is getting out of hand.”
The Knot reported that the average wedding dress in 2022 cost added a $1,900 bill to a bride’s nuptials whereas designer ones can run up to $10,000.
With an added 20% gratuity, saying yes to the standard dress would be $2,280.
As recent data shows much of the country is reeling with “guilt tipping” fatigue, the commenters on Brynn’s video — viewed almost 50,000 times — were no different.
“This happened to me last year when we purchased my daughter’s prom dress that we were already paying $500 for,” one user wrote. “It’s getting ridiculous.”
“I’m so sick of tipping culture in the [U.S.],” added another.
A major part of the frustration for those who have tipped past the point of excess tipping on every service imaginable is that doing so is conceptually flawed.
Tipping began as a cultural norm in American dine-in restaurants because servers typically opt for a salary below minimum wage in order to be eligible for a tip credit — something new legislation is looking to end.
That is why it hasn’t been traditionally applied to other full-salaried industries where workers make above-bar.
However, pairing tablet technology with the exploitation of guilty or sympathetic consciences has aggressively shifted the tipping culture in recent years. New research by USA Today finds 40% of Americans left a tip out of guilt and 63% complained about how many places insist on a gratuity now.
At the end of December, another TikToker, Ina Josipovic slammed a bridal store that prompted her for a ten percent tip as well.
