r/mildlyinfuriating • u/guitarman129 • Jun 13 '26

I just wanted a hot dog Recommended gratuity after tip was already included

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I’m sure there are a lot of tipping posts here so to keep it short - I had my wedding at a fancy restaurant. On top of the TERRIBLE service, the bill came with “suggested gratuity” even though I was told gratuity was included. When I asked the manager, he said that the “S/C: 24% SRC REGULA“ was the included tip and the suggested gratuity was if we wanted to add something extra - basically trying to trick people into giving a 49% tip!

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u/turkish_gold Jun 13 '26

If only there was conditional logic that could tell a computer to behave differently based on what’s on the bill.

Software engineering is going to take a huge step forwards once we figure out all this basic maths and logic.

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u/BadIdeaBobcat Jun 13 '26

software engineering in the POS space is like ... one of the most boring things someone can do, so not gonna attract any innovative enthusiasm, and I'm sure those who are programming them are probably mostly focused on other things anyway

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u/reddits_aight Jun 13 '26

It's not even that, there are probably several that handle this specific situation differently/better, but maybe cause some other pain point elsewhere.

Stack that on top of the giant pain in the ass that is switching a POS system, probably new hardware expense, etc.

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u/GreatValueProducts Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

There are a lot of stranglehold. You don’t innovate reporting, all restaurants and the state revenue departments expect the label means the same thing. On the UI side you will find out all the POS in the market have very similar UI because if you dare to change where the buttons are you should expect shitload of complaints from the waiters and restaurant owners. Don’t play with their muscle memory despite it’s a tablet. The hardware support results in hacks upon hacks in the source code.

Ironically, switching is not the pain in the ass though. It’s the part that is perfected. A lot of them have account executives to do the process and credits for hardware. It’s very easy to switch, making the market very competitive. Our competitors are probably more familiar with the features that I have never touched lol.

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u/GreatValueProducts Jun 13 '26

I work in POS and ours and most of the competitors in the industry have settings for pre-tax and post-tax settings and restaurants can configure that. As to why there is a settings in the first place, it is a very competitive space and restaurants switch POS over things like this all the time. I mean where I work lost a lot of customers because we didn't support credit card surcharging fast enough.

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u/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeb Jun 13 '26

All of the restaurants I worked at and others in my city have switched to toast which I find interesting

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u/GreatValueProducts Jun 13 '26

Yeah, they started a price war around 2 years ago targeting small restaurants (measured by revenue), and they were among the first to rollout credit card surcharging, which was one of the top feature requests for small restaurant owners. Therefore this happens. This hospitality POS space is so competitive, and nobody knows what happens in 2 years.

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u/OnlyOneBT Jun 13 '26

Sorry, for $15/hr in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, you don't get conditional logic.

To the defense of the coders, they don't have the context to know what are reasonable value adds beyond what is explicitly spelled out in the business requirements document. Even assuming they are fully competent and qualified engineers.

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u/snoboreddotcom Jun 13 '26

My dad worked programming the back end for POS. Was pretty good money and paid well.

His explanation when I asked about this is stuff years ago is that typically the functions are there, but not used. They also usually come with several pre configs that can be adjusted by the vendor. A food business may request the pre config for the restaurants, which includes tip options activated already. But sometimes that food business doesn't need the top option to be shown. There are usually commands to enter to disable it for the transaction. However owners don't read the manuals and so don't train on how to do it, or workers are doing it fast and so don't. Maybe you implement conditional logic, but maybe you discover some of your food businesses are using the service charge not for auto gratuity but for some other thing and now pissed it's broken. As you say, it's building a platform where they don't know every requirement, so better to be cautious and let the end customer select no tip than remove recommendations and break other uses

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u/random9212 Jun 13 '26

It's not hard to code in "if service charge is present don't print recommend gratuity."

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u/sonic_dick Jun 13 '26

You know restaurants arent the ones coding and creating POS systems, right?

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u/random9212 Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

Yes. Why would I be talking about restaurants when I was talking about coding? The person I responded to was talking about programming the POS, not anything to do with the restaurant.

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u/ButterscotchLow7330 Jun 13 '26

It's entirely possible that the service charge is something that is added into the system after the program is created. 

I can't say for certain, but it's possible that they simply program to POS and then all the items get added by the person who buys the software. So a service charge is just a random item added into it, the same as hamburgers. 

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u/rhade1412 Jun 13 '26

This is almost certainly true unless it's some kind of bespoke POS. No dev in their right mind would hard code items into a product designed to have mass appeal with a diverse target market. Maybe a few example items, but not intended for production use.

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u/random9212 Jun 13 '26

Yes, that may be true. But it doesn't make what I said any less true either.

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u/solarpanzer Jun 13 '26

Things like that are usually more complicated than one would think.

Maybe the business uses some configurable line item to represent the service charge, and the POS wouldn't know if that specific line item was meant to turn off the gratuity suggestion? Then you need some more configuration, so the business can tell the POS when not to print the gratuity suggestion.

Maybe that feature is even there, but the business owner can't be arsed to understand how to use it...

1

u/random9212 Jun 13 '26

I am talking about the software of the POS. Not what the operator of it had it do. Yes it could be configured all kinds of ways. The original comment I was replying to was wondering how the POS would know not to print the suggested tips. I was simply trying to say that having an auto grat or service charge is pretty normal and often when these are charged it is not expected to tip on top of that. So in the system there should be an option to charge that auto grat or service charge and there should also be an option to see if either of those are being charged to not print the tip suggestions. I don't know if this POS has that ability or not, it doesn't matter either way. But the software to do that is a pretty simple couple lines of code.

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u/solarpanzer Jun 13 '26

Right, I'm not trying to contradict that. I was trying to make the point the that the logic probably needs to be an configurable option, not trivially hardcoded. Which makes it a bit more involved and opens the door for user error.

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u/akesh45 Jun 13 '26

A developer pointed out it exists but restaurant staff have to implement it and they often don't know or care or even read the manual.

I

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u/badgerbrett Jun 13 '26

Concur. And interesting choice to mention Bangladesh out of nowhere.

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u/turkish_gold Jun 13 '26

One would think a resturaunt that bills $6000 on an event could do better in picking what software they use or they could use human effort.

My local bar which bills $2 equivalent for beer will black out the entire tip line if you've been paying cash tips.

This resturaunt just had no Fs to give, after apparently using all of them on customers with their pricing.

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u/GreatValueProducts Jun 13 '26

They can configure a lot of things. Things like these are what the restaurants ask for, similar to like tips are what the waiters ask for lol. If they don't like the POS there are a lot of POS available for them to switch to.

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u/turkish_gold Jun 13 '26

Yeah. They just seem to be lazy.

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u/heliosythic Jun 13 '26

This isn't on the software, this is on the restaurant adding a gratuity as a product to the bill. User error.

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u/pinkshirtbadman Jun 13 '26

but why?

Whats the actual benefit to setting up programing telling it not to put suggested amounts on there, if there's an auto gratuity?

The suggested amounts list a few different $amounts/%s to give customers an idea of X% tip is this much.

Even here with "we already added 24% for you the customer should either be looking at that suggested amount and say "it's irrelevant I already paid a tip and am fine with the amount " or they look at it and say "yeah okay I'm alright throwing in few more bucks".

No reasonable person should look at this and end up with the conclusion that only explanation is the restaurant is intentionally trying to actively trick customers into tipping twice.

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u/turkish_gold Jun 13 '26

I own a business. Having to not annoy my customers is worth something. Clear receipts are worth something.

A good PoS is highly customizable, it’s just that managers are lazy, incompetent, or specifically choose to not deviate from the defaults. Thats why we have been seeing tipping lines on receipts at vape shops, and boutiques. It’s the default now. But someone who cared would have customized it to provide a good customer experience.

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u/Good_Sun2829 Jun 13 '26

Wrote the program then and start selling it. Sounds like you believe there is enough demand

1

u/HyacinthFT Jun 13 '26

no man, computers can never be programmed. it just doesn't exist! people who don't understand this always look bad. computers were just handed to us by the cosmos and no one knows how to change anything in their programming.

1

u/Dyolf_Knip Jun 13 '26

I am a computer programmer. I'm sorry, but what you describe cannot be done. It would be like attempting heavier than air flight. Maybe after a few million years of research we'll figure it out, but not anytime soon.

1

u/juanzy Jun 13 '26

I've been in a fair amount of auto-grat situations in my lifetime, plenty of POS systems will say "Additional Gratuity" and have very low amounts in that section, making it clear that an Auto-Grat was applied. The ones that didn't where honestly shittier service and felt like they were trying to get you.

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u/sarcasticorange Jun 13 '26

It could, but the restaurant isn't writing the code.

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u/DueGrapefruit3151 Jun 13 '26

It wouldn't be called a POS if any actual attention to detail or thought was put into it.

0

u/ImBonRurgundy Jun 13 '26

It might sound straightforward, but that part of the system is probably buried within a mountain of spaghetti code and technical debt that would take months of work to unpick without causing a bunch of other unintended consequential system breaking issues.

This sort of minor, edge case, inconvenience is not going to get prioritised by any product manager when they have a ton of other shit to get done.

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u/turkish_gold Jun 13 '26

I need this item to be in the bill but it must be exempt from sales tax or tips is a super common issue.

Just checked and my PoS which still is running Windows XP can handle it.

So looks like we figured this stuff out 30 years ago.

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u/ImBonRurgundy Jun 13 '26

Sure, and it’s entirely possible that the pos in question has that but it’s buried inside some settings and the restaurant never bothers to change it

0

u/Philly_ExecChef Jun 13 '26

You’re really, really overestimating the software complexity of Toast, Oracle, or most of the garbage in the POS market

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u/fiestybox246 Jun 13 '26

Or people could read and use their own logic.