Is It Rude Not To Tip For Coffee? And How Much Should You Tip? Here’s What Baristas Say

The moment of truth comes when they flip around the touchscreen at checkout. To tip or not to tip? That is the question.

It’s early morning, and you just placed a coffee order at your local coffee shop. Maybe the barista asked about your weekend or wished you a good day. It’s a friendly interaction. You go to pay, and the inevitable happens — the barista whooshes the screen in your face, and you’re prompted to tip or not. Suddenly, the experience turns transactional and forced. Do you leave a tip? If so, how much? Will the barista judge you? Or do you just throw a buck in the tip jar if one exists? You ponder that it’s too early to have to answer these questions.

“I think it’s a conversation that people should talk about,” said Catalina, a barista at a specialty coffee shop in the Cincinnati area (she declined to give her last name because she’s new to the shop). “Or maybe I’m just deeper in the coffee community now, so I hear more about it.”

And people sure do talk about it. Take, for example, this assortment of tweets:

Caffeine is integral to Americans’ daily rituals, so why don’t more people tip baristas? According to a Pew report, only 27% of Americans said they sometimes tip baristas; 24% of people said they never do. Factoring in low wages and inflation, not tipping — which is by no means mandatory — can be detrimental to any barista, including one employed by Starbucks.

“I know everybody talks about [how]Starbucks pays their baristas so well. They make the equivalent of $22 an hour, and they have benefits. But you want to support your independent coffee shop,” said Joe Humpert, a former barista and former manager at Northern Kentucky’s Roebling Point Books and Coffee and a two-decade veteran of the coffee industry. “The smaller the coffee shop, the less likely they are to be able to fairly compensate for people. And if the prices of the drinks were raised — because margins and coffee are so narrow — to where you could pay the baristas $15 an hour, your latte would be $10 instead of $5.”