Why Tippers Are Being Less Generous These Days
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, March 25th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. In the early days of the pandemic, when we couldn't eat in restaurants, Americans tacked on hefty tips for delivery workers who brought them lunch or dinner. Since then, Americans' generosity when it comes to tips has dwindled.
During the pandemic, we started tipping on 90% of online orders, and now that's starting to go down. It kind of shows you that there's a shift happening.
Coming up, our personal finance reporter J.J. McCorvey has been following the money that Americans give to service personnel. He'll join us to discuss how tipping is changing as the pandemic eases. That's after the break.
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During the height of the pandemic, Americans upped their tipping game, showing a lot more gratitude to service personnel.
Why did Americans increase tipping at the start of the pandemic?
But since vaccines have become widely available, they started returning to form and being less generous with their tips. So where are people still tipping and where are they pulled back? WSJ personal finance reporter J.J. McCorvey joins us with more. Hey, J.J., thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, J.R. So JJ, take us back for a moment. Why did tipping increase significantly during the early days of the pandemic? And how much did it rise?
So a lot of us during the early days of the pandemic, we were cooped up and saving money while a lot of our local restaurants were losing business. And we really wanted to be more generous to local restaurants who were losing business during that time. And people found themselves tipping as much as 30% for a regular order. I think it was the delivery people, people who braved those early days of the pandemic and brought us our food. We weren't necessarily trying to tip those companies. We were trying to compensate those people who braved the pandemic. And since then, how much have tips declined? So according to data from Square, among purchases made over the phone or online, which includes obviously delivery orders,
the share of those orders that received the tip declined to 84.4% at the end of February from 85.7% in March 2021. So that's a significant number because before the pandemic, That was around like 50%. You know, people only tip about half the amount of time. And so the fact that, you know, during the pandemic, we started tipping on 90% of online orders. And now that's starting to go down. It kind of shows you that there's a shift happening.
Now, where specifically have people lightened up on tipping?
So as I mentioned, it's delivery orders, cases where you don't have to tip people in person. You can kind of avoid the social pressure of tipping in person and do it from your phone or from your home. And also on pickup orders. I spoke to some folks who said that they At their restaurants, they noticed that people weren't tipping at all on pickup orders, whereas earlier, maybe a year or so ago, people maybe felt compelled to help a little more or be more generous.
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