I hate tipping. I’ve learned a lot about it over the past 5 years or so. It has racist origins post-civil war history, it amplifies our societies worst qualities including agism/ sexism/ racism, it creates culture divide in restaurants between front of house and back of house, and it’s a lousy way to motivate people. There are a ton of articles on this academic and otherwise. But it’s not opinion. This is what tipping is.

But we’re about to turn on tipping for our employees. Why? Because I want Laura and Fab and our other staff to take more money home. We’ve tried to get there by price increases, but for the past 9 months or so our competitors have been avoiding price increases. Hard for us to be the only one increasing prices.

Recently modern Toast and Square and others figured out that if they present tipping as an option many people elect to tip, even in a quick service context. So right now even though Clover pays the highest average hourly wage rate in Boston our employees don’t have the highest take home pay. We have the change that. Look for tipping to hit Clover sometime in the coming weeks.