Hotels too. The advertised price is never accurate because their stupid resort fees.

It’s literally a culture of hiding true costs, weird af.

Makes me happy though in this day and age that people are waking up to this fact, and are starting to push back on it.

In the past corporations/governments thought people were a lot more unaware, than they are today.

It's a culture of trying to get away with whatever makes the most profits. We also have that, but there are some reasonable laws working against that. One of my favourites is the duty to display per kg or per litre price. Before that, shops made the package sizes deliberately confusing.

Have lived in both eu and us.

Agree, but the challenge on tax is that it's not harmonized across municipalities. This means that stores that are across the street from each other may have identical prices/profit margin and a different net price to the consumer. This would lead to consumer preferences biased by physical location and have lots of other weird side effects. You can see this in areas that border state lines when the tax is appreciably different.

Step one is a harmonized tax rate, but that's easier said than done.

It's really not that weird at all. It's a simple consequence of the EU having better consumer protection laws. Unfortunately the far right in the US is a lot stronger than in most of Europe and has been since the post-war era.

We also, in the US, have an old and antiquated system that was deliberately designed to be difficult to change because the founders had to convince the slave-owning class that abolition couldn't be forced on them if they agreed to join the newly-formed union. How did they do that? You guessed it! By making the Constitution almost impossible to change, which is one reason why it required the bloodiest war in our history to end slavery.

Again, there's nothing especially "weird" about it. As is true of a lot of contemporary reality, it's largely a consequence of history.

Interestingly, tipping culture is also at least tangentially a product of slavery as well, but that's a bit more complicated so I'll save it for another comment.

And if you're starting to suspect that a ton of what ails the US can be traced directly back to slavery, here's a hint; you may be on to something!

That said, it was the European colonial powers who brought slavery to North America in the first place, which kind of brings us full circle.

It's not okay. I can hear some of my customers' anxiety when they struggle to tip me. Some people lord it over me like I should revere them for their blessing. There is an unnecessary layer of stress to the customer service routine for everyone involved except the owner who benefits from this system. Not to mention some businesses pool their tips and share it with everyone, sometimes redirecting these funds into unscrupulous items like snacks without consent. >:(

Tips don't motivate me to provide great customer service to my customers. Tips serve to maintain cheap labor, but more important to me is how they erect social barriers. I can't blame someone for wanting or being motivated by tips when they're stuck near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. I'm there too so I understand, but there's just no reason for tips when we can get/provide great service without adding layers of paranoia; When we can provide a satisfying quality of life for everyone in the process with a ~~not-so~~-simple wage increase (and God forbid, better budgeting and management from business owners).

They also in general make my job harder, especially when an old person who's basically blind can't find any of the buttons or follow simple directions (PRESS 3 FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MARIANNE)

No. I actually kinda do. Like if I'm out with friends I literally get judged if I tip poorly let alone if I don't tip at all which is social suicide.

And if I have a coupon for a meal, say 50% or something like that I still have to tip on the original amount before the discount was applied.

Moreover, and most importantly in some restaurants tipping is the only source of income the server gets. Regardless of how I feel about it I am still responsible for this person's wage.

I hate tipping culture.

It's not socially acceptable to not tip servers in a full service restaurant in the USA. It's becoming a required social norm to tip fast casual.

The pandemic really changed the tipping norms in the USA.

Yes and no. All tips are supposed to be reported to the IRS. Whether they are or not is not really relevant. What really matters is that the customers aren’t forced to do an owners job. If an owner needs their customers to prop up their employees then the owners shouldn’t be in business.

I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.