Are Boomers Really The Worst Tippers? Here's What Waiters Say

Tipping has become controversial in the years following the pandemic largely due to inflated prices leaving customers with less to give. Combine that with "tipflation," where more and more services are starting to ask customers to tip, and you've got a recipe for tip fatigue. Amidst this, boomers have been labeled as the worst tippers among us. However, waiters on the internet (myself included) are coming to their defense.

The majority of comments from a Reddit post titled "Servers of Reddit: Which generation are actually the best tippers?" stated that boomers are the best. One Redditor wrote, "In my experience, it's the boomers who know what they want but are not high maintenance. They'll tell you exactly what they want, and as long as you meet that and check in on them, they tend to tip 22% or above." Another Redditor said, "Boomers, in my experience, were always excellent tippers, as long as they received good service. Even if something went wrong, as long as it was promptly corrected, tip would be great."

After working nearly a decade in various tipped food services (restaurant waiter, barista, food delivery), I'd have to echo the sentiments made on this Reddit post. Me and my coworkers could always count on boomers to leave a decent tip, especially when they recognized great service was genuinely trying to be provided. Boomers grew up during a post-war economic boom and were often raised by parents who experienced the Great Depression, potentially giving them a different perspective on the value of a dollar.

From another Reddit post titled "Boomers never tip" you'd expect the comments to mostly agree, but the responses were mixed. Most comments agreed that boomers are the worst tippers, but others argued that boomers consistently tip and several boomers in the thread shared their generous tipping habits. "My experience as a housecleaner is, the richer the boomer the more snobby they are and won't tip," wrote one Redditor. A defending commenter stated, "Gen Xer, here ... I work in a service industry, and I find it surprising when a Boomer doesn't tip." One boomer wrote, "I'm a Boomer and am 'self made' and got here by mopping floors, scrubbing toilets and putting up with idiot customers ... I figure there's your base pay for showing up, the 20% tip for doing your job, then an extra 20% for not stabbing customers in the eye."

In my experience, the worst tippers are the customers who don't tip at all when it's warranted, like when dining at a restaurant. While certain generations are often singled out for generalized tipping habits, there's far more that can influence the kind of tip one leaves. As a general rule of thumb for tipping food service workers, 20% of the total bill is considered a baseline for good service.