Employees at an Apple Store in Maryland are pushing the company to let it ask customers for tips during the checkout process.
The proposal comes from Apple’s first unionized store—in Towson, Maryland—which is currently in labor negotiations with Cupertino, according(Opens in a new window) to Bloomberg, which was first to report the news.
Along with more vacation time, paid holidays, and higher wages, the Towson store is floating the idea of permitting gratuities as “profit-sharing bonus structure,” the union said(Opens in a new window) on its Twitter account. That said, the employees concede the idea is a “little controversial.” Indeed, many US consumers have been encountering “tipflation” and “tip creeping,” where a growing number of restaurants and retailers are asking for tips and at higher rates.
So the idea may not fly with many consumers, let alone Apple. But employees at the Towson store say there’s some important background to why they’re pushing for tips: Some consumers who’ve shopped at the location have insisted they’d like to give one.
“Apple employees everywhere can tell you that they are already being offered tips by customers regularly, however, if an employee accepted even $1, it would be grounds for immediate termination,” the union’s Twitter account says(Opens in a new window).
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To avoid bribes, the gratuities would be split among all staff at the store. The proposed tipping system would also let users choose between a zero tip, 3%, 5%, or a custom amount.
“We understand there are a lot of concerns about the culture of tipping as a whole in the US, but there is currently no other mechanism that would otherwise allow customers to directly thank or contribute to the team that provided them with exceptional service,” the union says.
