Customers are now tipping their nonexistent employees.
An airport bookshop hit a traveler with a surprise “employee retention fee” — despite the customer scanning and bagging his own item at a self-checkout machine, triggering a wave of furious backlash online.
The outrage erupted after an exasperated flyer posted a picture of his receipt from the Bryant Park Market inside JFK Airport’s Terminal 5 in Queens on Reddit’s r/EndTipping forum.
The traveler posted that he had tried to buy a single book — “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of Edmund Fitzgerald” — priced at $21.99 before boarding an early-morning flight.
But when the bill printed, the customer was stunned to find a $2.01 sales tax tacked on alongside a sneaky $0.66 charge labeled as an “employee benefit.” Printed at the bottom of the receipt, it explicitly declared that a 3% surcharge is levied to fund employee retention programs — and clarified, in bold letters, that the added fee “is not a gratuity.”
The shopper uploaded the bill to Reddit’s popular r/EndTipping forum — a digital haven for fed-up consumers who frequently air their grievances over tipping fatigue and unexpected venue surcharges, to vent about the social pressure to tip in non-traditional service settings.
“I just wanted to buy a book before my 6 a.m. flight. And naturally, they tax on top of the added fee as well! ‘Not a gratuity,’” the infuriated airport shopper wrote in his viral post.
Fellow anti-tippers immediately flooded the comments, blasting the airport vendor for putting labor costs onto self-serving customers.
“I’d be so pi**ed I’d turn right around and return the book. I refuse to participate in this sort of rip-off bulls**t. It’s infuriating,” one enraged commenter fumed.
“That would be all for me. I would be done there. It’s the owner’s choice to apply it, but it’s mine to shop elsewhere,” another chimed in.
“That is actually a forced gratuity regardless of what name they put on it,” wrote a third angry Redditor.
The airport incident is just the latest example of retail shops and eateries quietly tacking hidden costs onto final bills, following a recent uproar from a diner who claimed he was “extorted” after a restaurant chain slapped an unexpected “admin fee” onto his burger order.
The public anger highlights a sweeping nationwide pushback against aggressive payment prompts: a recent study revealed that 78% of Americans feel tipping culture has gotten completely out of control, while 74% noted that digital touchscreens regularly nudge customers with ever-increasing default tip percentages.
When confronted by automated checkout screens, 59% of consumers admitted to tipping purely out of guilt even when receiving poor service, expressing growing resentment over expanding fee expectations and runaway gratuity prompts.
