Being overly fake nice because you want a tip. Tbh I’d be more inclined to tip you if you left me alone and stopped talking to me.
The whole tipping thing in USA is weird. Everyone wants a tip, it’s entirely random (as a non-American) how much tip to give. Just pay your staff a wage they can actually live on ffs.
Parts of Greece apparently also do tips. Is that new? Seems like it’s leeching into Europe :/
There’s actually a loose set of rules to it. Im not sure where the specific numbers came from, but 22% of the bill as a tip is considered “excellent service”, 18% or so is considered “mid” or “acceptable” service, and anything below that is a sliding scale of how bad you think they did. 0% is either you being rude and/or saying “i dont believe in tips”, but giving a $0.01 tip is basically saying “fuck you, you piece of shit,” (because fishing out a penny or writing it in takes more effort than opting out).
Those numbers used to be 12, 15 and 18. They’ve increased, but I’m not sure why, since they’re percentages. They keep up with increased food prices automatically. Not sure why tip growth has outpaced food prices.
It may also be my region. Its always been this way for me for at least the last 15 years or so.
Now, those squarepay terminals that suggest 30% tips or similar can eat rocks.
Yeah but how do you consult those rules? How often are they updated? How do you get notified of updates?
The fact that there are no answers to these questions and therefore everyone is working with mismatching rule sets makes the whole thing useless. You can be totally well meaning and still piss off a server because somehow you don’t know what the currently acceptable magic number is.
I recently visited the states for the first time in a decade and didn’t find out until afterwards that 15% is now considered by some people to be “low”. Sorry everyone who I tipped, I shafted you without realizing it. 🤷♂️
We don’t even get this memo. I thought it was still 15, 18, and 20. And I’m wholey against mandatory tipping, but always do so because I don’t want the underpaid staff to starve. I have enough friends in food service who can barely pay their rent with multiple roommates.
Depends where you are, but I think a lot of times they’re happy just to get anything.
As an American I agree it’s fucking weird. Tips should be for exceptional service and not an obligation.
School shootings Kids safety trainings for school shootings Guns everywhere Two party political system Rampant racism Prison slavery Everything about its police force Unaffordable medical system combined with absolute shit medical insurance I can go on for a while
A/C particularly, electricity waste. It’s damn ridiculous, even for Texas. Are northerners born in fridges?
Seems to have deliberately taken the opposite path of anything British:
- Drive on the wrong side of the road
- The light and power switches are upside down
- Weights & measures. Imperial? Ha!
- Screw your English dictionary. Ima put z’s everywhere, drop the letter u and randomly pronounce words like buoy so you think there’s an animal in the water over there
It kinda makes me laugh to think about it as just anti-British 🤣
The fear of naked (intact) female bodies, i.e. censoring of even the slightest nudity, when at the same time, it’s totally fine to have minors play computer games where they can dissect other humans in great bloody detail.
Oh, and chocolate that tastes like somebody barfed into it during manufacturing.
White socks and how Americans eat with their knife and fork.
Fast food portion sizes. It’s out of control. Drinking 1 liter of soda for lunch shouldn’t be normalized. BTW most people are super friendly and nice, in Michigan at least.
Oh, and why is all the cheese orange ?
I noticed too many churches in Texas.
The amount of sugar in any food of yours! It’s incredibly sickening and I’m not sure how you deal with that.
From Austria:
The amount of plastic waste you produce.
Every shopping trip you get (single use) plastic bags, every food item is packaged individually. Even your plates are often times made from plastic, as is the cutlery (sometimes).
All those plastic cups in every restaurant - it’s disgusting.
It’s insanity.
Also: general waste is labeled “landfill” in some places.
In many of the responses I can tell which part of the US they visited by the things they list as weird. It’s funny that they think the entire country is like some particular city or area.
All of the ads for Medication on TV
based on knowledge of the US : many things that other places take for granted or fight to preserve, you guys struggle to obtain.
based on my trip : fucking nothing, I visited new york and stayed at a run down, pre paid hotel. I ate food from stores or carry out. I can’t exactly critique the healthcare system, tipping culture, driving culture when I had access to a fairly modern public transport system, didn’t need medical assistance and didn’t need to tip 50 people just to eat one thing.
EDIT: it’s like asking tourists in antalya at the beach what they think of turkey, they’re fucking tourists, they aren’t affected by the dictator and his bullshit
I was just in Göcek and Ankara and I had some wildly interesting interactions with locals when they asked me how I liked Turkey.
“I like it, very beautiful country, lovely people, great food.”
“So you’d move here?”
“Uh… perhaps not”
“So you don’t like Turkey”
👀
lol
those fuckers have some nerve asking you that shit, when we have so much brain drain that most high streets are basically completely catering to elderly people with hearing aid and similar stores on each one, because all the working age people leave to live abroad.
No shit rich foreigners don’t want to move to turkey.
source : part of the brain drain for both turkey and the UK. fuck them countries.
My girlfriend and her sister are also in the brain drain. Definitely a sad state of affairs, so many of her friends and friends family’s have been either political prisoners, or had ongoing court cases, etc.
I’ve been trying to learn Turkish so we can move her family over here too and I can actually chat with them, but I fear they’ll need to work on their English so they can get around.
many of her friends and friends family’s have been either political prisoners, or had ongoing court cases, etc.
wow. I’m assuming the people asking you “wanna move to Turkey?” aren’t aware of this.
Best of luck to your gf’s family , gurbet recognise gurbet.
Teşekkürler!
I hope where you are now is more stable.
Juxtaposition of pearl-clutching Puritanism w/ a 21 drinking age against beer available in a 7-11.
Pick a fucking lane
As an American, my top realization was… everywhere else in the world yall use electric kettles - Americans frequently only have a stove top kettle like it’s the fucking eighteenth century.
They are common among US tea drinkers, but coffee seems more popular.
Honest truth is that people in the US don’t need to use kettles as much, so for a lot of households it’s just a question of why buy an extra appliance when the cheap $10 kettle from Target or a small saucepan will do for the few times a year a kettle becomes convenient.
But my electric kettle only cost me $10
Also: Microwave. Apparently, lots of people heat their water in the microwave. (See pinned comment here.)
I will admit as a kid when I wanted tea I used to just fill a mug with water and stick it in the microwave for a minute.
+1 for the account name being on topic
You ever eat instant ramen? You enjoy boiling things? Do you drink tea multiple times a year?
The kettle is worth it.
you can boil water in a pot on the stove, or in the microwave, we have options.
This is sort of the point - it’s such a pain compared to an electric kettle and I just don’t understand why Americans are so dedicated to avoiding such a useful appliance.
is it though?
- kettle: fill it with water, turn it on, and wait
- stove: fill a pot with water, put it on the stove and turn it on, wait
- microwave: put a cup of water in the microwave and wait
- coffeemaker: press the go button, it makes hot water
it’s useful in the same way that a rotary hammer drill is useful for drilling through masonry, i’m going to assume you probably don’t drill through much masonry in your life, therefore you don’t need it.
Americans aren’t stupid or daft, we just dont fucking need them. 95% of the time we need hot water, its for cooking, or coffee.
If we had a kettle it would literally just be landfill.
you’re effectively asking someone who doesn’t eat toast frequently why they don’t have a toaster, it’s a silly question.
Ramen is most commonly sold in sealed plastic bags in America. We just cook it in a pot like any other pasta. Lots of people I know don’t own any kind of kettle. If they need to boil water a pot or the microwave both work just fine.
Personally, I like tea, but I also have an induction cooktop, so I just have a kettle for that. It’s great. All the advantages of an electric kettle without having to put an electrical appliance by my sink.
That’s the thing, the answer for a lot of people in the US is no.
After coffee, the most common need for boiled water in US households is probably for pasta, and a kettle’s not really the tool for either of those.
People that do eat a lot of instant ramen or drink a lot of tea in the US are more likely to have electric kettles (as some people I know do) but most don’t eat ramen often enough and tea just isn’t as big here.
The stove top kettle might get a comeback since modern induction stoves are faster than an electric kettle. I’m about to get one and look forward to having one less appliance on the table.
I’m not sure it’s that much faster but we recently switched to a stove top kettle for our induction stove. It’s one less thing that needs to be plugged in somewhere. Also, the kettle makes a very cool sound! :)
I thought this one was also to do with their power being on a lower voltage so Kettles take longer?
But it’s still super weird. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s not. Boiling water with 110V power works just fine.
Electric kettles are are slower on 110 but way faster than electric(non induction) stove
We have keurigs now 🤡
(They can dispense plain hot water)
Is there a generic (non-brand) name for these boiling-water faucets? (That’s not a mouthful like “boiling-water faucets”). I think we call them quookers here, which is also a brand name, and I slightly dislike that practice. I mean, “brand name for generic thing” is very common, but the brands and things differ per country, so it’s like a layer of jargon to decipher.
I dont think there is. There are, however, actual instant hot-water dispensers you can install as an extra sink faucet and they are amazing.
Ah the company that convinced people that adding DRM to coffee was okay because they made it “easier” to make coffee (meanwhile I’ve faught far more with every kurig I’ve encountered than any $5 drip coffee machine I’ve ever encountered)
We mostly use it like a regular coffee machine though, with the cups you can fill yourself. No DRM used here.
Yeah but anything that comes out of a keurig always tastes kinda sludgy.
Clean your keurig
Oh I don’t own one… they make crappy coffee anyway.
