Tipping was never an obligation in Switzerland, at any rate not since the seventies, when service went into the prices. What remained was rounding up. Forty-four eighty, and the guest says keep the change, and means fifty. He says it in passing, while reaching for his coat. It is not an amount, it is a sentence.
The sentence was never an act of its own. It hung on the paying, you could say it or not, and if you did not say it, nothing had happened. The tip was a remainder, not a procedure.
The device turns it into a step of its own. It asks a question, and questions want answering. Selection, confirmation, someone standing beside you waiting until it is over. That is why you can no longer omit it. You can only decline it.
The first field does the most work. No tip.
In the past you gave no tip by doing nothing. You took the change, said thank you and left. It was not an event, and omissions stay invisible. Now you press your finger on a spelt-out refusal, in front of someone standing twenty centimetres away. A remainder has become an answer.
I have seen guests freeze for a moment at that point. Not because they are mean. Because they realise they have to say something they would never have wanted to say.
The staff have a choreography for this, written down nowhere and the same everywhere. Hold out the device, turn the head thirty degrees away, fix the eyes on a point on the wall that has suddenly become very interesting. Some take two small steps back, as far as decency allows. It means: I am not looking. It does not work. Both know that looking is possible, and that is all it takes.
The percentages come from somewhere else. Five, ten, fifteen is the language of a country where wages depend on the guest. With us the wages are in the bill, like the VAT. The numbers are not a yardstick, they are a default setting. And it does not come from the manufacturer, it has been chosen. Someone in the business decided which three numbers appear and which one stands in the middle, because whoever sees three numbers side by side takes the middle one. That is not generosity, that is design. Percentages have exactly one advantage, and it does not belong to the guest: they rise with the amount.
Something else has disappeared more quietly. The coins on the table belonged to the evening. Whoever pocketed them knew which table they came from. The digital amount has no origin. It is booked, distributed, settled and arrives later, correct and without a face. The numbers add up. Only nobody knows any more who was meant.
This is not nostalgia. The accounting is cleaner, the distribution fairer, and the old tip jars were no model of transparency. I am not defending the coins. I am noting that we have lost something that was never booked anywhere.
A gift needs the possibility of being left undone unnoticed. Otherwise it is not a gift. Whoever cannot say no in silence, his yes is no longer a yes. The terminal makes generosity visible and destroys it in the same moment.
And it works. The amounts have risen since the devices started asking. They have risen because the device asks, not because the evenings have got better. That is the trade the industry has made, mostly without noticing. More tips, less of what a tip was.
Sometimes, after tapping, someone still puts a two-franc coin on the table. On the table, not in the device. I have never asked why. But it lies there, without a receipt and without a percentage sign, and everyone in the room understands it at once.