Customer shocked after self checkout till asks her for tip

While opinions on tipping and tipping culture may vary there must surely be some things we can all agree on when it comes to figuring out where to draw the line.

In this case, it would be helpful if we could all agree that the person receiving the tip ought to be human and actually alive, because these days even robots are asking for a little extra.

One woman was flabbergasted when she'd run her shopping through a self service checkout and, before being able to leave, the machine asked her whether she'd like to leave it a tip.

With the options starting at 15 percent and going up to 20 percent, she was already going to be some way up the scale in terms of how much to give.

Reddit/komkomkommer

It may not be a perfect system but people understand that leaving a tip is an important thing to do in certain situations because a person's livelihood may very well rely on those tips.

While it might be more ideal to just pay people properly and remove the obligation of tipping to instead return it as an added bonus for a job well done, surely we can all draw the line at leaving a tip that doesn't even go to an actual person?

Not to hurt the feelings of the self service checkout (just in case the robots rise up and destroy us all), but you'd hope we were all on the same page about it not needing a tip.

It's a machine, it can't move, it would have nothing to spend the extra money it'd get from the tip.

This checkout asking for a tip was posted online to Reddit, where it was met with a tidal wave of disapproval expressed in the form of pithy internet comments.

Grace Cary/Getty

Plenty joked that since the checkout was self service, it should be 'offering you a discount for doing it yourself', while another declared that they 'don't f**king get this' as they wondered: "Who tf am I tipping, myself?"

A third ditched the jokes and said the shop could 'shove this where the sun don't shine', though self service checkouts are quite large so that would be quite the arduous task.

While someone else said they could understand this if it was happening in a place where a person was providing a service like making food but the checkout itself was self service.

They said it 'can be justified in some cases' if the money is going to an actual person and it's just done via the checkout but otherwise it wasn't really defensible.