You walk into your favorite local restaurant to pick up a simple bag of takeout food. You step up to the register, pay with your card, and the point-of-sale terminal spins around to face you. Suddenly, you are staring at a screen displaying aggressive percentage options starting at fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five percent for an order you placed online and picked up yourself. A wave of social pressure washes over you as the cashier watches your reaction. This modern checkout ritual has turned a routine transaction into an awkward ethical puzzle. Do you really need to tip when no servers delivered food to your table?
