Last week I watched a self-checkout machine ask a man for a tip. No human within twenty feet. He stood there, thumb hovering over the screen, doing the same guilty math we all do now. Meanwhile, my grandfather tipped his barber, his gas station attendant, and the kid who carried groceries to his car, every time, without a screen guilting him into it.
Tipping didn’t just grow. It moved. We tip in places that would’ve confused our grandparents, and we quietly stopped tipping the people they never would’ve stiffed. Here are nine tips that mostly vanished.
1. Gas station attendants
Full-service gas was the default for decades, and a quarter or two for the guy who pumped, checked your oil, and wiped the windshield was standard. Self-service killed the job in most states, and the tip died with it. New Jersey holds the line on full service, but even there the tipping culture is mostly gone.
2. Grocery baggers and carry-out help
There was a time when a bagger walking your groceries to the car earned a dollar, and everyone understood the deal. Most stores actually banned bagger tips somewhere along the way, and customers didn’t fight the rule. we just pocketed the dollar and moved on.
3. Milkmen and delivery routes
Weekly tips for the milkman, the paper boy, the laundry route driver. Entire jobs built on small regular gratitude. The jobs disappeared, and here’s the twist, their replacement is the delivery app driver, who we tip through a screen while the app takes a cut of everything.
4. Ushers and movie theater staff
Uniformed ushers once walked you to your seat with a flashlight and got tipped for it. Ask anyone under forty about tipping at a movie theater and you’ll get a blank stare. The whole idea sounds invented.
honestly, this one made me feel ancient just researching it.
5. Hotel bellhops, for most travelers
The bellhop tip isn’t officially dead, but look around a mid-range hotel. Wheeled luggage ended the era of needing help with bags, and most guests now decline assistance specifically to skip the awkward tip moment. The service survives at luxury hotels and almost nowhere else.
6. Washroom attendants
A dish of dollar bills next to the sink, a person handing you a towel. Outside a handful of old-school steakhouses and clubs, the job has evaporated. Most people under thirty have never once encountered one.
7. Cigarette girls and coat checks
Coat check still exists in cold cities, barely. But the broader category of small in-person services at bars and clubs, the ones that ran entirely on tips, has thinned to almost nothing. The tip went from a social custom to a line item, and the jobs couldn’t survive the transition.
8. Shoe shines
Airports and train stations used to have rows of shine chairs, and the tip was half the price. Sneaker culture, casual offices, and remote work finished what was left. The few shine stands remaining are novelty stops, not a trade.
9. Your regular barber, oddly enough
Barbers still get tipped, so this one is sneakier. What faded is the old habit of tipping everyone in the shop, the sweep kid, the towel guy, the apprentice. The one-person tip survived. The tip that spread through the whole room did not.
What actually happened here
We didn’t get cheaper. We got redirected. The same country that stopped tipping baggers now tips at self-checkout, in coffee apps, at the counter for a muffin handed to us in a bag. Total tipping is higher than ever. It just left the humans who used to earn it and moved to whoever owns the screen.
So here’s my question, and I genuinely want to know. Which one of these would you bring back, and which modern tip screen would you burn down first? Comments are open.
Amelia writes Cents That Count from her kitchen table. She has quit four budgeting apps, run one no spend month, tracked every small purchase for 60 days, and still buys coffee. Everything here is tested on a real, ordinary budget first.
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