#tipflation

One of the comments to this article pointed to a TikTok video where someone was asked to tip at an airport self-service counter. Presumably there was no employee interaction anywhere in the purchase process, so who gets the tip? At counter-service restaurants, the implicit assumption is that the employees will get them eventually, but how do we know for sure? I'm increasingly of the suspicion that this is just another manifestation of price optimization, where a company charges different prices to different customers based on how much they're willing to pay (which is practiced outside of retail too), but in front of you with a POS terminal instead of behind the scenes with algorithms.