2025年考研英语二阅读 Text 1 原文翻译及答案解析

U.S. customers historically tipped people they assumed were earning most of their income via tips, such as restaurant servers earning less than the minimum wage. In the early 2010s, a wide range of businesses started processing purchases with iPads and other digital payment systems. These systems often prompted customers to tip for services that were not previously tipped.

美国顾客历史上会给那些他们认为主要靠小费赚取收入的人小费，例如收入低于最低工资的餐厅服务员。在2010年代初，各种企业开始使用iPad和其他数字支付系统处理购买。这些系统常常促使顾客为以前没有小费的服务支付小费。

Today's tip requests are often not connected to the salary and service norms that used to determine when and how people tip. Customers in the past nearly always paid tips after receiving a service, such as at the conclusion of a restaurant meal, after getting a haircut or once a pizza was delivered. That timing could reward high-quality service and give workers an incentive to provide it.

如今的小费请求往往与过去决定人们何时以及如何支付小费的薪资和服务规范无关。过去，顾客几乎总是在接受服务后支付小费，例如在餐厅用餐结束、理发后或披萨送达时。这种时间安排可以奖励高质量的服务，并激励员工提供这样的服务。

It's becoming more common for tips to be requested beforehand. And new tipping technology may even automatically add tips.

事先要求小费变得越来越普遍。而且新的小费技术甚至可能自动添加小费。

The prevalence of digital payment devices has made it easier to ask customers for a tip. That helps explain why tip requests are creeping into new kinds of services. Customers now routinely see menus of suggested default options-often well above 20% of what they owe. The amounts have risen from 10% or less in the 1950s to 15% around the year 2000 to 20% or higher today. This increase is sometimes called tipflation-the expectation of ever-higher tip amounts.

数字支付设备的普及使得向顾客索要小费变得更加容易。这有助于解释为什么小费请求正在逐渐渗透到新类型的服务中。顾客现在经常看到建议的默认选项菜单——通常远高于他们应付金额的20%。小费金额从20世纪50年代的10%或更低，上升到2000年左右的15%，再到今天的20%或更高。这种增长有时被称为小费通胀——即对小费金额不断上升的期望。

Tipping has always been a vital source of income for workers in historically tipped services, like restaurants, where the tipped minimum wage can be as low as US$2.13 an hour. Tip creep and tipflation are now further supplementing the income of many low-wage service workers.

小费一直是历史性小费服务行业（如餐厅）员工的重要收入来源，在这些地方，小费最低工资可能低至每小时2.13美元。小费蔓延和小费通胀现在正进一步补充许多低薪服务工作者的收入。

Notably, tipping primarily benefits some of these workers, such as waiters, but not others, such as cooks and dishwashers. To ensure that all employees were paid fair wages, some restaurants banned tipping and increased prices, but this movement toward no-tipping services has largely fizzled out.

值得注意的是，小费主要使一些员工受益，例如服务员，但其他员工则不然，例如厨师和洗碗工。为确保所有员工获得公平工资，一些餐厅禁止小费并提高价格，但这种无小费服务的运动已基本失败。

So, to increase employee wages without raising prices, more employers are succumbing to the temptations of tip creep and tipflation. However, many customers are frustrated because they feel they are being asked for too high of a tip, too often. And, as our research emphasizes, tipping now seems to be more coercive, less generous and often completely disassociated from service quality.

因此，为了在不提高价格的情况下增加员工工资，越来越多的雇主屈服于小费蔓延和小费通胀的诱惑。然而，许多顾客感到沮丧，因为他们觉得被要求支付过高的小费，而且过于频繁。此外，正如我们的研究所强调的，小费现在似乎更具强制性、更少慷慨，并且常常完全与服务质量脱节。