The new part is every card payment system having a tip option, where as tips used to be a thing you gave a server in cash on the table, then a optional fee addended to a bill at a sit down restaurant to compensate the server (since they were getting payed below minimum wage), this is different though.
Even food providers where there are no servers have “tips” now. Often times establishments do not even choose to have them, they’re just the default on the payment system.
The tip system was always kind of scummy as it was putting the onus of preventing the server from getting kicked out of their home on the customer. Now though, rather than costumers being put on the hook for paying exploited workers, the companies are weaponizing that guilt based system to pad profits even further. Often times those “tips” don’t even end up going to the workers at the restaurant, they go straight in to the companies revenues, and pad the incomes of the payment service companies that get a 1-3% cut of every transaction.
What used to be conceptualized as a way to reward hard work is now just another avenue to scam people out of money. It’s another crack in the wall of a system that is mindlessly sabotaging it’s own justifications. Creating further contradictions.
It’s not that surprising, I think it shows the huge disconnect between what these institutions think the do for people and what they really do.
They assumed they were providing moral/spiritual guidance but in reality most people were coming to them because they were the only affordable source of community in the area. Another example of a point of community organizing would be something like a board game/table top store, but those are often expensive to participate in as they have a lot of over head that needs to be payed for. Churches of course were not free to run but they had a huge leg up by being tax exempt, not to mention had a lot of people willing to work for them for low wages out of passion for the topic. So they could get by on small volunteer donations.
So churches could survive in areas where something like a mall, or game store, a book shop or some other type of focused community couldn’t due to there not being enough people with the means to participate.
Now though, the effective monopoly that kept these churches popular has been broken, as anyone with a cellphone can go on to the internet and participate in community that way. Is it the same quality of experience? Is something being lost through purely digital community? Maybe, maybe not, but theses religious institutions have become so divorced from the interests and needs of their constituents that even a pale imitation has been able to absorb their audience in less than a couple decades.
The republicans looked at the polling numbers and writing on the wall and saw this was not going to win them any support from people they didn’t already have support from…
But there is a hard line group that is probably flipping their shit right now because they don’t care, they just want to burn everything down. I don’t suspect the republican’s current coalition can survive this kind of internal disagreement for long