Infuriated airport customer charged employee and retention fee at a self-checkout counter

Customers are now tipping their nonexistent employees.An airport bookshop hit a traveler with a surprise “employee retention fee” — despite the customer scanning and bagging his own item at a self-checkout machine, triggering a wave of furious backlash online.The outrage erupted after an exasperated flyer posted a picture of his receipt from the Bryant Park Market inside JFK Airport’s Terminal 5 in Queens on Reddit’s r/EndTipping forum.

The traveler posted that he had tried to buy a single book — “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of Edmund Fitzgerald” — priced at $21.99 before boarding an early-morning flight.But when the bill printed, the customer was stunned to find a $2.01 sales tax tacked on alongside a sneaky $0.66 charge labeled as an “employee benefit.” Printed at the bottom of the receipt, it explicitly declared that a 3% surcharge is levied to fund employee retention programs — and clarified, in bold letters, that the added fee “is not a gratuity.”The shopper uploaded the bill to Reddit’s popular r/EndTipping forum — a digital haven for fed-up consumers who frequently air their grievances over tipping fatigue and unexpected venue surcharges, to vent about the social pressure to tip in non-traditional service settings.“I just wanted to buy a book before my 6 a.m.flight.

And naturally, they tax on top of the added fee as well! ‘Not a gratuity,’” the infuriated airport shopper wrote in his viral post.Fellow anti-tippers immediately flooded the comments, blasting the airport vendor for putting labor costs onto self-serving customers.“I’d be so pi**ed I’d turn right around and return the book.I refuse to participate in this sort of rip-off bulls**t.

It’s infuriating,” one enraged commenter fumed.“That would be all for me.I would be done there.

It’s the owner’s choice to apply it, but it’s mine to shop elsewhere,” another chimed in. “That is actually a forced gratuity regardless of what nam...