The prompt arrived at the coffee counter before the norm did, which is why opinion here has never settled. Tipping in America was not originally a counter-service practice at all: it spread after the Civil War from European travel, six states criminalised it between 1909 and 1915, and those laws were ignored and repealed by the 1920s. The decisive commercial moment came in 1920, when Prohibition stripped hotels of alcohol revenue and owners found tipping very attractive because it reduced the pressure on them to increase wages. That established the arrangement in which the customer, not the employer, tops up the pay. Counter service stayed outside that arrangement for most of a century. What changed was software. Point-of-sale systems such as Square and ShopKeep made a tipping prompt a standard part of checkout, so cafés that had never solicited a tip began asking for one automatically, without any change in what the worker does or in what the customer receives. The result is a question with no inherited answer: 31% of Americans say a tip is necessary for a drip coffee, 51% say it is not, and only about a quarter of coffee buyers say they always or often tip.