One bottle of water. One empty shop. One touchscreen demanding an 18% tip for… absolutely nobody.
That is the scene Florida physician Clay Moss filmed at an unstaffed CIBO Express shop in Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal C, and it has detonated across Instagram and TikTok. His reel, posted on October 16 under the caption “Anyone else being asked to tip… nobody?”, has been watched millions of times. This week the airport’s operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, stepped in and said the tip button has to go.
The 18% that nobody earned
Moss scanned the bottle himself. There was no cashier, no barista, no one to hand him anything. The screen still served up a default gratuity of 18%, which he had to tap out of before paying.
“Look at this. This is what the world’s come to nowadays,” he says in the clip. Then the question that set the comments on fire: “Who is this automatic 18% tip — that I have to click out of — for?” He pans the camera around the small store to show there is no visible worker anywhere, and asks, “Who am I tipping here?”
The water cost $6.49. The suggested tip came to $1.17, which would have pushed the bill to $7.66 for a single bottle he fetched and scanned on his own. Moss removed the tip and paid for the water.
Is it real?
Viral outrage clips are easy to fake, so this one deserves the question. Here the strongest evidence comes from the operator itself: the Port Authority’s response refers directly to “the kiosk shown in the video” and says it has raised that specific machine with OTG, the company that runs restaurants and shops in Terminal C. Nobody involved has suggested the screen was staged or edited.
The fine print that muddied it
The screen in the video also lists, in tiny type, an “Employee Benefits Surcharge,” described as “not a gratuity payable directly to staff.” The Port Authority says that charge, approved in December 2024, exists to fund yearly pay raises for thousands of airport workers and to help concession operators cover costs tied to airport minimum-wage rules and the Healthy Terminals Act. In other words, the surcharge is a separate line from the tip prompt Moss was complaining about.
On the tip itself, the Port Authority did not hedge. “Tipping prompts have no place at self-checkout kiosks, and we have previously worked with OTG to ensure customers do not receive those prompts,” a spokesperson said. “We have contacted OTG about the kiosk shown in the video and expect the tipping option to be removed immediately. We will also confirm that no other self-checkout kiosks are prompting customers for tips.”
Requests for comment to CIBO Express and OTG had not been answered at the time of the reports.
The comments section went to war
Most viewers sided with Moss. “Auto gratuity in a self [checkout] is madness,” wrote one. “It should be an 18% discount since I’m acting as the employee,” joked another. A third went further: “Wish they had NEGATIVE TIP option for irritating me.”
Not everyone agreed. “That water bottle didn’t walk itself to the cooler. Someone had to put it there! Oh yeah, a waged employee,” one commenter fired back, asking who actually receives the money.
Moss calls his sudden fame an “unexpected side quest.” His diagnosis: “What made this moment so absurd to me is that we’ve removed the human interaction but kept the social expectation.”
Why this clip hit a nerve
The Newark screen managed to combine the two tipping practices Americans dislike most. In a nationally representative survey of 11,945 US adults carried out in August 2023, 72% said they oppose businesses adding automatic service charges or tips to bills, while more opposed (40%) than favored (24%) businesses suggesting tip amounts on a bill or checkout screen. The same survey found 72% felt tipping is expected in more places than five years earlier, and only about a third said it is very or extremely easy to know whether to tip at all.
For international readers, the backlash has deep roots. Tipping spread in the US in the 1850s and 1860s, and six states later outlawed it, starting with Washington in 1909; the last of those bans was repealed in Mississippi in 1926. A century on, the argument has moved from the dining room to the touchscreen.
Nor is this a first for Newark. Travelers have reported tip prompts at the airport’s self-checkout kiosks going back to at least May 2023. The Port Authority now says it will check every self-checkout machine there, which means the next traveler to buy a $6.49 water in Terminal C should find one button fewer.
Further reading
Image: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
