On the day I'm writing this—it's April 20, 2020, coffee shops and restaurants across the nation have been closed or altered their operations in some way. Millions of people have been laid off, and many of the folks who have lost their jobs are service workers—baristas, waitstaff, bartenders—many of whom rely on tips as a source of their income.

In this episode, I'm talking to Adam JacksonBey, the coffee pro behind GoFundBean. GoFundBean is a collection of virtual tip jars that serves as a nexus for people who want to help baristas who are out of work. That dollar that you’d usually tip for a coffee? You can go to GoFundBean and give it directly to one of the thousands of baristas who can’t work right now.

In this conversation, we talk a lot about GoFundBean and how necessary it is because so many service professionals make a huge chunk of their earnings in tips. But we also talk a lot about tipping in general. As Adam will talk about in this episode, GoFundBean isn't necessarily an effort one wants to be successful. It's one that has to be successful in order to keep people fed, help them pay their rent, but in an ideal world, tips—and the precarious nature of tipping in general—wouldn't be part of the service industry model. There's a lot of literature on the history of tipping, which we touch upon briefly in this episode, so you might want to give that a google search before you dive in, but if you're ready, I hope you leave this conversation with a framework to imagine a world without tipping—and what that could mean for the way we value and pay service workers. Here's Adam.