Dr. Umer Hussain
Assistant Professor at Missouri State University’s College of Business. His research explores the intersection of race, religion, and gender in sports.
Email: UmerHussain@MissouriState.edu
Dr. Steve Bien-Aimé
Associate Professor at the University of Kansas’s William Allen White School of Mass Communications and Journalism.
Email: bienaime@ku.edu
Perhaps the most revealing culture shock of the 2026 World Cup arrived after the meal for many international visitors to the U.S. The price displayed on the menu was not necessarily the amount ultimately paid, causing frustration and confusion among fans.
For many visitors, a tip is a small, discretionary reward because service is already reflected in both the advertised price and the worker’s wage. In the United States, by contrast, a restaurant tip is formally voluntary but frequently operates as expected compensation. Digital payment screens have made this contradiction more visible. The same request can appear after full table service, at a coffee counter, or when a customer simply collects a stadium beer. Even Americans disagree about which prompts should be honored.
For example, Kansas City restaurant operators were already preparing for this point of friction. Several restaurants adopted or considered automatic gratuities or service charges of approximately 18 to 20 percent regardless of the number of people, seeking to protect workers’ earnings from differences in international tipping practices. One business explained to the local media channel that the policy would cover every bill, avoiding the questionable task of identifying diners presumed to be foreign. Applying the rule generally was more defensible, although it transferred rather than resolved the misunderstanding. For guests who regarded the menu price as the total cost, discovering the additional charge only when paying could feel like punishment for violating a convention that had never been made explicit.
Moreover, mandatory service charges intended to accommodate a temporary influx of international visitors did not distinguish between tourists with substantial travel budgets and low-wage workers, students, or families who regularly relied on affordable local restaurants. Therefore, restaurants that adopted mandatory service charges placed an additional financial burden on local residents, especially those already living on limited incomes. The policy therefore shifted the burden of protecting workers’ wages onto consumers, including marginalized residents who had played no role in creating the confusion surrounding international tipping practices. More broadly, it exposed a structural problem: when employers rely on customer payments (i.e., tipping) to provide adequate compensation, both workers and economically vulnerable diners absorb the costs of an unclear and unequal system.
Previous research highlights that tipping culture can also be a means for race and gender discrimination by both customers and waiters. However, there remains a scarcity of research examining how sport mega-events may influence discriminatory practices within tipping culture.
Although mandatory service charges are not equivalent to the forced evictions or housing displacement that occurred during this World Cup in the U.S. and Canada – and are commonly associated with sport mega-events – they may represent a less visible form of everyday economic exclusion.
Research shows that mega-event development frequently concentrates benefits among businesses, investors, and affluent visitors while transferring social and financial costs to low-income residents, migrants, women, ethnic minorities, and other marginalized groups. Reporting by the Associated Press found that most of the sixteen host cities are addressing homelessness through existing programs, with little or no new funding tied specifically to the World Cup. Additionally, in the context of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, tipping policies may reproduce this unequal pattern within ordinary spaces of consumption: restaurants protect revenue and workers’ earnings by increasing customers’ bills, while financially vulnerable residents face higher costs in their own communities.
Examining tipping during sport mega-events therefore extends the concept of displacement beyond physical removal to include economic and cultural displacement, whereby local residents may feel increasingly unable to afford, access, or comfortably participate in everyday hospitality spaces transformed to accommodate global visitors.
Preparing for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics
The better host-city response would be transparency in the future. Restaurants could explain before ordering that tax would be added to the listed price, identify any service charge, describe how it supported staff wages, and state clearly whether an additional tip was optional. Multilingual notices and a single policy for all diners would reduce confusion without turning perceived nationality into a pricing category.
Timing is especially important during a mega-event. Restaurants cannot expect repeat customers to learn local norms gradually. A visitor may eat only once in a particular establishment, order through a translated menu, and leave the city days later. A worker, meanwhile, may depend on the tournament’s brief surge in business to offset slower periods. The familiar American workaround, explaining the system verbally, also falters in noisy rooms and across languages.
As global sporting attention turns from the 2026 World Cup to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, the more significant legacy question is not whether international visitors learned when and how much to tip. It is whether host cities learned to make the economics of hospitality intelligible to the global public they invited. A genuinely international welcome should not require guests to discover the true price of service only at the bottom of the bill.
