The Village Inn (VI) in downtown Gambier has implemented an automatic 18% gratuity on purchases made with K-Cards. Josh Smith, the VI’s owner, said that he made the change because an estimated half of all K-Card receipts are signed without a tip. He put up a  sign in April advertising the new policy. 

K-Cards are students’ all-in-one passes to get into dorms, check out library books and buy goods from select establishments in both Gambier and Mount Vernon. Many students carry their K-Cards in lieu of a card or cash, as K-Cards can be loaded with money at the start of the semester and used over time, similar to a debit card. However, according to Smith, the fee for businesses to swipe K-Cards is higher than that of other cards. The fee for scanning K-Cards was increased at the end of the 2025-26 academic year. Additionally, due to the systems of Ugryd, the parent company that facilitates the K-Cards, the businesses do not see the money from the K-Cards until several days after a purchase. 

“It’s to the point now where [the fee is] high enough, and there’s enough of those receipts not getting billed out; like, I’ve got to do something to at least cover my staff’s butts,” Smith said. “If you got a table of 15 kids and five of them tip $1, and the rest of them don’t tip you at all, you just ran your [butt] off for an hour and 15 minutes for five bucks, which is not cool.”

There could be several reasons why K-Card tabs are most often left untipped. The first, as another Gambier business owner noted, is that college students are not always the most generous patrons. 

“Were people not tipping?” Zady Hasse ’28 asked in an interview with the Collegian. “Then yeah, fair enough,” she conceded. Hasse also wondered if it could be because of the extra step of tipping with K-Card that Kenyon students forget to tip when not directly asked. When a student uses a K-Card at the VI, they are presented with a physical receipt instead of using the handheld devices that automatically ask you for a tip as you pay. 

“I think, as a campus, we should be doing more to support the VI. They’re our one source of VI,” Hasse elaborated. “I think we need to be tipping them far more than they are tipped because every time you order a shot it’s actually a double.”