Tipping

I know this is a controversial subject, so if you don’t want to read it – don’t.

Tipping has a long history of people (usually the wealthier ones) sharing a bit of their wealth with those who perform services for them: services they either don’t wish to do or haven’t the time to do themselves or haven’t a clue how to do. Servants in the household were tipped for performing services beyond the job for which they were hired or for performing an extraordinarily good job (like a cook who prepared a feast the exceeded expectations – not only would the host tip the cook and servers, so might the more impressed guests). Running errands, such as carrying messages, delivering packages, and picking up packages also earned tips because it was hard work. The tip was not just an appreciation of a well-done job, it was payment for the expenditure of labor on behalf of the tipper. Very often, the only pay many service people received was the tip they got from the person using their services.

That has remained fairly entrenched in our society, especially among waitstaff in restaurants, bellhops and skycaps and valet parkers and delivery drivers.

Many of the people in these occupations receive only a token pay from the businesses which recruit them (I won’t call them employers because technically, they aren’t) because they are expected to earn their pay from the people for whom they perform their services.

Fine restaurants don’t hire waitstaff, they provide the waitstaff with a location where they can ply their trade and earn money. These restaurants then take a portion of the earnings as their cut for providing a work environment. “Modern” laws have the restaurants pay the waitstaff a minimal amount (most places, it’s $1.10 – $1.50 per hour), but they still take a portion of the waitstaff’s tips as a fee for providing them with their stations.

Hair salons do the same thing – charge the hairdresser a fee for their cutting station, then take a portion of the tips and fees the hairdresser receives.

Delivery drivers, for fast food restaurants usually, also only receive minimal pay and depend upon tips to pay for their gas and wear on their cars and for their paychecks.

Much of the American service industry is built upon the bottom level service people – the very ones with whom the paying customer interacts – reciveing the absolute least pay with the expectation that they will receive tips, passing along a portion of those tips to the company itself. Local mangement, upper management, the board and/or owners are the ones who make money, the people who earn that money for them get relatively little.

In America, this whole tip situation is all coonicats.

The service people who receive tips should be viewed as self-employed at specific locations. Their “tip” isn’t a tip at all, but their pay for providing the service, be it food service in a restaurant, hair styling in a salon or barber shop, valet parking at the conference center, shoe shining on the concord, message carrying between office buildings, or luggage carrying at the airport or hotel. There is no “standardized” pay for these services, and many Americans refuse to pay it because they are under the mistaken impression that some business owner is paying these people to perform these services.

Truth is, most businesses pay these service people a token amount just so they can control how many service people are on their property and to exert some degree of conformity over them. But it is just a token amount – less than $2.00 an hour, sometimes substantially less. It is a bizarre half-breed between the freedom of service people to offer their skills for pay and the business world of working for a wage.

This underpayment has its origins in the Regency world of the wealthy offering largesse to the street urchins and stableboys and street people and servants and so on who did small tasks for them, and of the stableyards and hotels and such of paying a pittance to the people they felt would enhance their business to hang around their establishments in order to render services to the wealthy, although some business owners charged the people a fee to be attached to their establishment – and got it as people competed for a place to earn these tips from the wealthy patrons.

Service people are terribly squeezed by their own misunderstanding of their position towards the business and the misunderstanding of the customers about the service people working at that location.

It’s an unpleasant situation for both the customer and the service people, and a profitable one for the business. It is the service people who ultimately suffer the worst over this, though.

In America, as egalitarian as it tries to be, tipping is a confusing issue.

Too many Americans who aren’t in the service industries feel they are already paying for that service when they pay the business the fees charged. Those fees, though, don’t cover the wages of the service people at the point of contact because the wages of the service people are not a part of the business expenses.

The bizarreness of businesses “hiring” service people for less than the minimum wage (and far less than a living wage) is that the people they “hire” are under the impression they are a part of the business, members of the company – and the businesses foster that attitude because it gives them power over the service people and control over their actions.  Actually, the employees hired at below minimum wage to perform services for a businesses customers are actually contract labor who get their real wages from the customers, not the business owner.  Many customers have forgotten this or never learned it.

It was part of the Regency through Victorian era culture – the wealthy disbursed small sums of money to all the various people who rendered them small services – holding their horses, running errands, delivering small packages, delivering private messages, putting down a portable crossing over a mud puddle, opening doors, carrying packages, bringing them drinks or food, and so on.  The wealthy understood they were expected to pay for these small services, and the people who received the money for them expected to be paid for these services.  But as the middle class rose and gained wealth and mimicked much of the ways of the wealthy, they didn’t see the tipping, or they didn’t understand the reasoning behind it, and they were jealous and frugal of their wealth, so they resented tipping.

America was colonized during this turbulent changeover from tipping to wages for services rendered, and has kept it all confused and difficult.  Instead of progressing smoothly to a wage-based society of employer/employee, America continued to be a hodge-podge of contract laborers, employers, employees, and entrepreneurs with employers forcing employees to sign secrecy agreements about the amount of wages they receive – this allows employers to pay unfair wages and to discriminate against some employees based on gender, age, looks, religion, or other irrelevant to their job attributes.  This secrecy makes it difficult for people to know they are the targets of discrimination and to change it to a fair wage.  And it makes it difficult for customers to know if the employees who serve them are paid a fair wage or are contract laborers working for tips.

Until we have universal fair wages and all forms of wage discrimination are removed, I prefer to act as if wage discrepancies and discrimination continues, and will tip those who would traditionally work for tips instead of wages – the biggest holdout is the restaurant industry, but hotels also do this with their bellhops and janitorial staff and concierge, and airports with their skycaps, and there are a few other palces where people are still hired with the expectation that they will earn their money directly from the customers they serve and not from the employer.  Those people still deserve to be paid for their work, and if it must come from my pocket until there are fair wage laws, then so be it.

Let me simplify it for you: if someone else does something for you, especially something you could do for yourself if you just took the time to do it, then that person has earned a tip. Whether it’s bringing you a refill of your beverage, or washing your car, or shining your shoes, or bringing you the newspaper, or mowing your lawn, or carrying your groceries or baggage – you owe them a tip, a subsidy for the work they did just for you personally.

You may also have to pay a fee to the business for the products used in the service (from the lawn mower to the hotel room, the meal to the shoe polish and everything in between and beyond), but the person who did the actual service, that service person has earned the subsidy above and beyond what the business earned for supplying the product, because the employer isn’t paying them to do the work, just to be present so they can earn money from the customer.

How much of a contribution one makes to the service person is reasonably personal. It’s also very confusing, not just within the US, but for Americans who travel abroad. The easy way out is usually a standardized 10-15%. But what about those services for which there is no immediate fee – such as a hotel room and all the service people associated with it – bellhops, concierge, desk clerk, maids, room service; or the skycaps at the airport? Surely you don’t tip them 15% of your airplane ticket or hotel room fees? And that’s true, you don’t.

I tip these people based upon the amount of time they spend helping me and the aggravation value of it. If I reckon 17¢ per minute (that’s just over $10.00 an hour – more than I earn, so I consider it a fair amount), plus the aggravation of whatever they help me with, it usually works out to between $3 and $5 for most things.

I adamantly believe the minimum of 10% of the receipt or the $3-$5 assistance tip should be given even when personal finances are tight. If I can’t afford the minimum gratuity, then I don’t need to avail myself of the service.

Now, this doesn’t mean I have to leave exactly that amount for a tip. If the service is very good, I am free to leave more, along with a written note on why I thought it was so good. And if the service is terrible, I am equally free to withhold the tip, and possibly a written note explaining why. I am more likely to leave a note when the tip is meant to be shared between several service people (like all the waiters, all the busboys, all the bar tenders), although I am more likely to avoid places with tip shares because the bad waiters receive as much as the good ones, and that totally defeats the purpose of tipping – which is to pay the person(s) who directly served you.    Places that want to institute tip sharing should consider eliminating tips altogether, raise their prices slightly, and pay real wages.

The purpose of tipping is to pay someone for doing you a service. If they do the service, if they make an effort to do the service and still mess up, they have earned the tip. If they don’t do you the service, or they do it very very badly (and it has to be very bad) with no effort to make it better (however marginally), they don’t get a tip. They have to be very bad to not earn the tip.

I become very angry at people who refuse to leave tips because, in my mind, they are rude, as well as thieves. They have taken a service and stiffed the person who provided that service. That’s like going to work for someone and being docked a part of your pay every time your boss felt like docking you – no matter how good or bad you did your job.

So long as businesses continue to operate as if their waitstaff were contracted employees expected to earn their money from the patrons of the shop instead of the owner (very Victorian), these service people need tips to survive.  So long as businesses refuse to pay their employees a living wage, they need tips.  I do not think it is fair to punish the waitstaff if you disagree with their wage arrangements – instead, don’t patronize the entire business.  Eat elsewhere. Eat at places where you know the employees receive a fair and livable wage and don’t need the tips to pay them the wages their employer is supposed to be paying them.  If the business loses customers over their wage practices, they will change.  Stiffing the employee doesn’t hurt the business at all.  Just the person who was nice and helpful to you and served you.

Tipping isn’t about customer satisfaction, it’s about paying for services rendered.

It all has to do with the history of tipping and how it evolved in America. The very deepest roots extend back into the Roman days of slavery, when they couldn’t pay a slave wages, but could give them money to save up to buy their freedom. Slaves, however, couldn’t own the money they earned, their owner could take it at any time for any, or even no, reason.

The concept that the money was important to the slave but not to the person who gave the money, has perpetuated itself in our society, so deeply ingrained we don’t even notice it. Withholding the money was far more than not paying the service worker, it was an indictment upon their character. Look at the responses – bad service gets no tips, tipping should never be assumed, the adamant non-tipper – all of this is not a measure of the work provided, but a comment upon the character of the person doing the work.

I agree that waitstaff paid a good wage will treat customers well – after all, they aren’t stressing over whether they will earn enough tips to pay their bills or feed their family. They don’t have to endure abuse the way a tip-dependent waitstaff would. Decent wages are a win-win-win situation for employer, staff, and customer.

If the service worker were paid  a living wage, even if it is on the low end of living, then I’d have no problems with the adamant non-tipper or the fact that tipping is used to convey customer satisfaction.

When the service person is dependent upon the tip for their pay, then it is utterly, morally, ethically, wrong to withhold that tip if service is provided, even if it’s bad service. It’s very simple: Service = tip (the tip can be low if service is bad, but should not be non-existent, service was provided, pay is required). No service = no tip.

When employees receive a living wage for working their jobs, and don’t depend upon the customer paying them for their services, tips won’t be needed.  Then, they’ll truly be a compliment upon the service rendered or a comment upon the character of the service employee.

Until then, a tip is payment for services rendered.