Of all our cultural folkways, the most awkward one might be that which dictates we must nestle even more of our hard-earned bills under our plate after we've already paid. How does such a practice begin? And ought we actually to feel any sense of prompting to follow it?
With only a bit of microeconomic conjecture, one can see not only how it came to be standard practice, but how it was entirely unavoidable that it did. Patient zero of the phenomenon—a tired Patriot at some bar in colonial Massachusetts, I prefer to imagine—probably had no idea exactly what he had started when he first flipped the barkeep a penny for his care. But once he began to tip, he could hardly just stop without an explanation, and moreover, likely had no reason to do so; words between the staff are always loose, and thus, chances are that he was always the first militiaman in all of Boston to get his beer. Customers were not the only ones who benefited from the practice, either, nor were they the only ones who noticed. Businesses, too, probably began to notice a sly opportunity to shift at least part of the business of wage negotiation to their servers, with social politesse serving as the arbitrator.
And why will it never, ever disappear? Label it typical American hubris if you must, but embedded in our claim to personal liberty is our need to have control over the economic incentives of our service providers; even if it didn't originate here, gratuity is paradigmatically American. And if we honestly wished to discourage the practice, how exactly would we proceed? Probably by creating some kind of wage structure that shifted some of the burden back onto the business owner, and minimized the role of customer gratuity, right? This would satisfy Mr. Pink, the character in Reservoir Dogs who, as it must be said, was not against tipping for the extraordinary but against tipping for the ordinary. Unfortunately, this creates a different problem of incentives; if tips constituted only a trivial portion of a server's income, that bottomless iced tea would suddenly effectively become a lot less bottomless. We are trapped between our desire for wage control and our abhorrence of wage responsibility.
But should we follow this practice, or do we have a principled responsibility to end it? Certainly, one should never say “tips” are “to insure prompt service;” not only does this false acronym confuse “insure” with “ensure,” it doesn't even seem to actually be the case. Gratuity does not any longer ensure speedy or careful service at all, but has rather become entirely absorbed as a necessary and expected portion of service sector wages. And it is often said—and not just by absurd characters in Tarantino movies—that we should “rebel” in response. But this maneuver is only wanton self-interest masquerading as some kind of civil disobedience. If someone makes the claim to have an ideological objection to gratuity, they've essentially asked to stop being taken seriously.
But there is, perhaps, also a more final and pragmatic reason to tip: to adopt the non-tipper's stance is only to be cavalier with the livelihood of those who behind closed doors prepare your food, and thus, to be cavalier to your own. (Throwing an economic tantrum might temporarily alleviate one's righteous indignation, but it certainly won't actually do you the slightest bit of good; for a broader discussion of this, just read Steve Dublanica's thoughtful and captivating weblog “Waiter Rant.”) Like our frightening discovery of microscopic bacteria in the nineteenth-century, the servers are our bosses and they always have been, rather than the other way around.
