“{Tips are} democracy’s mortal foe {because
they} create a servile attitude for a fee.”
William Scott in “The Itching Palm”, 1916
Tipping is the custom of paying a gratuity,
or extra charge, when purchasing a service.
It is paid directly to the person who has served you, rather than their
employer. The custom is supposed to
reward good service, or to top up the wages of employees. In America, tips are considered an essential
part of some workers wages, and they are needed by many restaurant staff to
meet their living costs.
Whether tips are paid or not, and how much
is expected, varies from country to country.
They are basically unknown in Japan.
It is usual to pay a tip of between 10 and 15 per cent in restaurants
and taxis in the UK. As suggested above,
in America, tipping is more common and might be expected for a wider range of
services.
But according to a news article I read
recently, the custom of tipping might be on the way out. This is because
people are using cards and internet banking to pay for many things that they
formerly used cash for, and because they make many transactions over the
internet rather than in person. If you
ordered your taxi through a phone app, and paid for it using an on-line service
like PayPal, how can you tip the driver?
So if the custom of tipping is dying a
death from new technology, should we mourn its loss?
I sympathise with lowly paid staff who are
reliant on tips to pay their bills, but this could easily be fixed by forcing
companies to pay a decent minimum wage.
I also can’t accept the argument that
tipping encourages good service. Believe
me, the service in Japan compares very well with that in the US or UK. I am reminded of an interesting story about a
library which demonstrates the limits of using money as a motivating tool. Every now and then in one library, users
would bring the books that they had borrowed back late. To try to reduce the number of people doing
this, the library introduced a fine. The
number of people returning their books late then suddenly rose
dramatically. Before the fine was
introduced, people returned the books on time because they felt it was their
moral obligation to do so. After
the fine was introduced, the motivation was purely financial. People no longer felt bad about returning the
books late. The same is probably true in
the service industries. People do a good
job when they have pride in their work, rather than when they are offered a tip.
Perhaps surprisingly, tipping has at times
had a very bad reputation in the US, where it is most common. Six different states banned tipping for a
while in the early 20th Century and a number of organisations were
founded to fight the custom. These
organisations argued that tipping forced an aristocratic relationship
upon the person paying and the person accepting the tip. Thus, it was anti-democratic. William Scott wrote, “Tipping, and the
aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape. It is a cancer in the breast of democracy.”
Try shouting that to the New York waiter as
he chases you down the street for his tip.
Vocabulary:
a mortal foe – a deadly enemy
servile – showing an excessive willingness
to serve or please others
to top something up – to increase
something, like wages, a drink etc. a little beyond the current amount
to be on the way out – to be in terminal
decline; to be facing removal, deletion etc.
a transaction – a deal; an instance of
buying or selling something
to mourn – to feel or show grief or regret
for a death
an obligation – a duty; something you
should or must do
aristocratic – upper-class
to exemplify something – to be a strong
example of something
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