From: Mermaid . (britannica@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 19 2002 - 09:52:54 MST
http://www.counterpunch.com/tipping1.html
Tipping in America
By Alexander Cockburn
Tip-skimming has surfaced in Boston, and there can't be a tipper in America
who, on hearing the news, doesn't exclaim, "The greedy bastards!" In a
lawsuit filed March 7 in Suffolk Superior Court, five former servers from
the venerable eatery called Locke-Ober say the restaurant made them kick
back the bulk of their tips to management. Then, when they made a fuss, they
were fired. When they complained, the suit alleges, they were fired. Suits
are being filed against three other restaurants by employees. The waiters
allege that the restaurants are breaking state labor laws by grabbing their
tips
Sue Anne Foti, who has been a waitress for 25 years, worked at Morton's, the
Chicago steakhouse on Boylston Street, for two years before she was fired in
November. ''They forced us to pay the management's salary,'' she told the
Boston Globe. ''I'm a single mother and I've got two kids. They were taking
food out of my kids' mouths.'' Skimming tips allows restaurant owners to pay
managers less out of their own pockets, because the tips make up the
difference.
Appearances to the contrary, greed isn't unique to Boston. This must be
happening across the country. Soon we'll be asked to make it standard
practice to tip a minimum of 30 per cent: 15 per cent for the workers, and
15 per cent for the management.
Hovering somewhere between charity and a bribe, the tip is one of our most
polymorphous social transactions. At its most crude it can be a loutish
expression of authority and disdain. At its purest it can approach a
statement of love. At one end of the scale we had the foul decorum of those
old lunch places where the men thought it their right to pat the waitresses
on the backside. If a waitress objected to these caresses the tip would be
thrown into the dirty plate.
At the other end we have the elevated snobbism of Marcel Proust, for whom
the tip was a profound and complex form of social expression. 'When he
left,' writes Proust's biographer George Painter of one meal in the Paris
Ritz, 'his pockets were empty, and all but one of the staff had been
fantastically tipped. "Would you be so kind as to lend me fifty francs," he
asked the doorman, who produced a wallet of banknotes with alacrity. "No,
please keep it - it was for you"; and Proust repaid the debt with interest
the next evening.' Of course he also used tipping for the coarser purpose of
inducing certain waiters to partake in those sessions of mutual masturbation
which was apparently as far as Proust proceeded in his erotic encounters.
Hanns Sachs who grew up in Vienna at the same time as his 'master and
friend' Sigmund Freud wrote a memoir of life in that city in the late
nineteenth century in which he devoted some testy pages to the growing
complexities of trinkgeld, complexities which he took to be evidence of the
decadence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everybody had their hand out for
prescribed portions of trinkgeld - the coachman, the doorman, the hatcheck
girl, the waiter, the wine waiter, the headwaiter, the maitre d'hotel:
"Every door which you had to pass was opened for you by someone who demanded
a tip; you could not get into the house you lived in after 10 p.m. nor seat
yourself in the car in which you wanted to ride without giving a tip. Karl
Kraus, Vienna's witty satirist, said the first thing a Viennese would see on
the day of Resurrection would be the outstretched hand of the man who opened
the door of his coffin."
Doctor Sachs' indignant portrait is clearly reminiscent of today's taxi
driver, doorman, hatcheck lady, waiter, and so forth, all of whom, from
Manhattan to San Francisco and from Chicago to Corpus Christi expect and
usually receive similar trinkgeld. Is America therefore in decline? Visitors
to the young republic found to their surprise that coachmen and waiters
refused their tips. An organization called the Anti-tipping Society of
America, founded in 1905, attracted some hundred thousand members, most of
them traveling salesmen. But anti-tipping laws were declared
unconstitutional in the same year that Congress passed the Volstead Act, and
Americans entered the twenties buying bootleg liquor and tipping big.
Tipping is even bigger money now, with well over five billion dollars per
annum being left on plates, scrawled on credit cards, squirmed through taxi
partitions, and slapped into outstretched palms. This is not so much an art
as an item in the federal budget serious enough to provoke certain
government provisions designed to insure that the U.S. Treasury gets its tip
too.
That's the trouble. Tipping is a paradox: formal yet informal, public yet
private, commercial yet intimate, voluntary yet in reality so close to
compulsory that most people, across the years, have little difficulty in
remembering the times they felt compelled to leave no tip at all. If tipping
becomes an entirely mechanical act, beneath government supervision, it loses
its vitality.
A tip must, however fleetingly, be the acknowledgement of a personal
relationship, which is why the process can instill such panic in people
plunged into a ceremony where much is uncertain and where only a special
familiarity will teach one the proper mode.
Due contemplation of the appropriate tip, in size and allocation, discloses
not only what sort of place you are in but what sort of person you are: the
sort who self-righteously calculates fifteen percent of the pre-tax total
and gives fifty cents to the hatcheck girl, or the sort who bangs down a big
tip with the vulgar flourish that says, 'There! I've bought you!', or again
someone like Proust, who saw the tip as a perverse gift.
At the conclusion of an excellently cooked but badly served meal at Boeuf
sur Ie Toit, Proust (in Painter's words) ignored the person who served him
so badly and 'Summoned a distant waiter and rewarded him regally. "But he
didn't do anything for us," protested [Paul] Brach and Proust replied, "Oh,
but I saw such a sad look in his eyes when he thought he wasn't going to get
anything.'"
The tip can become a bond between tipper and tippee, leagued in a
transaction against absentee ownership. We tip waiters, doormen, hat ladies,
taxi drivers, and hairdressers. We don't tip flight attendants. Last week
there were reports of a tip sign at one airport askin g for trav ellers to
tip the security people checking your bags. Bank clerks, no; croupiers, yes.
The modalities are complicated, ever-expanding. The service economy,
exploding decade by decade, will affect the tipping process. Seen more
darkly, this could mean two increasingly divergent classes, one rich and one
poor, with the latter increasingly dependent on tips, gratuities, presents,
and other pretty expressions of the master-servant relationship to get by.
Tipping in America may therefore become an ever more complex and fraught
affair, approaching the status of necessary alms-giving as for the
well-heeled traveler in India.
It would be better, some argue, to give up tipping altogether, as they tried
in the old days in Eastern Europe and China. Tipping is, after all, about
the relationship between served and servant and should play no part in a
free society of equals. It depends on what one thinks the origin of tipping
is. It can be traced to the primitive gift exchange, the amiable and
generous distribution of surplus goods and cash which, in its most abandoned
expression takes the form of the potlatch, where the surplus was either
disposed of by common consumption or heaved over the side of a cliff.
Me? I'm a 20 per cent guy, as a rule, unless the service has been lousy.
Women tend to be tighter in the tips. Smokers and drinkers tip better than
the live-clean crowd. Working people tip better than the rich folk, taxi
drivers tell me.
In a perfectly equal society everyone would exchange equivalent
gifts--portions of the surplus. Everyone would tip and everyone be tipped in
universal rhythms of generosity and gratitude. But, of course, modern
society is not equal and the surplus wealth is unequally controlled and
allocated, so the distribution of surplus wealth must always be an
expression of power and of domination.
All this was understood perfectly by P.G. Wodehouse who approached the
intricacies of the served-servant relationship more boisterously than
Proust, but who expressed it with equal realism as in the scenes at the end
of so many of the Wooster-Jeeves sagas, in this case The Inimitable Jeeves.
"Jeeves!" I said.
"Sir?" "How much money is there on the dressing table?"
"In addition to the ten-pound note which you instructed me to take, sir,
there are two five pound notes, three one-pounds, a ten shillings, two half
crowns, a florin, four shillings, a six pence and a half penny, sir."
"Collar it all," I said. "You've earned it."
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