Sorry, but there’s a difference between a restaurant server and a barista.
Sorry, but there’s a difference between a restaurant server and a barista.
I n college, I became obsessed with the Godfather movies, to the point where I would sometimes entertain myself by walking through grocery stores, handing out dollar bills to the employees. “You’re doing a beautiful job, here’s a little something,” I would intone, Vito Corleone–style, and watch shelf-stockers, checkout clerks, and grocery-baggers recoil as if I was handing them a week-old expired toad.
It was fun to see how employees who were not used to receiving tips reacted when offered a gratuity. They typically expressed horror and politely declined. (Although, per the rules of La Cosa Nostra, I now cannot refuse any of their requests on my daughter’s wedding day.)
This reticence has now all but fallen by the wayside, as the ubiquity of electronic-payment systems practically insists you shell over extra cash for services previously not considered to merit tips. We have all been in line at a coffee shop or fast-food restaurant when a suggestion pops up on the payment screen with a specific tip amount for the person working the register. And there is no pressure more intense than determining how much to tip a sandwich artist as they hold your Cold Cut Combo hostage, awaiting your 10, 15, or 20 percent ransom payment.
Until recently, America had settled into a comfortable system of who received tips and who didn’t. Typically, tips were reserved for someone who provided a personal service, either catering to your needs over a period of time (as does a restaurant server or hair stylist) or engaging in a physically demanding endeavor so you don’t have to (as a bellhop does when hauling bags).
But with the advent of electronic-payment systems, the universe of tip recipients has opened up to just about anyone working a counter at a deli, bakery, coffee shop, or movie-theater concession stand. You may even get hit up for cash while stopping at a drive-thru. And whereas tips were once reserved for exceptional service, the new systems shame customers into rewarding . . . service.
The modern situation was predicted in a prescient 1997 New York Times piece by author Michael Lewis, in which he argued in favor of doing away with tipping altogether. Lewis had noticed that more coffee-shop registers were adorned with small cups soliciting tips and rued the day such tips would become obligatory.
“The young man or woman behind the counter has performed no especially noteworthy service,” Lewis wrote. “He or she has merely handed you a $2 muffin and perhaps a ruinous cup of coffee and then rung them up on the register. Yet the plastic cup waits impatiently for an expression of your gratitude.”
Lewis further noted that once a tip became customary, it essentially turned into in-house inflation. “A tip that is a sure thing is no longer a tip really,” he wrote. “It’s more like a tax.”
And that is where we are now. A surcharge, enforced by peer pressure, on the back of an inflationary cycle that has already driven up the cost of our goods and services.
Of course, complaining about tipping is only a slightly more recent phenomenon than tipping itself. (One imagines a trailblazing ancient Mesopotamian moaning that his boiled goat lacked seasoning, declaring, “I’m not leaving more than 10 percent for that.”)
In April 1912, a man named Barry Boyle (identified only as a “government employee”) took to the pages of the Boston Globe to decry tipping culture, saying the system produced “a parasitic class of menials who pander to the vices of vulgar wealth” and who “aggravate class distinctions wholly incompatible with the democratic spirit of social equality.” Boyle suggested that if a “socialistic state” were implemented in America, no one would ever have to stoop so low as to work for tips.
One suspects no American has ever waited longer for his food in restaurants than government employee Barry Boyle.
But Boyle had plenty of allies. Buttressed by William Rufus Scott’s anti-gratuity book The Itching Palm (real title), six states outlawed tipping by 1917. Iowa actually implemented an anti-tipping law, but after First Lady Edith Wilson visited the state and, unaware such a law existed, tipped a Des Moines waitress $5, the state rescinded the law altogether.
One would think the primary objection to tipping would be tight-fisted conservatives, but the labor movement has battled gratuities for over a century. Workers’ organizations and their progressive allies have long seen the tipping system as a subsidy for businesses; every dollar a customer pays an employee directly is one fewer dollar the business must pay in labor costs, making tipping a form of corporate welfare. (Others unconvincingly argue that tipping is sexist and racist, despite the fact that serving and busing jobs provide good incomes for millions of people with little to no education, among them women and members of minorities.)
The corporate-welfare angle is what labor groups had in mind in the middle of the last decade, when some banded together to push for the elimination of tipping at a number of major chains such as Applebee’s, Olive Garden, and TGI Friday’s. At Joe’s Crab Shack, the first national chain to go no-tip, the experiment lasted only three months.
The no-tip plans effectively raised the cost of meals, then paid wait staff higher hourly wages in lieu of gratuities. (Some of these higher wages were imposed by cities like San Francisco, which enacted a $16 minimum wage for servers.)
But restaurant owners reported that wait staff were fleeing their jobs for businesses that allowed tips. Some would receive training at a tip-free restaurant, only to immediately leave for a tipping restaurant once they gained the requisite skills.
In 2016, Richard B. McKenzie, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, surveyed 40 servers who worked in Southern California, asking them how much they would need to make per hour to make up for the loss of tips. The servers scoffed at proposals to pay them a $15 to $18 wage, with 62 percent of them telling McKenzie they would need to make at least $30 an hour to leave for a non-tip job. (Lest one think this is a by-product of the high cost of living in the Los Angeles area, McKenzie also surveyed North Carolina wait staff, who demanded a wage of $26 per hour — even more than the California servers when adjusted for said cost of living.)
Clearly, Americans prefer a system where they pay less for food and offer tips to the people who bring them the food based on the quality of service they receive. It gives them more control over their dining experience.
And this is the primary reason to retain the tip model for servers working in restaurants and others providing personal services: Gratuities provide the incentive for good service. Your waitress isn’t being extra nice to you because she thinks you’re handsome or funny; she is busting her tail for a bigger tip. And your experience as a customer will be better for it.
But this is also why tips for people working behind a counter at a fast-food restaurant aren’t necessary. For one, they are being paid a full wage, unlike servers, who oftentimes earn half the federal minimum wage because they get tips. When the minimum wage of 25 cents per hour was instituted in 1938, restaurant workers were left out, because of the income they were pulling in directly from customers.
Further, the person who now may be shaming you into a tip isn’t providing you with a customized experience. Handing you a sandwich or a scone is far different from waiting on you at a table. Your tip doesn’t incentivize better service, so it accomplishes basically nothing.
And while you are not obligated to tip on the touch screens, clearly more people are being shamed into doing so. According to Square, a company that provides digital tipping software, tips at over-the-counter establishments grew 16.7 percent between 2021 and 2022.
The electronic screens are different from the tip jar of yore. Customers could just pretend they didn’t see the cup with dollar bills in it; now they are being prompted to tip as a standard part of their payment process. Not only the worker but often the people in line behind you can see whether you are tipping or not. (In my years as a restaurant server, it was always my policy to wait until a party had left before collecting their completed check; knowing how much they tipped you while everyone was still present made it uncomfortable for all involved.)
Of course, if food companies had increased the cost of their products by 16.7 percent in a year’s time, senators like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would stage a sit-in on the floor of the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to decry the “greed” of the corporations.
“Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed,” said 38-year-old graduate student Dylan Schenker, a Philadelphia barista who spoke with the Associated Press. Schenker, who makes a $15-an-hour wage, told the reporter the extra $400 a month he makes in tips “helps cover his monthly rent and eases some of his burdens.”
But customers don’t owe him or anyone anything. Strictly speaking, nobody is “overpaid” or “underpaid.” You either agree to do a job for the amount you’re offered, or you don’t. Your value is entirely set by how much you’re willing to accept to do a job — if you believe you’re “underpaid,” then you can go work somewhere else and make more money.
In a free country, consumers should be able to tip whomever they want for whatever reason they want. None of us should be Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs, refusing to tip anyone on principle, but it is not up to consumers to backfill the pay desires for employees doing rudimentary tasks. That is up to the employer and employee to work out. In the end, compulsory compassion isn’t compassion at all — it is simply a new, hidden tax placed on customers who may already be cash-strapped.
If you’re not willing to pay 20 percent extra for your chai latte, what’s the worst thing that can happen? Other than a horse’s head in your bed, of course.