Posted 8/29/2005 05:15:00 PM by Douglas

Tipping: It's not just a city in China anymore.

Tipping didn’t take hold here until after the Civil War, and even as it spread it met with fervent public opposition from people who considered it a toxic vestige of Old World patronage. Anti-tipping associations were formed; newspapers—including the Times—regularly denounced the custom. Tipping, the activists held, fostered a masterservant relationship that was ill suited to a nation in which people were meant to be social equals.

I guess what's interesting about this article is that is comes as it does from The New Yorker. If ever there was a city dependant on its working class to make a living off tips, it's New York. So why do we do it?

The practice really belongs to what sociologists call a gift economy rather than to a market one. The free market, at least in theory, is all about impersonal exchange—as long as you have goods to sell and I have money to buy them, we can make a deal, regardless of how we feel about each other. But, when it comes to tipping, who we are and how we feel matter a lot, because a tip is essentially a gift, and we give better gifts to people we like than to people we don’t. Tippers aren’t trying to drive hard bargains or maximize their economic interests; they’re trying to demonstrate their status and to reciprocate what they see as good behavior.

That's kinda the way I've looked at it. The obligatory 15% is pretty stupid. The waiter gets less money in tips if my table splits an appetizer and I order a salad instead of a steak? It's the same amount of legwork on his part, either way, right? So why the rift?

William R. Scott, in his 1916 polemic “The Itching Palm,” described the tip as the price that “one American is willing to pay to induce another American to acknowledge inferiority”

That, in essence, is what it boils down to. The tip is the tribute that condescension plays to apathy. The chance of you getting spit in your food from some disaffected waiter has absolutely nothing to do with your tip (exactly like it doesn't at McDonald's). And at the risk of sounding like Mr. Pink, "learn to fucking type, because if you expect me to help out with the bills, you're in for a big surprise."