The Tipping Scam

A new meme is going around, pushing for waitresses to be paid a 20% tip.

So if we take that seriously, then if it's a party of five going out to eat, we have to pay as if an entire extra person was eating - just to make sure we get the service we were already paying for?

No.

10% - not 15%, let alone 20% - was good enough for the gals in 1943 waiting for their husbands to come back from WWII. And since percents remain constant with inflation, then 10% of a $10 meal now is as good as 10% of the $2 meals back then. And back then, ten people would have had to eat in order for the tip to rise to the cost of an entire extra meal! Ten people - not five!

The scam is in invoking the Single Mother or the Elderly Old Lady. Or both. As if every waiter and waitress is in some terrible financial position in desperate need of you ponying up just so they can survive the cold winter night. "But...but...they're single mothers! What about all that hard work! The long hours! Did you know they make less than minimum wage?!"

Often it will even be personalized, to greater or lesser degrees. From "Well, the waitress I know is very nice, she deserves every penny she gets!" all the way up to, "Me mum was a waitress...*sniffs, sniffs*...she worked bloody hard to make sure I had clothes on my back...*tear rolls down cheek*...she sure don't need no heartless arsehole like you to stiff her on the tip! If she was alive, that is! She died with a coffee pot in her hand! Some bugger like you wanted a fourth refill!" I cry foul. I mean, honestly, if the wages are otherwise so lousy that the customers have to be begged off of more aggressively each year, then it's time they all quit (yeah, even your dear old mom!) and applied at McDonalds. Or Walmart. Or went to college on loan packages available to all. Or a thousand other options. I mean, what, is this 1850? Is waitressing the only work out there for women? Hardly.

Is it truly forgot that they (waitresses and waiters) each applied for these jobs? That they were not captured by men with nets and guns while they ran across the plains of the Midwest laughing and carefree? That they were not branded and shackled and forcibly impressed into the food service industry?

I had a guy at our sober living home once, and he was a waiter. Same lousy hours - if we count between five and eight hours as lousy. Same hard work - if writing on pads and bothering to remember things counts. He'd put in his hours, but then he'd take the $75 to $100 he made in tips each day and blow it on Hydrocodone. Why not? His wages and just the tips from a day or two could readily afford his weekly living expenses.

Do all the wait staff make $100 a day? Nope. But it'd be an odd shift for them not to bring in $50 a day. And if we assume $10 meals - which with drinks and taxes they are always at least that - and a 10% tip, that assumes they only served 50 people. That is quite livable, and in fact the same in tips as what a day laborer would earn in 8 hard hours of manual labor. (And some of you brighter readers are already doing the math of 'tips you usually leave' times 'customers you see in an hour' times 'hours in a regular shift' and starting to get my point.)

So it is absurd for it to be suggested that a normal family must now pay the cost of an entire extra meal just so Flo doesn't collapse from malnutrition into a snow drift while walking home to the bridge she lives under and leaving seven orphans behind. Because yeah, also in this scam is the tacit assumption that the customer should ever, for any reason, have to pay extra for what he already paid for. And what do we call it, when the reason for you having to give is the alleged distress of another, with no other value offered? Begging. And one does not go to a restaurant to be subject to that.

Try that with your boss sometime. "Yes, sir, well, I'd have been faster with that file, but last time I brought a file to you, all you said was 'thank you'. No tip. And do you know how little I make? I mean, yeah, I know you do, but jeez, it's just terrible. I've kids, did I mention that? How about you start telling our customers to give me a little extra something something on each order? You know, To Insure Promptness in me getting it done? We good on that?"

See? Tipping itself is a scam. And while I accept that we live in a culture in which that has been accepted for some professions - barbers, cabbies, waitresses, as opposed to equally deserving ditch diggers, sewer workers and cashiers - I disagree with the additional scam of forever raising the percents!

I thus say "No" on 20%. And "No" on the previous crap about 15%.

10%. Good enough for the "Greatest Generation". Good enough now.