As an American living in Paris, I’m not exactly sure when I first started having moments of culture shock on my visits back to the US. But there are two American practices that I now find irritate me no end: sales tax not being included in the sticker price of items, and tipping. (OK, three if you count non-detachable shower heads.)
In fact, Americans on the whole, it appears, are increasingly fed up with tipping, which has experienced inflation and creep: leaving 15% has morphed into standard options of 20%, 25% and 30%, and tipping has popped up in situations far removed from restaurant table service, such as takeouts, convenience stores and at self-checkouts. When it was time to return to Paris, an iPad screen at the airport suggested that I leave a tip after buying a single banana.
Even in Paris, tip-creep seems to be inching forwards, starting with anglophone coffee shops and making its way into bobo (hipster-chic) bars and restaurants – though with more modest suggested amounts of 3%, 5% and 7%.
If I sound like a cheapskate and a grouch, forgive me. I want workers to be paid fairly, especially service-industry workers. But is tipping really the best way to do that?
“I really dislike tipping culture,” says Mimi, who served me a drink on a rooftop bar in Charlottesville and is a fourth-year undergraduate at the University of Virginia. “I know that I have to give compliments to women and flirt with older men,” she explains, pointing out that even then, sometimes big tables will stiff her on a tip.
Plus, she adds, as the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, she is sensitive to the legacy of racism at the core of tipping in the US. (Originally tipping was looked down upon as an anti-democratic practice of European aristocrats, but it spread after the American civil war, largely as a way to continue to exploit the labour of former enslaved people.)
The argument that economists most frequently put forward for tipping is that it results in better service for customers, especially repeat ones. That rationale struck me as rather specious when I first encountered it on an undergraduate course, and it does even more so today, with recent research from two French academics who find a “systematic absence of a link between tipping and client satisfaction”.
Of course, in France a tip is really, truly that. In the US, employees who receive tips as part of their job actually earn a minimum wage far below the actual minimum wage, at just $2.13 an hour (though in reality there’s a tangled knot of complexity in this: employers must make up any shortfall in tips to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and in some states employers go above this floor).
My first complaint with (US-specific) tipping is that it’s annoying. Why should I have to carry the mental charge to consistently add roughly 10% sales tax, and then another 20% tip on top of that to the prices listed on a menu? What better way to put a twinge of irritation on an otherwise good meal than to get the bill and be reminded that your $15 tacos were actually a bait and switch – the real cost was $19.80.
My other issues with tipping are more philosophical. Neither society nor the economy should need philanthropy to function. Early Americans had it right: it is anti-democratic, and ultimately serves to assuage individual consciences about inequalities rather than ameliorate them.
There is nothing wrong with offering a tip as a way to express appreciation for good service, or an experience that was truly wonderful and went beyond the expected. But a tip that is morally and economically obligatory is not a tip, it’s a surcharge. Not leaving a tip is in effect saying that you were treated so egregiously that you are withholding a portion of a server’s otherwise expected earnings in retaliation.
Instead of small kindnesses freely offered, we are all, unwittingly perhaps, engaged in a system of potential sanctions for subpar service. And besides, what if the person I really want to thank is … the chef? In the US, it’s not always standard that tips will be distributed collectively to all restaurant staff. Furthermore, staff are sometimes victims of tip-theft by their employers, a practice that the UK has recently tried to stamp out with new legislation.
Shouldn’t a server be free to have a bad day at work? To be preoccupied with a sick parent, to have had a fight with their best friend, or partner, the day before? To be daydreaming about being a rock star at a festival, and slow to react because they’re caught in the rush of an imaginary crowd? All without those moments of humanity having a direct potential impact on what they should earn that day? Or more importantly, shouldn’t they be free to refuse to take abuse from a customer behaving inappropriately without losing income?
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A few days after asking Mimi for her thoughts on tipping culture, Carole Griffin, who runs Birmingham, Alabama’s 40-year-old Continental Bakery and sister restaurant Chez Lulu, tells me she has tried a few times to go no-tipping with gratuity included on the bill. The servers, though, have been the ones opposed to the change. When asked if she would prefer to be paid a higher, more standard salary instead of working for tips, one server who had been at Chez Lulu for 10 years – enough time to amass a base of regulars who tip well – replied: “Hell no.”
Her French counterparts, however, have a different take. “If you have to work for $2 an hour and hope that you get enough tips from the goodwill of customers, that sounds too difficult and too psychologically stressful,” says Lucie, who works at a restaurant on the French side of the France-Switzerland border.
Marion Goux, a 25-year-old barista in Lyon, agrees, telling me that she thinks US-style tipping culture in France could just result in businesses paying their staff less. For her, a tip is still a nice surprise and an added bonus, not a necessity to pay the rent. “I love interacting with visitors from other countries especially,” she says. “When I get a tip, it’s not because I did anything specifically to get it. I just did my job well.”
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Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist