Tipping started to mature in the 16th century, when currency was given out of gratitude or compassion outside of religious establishments. But now it’s less compassion and gratitude than fear of embarrassment or social shame, driven by what publisher William Rufus Scott called a capital-S “Social Convention” in 1916. Scott wrote an infamous polemic against the contemporary practice of tipping entitled The Itching Palm, in which he described tipping as “the price of pride…what one American is willing to pay to induce another American to acknowledge inferiority.” Scott stuck at the heart of the issue: “The ‘what will people say’ mania holds the average person in an iron obedience to a custom which is innately loathesome. It makes you conspicuous to be a dissenter. The serving persons understand this psychology perfectly.”
The absurd sociological pressures of tipping have only gotten worse. Have you ever heard a horror story of terrible service? The second question after one of these stories should be: “Well, what’d you tip?” It isn’t, because who stiffs their waiters? Nobody. And yet, the responsibility to compensate for low wages falls on the patron—and not the establishment—for poor service. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Around the time, Scott was actually tapping into a zeitgeisty movement. In 1909, Washington became the first American state to pass anti-tipping legislation, and over the next ten years, Mississippi, Iowa, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas passed anti-tipping laws as well, making both givers and receipts of tips misdemeanor criminals. Most of these laws were repealed because they were found to be generally impossible to enforce, but the motivation for them wasn’t just an issue of social graces (note the primarily southern states they were in). The respective governments also wanted to pick up the lost tax revenue pocketed by anybody who was tipped, specifically, the service industry.
In 2008, the IRS found—found—$65 billion in unreported income. Service industry tips were estimated to be at $26 billion that same year. If—to be kind—one in every twenty waiters under-reported their tips in 2008, $1.6 billion in tax revenue would be lost to Americans. And that’s an optimistic scenario.
And there are straightforward issues of fairness. Why, for example, should one tip a waiter who works harder—say, a single-staffed graveyard shift worker at a packed diner—substantially less than the waiter who doesn’t break a sweat but makes five times that amount from one table? This only encourages the upsell of high-dollar items. Quiet, hard work goes unrewarded while the waiter who smiles as they foist a $200 bottle of wine upon you is obligated to a $40 reward from you just for selling it to you.
What about the common complaint in major American cities of European tourists who don’t tip because they’re not accustomed to it? Those Europeans don’t necessarily deserve to be chased down the street and humiliated, yet, management isn’t always going to compensate waitstaff for the unrewarded work put into serving that table.
Finally, the “tip pool”—where waiters’ tips are pooled together and then doled out via percentage points—means that someone’s excellent service may be unfairly punished because (if they’re daring enough to do so) another customer received poor service and left less money as a result. In the supposed meritocracy of America, this should be problematic.
But speaking of the supposed meritocracy: there isn’t one. Dare to learn what might be the dirtiest secret of American tipping? In a totally random sample, it’s racist.
Here’s a dinner conversation you’ll never have: in 2008 Ian Ayers published a study in the Yale Law Review collecting data from taxicab rides in New Haven. Ayers found that black cab drivers were tipped one-third less than white ones, and that black passengers tipped one-half less than white passengers, noting that if tipping were mandated, it’d reduce both the tendency of black drivers to receive less than their white counterparts, and the tendency of white drivers to eschew picking up black passengers for fear of bad tips.
Why should tipped professionals be discriminated against by race, or beauty? Endless studies note time and time again that attractive Americans tend to make more money than unattractive Americans in the same fields. Just last June, Newsweek reported that attractive women and men earn four and five percent more than their less-attractive counterparts, respectively. In the world of tipped economies, equal opportunity loses to the reinforcement of prejudices dangerous to society. Even the Supreme Court thinks so: in 1971’s Griggs v. Duke Power, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was ruled to prohibit businesses with discriminatory practices against those protected under it, even if that effect is unintended. Tipping, which has been proven to be discriminatory, could be downright unconstitutional.
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