So, now that you know that tipping is racist, enforces anything but fairness and a meritocracy, preys on your guiltiest impulses, started as a criminal practice, continues as a criminal practice, and exploits people on every side of it, what’s to be done? Can anything be done?
Surely it can. The majority of industrialized nations make a service charge obligatory in restaurants, with an option to tip after it. That’d be a start. Critics, many of whom look to England and France’s often awful—if not downright hostile—service as an example, argue that it kills the incentive for quality hospitality.
Let’s assume for a moment that this is true, disregarding the fact that the highest concentration of highly-regarded fine dining restaurants in the world are in Europe and known for incredibly good service. Let’s go with the stereotype and say that the French are notoriously assholes, and the English are notoriously stuffy. What’s the misanthrope’s American stereotype? Folksy. Disconcertingly kind. Go-getters. (When we’re not being rude and uncongenial on our Paris vacations.) The real bottom line is that jerks are jerks no matter where in the world they are, or what they’re being paid. A smart restaurateur will just hire better employees. Some restaurateurs have already taken these steps.
Thomas Keller—the chef/owner of two of America’s most famous restaurants, Napa Valley’s The French Laundry and New York City’s Per Se—made gratuity at Per Se a mandatory service charge in 2005. Per Se is still commonly known as one of the best meals—and service experiences—in the history of New York City. What many waiters (especially in New York) don’t like about this system is that it forces institutional devotion, especially in the case of people like casino magnate Steve Wynn and Mario Batali. Wynn is accused of taking tips from his dealers for management; the case is currently in its third appeal, and looks to be headed for the Supreme Court [full disclosure: my father’s a lawyer on the case, and naturally, like everyone else, wouldn’t talk to me about tipping]. Batali’s currently being sued for much the same thing, in addition to paying below-minimum wage and no overtime where it was due.
The Batali case encapsulates every angle of the problem: an employer who may or may not be exploiting his employees thanks to dependence on an awkward, unfair system, with the intent of engendering institutional loyalty (and the long-term success of said institution). But what if everyone stepped back and sacrificed convention for the long-term benefits of doing away with tipping? The extremists’ solution would be to put the cost of the food on the menu and for employers to pay fair wages regardless, but a compromise would be an across-the-board service charge. Cases like Wynn’s and Batali’s would be fairly straightforward. Americans at-large wouldn’t get cheated out of due tax revenue. Discriminatory habits would be curbed, and the standard for good service would be equalized. The awkwardness of paying the check would go away, as would some of the obnoxious externalities that come with tipping (like the omnipresent upsell). And the gratuity really would become, in essence, a reward, not an obligatory charge we have to pay regardless of what we experience.
But old habits die hard. After he’d disappeared, I tried my proposition on some of the servers at Jeff’s place. They were all aligned against me, even after being presented with the potential for a higher, fairer income. “I just like the feeling of being tipped out at the end of the night,” Kay, a young twenty-something server noted. “It’s a great feeling. It’s the feeling of being rewarded.”
As good as her service always is, that’s always going to be the fundamental problem with tipping: we’re paying for emotional reciprocity, out of obligation, and nothing more. Really, though: Who’s that good for?
Foster Kamer is a senior editor at The New York Observer. His work has also appeared in Esquire and The Village Voice and on Gawker.com, BlackBook, The Awl, Rolling Stone.com and BBC Two’s The Culture Show.
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