More than a decade ago, Jonathan Gold shared his golden rule for tipping — 20% every time. At the restaurant, the coffee shop, the valet, the bar. But do we need a new golden rule? While it's customary to leave a tip after a sit-down meal, customers are now being confronted by tablets with options to add a tip everywhere, from movie theaters to impound lots.
In a piece for the New Yorker, staff writer Zach Helfand wonders "Has Gratuity Culture Reached A Tipping Point?" "Don't, and you’re a cheapskate," he writes. "Do, and you’re a sucker."
Evan Kleiman: Where did the concept of tipping begin?
Zach Helfand: I have a hunch that for as long as there's been money, there's probably been a little extra paid out for services provided. But as far as we can tell, the earliest known instance of what people who study this consider tipping is in the 16th century, on the states of aristocrats in Europe. When visitors would come and when you were waited on by the footmen and whoever else were there, you would pay them what's called a "vail," which was basically a tip for services provided. And the nice thing was, if you owned the estate, if you were the lord, you would have to pay your servants a little bit less because your friends would come over and visit who would have to subsidize it a little bit. From Europe, it eventually caught on in America. Visitors from America would go to Europe, bring back the practice and it spread, in large part, due to the Pullman Company, the train company. George Pullman hired mostly formerly enslaved Black men as porters. He didn't want to pay them a lot, so he used the idea of tipping to get the public to subsidize the wages. The trains went everywhere and so did the practice, and it became pretty entrenched here.
The word "tip" itself, what does it mean?
Zach Helfand: The etymology is disputed. The often told tale is that it's an acronym for "to ensure promptitude." The story is that at old taverns in England, at coffee houses, there was an urn that was set out and people would drop a coin in there to get more prompt service. Etymologically, people who study this are skeptical. They think there's not a lot of evidence for it. But that's the tale that's often told.
Tell us about the hat check king of New York City.
Zach Helfand: So the hat check king, it was such a delight to discover, it turns out Lillian Ross, one of the great writers for The New Yorker, had actually profiled him many decades ago. The hat check trusts were these concessionaires in New York who would pay nice restaurants for the privilege of checking hats and coats at the front of the business. Men and women would come in, they would need to check their coats, men would always wear hats no matter the season, and they would have to pay a nickel or a dime to tip the usually young women who would check their coats. The tip trusts who ran the hat check and coat check businesses would pocket all of the tips themselves. So the women who were checking the coats didn't actually get the tips in the way that most patrons would have expected.
The most successful of them was a man who appropriately enough got the moniker of the "hat check king." At his height, he was bringing in about I think $50 or $60 million a year just on tips. It was just from the nickels and dimes and quarters that people would pay because they were pretty much obligated to check their hats every time they would go to a restaurant.
The funny thing about this was I had a conversation for this piece with Danny Meyer, the restaurateur who has Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, he founded Shake Shack, and hates tips. He tried to get rid of tips at his own restaurant and ran an experiment where they had no tipping for a number of years and eventually gave that up during the pandemic. But still, to this day, he does not like the practice and doesn't think it makes any sense.
As we were chatting about this, we were talking about the hat check king, and he said, "Actually, my first restaurant in New York, Union Square Cafe, the building it was in, the landlord, the guy who owned the building, was the son of the hat check king. His whole real estate empire had been built upon these little tiny nickel and dime tips, and that's where Danny Meyer opened his first restaurant. So even the guy who hates it and tries to get rid of it was like I can't escape tips everywhere I go. Even my business was built upon the foundation of tips.
You point out that once tipping takes hold, it can be hard to get rid of, as we see here in America. We've seen this play out over the last 10 years when, as you mentioned, high-profile restaurant tours like Danny Meyer have tried to eliminate it. Why do you think Europe managed to move on from the practice and here we just dig in our heels?
Zach Helfand: I think it's partly cultural but I think a lot of it has to do with minimum wage laws. This varies from state to state but federally, the tipped minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour. The idea is that you make up the difference between the tipped minimum wage, that $2 figure, and the actual minimum wage through tips. But that's still a strikingly low number. And it assumes that the customers are just going to subsidize those labor costs for the business.
Now, there are some states, like California, that don't have a tipped minimum wage. Waiters and all service workers have to get paid the full minimum wage and if they get tips, they get that on top of the full minimum wage. But I think the problem is that people don't know. It takes a labor lawyer or an economist to sort out who gets paid what. If you're a customer just going into a coffee shop, you probably have no idea what the people are getting paid, and you just assume this is a business in which this person gets tipped, so I have to tip. You feel like if you don't tip these people, then they're not going to be making a living wage. There are some states that have tried to do away with the tipped minimum wage that's lower than the regular minimum wage but unless there's a sweeping nationwide movement to eliminate tips and eliminate the confusion over who should get tips and who doesn't, it's just never gonna go anywhere. I don't think that movement is gonna happen anytime soon, or maybe ever.
Let's talk about who gets the tips and what constitutes service. You mentioned legal issues. I know that restaurants are terrified of getting sued. You mentioned that there have been a lot of cases, for example, with sushi chefs.
Zach Helfand: I love the sushi chef example. In most states, I know in New York it's this way, for a transaction to be considered a service transaction, you kind of have to enter into some sort of relationship with the worker. So you have to be able to look them in the eye, you have to be able to see them is a big part of it. If a chef is cooking me dinner, to me, that seems like a very intimate act. This person is touching and prodding the food that I'm going to be putting in my mouth and I'm trusting it's healthy and cooked. But because the chef works behind the kitchen, that is not considered service in the eyes of New York law and most jurisprudence is not considered service. The waiter who I'm looking in the eye, that's obviously considered service.
The sushi chef is really interesting. There have been lawsuits that have hinged over to what extent the sushi chef is interacting with the customer. If the sushi chef is taking the customer's order, they're a service worker. If the sushi chef is just glumly looking down and making the sushi and not talking and interacting, then maybe they're not a service worker. The guy who's right next to the sushi chef who's making rice and not interacting with the customer at all, he could be not a service worker, and the sushi chef who is interacting with customers could be a service worker.
It's a silly distinction to me but a lot of it has to do with why we tip psychologically. A lot of it has to do with guilt and shame and the fact that when you are being served, you feel like you're in a superior position to someone. I think that makes us uncomfortable. We don't want to feel like we're better than someone or be made to stare that in the face, so we tip. When work is invisible, when it's behind a wall or in a kitchen or in another room, we don't have that guilt anymore, so we don't feel the social need to tip and that's kind of been written into law.
It's really interesting, this idea of how guilt and even masochism are at play in this exchange between worker and customer. I would imagine there's been a fair amount of power in certain situations where ego is at play. I've always felt that this is maybe the ultimate reason why tipping won't go away in America, so the customers have the last say, in a way. Are there certain people who are always good tippers and others who are chronically bad at it?
Zach Helfand: There's folk wisdom passed down about who is and isn't a good tipper. I think it's tough to say that any one specific group is good or bad definitively although if you talk to waiters, there's a very, very good chance that they'll tell you that Europeans don't tip as well. French people don't tip as well, when they come to America. It's because they're not used to it. They don't know the rules, necessarily. But besides that, the folk wisdom which may or may not be true, is that people like teachers, lawyers, Lexus owners are bad tippers and mobsters, CEOs, pickup truck drivers are good tippers. There are certain reasons for all of those. But that's part of the folk wisdom that's passed down among waiters.
Oh, yeah. Waiters will talk about this endlessly. So now we get to the crux of the story, which is technology, the iPad pirouette, as you call it. Were you able to quantify how much more or less we are tipping because of digital transactions?
Zach Helfand: It's hard to put an exact number on how much more we're tipping. What I've found and what the research into this has found was there was a slight increase at the beginning of the pandemic in the amount that we tip. That was called the guilt-tipping boom. That's mostly leveled out. Now, the difference is the amount of places where we tip. People are tipping the group of workers known as assistant coaches. It might be on your kid's youth [sports] team. We're tipping box office attendants at theaters and at movie theaters. The butcher shop is a good example. The butcher I talked to, they instituted the screens, the swiveling iPad, when the inflation boom started. He was an employee at the butcher shop and he found that his pay was not quite keeping up with inflation. But then when they factor in the tips, it really kept him afloat. So sometimes it does work itself out in these nice ways.
I think at its best, the practice kind of makes you think about what we owe each other. What what is this person providing for me? What do I owe them in return for that? I think that's a nice thing to be able to think about. When the system is new, you really do think about those questions a lot. The problem is, it kind of solidifies into certain rules, and then it's an obligation and businesses often take advantage of it because they can lower their labor costs and just pass it along to you knowing that you're gonna tip 20% every time.
One of my favorite anecdotes in your story is when a girl goes to the impound lot to get her car and at checkout is asked if she wants to leave a tip.
Zach Helfand: This was the daughter of the butcher I talked to. She herself worked at Starbucks and talking about the irrationality of who gets tipped, she found that on days,when she wore makeup, she would get higher tips at Starbucks. She went to the roller rink and got her car towed. It was something like $900 and there was a service fee on top of that, a convenience fee it's called, which is basically a mandatory tip by another name. They go and try to pick up the car, and it's $900, and it's like do you want to tip me on 5, 8, 10% on top of that? They were like, absolutely not. Why would I want to tip you for the service that I didn't even ask for? It's one of those things where when you use the checkout system, the iPad, a lot of times the default is to tip. So we're seeing these tips pop up in places like the self-checkout kiosk or the impound lot, where it makes no sense to tip but it's just the default. That's how these things spread.
One thing that really struck me when this iPad swivel started happening was how it took this intentional decision from a private space to a public space. People behind you, in a lot of these interactions, can see what you're doing.
Zach Helfand: My editor calls it a spotlight, you feel like the iPad is glowing and it's pretty bright and everyone can see it and it's big. It makes this already very fraught, psychological transaction way more fraught.
It's fascinating. The other night I was at a restaurant. It was cold. It was late at night. I went to get my car from the valet. I didn't have any cash. I always give cash to the guy who delivers my car because I know the fee is going to the company. So the transaction was done on an iPad credit card app. I tipped my usual 20%, maybe even a little more. Then I'm waiting for my car and I noticed that the woman who came after me tipped zero. It just stuck with me for so long as I climbed into my car and wound my way through the streets of Los Angeles on a cold, dark night. I was like, wow, zero, interesting.
Zach Helfand: It seems like a judgment. It seems like "You get nothing!" I was in Buenos Aires over Christmas and I didn't know what the tipping rules were. We went out to dinner and there's no line on the bill to tip with your credit card and so few people carry around cash anymore. We learned, after the meal was over and after we left the restaurant, that in Argentina, usually you are expected to tip a bit but it's supposed to be in cash. So we felt horrible and had to go back the next day and get some cash to give to the server from from the last night because we felt so bad that she would go home A) without money and B) thinking that she did a bad job, that we gave her nothing because she deserved nothing. We were so guilt-ridden, we had to go back the next day.