Just a Vapor

I read Vox Popoli every day, and would love to do my own posts based on half of his posts, but this isn’t the Vox Popoli discussion board, so I keep the cross-posting to a minimum. However, he’s got one today that I really want to get my opinion out there about. Grumpamoose had a post on the same topic back on the 7th.

Here is Vox’s:

From the New York Times:

On bitterwaitress.com, the most popular page is an annotated database of people who give bad tips (defined on the site as “any gratuity under 17 percent for service which one’s peers would judge as adequate or better”)

If that’s the determining factor, count me in as a proud “bad tipper”. Seventeen percent is absolutely ridiculous… the Almighty himself only expects ten. It seems strange that as service has gotten worse and worse over the years, expectations of compensation for it have nearly doubled.

Tipping is something that I really hate. It’s not because I’m cheap, it’s that I was taught that tipping was a way of thanking a person for good service. Now, tipping has become a form of extortion. If you don’t tip generously, you’re guaranteeing bad service from that person the next time around.

What upsets me the most is that tipping has become such an expectation that restaurants pay their servers less than they deserve expecting them to make up the difference in tips. In Minnesota, it’s even legal to pay them less than minimum wage if they get tips.

Now, I should mention that just because I hate tipping, and admit to being cheap (at times), I usually tip well within etiquette. A $2 tip on a $8-10 meal is not abnormal for me. Normally I don’t give it a lot of thought either.

A recent experience really upset me in regards to tipping. My wife and I rented a cabin on the Canadian border for our honeymoon. We paid more for four nights in that cabin than it would have cost us to go to Cancun, and the first week of January, Cancun is certainly tempting. Now the package we got was supposed to be all-inclusive. They even charged an 8% “service charge” that was admittedly a mandatory tip. This money was supposed to go to the food service staff and the housekeeping staff. Now, the housekeeping staff did nothing but bring us clean towels each day. They didn’t vacuum the cabin or change the sheets. If it took them 2 minutes to do their thing at our cabin, that’d be a lot. As for food, we ordered most of our meals to be delivered to our cabin. When we first got there, if we asked for dinner to come at 6:00, it was there at 5:50. We didn’t bother tipping, they were charging us a healthy sum as a mandatory tip already. That wasn’t good enough though. As the days progressed, our meals were showing up later and later. By the last day, they didn’t come at all.

As much as we liked the place otherwise, we will likely never go back because of that. There’s just no reason for the service to get so bad because they’re not satisfied with the money they are already extorting from us.

I may dislike the concept of tipping, for the most part, but I don’t usually stiff people because of it. If I want a pizza, but don’t want to tip the delivery guy, I go pick it up myself. If I don’t want to tip at a restaurant, I call ahead and get it to go. If they’re doing nothing more than handing me my meal, there is no reason to expect a tip. Tips are for the people that check back every five minutes to see that I don’t need more pop (soda), or dessert.

If the pizza place charges for delivery, it comes out of the tip. Many Pizza Hut’s charge $1. The driver uses his own car, and I suspect pays for his own gas. I assume he gets the dollar, and give him $1 less for a tip.

It all boils down to the nature of the tip. If it’s voluntary, I try to practice good etiquette. If it’s built into the charges, it will aggravate me to no end. If it’s built in and more is expected, I may not patronize that business again.

I especially like Vox’s comment that the Almighty only asks for 10%. I think that applies to taxes too, but that’s another topic altogether.