Before screens, tipping, like a marriage proposal, was a private affair. Tips can reveal hidden values or the rumblings of the subconscious. A waitress’s breast size, for instance, correlates positively with tip size. “Mad Men”-era husbands tipped more when dining with someone else’s wife than with their own. The grief-inflected gratitude of the post-pandemic period introduced new tipping behaviors. Etiquette experts studied the so-called guilt-tip boom. The gratuity, like everything else, has gone contactless—the swivelling of the iPad. In the past three years, according to data from the payroll company Gusto, tips in bakeries and cafés are up forty-one per cent. Apparently, we now tip assistant sports coaches (up three hundred and sixty-seven per cent) and theatre-box-office staff (up a hundred and sixty-one per cent). Do you tip the cashier when all she’s done is ring up your salad? Don’t, and you’re a cheapskate. Do, and you’re a sucker. Where before you scribbled a tip in the candlelit darkness of a restaurant, now you do it in the spotlight glow of the screen. The polite thing to do, standing in line, is to behave as you would at the A.T.M., or the urinal: look away.
Recently, I spoke with Michael Reed, a butcher at Bob’s Quality Meats, a shop in Seattle. “It’s a field where it’s not customary to tip,” he told me, on his day off. Reed has worked in what he calls “retail meat” for twenty years. It’s more occupation than passion, but he’s proud of the personal touches in his butchery. Immigrants describe, and receive, home-country cuts that don’t have English names. Reed knows which customers have bad teeth, and he slices their steaks thin. In 2021, Bob’s installed a new checkout system: the swivelling tablet. The shop set its own tipping options—from three per cent to ten per cent. “I didn’t think it would generate a significant amount,” Reed said. “I turned out to be wrong.”
There were some complaints. One person ranted on Facebook. But, wordlessly, compromises formed. Graces were extended. Reed would get a buck or two when he deboned a chicken. He wouldn’t when he handed over a slab of bacon. The filet-mignon crowd usually chipped in. Some customers couldn’t. (Food stamps can’t be used for gratuities.) “The tipping system is there to keep the base price affordable for folks like them,” Reed said. Over all, a little less than half of his transactions were tipped. The extra money kept him afloat through the inflation years.
Reed’s daughter, who is nineteen, was a tipped employee, too. She worked at Starbucks, where, she noticed, her tips were bigger when she wore makeup. One night this summer, her Chevy Cruze got towed at a local ice rink. She and Reed went together to the impound lot: forms, cashier, the tablet. They owed more than nine hundred dollars, including a “convenience fee,” the spiritual cousin of the tip. Reed swiped his card. On the screen, additional gratuity options appeared. “A tip?” Reed said. “You must be out of your mind!” The cashier averted her eyes.
The gratuity, classically, functions as a “thank-you,” but it can also serve as a “sorry.” People most often tip in settings where the workers are less happy than the customers. The Freudian Ernest Dichter once described the compulsion as “the need to pay, psychologically, for the guilt involved in the unequal relationship.”
Michael Lynn, a marketing professor at Cornell, has studied tips for forty years, beginning when he was a bartender in graduate school. “When you think about it, you go, ‘Why would people give up money they don’t have to?’ ” In restaurants, he has found, the answer has to do with social approval. Lynn almost never tips for takeout or counter service, the domain of the iPads. (“I get pissed,” he said.) To study how the new tip options affected customer behavior, he conducted research with a laundry-service app, which randomly suggested different gratuity amounts. He found that the more the company asked for the more customers paid. Ratings and retention were unaffected. (When the chain Joe’s Crab Shack eliminated tipping, customer satisfaction actually went down.) The dynamic can be compared to masochism.
Tips have long provided a convenient way to foist payment obligations onto others. Kerry Segrave, the author of the comprehensive history “Tipping,” identified the gratuity’s potential origins, in Europe during the late Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay “vails” to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with “To Insure Promptitude.” Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to “TIP.” By the end of the nineteenth century, some business owners demanded their employees’ tips. Some cafés charged waiters a fee for the privilege of working there. In France, tips were placed directly into a wooden box called le tronc, controlled by the proprietor. French waiters went on strike in 1907, identifying two of the great evils of their profession: le tronc, and a ban on mustaches. (“Women are quite determined to starve with their children rather than see the whiskers of their husbands still fall under the razor,” one newspaper reported.) They eventually prevailed on both counts.
American visitors to Europe brought tipping back to the United States. Perhaps no entity did more to spread the practice than the Pullman Company. George Pullman preferred hiring formerly enslaved Black men as railroad porters. He paid them as little as possible, and used tips as a subsidy. The system spread as far as the train lines. By the nineteen-twenties, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters estimated that the policy had saved the Pullman Company a hundred and fifty million dollars. The porters had long fought to eliminate tipping. Their efforts had been rebuffed by the Pullman Company’s president and, later, chairman, Robert Todd Lincoln.
Once the practice gets its hooks in, it can be hard to dislodge. In New York, at the turn of the twentieth century, some enterprising concessionaires paid restaurants thousands of dollars a year to run their coatrooms. These concessionaires became known as the tip trust. At least one dressed young women in theatrical French-maid outfits to collect coats, hats, and tips; the young women turned over all revenues to the trust. (When skimming was discovered, the trusts banned pockets.) Men joked that they bought a hat for five dollars and paid seventy-three dollars a year to wear it. A hat manufacturer sold roll-up models that men could hide inside their coats. The greatest of the tip-trust barons, known as the Hatcheck King, brought in the equivalent of sixty million dollars a year. The trusts were powerful politically. Today, businesses in New York are not allowed to take their employees’ tips, with one exception: hat-and-coat checks.
Across Europe, minimum-wage standards were raised, and tipping largely disappeared there. In 1966, the United States Congress lowered the base wage businesses had to pay tipped workers. Nationally, it’s still just $2.13 an hour.
Each method of tipping has its own rituals. The phone number left for the waiter or waitress on the bill, below the tip line. The palmed maître d’. I’ve had barbers who’ve requested that I denote my Venmo tips as “pizza,” to facilitate some minor tax fraud. The most recognizable, these days, is the iPad pirouette, evoking an upturned palm. Gerard Knight led the design team at Square, one of the major tablet-payment providers, when it first rolled out its tipping feature. “Turning around the interface to say ‘Give me money’ can be kind of an obnoxious gesture,” he told me. Originally, the designers used a Trojan horse, of sorts. “The idea was you turned it around anyway, to capture a signature”—most credit cards at the time required one—“and in that process you prompt that customer for a tip.” They considered options besides the three-choice menu. “Things like sliders, where you slide from ten per cent to twenty per cent,” he said. “All of those things just seemed gimmicky.”
Recently, I got in a cab whose screen was in accessibility mode. When it came time to pay, I was presented with a big plus sign and a big minus sign. “Tip is set to zero,” a loud voice said. I hit the plus. “Your tip is now five per cent,” it said. I punched it again. Plus, minus, plus, plus. “Your tip is now ten per cent. Your tip is now five per cent. Your tip is now . . .”
“Can you hear this?” I asked the cabbie.
“Yeah,” he said. I tipped thirty per cent.
Internalizing all the rules can be like learning a language. Do you tip more if the cabbie can see (or hear) the sum? Do you pay the delivery guy based on bill size, distance travelled, weather, or some combination? Do you tip on the tax or on the subtotal? The whole thing is effortful, with a potential for embarrassment. But given the question at hand—what do we owe our fellow-man?—shouldn’t there be something on the line? One can perceive, in the mental math and the silent negotiations, a lurching attempt at fair play.
One common tipping complaint is some variation of the truffle conundrum: Why should we tip more on the pasta with truffles than on the one without? Call it a wealth tax. There’s also a celebrity tax. One waiter, whose diners have included Selena Gomez, Jon Hamm, and Matthew Macfadyen (“He ordered two entrées successively,” he recalled. “I was impressed”), said that those who are rich and identifiable typically leave thirty to fifty per cent. “Robert Plant tipped me twenty per cent, which I respected,” he said. “There’s this paranoia of being despised by the waiter, and they overtip to compensate. I always thought that was pathetic.”
Cartoon by Edward Steed
Among the ranks of recognized good tippers: Taylor Swift, Amy Schumer, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Barack Obama has been documented tipping twice in one meal. Mark Twain, meanwhile, stiffed his coachmen. When Leon Trotsky was living in the Bronx, eating his meals at a Jewish dairy restaurant, he refused to tip, and encouraged others to do the same. Soon he was having soup spilled on him. Service providers are purportedly tipped well by mobsters, C.E.O.s, professional golfers, and people who drive pickup trucks. Reputed bad tippers include teachers, lawyers, professional tennis players, and Lexus owners. Germans are O.K. No one wants to see the French. A French friend of mine said that, upon his arrival in America, he felt obligated to tip excessively. “It felt like my duty as a green-card holder,” he said. He always caught the barista’s eye when he put the dollar in the jar. Once, she turned away after successive dollar-bill drops, so he fished one out and tried again. She noticed. His wife later informed him that he’d reënacted a scene from “Seinfeld.”
Larry David drove a cab for a short time, living on fares and tips. “I didn’t know why they did it,” he said, of the tippers, when I called him at his office in Los Angeles. “Who are those people? Why are they being so nice to a stranger they’ll never see again? It was great!” Were he invested with the authority, David said, he’d raise wages so workers wouldn’t have to rely on tips, and then he’d publish the Larry David book of tipping. “I’d go over every possible service,” he said. “The air-conditioner guys, the refrigerator guys. The moving guys! That’s always a problem. What do you tip the guy who moves your couch? Who knows?”
David didn’t come up with the “Seinfeld” tipping episode—that was Jeff Schaffer and Alec Berg. “Jeff Schaffer’s right here!” David said. He fetched him and put him on the phone.
“I’ve been waiting in Larry’s closet for twenty-seven years to tell this story,” Schaffer said. “You know what bothers me? At a place like Kreation, the juice place, sometimes they’re not making the juice—the juice is in a refrigerator. You’re taking the beverage that’s already packaged, and then the tipping gives you these options: eighteen per cent, twenty per cent, twenty-two per cent.”
“It freezes you in your tracks,” David said.
Schaffer said that the “Seinfeld” episode emerged from real life. He and Berg, trying to walk off some morning writer’s block, stopped at a sandwich place near the studio lot. Just as Schaffer put a dollar into the jar, the sandwich maker turned away. “I was, like, He’s not going to see my tip! You so rarely have an opportunity to do something good. If it’s not seen—”
“What’s the point?” David said.
In New York, restaurants get sued all the time for mismanaging, or dipping into, their employees’ tips. Mario Batali once settled a case for $5.25 million. Nobu has paid $2.5 million. Jean-Georges Vongerichten has paid $1.75 million. Louis Pechman, a labor lawyer who specializes in wage theft, and who gives clients crumb scrapers with his firm’s wage-theft Web site on them, as if they were business cards, won a settlement of $3.1 million from Sparks Steak House. “Where Big Paul Castellano got whacked,” he told me recently, at his office, near Grand Central. Pechman represents both waiters and owners. “New York law is very dangerous when it comes to tips,” he said. “I tell my management clients, ‘Tips are like kryptonite. Just stay away.’ ” Legally, only food-service workers are entitled to a share of tips. Pechman’s cases often come down to one question: What constitutes service?
He was preparing a suit against a grill-your-own-meat place. Before initiating legal action, Pechman always visits the business undercover, to scope it out. “I call it ‘foodie by lawsuit,’ ” he said. “It’s become kind of my trademark.” A couple of weeks later, Pechman and an associate, Christian Mercado, arrived for their scouting mission. “This is nicer than the last place we sued!” Pechman, who has a beard and wore a gray pullover, said, as he climbed into a booth. One benefit of Pechman’s methodology is that he gets to try a restaurant from which owners may be tempted to ban him.
Not everyone holds a grudge. “I found my favorite Greek place, in Astoria, this way,” Pechman said. “I eat there once a month.”
The staff at the grill place pooled their tips—an industry norm. They had approached Pechman alleging that a restaurant manager was claiming a share of the pool for himself, which is illegal. Maimon Kirschenbaum, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Batali, Nobu, and Vongerichten cases, told me, “At another high-end restaurant”—a non-pooled place—“waiters had to slip the manager a twenty, or else you’d get the worst section of the restaurant, where they put European people.”
The waitress came by and we ordered a meat-combo platter, a seafood pancake, and some beers. The restaurant had multiple areas. “How do you decide who goes where?” Pechman asked her.
“The other area is mostly intestines,” she said. She brought over a tray of raw rib eye, kalbi, and skirt steak. We looked lost, so she arranged them on the grill and showed us what to flip and when.
“You serve, you cook, and you teach!” Mercado said.
Here was someone who was earning her tip. One legal quirk is that if the waitress were actually a cook, searing meat in the anonymity of a kitchen, she wouldn’t be allowed in the tip pool. Only staffers who interact directly with customers—servers, busboys, runners—are considered food-service workers.
