Unraveling the Enigma of Tipping: A Cultural and Economic Conundrum
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Tipping is confusing, and paradoxical. We tip some people who provide services but not others who work just as hard for just as little pay. It is insulting to leave any tip in Tokyo but offensive not to leave a large one in New York. It is assumed that the purpose of tipping is to encourage good service but we leave one only after the service has been given, when it is too late to change it, often to people who will never serve us again. Tipping challenges the sweeping generalisations of economists and anthropologists alike. To understand how and why we tip is to begin to understand just how complicated and fascinating we human beings are.
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Historians mostly agree that tipping was originally an aristocratic custom. In early 17th century England, it became expected that visitors to a private home would, on departure, leave a small amount of money, called a vail, to the servants. The practice spread to coffee houses, then to other service providers and eventually abroad. The word ‘tip’ itself is of unclear origin. The most likely source is the Latinstips, meaning a gift. Since the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first usage of the word in 1706, it is almost certainly a myth that it stands for ‘To Insure Prompt Service’, a sign Samuel Johnson reported seeing on a tipping jar in an 18th century coffee house. Tips have rarely insured any such thing. Like parting vails, most are given too late to make a difference, which has made the custom baffling to economists, who cannot understand why people would pay more for a service than they need to.
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Tipping for better service not only defies the arrow of time, it also flies in the face of observation. Studies have shown that there is only a weak relationship between customers’ satisfaction with service and the size of their tips. There are other, more reliable ways of increasing tips than doing a good job, such as ‘upselling’: persuading the customer to order more, or more expensive, food and drink. A larger bill almost always means a larger tip, since most people simply give a percentage. The complex function of the tip reflects the multi-faceted function of the restaurant. It is in part a form a payment, a pure financial reward for a job well done. But it is also an expression of gratitude, a way of giving the staff the means to have some of the pleasure you have just had yourself. Perhaps that is why some waiters say that they view the two parts of their earnings differently, paying their bills with their wages and having nights out on their tips. Any universal explanation of tipping comes up against the problem of place. How and when we tip varies according to each culture’s values and traditions. One variable appears to concern the nature and importance of respect. It seems that the more honourable that restaurant work is in a society, the less that staff are tipped.
