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Title: The Itching Palm
A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America
Author: William R Scott
Release Date: July 15, 2010 [EBook #33170]
Language: English
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_The Itching Palm_
A STUDY OF THE HABIT
OF TIPPING IN AMERICA
_By_
WILLIAM R. SCOTT
_Author of_
_"The Americans in Panama,"
"Scientific Circulation Management," Etc._
THE PENN PUBLISHING
COMPANY PHILADELPHIA
1916
COPYRIGHT 1916 BY
THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY
The Itching Palm
THE AUTHOR WILL BE PLEASED TO CORRESPOND WITH ANY READER WHO
APPROVES OF, OR HAS COMMENTS TO MAKE UPON, THE ATTITUDE TAKEN
IN THIS BOOK TOWARD THE TIPPING CUSTOM.
WILLIAM R. SCOTT.
PADUCAH, KENTUCKY.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I FLUNKYISM IN AMERICA 7
II ON PERSONAL LIBERTY 10
III BARBARY PIRATES 15
IV PERSONNEL AND DISTRIBUTION 19
V THE ECONOMICS OF TIPPING 26
VI THE ETHICS OF TIPPING 36
VII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIPPING 47
VIII THE LITERATURE OF TIPPING 58
IX TIPPING AND THE STAGE 68
X THE EMPLOYEE VIEWPOINT 73
XI THE EMPLOYER VIEWPOINT 88
XII ONE STEP FORWARD 97
XIII THE SLEEPING-CAR PHASE 105
XIV THE GOVERNMENT AND TIPPING 113
XV LAWS AGAINST TIPPING 122
XVI SAMUEL GOMPERS ON TIPPING 144
XVII THE WAY OUT 158
INDEX 169
THE ITCHING PALM
I
FLUNKYISM IN AMERICA
"Oliver Cromwell struck a mortal blow at the universal heart of
Flunkyism," wrote Carlyle of the execution of Charles I.
Yet, Flunkyism is not dead!
In the United States alone more than 5,000,000 persons derive their
incomes, in whole or in part, from "tips," or gratuities. They have the
moral malady denominated The Itching Palm.
Tipping is the modern form of Flunkyism. Flunkyism may be defined as a
willingness to be servile for a consideration. It is democracy's deadly
foe. The two ideas cannot live together except in a false peace. The
tendency always is for one to sap the vitality of the other.
The full significance of the foregoing figures is realized in the
further knowledge that these 5,000,000 persons with itching palms are
fully 10 per cent of our entire industrial population; for the number of
persons engaged in gainful occupations in this country is less than
50,000,000.
Whether this constitutes a problem for moralists, economists and
statesmen depends upon the ethical appraisement of tipping. If tipping
is moral, the interest is reduced to the economic phase--whether the
remuneration thus given is normal or abnormal. If tipping is immoral,
the fact that 5,000,000 Americans practice it constitutes a problem of
first rate importance.
Accurate statistics are not obtainable, but conservative estimates place
the amount of money given in one year by the American people in tips, or
gratuities, at a figure somewhere between $200,000,000 and $500,000,000!
Now we have the full statement of the case against tipping--five million
persons receiving in excess of two hundred millions of dollars
for--what?
It will be interesting to examine the ethics, economics and psychology
of tipping to determine whether the American people receive a value for
this expenditure.
II
ON PERSONAL LIBERTY
The Itching Palm is a moral disease. It is as old as the passion of
greed in the human mind. Milton was thinking of it when he exclaimed:
"Help us to save free conscience from the paw,
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw."
Although it had only a feeble lodgment in the minds of the Puritans,
because their minds were in the travail that gave birth to democracy,
enough remained to perpetuate the disease. In Europe, under monarchical
ideals, a person could accept a tip without feeling the acute loss of
self-respect that attends the practice in America, under democratic
ideals. For tipping is essentially an aristocratic custom.
TIPPING UN-AMERICAN
If it seems astounding that this aristocratic practice should reach such
stupendous proportions in a republic, we must remember that the same
republic allowed slavery to reach stupendous proportions.
IF TIPPING IS UN-AMERICAN, SOME DAY, SOMEHOW, IT WILL BE UPROOTED LIKE
AFRICAN SLAVERY
Apparently the American conscience is dormant upon this issue. But this
is more apparent than real. The people are stirring vaguely and uneasily
over the ethics of the custom. Six State Legislatures reflected the
dawning of a new conscience by considering in their 1915 sessions bills
relating to tipping. They were Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska,
Tennessee and South Carolina.
The geographical distribution of these States is significant. It is
proof that the opposition to the practice is not isolated, not
sectional, but national. North, Central, South, the verdict was
registered that tipping is wrong. The South, former home of slavery,
might be supposed to be favorable to this aristocratic custom. On the
contrary the most vigorous opposition to it is found there. Mississippi,
Arkansas, Tennessee, and South Carolina simultaneously had laws against
tipping--with the usual contests in the courts on their
constitutionality.
The Negro was servile by law and inheritance. The modern tip-taker
voluntarily assumes, in a republic where he is actually and
theoretically equal to all other citizens, a servile attitude
for a fee. While the form of servitude is different, the slavery
is none the less real in the case of the tip-taker.
Strangely enough, bills to prohibit tipping often have been vetoed by
Governors--notably in Wisconsin--on the ground that they curtailed
personal liberty. That is to say, a bill which removed the chains of
social slavery from the serving classes was declared to be an abridgment
of liberty! "Oh, Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name!"
The Legislature in Wisconsin almost re-passed the bill over the
Governor's veto. In Tennessee and Kentucky bills have been vetoed for
the same given reason, though Tennessee in 1916 finally had such a law
in force. In Illinois, the law was framed primarily with the object of
preventing the leasing of privileges to collect tips in hotels and other
public places, and not against the individual giver or taker of tips.
SHORT-LIVED LAWS
The courts have negatived such laws on much the same grounds, so that
anti-tipping laws thus far have been, generally, short-lived. The reason
is, of course, that popular sentiment has not been behind the laws in an
extent sufficient to give them power. Judges and executives simply have
yielded to their own class impulses, and the pressure from organized
interests, to suppress the legislation. When the public conscience finds
itself and becomes organized and articulate, they will have no
difficulty in finding grounds for declaring regulatory laws
constitutional. The history of the prohibition of the liquor business is
a parallel.
PERSONAL LIBERTY
Personal liberty is a phrase that is being redefined in America in every
decade. In its broadest sense it is interpreted to mean that a man has
the right to go to perdition if he so elects without neighbors or the
government taking note or interfering.
Anti-liquor laws in the early days of the temperance movement fared
badly from this interpretation, just as anti-tipping laws fare to-day.
But as public sentiment crystallized, and judges and executives began to
feel the pressure at the polls, a new conception of personal liberty
developed. In its present accepted sense, as regards liquor, it is
interpreted to mean that no citizen may act or live in a way that is
detrimental to himself, his neighbor or his government, and his
privilege to drink liquor is abridged or abolished at will.
The right to give tips is not inalienable. It is not grounded on
personal liberty. If the public conscience reaches the conviction that
tipping is detrimental to democracy, that it destroys that fineness of
self-respect requisite in a republic, the right will be abridged or
withdrawn.
III
BARBARY PIRATES
The American people became fully aroused on one occasion to the iniquity
of tipping--on an international scale.
In 1801 President Jefferson decided that the United States could
tolerate no longer the system of tribute enforced by the Barbary States
along the shores of the Mediterranean.
Before our action, no European government had made more than fitful,
ineffectual attempts to break up a practice at once humiliating to
national honor and disastrous to national commerce. Candor requires the
admission that we, too, submitted for years to this system of paying
tribute to Barbary pirates for an unmolested passage of our ships, but
the significant fact is that American manhood did finally and
successfully revolt against the practice.
By 1805 our naval forces had brought the pirates to their knees and all
Europe breathed grateful sighs of relief. Even the Pope commended the
American achievement. The practice was contrary to every dictate of
self-respect.
TRIBUTE
These pirates of Algiers, Tunis, Morocco and Tripoli did not pretend to
have any other right behind their demands for tribute than the right
they could enforce with cutlass and cannon--a right ferociously
employed. It was not robbery in the ordinary sense of the word. They
demanded a fee based on the value of the cargo for the privilege of
sailing in the Mediterranean, and this being paid, the ship could
proceed to its destination. Ship-owners soon began to figure tribute as
a fixed expense of navigation, like insurance, and passed the added cost
along to the ultimate consumer.
This practice of paying tribute was a system of international tipping.
The Barbary pirates granted immunity to those who obeyed the custom, but
made it decidedly warm and expensive for those who dared to protest
against it--just as do our modern pirates in hotels, sleeping cars,
restaurants, barber shops and elsewhere.
If a ship refused to pay tribute it was sunk, and the sailors went to
slavery in the desert, or to death by fearful torture. President
Jefferson could not see any basis of right in the position of the
Barbary States that the Mediterranean was their private lake through
which ships could not pass without paying toll. He sent Decatur to
register our protest.
With the Pinckney slogan: "MILLIONS FOR DEFENSE--NOT ONE CENT FOR
TRIBUTE!" the American naval forces made good our position. The tips
that skippers of our nation had been paying to the pirates were saved
and the custom soon was abandoned by other nations.
* * * * *
To-day, the old battle cry is reversed to read: "Millions for
tribute--not one cent for defense!"
It is certain that a greater tribute is paid in one week in the United
States in the form of tips, than our merchantmen paid during the whole
period that they knuckled to the Barbary pirates.
In New York City alone more than $100,000 a day is paid in gratuities to
waiters, hotel employes, chauffeurs, barbers and allied classes. But
New York has reached a subserviency to the tipping custom that is
amazing in a democratic country.
This vast tribute is paid for not more real service than the Barbary
pirates rendered to those from whom they exacted tribute. It is given to
workers who are paid by their employers to perform the services enjoyed
by the public. If the Barbary pirates could see the ease with which a
princely tribute is exacted from a docile public by the tip-takers, they
would yearn to be reincarnated as waiters in America--the Land of the
Fee!
IV
PERSONNEL AND DISTRIBUTION
The Itching Palm is not limited to the serving classes. It is found
among public officials, where it is particularized as grafting, and it
is found among store buyers, purchasing agents, traveling salesmen and
the like, and takes the form of splitting commissions. There are varied
manifestations of the disease, but whether the amount of the gratuity is
ten cents to a waiter or $10,000 to a captain of police, the practice is
the same.
This is a partial list of those affected:
Baggagemen
Barbers
Bartenders
Bath attendants
Bellboys
Bootblacks
Butlers
Cab drivers
Chauffeurs
Charwomen
Coachmen
Cooks
Door men
Elevator men
Garbage men
Guides
Hatboys
Housekeepers
Janitors
Maids
Manicurists
Messengers
Mail carriers
Pullman porters
Rubbish collectors
Steamship stewards
Theater attendants
Waiters
The foregoing list is not offered as a complete roster of those who
regularly or occasionally receive tips. Nearly every one can think of
additions, and at Christmas the list is extended to include money gifts
to policemen, delivery men and numerous others.
THE TIP-TAKING CLASSES
At the last Census, in 1910, there were 38,167,336 persons in the United
States, out of a total population of ninety-odd millions, who were
engaged in gainful occupations, that is, who worked for specified wages
or salaries. Of this number, 3,772,174 persons were engaged in domestic
or personal service, or practically ten per cent. of the industrial
population.
This means that in round numbers 4,000,000 Americans of both sexes and
all ages were engaged in the lines of work specified in the foregoing
list, with certain additions as mentioned. These are the citizens who
profit by the tipping practice.
Since 1910 the growth in population to one hundred millions, and the
steadily widening spread of the tipping practice will increase the
beneficiaries of tipping to 5,000,000. An idea of the relative
distribution of the total may be obtained from the statistics of fifty
leading cities. The numbers represent the tip-taking classes in each
city.
CITY NUMBER
Albany 8,000
Atlanta 23,000
Baltimore 48,000
Birmingham 16,000
Boston 61,000
Bridgeport 5,200
Buffalo 25,000
Cambridge 7,500
Chicago 135,000
Cincinnati 30,000
Cleveland 31,000
Columbus 14,000
Dayton 6,500
Denver 17,000
Detroit 26,000
Fall River 4,000
Grand Rapids 5,500
Indianapolis 19,000
Jersey City 14,000
Kansas City 24,000
Los Angeles 26,000
Lowell 5,500
Louisville 23,000
Memphis 19,000
Milwaukee 22,000
Minneapolis 19,000
Nashville 15,000
New Haven 9,000
New Orleans 37,000
New York 400,000
Newark 17,000
Oakland 11,000
Omaha 10,000
Paterson 5,000
Philadelphia 105,000
Pittsburgh 41,000
Portland 17,000
Providence 14,000
Richmond 15,000
Rochester 13,000
St. Louis 56,000
St. Paul 16,000
San Francisco 44,000
Scranton 6,000
Seattle 19,000
Spokane 7,000
Syracuse 9,000
Toledo 9,500
Washington 43,000
Worcester 9,000
In all other cities, towns and hamlets there are proportionate quotas to
bring the grand total to 5,000,000. Any estimate of the daily tipping
tribute for the whole country necessarily is only an approximation, but
$600,000 is a conservative figure. At this rate the annual tribute is
around $220,000,000.
IN NEW YORK ALONE
Taking New York with its 400,000 persons who profit from tipping, the
leading classes of beneficiaries are as follows:
Barbers 20,000
Bartenders 12,000
Bellboys 2,500
Bootblacks 3,500
Chauffeurs 12,000
Janitors 25,000
Manicurists 4,500
Messengers 1,500
Porters 15,000
Waiters 35,000
The tipping to these and other classes varies both in amount and
regularity. Waiters and manicurists in the better-class places receive
no pay from their employers and depend entirely upon tips for their
compensation. Barbers and chauffeurs are classes which receive wages and
supplement them with tips. Sometimes the employer will pay wages and
require that all tips be turned in to the house.
It is a common feature of the "Help Wanted" columns to state that the
job is desirable to the workers because of "good tips." Thus the
employers are fully alert to the economic advantage of tipping, and
wherever it is practicable they throw upon their patrons the entire cost
of servant hire.
The extent to which employers are exploiting the public is realized
vaguely, if at all. The vein of generosity and the fear of violating a
social convention can be worked profitably, and they are in league with
their employees to make it assay the maximum amount to the patron.
In a restaurant where the employer has thus shifted the cost of waiter
hire to the shoulders of the public, the patron who conscientiously
objects to tipping has not the slightest chance in the world of a square
deal in competition with the patron who pays tribute, although he pays
as much for the food.
A waiter, knowing that his compensation depends upon what he can work
out of his patron, employs every art to stimulate the tipping
propensity, from subtle flattery to out-right bull-dozing. He weaves a
spell of obligation around a patron as tangible, if invisible, as the
web a spider weaves around a fly. He plays as consciously upon the
patron's fear of social usage as the musician in the alcove plays upon
his violin.
This is a particularly bad ethical and economic situation from any
viewpoint. The patron, getting only one service, pays two persons for
it--the employer and the employee. The payment to the employer is fixed,
but to the employee it is dependent upon the whim of the patron. To make
this situation normal, the patron should pay only once, and this should
cover both the cost of the food and the services of the waiter.
Theoretically this is the present idea under the common law, but
actually the patron is required, through fear of well-defined penalties,
to pay twice.
Naturally, if the $200,000,000 or more annually given to those serving
the public should be withdrawn suddenly, employers would face the
necessity of a radical readjustment of wage systems. In many lines wages
would be increased to a normal basis, either at the expense of the
employer's profits, or through additional charges to patrons. Before
going further into the employer phase of the practice, the economics of
tipping in individual instances will be an interesting study.
V
THE ECONOMICS OF TIPPING
The basic question is, does tipping represent a sound exchange of
wealth? Do the American people receive full value, or any value, for the
$200,000,000 or more given in tips?
Values, of course, may be sentimental as well as substantial and, so far
as tipping is concerned, it can be demonstrated that if any values are
received they are sentimental. The satisfaction of giving, the balm to
vanity, the indulgence of pride, are the values obtained by the giver of
a tip in exchange for his money.
It is a stock argument for tipping that the person serving frequently
performs extra services, or displays special painstaking, which deserve
extra compensation. Only an examination of individual instances can
determine whether this is true. The proportion of the tipping tribute
which really pays for extraordinary service is negligible. A brief
inquiry into a few of the more prominent instances of tipping follows.
THE WAITER
If food is sold undelivered, then the waiter in bringing it to the
patron and assisting him in its consumption does perform an extra
service for which payment is due.
But this is not the fact, any more than that a shoe clerk should be
tipped for assisting a customer in the selection of his employer's
footwear. In both instances, the cost of the service is included in the
price of the article--food or shoes.
The prices on the bill of fare have been figured to include all costs of
serving it, such as cook-hire, waiter-hire, rent, music, table ware, raw
materials and overhead charges. If a sirloin steak costs seventy-five
cents a definite part of that amount represents the wages of the waiter
serving it.
Thus the waiter has no claim upon the patron for compensation, because
the patron, in paying for the food, provides the proprietor with funds
from which the waiter's wages will be paid. If the patron, in addition,
gives the waiter a tip it is clearly a gift for which no value has been
returned. The waiter is paid twice for one service.
ECONOMIC WASTE
The question then recurs, is this gift to the waiter a sound economic
transaction? Economists teach that no transaction is industrially sound
which does not involve an equal exchange of values. The exchange of five
dollars for a pair of shoes is a sound transaction because the dealer
and the customer each receive a value. But the gift of a quarter to a
waiter as a tip is an unsound transaction because the patron receives
nothing in return--nothing of like substantiality.
The patron may justify the gift from sentimental considerations, of
pride, generosity or fear of violating a social convention, but no
sophistry of reasoning can prove that a substantial value has been
received.
Of course, a waiter may give a patron more than the proprietor agrees to
give in the bill of fare, and this undoubtedly is an extra service--_but
it is also a dishonest service_. Every extra service to one patron means
a deficiency of service to other patrons. It is a common experience
that liberal tipping obtains special attentions which non-tipping
patrons miss, but, being dishonest, such a condition is outside the
scope of this inquiry. When a patron pays for food he is entitled to
adequate and equal service, and no largess by other patrons should
interfere with this basic right.
On its economic side, then, tipping is wrong. Wealth is exchanged
without both parties to the transaction receiving fair values. The
psychology and ethics of the transaction will be considered in other
chapters.
THE BARBER
No tipping is so inexcusable as that which is done to a barber. The
trade is highly organized and the workers are well-paid under good
working conditions. There is not the slightest chance for the barber to
serve a patron in a way for which the patron does not pay in the shop
tariffs.
If a haircut costs thirty-five cents, the patron is entitled to just as
good a hair-cut as the barber can give. The patron enters the shop upon
the assumption that he is entitled to a satisfactory service. Hence, in
tipping a barber a patron is yielding in a peculiarly timid way to the
mesmeric influence which the tipping custom exerts over its devotees.
It is a wanton waste of wealth, an unsound business transaction, because
money is given where charity is unnecessary and where absolutely nothing
is given in return. "But my barber takes lots of pains with my hair,"
the patron exclaims in justification of the tip. As in the instance of
the waiter, if he takes more than a normal amount of pains with your
hair he is dishonest to his employer and to other patrons whom he must
neglect to pay you special attention. Your right is to a satisfactory
service, and this you pay for in the regular charge. Any extra
compensation is unearned increment to the barber.
The unctuous manner he employs to arouse a sense of obligation in a
patron, when stripped of disguises, is a plain hold-up game. This will
be shown in the consideration of the psychology and ethics of tipping.
THE HOTEL
The attitude that hotel employees have been allowed to develop toward
the public is a blot upon professional hospitality.
Every one of them takes the hotel patron for fair game. And the hotel
proprietor, with a few notable exceptions, encourages this despicable
attitude. The assumption is that the patron pays at the desk only for
the privilege of being in the building.
Hence, they will not cheerfully move his baggage to his room unless he
pays to get it there. He cannot have a pitcher of ice water without
being made to feel that he owes for the service. The maid who cares for
his room exacts her toll. The head waiter demands payment for showing
him to a seat. The individual waiters at each meal (and they are changed
each meal by the head-waiter so that the patron has a new tip to give
each time he dines) require fees. If he rings a bell, asks any
assistance, goes out the door to a cab, in short, whichever way he
turns, an itching palm is outstretched!
Just think for a moment of the real significance of this state of
affairs. Hotel hospitality? Why, the Barbary pirates would have been
ashamed to go it that strong!
To ignore this grafting spirit means insulting annoyance. The suave
hotel manager listens to your complaint and smiles assurance that his
guests shall have proper service, but underneath the smile he has a
contempt for the "tight-wad," and instructs the cashier always to give
the waiters small change so as to make tipping easy for the patrons.
In truth, what does a hotel guest pay for when he registers? Certainly
for the service of the bell-boy who carries his suit-case to his room;
for the keeping of the room in order; for water, clean towels and other
necessities for his comfort; for the privilege of finding a seat in the
dining room; for the right to use the doors--all without extra charge.
But the hotel manager admits this in theory and outrageously violates it
in practice. All tipping done to bell-boys, porters, maids, waiters,
door men, hat-boys and other servitors in a hotel is sheer economic
waste. When the guest pays his bill at the desk he pays for all the
service they perform.
The hotel manager protests that the money that passes between his guests
and his employees is not his affair. But he proves his insincerity by
adjusting his wage scale on the estimate that the guests will pass
money to his employees!
Professional hospitality as "enjoyed" by Americans is a travesty on
democracy. That Europe should have such a system and spirit is
historically understandable. Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it
exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape. It is a cancer in the
breast of democracy.
THE CHAUFFEUR
It would be possible to run through all the classes tipped and prove
that the extra compensation is unearned. The chauffeur is a latter-day
instance of the itching palm. Like the barber, the chauffeur is paid
well for his work. He does nothing for which the patron should give him
a tip. The taxi-meter charges the patron roundly for all the service
given, yet tipping chauffeurs is as common in the larger cities as
tipping barbers or waiters. It simply shows the spread of the practice
to workers who have no other claim upon it than their own avaricious
impulses--and the extreme docility of the public. Every tip given to a
chauffeur is so clearly a bad economic transaction that further argument
is unnecessary.
So widespread has the practice become that tipping is, individually, a
problem, as well as collectively. The traveler has a formidable cost to
face in the tipping required. When the total passes $200,000,000 a year,
it becomes a problem which the American people will find more difficult
of solution the longer it continues unchecked.
The whole argument is summed up in this. Tipping is an economic waste
because it is double pay for one service--or pay for no service. It
causes one person to give wealth to another without a fair return in
values, or without any return. The pay that employers give to their
employees should be the only compensation they receive. All the money
given by the public on the side is unearned increment.
The best condition for a fair exchange of wealth is where standards are
known and prices are definite. Self-respect and sound economics flourish
in such an atmosphere, whereas, if values are hazy and compensation is
indirect and irregular, as it is under the custom of tipping, the
bickering that follows degrades manhood.
From an economic viewpoint, all businesses are on an abnormal basis
which figure minimum wages, or no wages, to their employees on the
assumption that the public will, through gratuities, pay for this item
of service.
"One service--one compensation" is the only right relation of seller and
buyer, of patron and proprietor.
VI
THE ETHICS OF TIPPING
The moral wrong of tipping is in the grafting spirit it engenders in
those who profit by it; in the rigid class distinctions it creates in a
republic; in the loss of that fineness of self-respect without which men
and women are only so much clay--worthless dregs in the crucible of
democracy.
In a monarchy it may be sufficient for self-respect to be limited to the
governing classes; but the theory of Americanism requires that every
citizen shall possess this quality. We grant the suffrage simply upon
manhood--upon the assumption that all men are equal in that fundamental
respect.
THE PRICE OF PRIDE
Hence, whatever undermines self-respect, manhood, undermines the
republic. Whatever cultivates aristocratic ideals and conventions in a
republic strikes at the heart of democracy. Where all men are equal,
some cannot become superior unless the others grovel in the dust.
Tipping comes into a democracy to produce that relation.
Tipping is the price of pride. It is what one American is willing to pay
to induce another American to acknowledge inferiority. It represents the
root of aristocracy budding anew in the hearts of those who publicly
renounced the system and all its works.
The same Americans who profit by this undemocratic practice exert as
much influence, proportionably, in the government of the republic, as
those who give tips, or those whose sense of rectitude will not allow
them to give or accept gratuities. Is a man who will take a tip as good
a citizen, is his self-respect as fine, as the one who will not accept a
tip, or who will not give a tip? Is the one as well qualified to vote as
the other?
What is a gentleman? What is a lady?
Can a waiter be a gentleman? Can a maid be a lady?
Would a gentleman or a lady accept a gratuity?
What would happen if a tip should be offered to the average "gentleman"
who patronizes restaurants, and taxicabs and barber shops? He would have
a brainstorm of self-righteous wrath!
THE TEST OF DEMOCRACY
And there is the test. If a "gentleman" would not accept a tip, is it
gentlemanly to give a tip? If a "gentleman's" self-respect would rebel
at the idea of accepting a gratuity, why should not a waiter's
self-respect rebel at the idea?
"Oh, but there's a difference!"
The difference is there indeed. It is the difference between aristocracy
and democracy. In an aristocracy a waiter may accept a tip and be
servile without violating the ideals of the system. In the American
democracy to be servile is incompatible with citizenship.
Every tip given in the United States is a blow at our experiment in
democracy. The custom announces to the world that at heart we are
aristocratic, that we do not believe practically that "all men are
created equal"; that the class distinctions forbidden by our organic law
are instituted through social conventions and flourish in spite of our
lofty professions.
Unless a waiter can be a gentleman, democracy is a failure. If any form
of service is menial, democracy is a failure. Those Americans who
dislike self-respect in servants are undesirable citizens; they belong
in an aristocracy.
TIPS DISLIKED BY RECIPIENTS
Fortunately, conditions are not as rotten as the extent of the tipping
practice would indicate. The vast majority of Americans who give tips do
so under duress. At heart they loathe the custom. They feel that it is
tribute exacted as arbitrarily and unrighteously as the tribute paid to
the Barbary pirates. Some day this majority will rise up and deal as
summarily with the tipping practice as our forefathers dealt with the
Mediterranean tribute custom!
A great number of servants and workers in such lines as barber shops,
restaurants and other public service positions are equally opposed to
the custom. They are caught up, however, in a system where they must
conform to the custom or lose their employment. Many a barber or waiter
or chauffeur whose self-respect rebels at taking a tip is forced to do
so in order not to offend patrons. For nothing so stirs up a "gentleman"
as for the person serving to decline a tip. The reason is that he feels
the rebuke implied in the refusal and knows in his conscience that the
practice is wrong. We always grow more indignant at a just accusation
than at an unjust one!
CONSCIENCE IS STIRRING
The constant re-appearance of laws to regulate tipping, in every section
of the country, proves that the conscience of the people is stirring.
The daily and periodical press now and then condemn the practice
editorially in unmeasured terms and persons prominent in the public eye
occasionally flare-up at some particularly flagrant manifestation of the
itching palm. Governor Whitman, of New York, in an address to the
Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, said (as District Attorney
then):
"It is a brave thing, a womanly thing and a courageous thing for
you to band together to combat an evil. And I hope you will
stand pat. We are all growing to tolerate a kind of petty
grafting that is not right, that is un-American. I object to
having a man take my hat and hang it up for me and then accept
a coin. I am strong and big enough to hang up my own hat. And I
also prefer to carry my own bag to having a boy half my size
carry a bag that is half his size and be paid with a coin. If he
honestly earns the money he should have it as an earning, not as
a gratuity. It is this giving of gratuities that is unlike us,
it is a custom copied from a foreign country where conditions
are different from ours."
Where one person has the courage to speak out against this deep-rooted
social convention, unnumbered thousands feel dumbly the same opposition
to it. Harry Lauder, the Scotch comedian, a citizen of a monarchy, on
one of his tours in America, was reported by the newspapers as being
disgusted with the development of so aristocratic a custom as tipping in
America, the cradle of democracy. The press will yield many such
evidences of condemnation for the practice in high places. They are
cited to prove that opposition to tipping is not a mere distaste among
persons of limited means who cannot afford to tip generously.
The cost of following the custom is an important item; but those who
consider it morally wrong gladly would pay any increase in charges that
might follow the abolition of the custom. If the Pullman company should
agree to abolish tipping if each patron would pay a quarter more for his
berth it would be a long step in advance--though the custom should be
abolished without additional charges to the public.
HUSH MONEY
The United States went through a period of muck-raking against graft
among politicians and big business men. It was found that the idea of
"honest graft" was shockingly prevalent. The especially odious
manifestations were dealt with, but the little springs and rivulets that
combine to make the main stream were allowed to trickle along, unite,
and become a torrent! Tipping is the training school of graft.
Will a messenger boy who thinks that the public owes him gratuities
develop into a man with sound morals? Will the bell-boy who works for
tips grow up to be a policeman who accepts hush-money from the corner
saloon-keeper? What is the difference between a tip to a bell-boy for
doing what the hotel pays him to do and the hush-money to a policeman
for overlooking the offence he is paid to detect?
The tipping practice has created an atmosphere of petty graft, the
constant breathing of which breeds all other forms of dishonesty. It is
small wonder that with so much avarice in low places that we have been
shocked by graft in high places. The tipping custom is educating the
grafting spirit much faster than the prosecuting arm of the government
can destroy it.
There is a direct connection between corruption in elections and the
custom of tipping. The man who lives upon tips will not see the
dishonesty of selling his vote, so readily as if he discerned the
immorality of gratuities. Of course, not all tip-takers sell their
votes; but the moral laxity in one direction predisposes toward laxity
in other directions.
SPLITTING COMMISSIONS
When a gratuity gets above a small amount, it is known as splitting
commissions, or plain graft. Salesmen in their anxiety to sell goods
will divide their commissions with the buyers. Frequently buyers or
purchasing agents will demand this concession when it has not been
offered. One New York department store found that its piano buyer was
accepting money for placing all orders with a particular manufacturer.
This store discharged its buyer, and yet the proprietor of the store
doubtless tipped the waiter at lunch the same day he so acted! He failed
to see that a waiter (paid to serve patrons) who accepts tips, is
precisely on the same level as a buyer (paid to purchase in the whole
market), who concentrates his orders with one house for a fee.
A clipping from The New York _Times_ shows the attitude that employers
are taking toward split commissions:
"Several wholesalers in this market received a letter yesterday
from a prominent dry goods retailer in the middle West saying
that their buyers would be in this city to-day and that each one
had signified her acceptance of a rule against taking petty
'graft.' The retailer asked that the salesmen try not to make
this rule difficult to observe. The rule follows: 'You must not
accept entertainment of any kind, even luncheon or dinner, from
any one in New York. We will make an allowance, sufficient to
cover all expenses, including entertainment.'"
This retail merchant had discovered that a free theater ticket or dinner
could create such a sense of obligation that his buyers would not be
able to exercise the freedom of choice that was necessary. The New York
salesmen offered the tickets and dinners in the form of gracious
hospitality, but knew all the while that their real intent was to bind
the buyers to them through a sense of obligation without regard to the
merits of the goods.
Thus the spirit of "honest graft" is spreading out in America. It grows
with what it feeds upon. It is a moral miasma, the fumes of which are
permeating all strata of society.
THE BIBLE AGAINST TIPS
Following are only a few of the many citations in the Bible against
tipping, gifts, gratuities, greed and like practices and impulses:
Exodus 23:8. And thou shalt take no gift; for the gift blindeth
the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.
Ecclesiastes 7:7. Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a
gift destroyeth the heart.
Proverbs 15:27. He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own
house; but he that hateth gifts shall live.
I Samuel 12:3. Behold here I am: witness against me before the
Lord, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose
ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I
oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind
mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it you.
Isaiah 33:14-15. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring
fire?... He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly ...
that shaketh his hands from holding bribes.... He shall dwell on
high....
Job 15:34. For the congregation of hypocrites shall be desolate,
and fire shall consume the tabernacles of bribery.
Luke 12:15. And he said unto them, Take heed and beware of
covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth.
VII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIPPING
Why the custom of tipping should be followed so generally when it is
palpably a bad economic practice and ethically indefensible is a
psychological study with the same aspects that the slavery issue
presented before the Civil War.
The Puritan conscience allowed that institution to grow to formidable
proportions before arousing itself decisively, and it has allowed this
equally undemocratic custom to attain national ramifications.
CASTE AND CLASS
In its broadest statement, the psychology of tipping presents the two
antipodal qualities of pride and pusillanimity. The caste system is not
based upon the superiority of one class over another, but upon the
_pride_ that one stage of human development feels over another stage of
human development.
A democracy cannot do away with different stages of development in the
human mind. But it does do away with the belief of one stage of
development that it is worthy of homage from another stage of
development. Democracy does not concede that one man working with his
brain is superior to another man working with his brawn. Democracy looks
beyond the accident of occupation, or the stage of human development,
and sees every man as originating in the same divine source. "We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that _all_ men are created equal."
In a monarchy, the craving of the human mind for approbation--the
quality of pride--is cultivated into the class or caste system. Those
citizens who have attained a larger measure of culture than their
fellow-men allow the false sense of pride in that culture to creep into
their ideals and actions. They seek for some method of visualizing this
assumed superiority, of obtaining the acknowledgment of it from their
fellow-men. With an unerring instinct of human nature they play upon the
cupidity of those whom they desire to place in a servile relation. A
gift of money wins the social distinction they covet.
Thus the tipping custom has its origin in pride, and it necessarily
involves humility as a correlative condition. If all men are created
equal, as we aver in our basic political creed, they cannot become
unequal except artificially, except by an agreement of one set of
citizens to play the rôle of servitors for a consideration from another
set of citizens. One set of citizens will become abased--that is, they
will surrender their birthright of equality--in order that another set
may strut around in a belief of superiority and indulge a sense of
pride.
NO SUPERIOR CLASS
In a democracy, the gradations of culture exist, but it is not
permissible for one class of workers to assume a superiority over
another class. That they do assume it is evident, and that for all
practical social purposes we live and move and have our being on that
assumption is evident, but in granting manhood suffrage, in allowing the
proud and the humble to have an equal voice in government, we declare
the social system a fungus growth.
At the moment of the highest power of the institution of slavery it was
not less wrong than at the moment the first ship-load of slaves was
landed. No mere accumulation of material property can vitiate a
principle of right. Hence, the very widespread acceptance of the tipping
custom lends no authority to it. If 95,000,000 Americans are engaged in
tipping 5,000,000 Americans, and if both the givers and the receivers
apparently concur in the rightness of the custom, it does not thereby
become right. We must go back to first principles to find the answer.
TIPPING AND SLAVERY
The American democracy could not live in the face of a lie such as
slavery presented, and it cannot live in the face of a lie such as
tipping presents. The aim of American statesmanship should be to keep
fresh and strong the original concepts of democracy and to beat back the
efforts of base human qualities to override these concepts.
The relation of a man giving a tip and a man accepting it is as
undemocratic as the relation of master and slave. A citizen in a
republic ought to stand shoulder to shoulder with every other citizen,
with no thought of cringing, without an assumption of superiority or an
acknowledgment of inferiority. This is elementary preaching and yet the
distance we have strayed from primary principles makes it necessary to
prove the case against tipping.
The psychology of tipping may be stated more in detail in the following
formula:
To one-quarter part of generosity add two parts of pride and one part of
fear.
FIRST INGREDIENT, GENEROSITY
This is a subtle element and merges into a sense of obligation on slight
provocation. You feel that your position in life is more fortunate, and
pity enters your thought. If an extra service is given, in reality or in
appearance, the servitor has pitched his appeal upon the ground of
obligation. Few persons can rest easily until a sense of obligation is
discharged through some form of compensation. The opportunity to balance
the account comes when cash is being passed between you and the person
serving. You offer a cash consideration proportioned to your sense of
obligation.
Inasmuch as the whole argument in favor of tipping is based upon the
allegation that the servitor actually gives a value in extra service,
the element of obligation will be examined closely.
The Pullman porter or the waiter who can succeed in making a patron feel
a sense of obligation knows that he has assured a tip for himself. The
company or the restaurant business is a vague fact, while the man
hovering over your berth or table is a most tangible relation. His art
is to make the patron feel that he is responsible for the careful
attentions. In a subconscious way the patron knows that the price of the
ticket or the food includes the service (wages of the porter or waiter)
but the obsequious alertness of the attendant overshadows this
knowledge. It is present personality versus an abstract entity known as
company or restaurant. Hence, though the price of the ticket or the
payment of the check pays for the porter's or waiter's service, the
patron has been made to feel a second obligation which he discharges
with a tip.
CLOAKROOM TACTICS
Thus tipping involves two payments for one service. Servitors
understand clearly the psychology of the sense of obligation from
experiment even though they could not read understandingly a book on
psychology. A trial in Detroit over the division of the tips in the
cloak-room of a restaurant furnished the following proof:
"'How do you make people "cough up"?' queried the judge.
"'When they are going away I brush them down, and if they don't
give me something I take hold of their lapel and say, "Excuse
me," and brush them again. I pretend that's the only English I
can speak. If they don't give me something then I hold on to
their hats until they do give me something. I made $12 the first
day I worked at the place.'
"'Why did you pretend you could not speak English?' demanded the
judge.
"'The more English you know the less tips you get.'"
This morally obtuse hat-boy knew that the average person does not want
something for nothing when dealing with serving persons, and he
exploited this trait to the maximum. Pullman porters and high grade
waiters are more polished in the use of the same method, but it all
gets back to the idea of creating a sense of obligation by actual or
pretended service beyond the expected.
Undoubtedly, a rigid adherence to the letter of duty would result in
service that would be unsatisfactory, but this is to be surmounted
rightly by the employer requiring flexibility of service from
employees--not by the public paying extra for affability, courtesy and
attentiveness.
SECOND INGREDIENT, PRIDE
Anxiety to cut a good figure before servants or allied classes of
personal workers is a rich vein of pride which they do not fail to work
for all it is worth. This kind of mind is always agitated from fear that
the tipping has not been done handsomely enough. The satisfaction of
having a fellow creature servile before your largess is a factor. The
gratuity emphasizes your position in the social scale. It stamps the
giver as a gentleman or lady. The smirking attentiveness of the servitor
is balm to vanity.
* * * * *
Truly, if it were not for vanity there would be no tipping system.
THIRD INGREDIENT, FEAR
The power behind the tipping custom is Social Convention and the fear of
violating it. The so-called social leaders, actuated by aristocratic
ideals, establish the custom and the crowd follow suit in a desire to do
the "proper" thing. The "what will people say" mania holds the average
person in an iron obedience to a custom which is innately loathed. It
makes you conspicuous to be a dissenter. The serving persons understand
this psychology perfectly. To drift along with the current of social
usage is easiest, whereas, to go against it requires the highest order
of courage. The multitude simply rate it as one of the petty vices and
let it go at that.
THE REMEDY
Now what is the method of meeting and mastering this situation?
Precisely the same reasoning employed by the Americans in 1801 against
the custom of paying tribute to the Barbary pirates.
First, establish clearly in your mind that tipping is wrong. The slogan
is: ONE COMPENSATION FOR ONE SERVICE. With this premise, you can
answer, _seriatim_, every argument which arises in favor of the custom.
To the plea of generosity or obligation the reply is, full compensation
for all service rendered is included in the bill you pay at the hotel
desk, at the ticket window, to the barber-shop cashier, for the
taxi-meter reading, and so on. Any extra compensation implied by the
person serving is an imposition and has no justification either as
charity or obligation.
Second, the promptings of pride must be recognized frankly and mastered
by democratic ideals. When a tip is given, not only is an individual
wrong done, but a blow is struck at republican government and the ideals
upon which it is founded. Patriotism, as well as faithfulness to
self-respect requires that all customs which promote class distinctions
shall be held in check. In entertaining a democratic attitude toward all
Americans you are strengthening the government under which you live. You
will not become less of a gentleman or lady if the socially submerged
classes rise to a normal plane of self-respect. In declining to place a
false valuation upon them you are promoting the true mission of
Americanism.
"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Third, the fear of violating a social custom is overcome when you
understand its pernicious nature. The general observance of it gives the
custom neither rightness nor authority. With full assurance that the
custom is wrong and with a measure of the courage Decatur showed before
Tripoli, an apparently formidable, but really vulnerable, custom can be
destroyed.
VIII
THE LITERATURE OF TIPPING
Writers of books on etiquette uniformly accept tipping as the correct
social usage. They state just the amount that it is proper to give on
various occasions and thus do their utmost to rivet the custom upon the
people.
A few extracts from such books will be given here to show how the custom
is strengthened by the arbiters of etiquette. Those masses of Americans
who are aspiring to a broader culture naturally turn to these books, and
have their Americanism poisoned at the very start. They are educated to
believe that tipping is essential to social grace. The feature
departments of newspapers in answering queries about tipping usually
confirm this impression, though now and then a side-swipe is delivered
at the extortionate attitude of the serving persons.
HOTEL FEES
Taking up the hotel first, the following advice is from "Everyday
Etiquette":
"A porter carries a bag and he must be tipped; another carries
up a trunk, he must be tipped; one rings for ice water and the
boy bringing it expects his ten cents; one wants hot water every
morning and in notifying the chambermaid of this fact, must slip
a bit of silver into her palm. The waiter at one's table must be
frequently remembered, and the head waiter will give one better
attention if he finds something in his hand after he shows the
new arrival to a table, and, of course, on leaving one will give
a fee.
"It is usually best for a transient guest to fee the waiter at
each meal, since another man will probably be in attendance at
the next one. The usual rate is to give 10 per cent. of the sum
paid for the lunch or dinner--ten cents being the minimum except
at a restaurant of humble pretensions, where five will be gladly
accepted by the waitress."
If the waiters and other hotel employees had written the foregoing
themselves could they have put it more strongly? Note the advice to tip
the waiter at each meal because a new one may be on hand at the next
meal! This implies that the failure to tip is a grave offense, and that
no risk of giving it must be taken. The patron may rest assured that a
new one will be on hand at the next meal, for the head waiter shifts
them about for exactly that reason--to make the patron tip again.
However, in this same book, there is a reluctant note, as shown by the
following extract:
"We may rebel against the custom and with reason. But as not one
of us can alter the state of affairs, it is well to accept it
with good grace, or reconcile oneself to indifferent service."
Hotel managers will read this with entire approval. And yet, consider
what a contradiction it is for a hotel to advertise its service at such
and such rates and then subject its guests to "indifferent service" if
they do not cross an itching palm at every angle in the building!
TIP--OR BE INSULTED
Any one who conscientiously objects to tipping knows how true it is that
in the "best" places, with one or two notable exceptions, not only
"indifferent service" but positively insulting deportment may be
expected from the servitors if the tips are omitted.
The servitors are aggressive because their remuneration depends upon
what they can work out of the patrons. The employer had hired them on
the understanding that any compensation they receive must come from the
gratuities of patrons. In certain hotels the management carries the
exploitation to the point of charging the servitors for the privilege of
working the patrons. The tipping privilege in one hotel has been sold as
high as $10,000 a year!
The economic pressure of tipping upon the patron causes one authority on
etiquette, "Good Form For All Occasions," to exclaim:
"Women of frugal mind endeavor to call on these functionaries as
little as they can because the cents readily mount into dollars.
The elevator-boy receives fewer tips than his peripatetic
brother and need not be feed after a short stay."
Here is proof that those who from economic or ethical reasons do not
wish to tip are persecuted. They are advised that the easiest way to
avoid the displeasure of servitors is to call on them for service as
little as possible! The two dollars or more they pay at the hotel desk
for a day's domicile must be exclusively for the privilege of sitting in
a chair or sleeping in a bed. The moment they require the service of any
of the employees about the building, they are under a second obligation
to pay. And yet, hotels prate about their "hospitality." The Barbary
pirates were hospitable in the same way--after you paid the tribute!
HOW THE BOOKS HELP
"The Cyclopædia of Social Usage" states the tipping obligation as
follows:
"In a large and fashionable hotel generous and widely diffused
gratuities are expected by the employees. The experienced
traveler usually distributes in gratuities a sum equal to ten
per cent. of the amount of the bill. It is customary when a
lengthy sojourn is made in an hotel or pension to tip the
chambermaid, the various waiters and the porter who does one's
boots, once in every week. Once in every fortnight the head
waiter's expectations should be satisfied, and where an elevator
boy and doorman are on duty, they, too, have claims on the purse
of the guest.
"In a fashionable European hotel the rule of tipping a franc a
week all around may safely be observed during a long stop. But
at the hour of departure something extra must be added to the
weekly franc, and the head waiter will scarcely smile as blandly
as need be if he is not propitiated with gold."
Others, the writer says, have claims that it is well to recognize and
meet before they urge them.
Practically all the books on etiquette have the same note of
subserviency to the custom. The point to be remembered is that, without
being conscious of it, these writers are in league with the
beneficiaries of the custom to perpetuate and extend it. Most of the
authors think the custom is right, they have the aristocratic viewpoint
that servants should "know their place" and, in a republic, be made to
acknowledge it by accepting a gratuity. Others simply take conditions as
they find them and write to inform readers how to avoid unpleasant
incidents. But regardless of the opinion of the writers on the ethics of
the custom, the books are one of the principal supports of the custom.
Leaving the hotel, and considering the tipping custom in its relation to
private hospitality, we find this advice in "Dame Curtesy's Book of
Etiquette":
"It is customary to give servants a tip when one remains several
days under a friend's roof. The sum cannot be stated but common
sense will settle the question."
IN PRIVATE HOUSES
The theory of tipping to servants in private homes where one may be a
guest is based on the assumption that one's presence gives the servants
extra work and they should be compensated therefor. The extra work
undoubtedly is involved, but in a really true conception of hospitality,
should not the servants enter into it as much as the hosts? Or, if the
guest entails extra work should not the host's conception of hospitality
cause him or her to supply the extra compensation? The guest who tips
servants in a private home implies that the host or hostess has not
adequately compensated them for their labor.
The tips under such circumstances are a reflection upon the hospitality
of the home. A host should ascertain if servants consider themselves
outside the feeling of hospitality and pay them for the extra work, thus
giving the guest _complete_ hospitality. It is bad enough to tip in a
hotel, for professional hospitality; to tip in a private home is, or
should be, an insult to the host.
ON OCEAN VOYAGES
The same author advises in regard to the Pullman car that "a porter
should receive a tip at the end of the journey, large or small according
to the length of the trip and the service rendered," and then considers
the custom aboard a ship, as follows:
"There is much tipping to be done aboard a ship. Two dollars all
around is a tariff fixed for persons of average means, and this
is increased to individual servants from whom extra service has
been demanded."
The traveler boards a ship with a ticket of passage which includes
stateroom and meals and all service requisite to the proper enjoyment of
these privileges. The stewards and other employees on board are
expressly for the purpose of giving the service the ticket promised.
Hence, extra compensation to them may be justified only as charity. They
cannot possibly render extra service for which they should be paid. If a
passenger called upon the engineer to render a service, that employee
would be rendering an extra service, but stewards and stewardesses and
like employees are aboard to render any service the passenger wants or
needs. Moving deck chairs, bringing books, attending to calls to your
stateroom, serving you food and the like duties are all within the scope
of their regular employment.
But read another writer's pronouncement:
"At the end of an ocean voyage of at least five days' duration,
the fixed tariff of fees exacts a sum of two dollars and a half
per passenger to every one of those steamer servants who have
ministered daily to the traveler's comfort.
"Thus single women would give this sum to the stewardess, the
table steward, the stateroom steward, and, if the stewardess has
not prepared her bath, she bestows a similar gratuity on her
bath steward. If every day she has occupied her deck chair, he
also will expect two dollars and fifty cents.
"Steamers there are on which the deck boys must be remembered
with a dollar each, and where a collection is taken up, by the
boy who polishes the shoes and by the musicians.
"On huge liners patronized by rich folks exclusively, the
tendency is to fix the minimum gratuity at $5, with an advance
to seven, ten and twelve where the stewardess, table steward
and stateroom steward are concerned."
Then follow instructions to tip the smoking-room steward, the barbers
and even the ship's doctor!
THE "RICH AMERICAN" MYTH
It is small wonder, in view of the nature of the literature of tipping,
that Europe has found American travelers "rich picking." Before
embarking on the first trip abroad the average American informs himself
and herself of what is expected in the way of gratuities, and everywhere
the tourist turns in a library advice is found which effectually throws
the cost of service upon the patron. Railroad and steamship literature
usually avoids the subject because these companies do not want to bring
this additional expense of travel to the attention of the public. A
steamship folder will state that passage to London is ninety dollars,
including berth and meals, but gives no hint that the tips will amount
to ten dollars more!
IX
TIPPING AND THE STAGE
An almost invariable laugh-producer on the stage or in moving pictures
is a scene in which a bell-boy or other servitor executes the customary
maneuvers for obtaining a tip.
Play producers know that the laugh can be evoked and any hotel scene is
certain to include this bit of business. In seeking the explanation of
the humor in such a scene, the answer will be found to be cynicism and
the peculiar glee that people feel in observing others in disagreeable
situations.
COMIC WOES
The slap-stick variety of comedy is based upon this trait in human
nature. If a man is kicked down three flights of stairs, the spectator
howls with delight. And, particularly, if a policeman is worsted in an
encounter, the merriment is frenzied. Our Sunday comic papers depend
almost exclusively upon violence for their humor. It is the final
spanking the Katzenjammer Kids receive that brings the laugh. The climax
to many other comics--notably Mutt and Jeff--is violence.
Hence, a tipping scene on the stage or in moving pictures creates a
laugh because the public sees the tip-giver as a victim. He usually
exaggerates his rôle by making the giving of the tip a painful act to
himself, and the whole scene proves the contention in this discussion,
namely, that tipping is wrong. If the spectators did not perceive the
bell-boy as a bandit, and the hotel guest as a victim, no laugh would
result. They have been in similar situations and know the feelings of
the victim.
Sometimes stage managers vary the incident so that the laugh is on the
bell-boy, by having the guest refrain from tipping. Then the spectators
laugh at the bell-boy's disappointment--again finding humor in
misfortune.
TIPS IN THE MOVIES
With the development of moving pictures the utilization of this kind of
humor has widened immeasurably. And the point to be considered here is
the influence of such visualization of tipping upon the spread of the
custom. Undoubtedly tipping is increased by moving pictures and by stage
representation. The public is made to feel that, despite the inherent
wrong in the custom, it must be followed, or they will experience the
unpleasantness at which they have just laughed.
Another example of the itching palm which may be depended upon to
produce a laugh is a scene in which a policeman is handed a bill for
neglecting his duty in some respect. A well-to-do man will cross the law
in some manner and in the play he winks an eye, the policeman turns his
back with his palm extended, a bill is slipped into it, and he departs
to the sound of the spectators' laugh.
The effect of these scenes upon the public is dual. It either confirms
their impression that all servants or officers are "approachable," or it
creates among the unsophisticated the idea that tipping or graft is the
customary and proper method of dealing with such classes of citizens.
The worldly wise gain the first impression, and the spread of the
tipping custom is assured by the second impression.
Moving pictures have extended this influence to every nook and corner of
the country. The result is that persons who live in the smaller and more
democratic communities are educated to the big city development of the
itching palm. And the effect upon children and young people is
pernicious in the extreme.
IMPRESSING THE YOUNG
A boy who sees a tipping scene in a moving picture gains the impression
that it is smart to exact such tribute. Or he gains the impression that
he has been overlooking a rich vein of easy remuneration. The photo-play
directors, either consciously or unconsciously, are doing great damage
to democratic ideals by featuring such scenes. It will not be surprising
if, among the other evils fostered by moving pictures, the next
generation displays a marked increase in the grafting propensity. The
young people are being educated to think it natural.
Thus, aside from the human impulses of pride and avarice, it is apparent
that literature and the stage are strengthening the custom of tipping by
their representations of it as humorous. People will not combat anything
at which they laugh. The itching palm has two doughty champions in the
books on etiquette and the theaters.
Actors, it would seem, have enough contact with the itching palm among
stage hands to make them ardent advocates of reform, to say nothing of
their contact with it in hotels. On the vaudeville stage especially the
carpenter, the electrician, the property man and their co-workers must
be "seen" with regular and generous donations to insure a smooth act. In
many theaters the stage hands have a definite scale of tips for regular
duties that they perform--and for which the management also pays them.
X
THE EMPLOYEE VIEWPOINT
From a waiter, or a porter, or a janitor's point of view, tipping is
wrong only when it is meager. They regard this form of compensation as
not only just but usually too sparingly bestowed.
Unquestionably, with any reform in the manner of compensation to persons
engaged in domestic or other serving capacities, must go a reform in the
attitude of the public toward servitors. The patron who abuses his
privileges, who exacts of employees far more than he has the right to
ask, who treats them as automatons without sensibilities or
self-respect--such a patron must be handled simultaneously with the
change in manner of compensation.
Employers, particularly in hotels and like public places, will have to
give more attention to seeing that employees are not mistreated by the
swaggering, blatant, selfish type of patron. This type abounds and has
been developed largely by the tipping custom, that is, the extremely
servile attitude assumed by servitors in order to stimulate tipping has
brought out the opposite quality of domineering pride in the patron.
THE SORE SPOT
No feeling so rankles in the mind as the sense of uncompensated labor.
The thought that patrons have gotten something for nothing leaves a sore
spot in the thought of servitors. And if they are employed in places
where the only compensation they receive is from the gratuities of
patrons, this soreness is incurable. The next time the patron appears he
will be made to feel the displeasure of the employee. Thus, in one
sense, it is the system that is wrong, a system which does an injustice
to both employee and patron.
Every employee has a fairly clear idea of his duties. Most employees
scrupulously refrain from doing more than the duties for which they are
paid expressly. Hence, when an employee over-steps this boundary he has
fixed in his own mind, he has the sense of uncompensated labor. He
feels a grudge either against the employer or the patron. He looks to
one or the other to supply the extra remuneration for the extra service.
As a consequence, personal service workers are nursing a grievance much
of the time. Their conversation and thoughts are about some patron who
has failed to compensate them, or has, in their judgment, inadequately
compensated them. They devote little time to thinking of a reform in the
system that would give them an adequate compensation from the employer
and do away entirely with the patron-to-employee form of compensation.
THE MARTYR
The tipping system is so established now that the individual who opposes
it must be prepared to play the rôle of martyr, whether employee or
patron. Employers who profit by the no-wage system dislike employees
with a degree of self-respect that makes them rebel at gratuities. Such
wages as are paid are so nominal that the employee cannot subsist upon
them alone. He either has to quit that line of work or enter it and
conform to the conventional methods.
In Chapter V the equity of tipping certain employees was considered and
the claim of other employees as to their rights will be considered
briefly here.
BAGGAGEMEN
Tipping men who call for and deliver trunks has become a fixed custom in
the cities and is expected, though not so often practiced, in the
smaller towns. The transfer company theoretically charge for the
complete operation of moving the trunk from the home or hotel to the
railroad station. But the men on the wagons or trucks exact tips for
carrying the baggage up and down stairs or elevators. The question is,
are they entitled to this extra compensation? The baggagemen argue that
their business, strictly interpreted, is to carry the trunk from the
house to the station and that going up stairs and into rooms is an extra
service. Hence, they stand around and make it evident that they expect
compensation from the patron, in addition to their wages from the
company.
Their position is not tenable. A patron pays the company to get his
trunk from wherever it may be and to deliver it to its destination.
Whatever operations are necessary to get the trunk are the natural
duties of the company and its employees. The charges of the company are,
or should be, based on the complete service. The exaction of extra
compensation in the form of tips by the employees, therefore, is an
imposition. In calling the company no person, tacitly or openly, agrees
to the argument that the trunk is to be moved from curb to curb.
The understanding is that your baggage is to be removed from its
customary place in the home to the customary place in the station or
other destination. It would be as reasonable for baggagemen to dump a
trunk outside a station and demand a gratuity from the railroad for
bringing it inside, as to demand a gratuity from the patron for taking
the trunk up or down stairs. Tipping to baggagemen is unnecessary. If
the company pays inadequate wages the remedy lies not from the patron
through tips but from the employer through the payment of increased
wages.
BOOTBLACKS
Of late years the custom has grown up to tip bootblacks. This is in
addition to the regular charge paid for the service and has no
justification except in the false plea of the servitor that if the
patron does not tip him he will have no compensation. Here it may be
stated that the thought that the tip constitutes the only compensation
the employee receives is the chief influence in the mind of the patron.
He feels a pity for the employee even though he objects to the bad
economic system that enables employers to engage workers on such a
basis. The employees exploit this thought in the mind by leading the
conversation with the patron into the channel of compensation. At some
time during the service he lets the patron know that the tips he
receives are his only compensation and this arouses the sense of
obligation in the patron who does not like to have his shoes shined for
nothing, even though the payment at the desk covers the transaction.
Any one who has patronized a restaurant regularly, or a bootblack stand,
or a barbershop, or manicurist, or any public place, will recall how
invariably the servitors bring up the subject of tipping and always with
the suggestion that they would be disabled financially if it were not
for the generosity of the public.
This is all a carefully and skilfully planned campaign to exploit the
patron.
BARBER SHOP PORTERS
Patrons who do not tip barbers frequently tip the porters who brush them
down. On the surface it seems that the porter's attentions in a barber
shop are extra and deserve extra compensation. Yet, theoretically, no
master barber would admit that a patron of his shop has any other
charges to pay than the regular tariffs. The porter is there as an extra
measure of service from the shop. Practically, however, the shops all
proceed on the assumption of tipping. The porter is a much-aggrieved
individual if he is overlooked. In any sound economic system, the
porter's compensation should come exclusively from the shop. If his
attentions are decided to be extra, there should be a regular scale of
compensation, as for a hair cut, which the patron should pay. So long as
his services are furnished by the shop without being included in the
regular shop tariffs, the patron owes the porter nothing for his
attentions.
The solution of the whole tipping problem lies in the foregoing
postulate--that if any employee is in a position to render an extra
service there should be a regular scale of charges for such service. It
is the irregular compensation, depending upon the whim of the patron,
that makes the practice economically unsound. No hotel, or other
employer, should have on the premises any employee whose compensation
depends upon chance. If a hotel stations an employee in the washroom he
should be there distinctly as part of the service for which a patron
pays at the cashier's desk. A porter in a barber shop should be engaged
exclusively at the shop's expense as part of the complete service for
which a patron pays to the cashier. Employers, however, are much too
shrewd to scatter employees around on the formal understanding that the
patrons are to compensate them. They pretend that they are engaged as an
extra measure of courtesy or service from the employer and then are
educated to exact, through tips, their compensation from the patron.
DOOR MEN
It would seem that if there were any place where the patron might feel
free to forget his coin pocket, it would be in the use of doors. But it
is customary now to tip door men. That is, you have to pay to enter a
hotel, a restaurant or other public place in order to spend money with
the employer. The employer will smile blandly and assure you that no
patron need tip the door man, but the door man will give unmistakable
evidence to the contrary. The tipping of door men shows how the custom
grows with what it feeds upon. To the devotee of the custom every
underling has an itching palm that must be scratched with a coin and the
employer rejoices because it relieves him of wage-payments. Tipping
doormen is incomprehensibly weak. Elevator men are in the same class.
GUIDES
In parks and other public places where the employer or the Government
furnishes guides and where patrons pay a regular fee for being shown the
sights, the guides carefully cultivate the tipping propensity. Their
most common method is to start a conversation about how inadequately
they are paid for their work and the high cost of living. They play upon
the sympathies of the sight-seers until at the end of the trip the
feeling is strong that the guide should be remembered. He pockets the
gratuity and looks for other game. The patrons overlook the fact that if
he is underpaid the employer or the Government is at fault. He often
works in the appearance of extra attentions to create the sense of
obligation. It is clearly a case of double compensation for one service.
HATBOYS
The cloak-room is one of the best devices for throwing the item of wages
to the shoulders of patrons. For some one to check and guard your hat
and overcoat while you see a show or dine has a speaking likeness to a
real extra service. But it is as counterfeit as the other pretenses of
extra service. It is every restaurant's or theater's duty to provide for
hats and coats of patrons. The meal or the show cannot be enjoyed unless
this preliminary function is performed by the proprietor. When two
dollars is paid for a theater ticket it also pays for this service, and
extra compensation to the attendant in charge may be defended as charity
but not as an obligation. A patron who buys a meal in a restaurant owes
the cloak-room attendants nothing. He paid for their service in paying
for the meal. Tips to hatboys are superfluous.
JANITORS
The autocrat of the basement is a man with a grievance even when
generously tipped. From his viewpoint he is called upon to do a score of
things outside his duties. Must he do these for nothing? He must not.
The only question is who shall pay him. The janitor should be hired by
employers upon the understanding that the renters have the right of way
in utilizing his services. Or, apartments should be leased with a clear
understanding of the janitor's duties, so that he will have no lee-way
to exploit the renters. On the face of it, the idea of defining a
janitor's services so that everything outside of the regulations would
be extra service for which the renter should compensate him, seems
difficult of execution. But the difficulty is less real than apparent.
And in the meantime, the janitor regularly is tipped to do things for
which he is paid by the employer. He is "out for his" as eagerly as the
waiter or the Pullman porter. Hallboys in the apartment houses are
equally avaricious. Now and then the metropolitan papers contain letters
to the editor complaining of their exactions--pathetic letters from
well-to-do persons paying thousands of dollars' rent for apartments! One
way out would be to insert in a lease that the renter shall receive full
and equal service without extra compensation to employees.
MANICURISTS
These young women have the best psychological opportunity to exact
tribute, particularly where the patrons are men. The personal contact is
influential, and the plaintive tale of meager salary and small tips
which she purrs into your ears, the meanwhile flashing a languishing
smile--it's a great little game which she plays for all it is worth!
Some of them receive eight dollars a week in "salary," and the tips
amount to enough to make their income thirty-five a week and more. The
employer has the fifty, seventy-five cents or a dollar charge for the
service as practically clear profit. Many men tip the manicurist as much
as they pay for the service. Perhaps many of them feel that they get
their money's worth in social enjoyment--not believing that the young
woman bestows the same charm upon every other male victim! "I feel sorry
for that little Miss Brown. If it wasn't for the tips she couldn't live
on her salary," said one sympathetic man. He objected to tipping as a
rule, but here was a clear case where it was worthy! No use arguing
ethics with him.
MESSENGERS
The custom of pay to telegraph messenger boys by the recipients of
messages is peculiarly reprehensible because it is fixing a standard of
graft in his mind that will work out into worse practices in maturity. A
boy given a tip has had his self-respect punctured in a dangerous way.
He may grow up and out of such a conception of compensation, but it will
be a struggle, and much of our police and other public graft had its
origin in the cultivation of the belief that "tips" are proper. A
messenger boy has absolutely no claim upon a patron for extra
compensation. The price of a telegram includes the cost of delivery.
STENOGRAPHERS
Public typists often expect gratuities. The regular charges are for "the
house." They want something for themselves on the side. Sometimes the
tips are so large that the employer gets greedy and requires them to be
turned in, as proved by the following extract from a want ad in the New
York _Times_:
"Remuneration half of all you make with weekly guarantee of $20;
proceeds net more than guarantee. No smoking; tips must be
turned in."
It seems self-evident that anything given to stenographers beyond the
regular charges for the work is pure waste. They cannot possibly give
any service in return, and cannot retain the proper self-respect in
accepting something for nothing. Many of them, however, take the tips
simply to avoid offending patrons.
The list of tip-takers is too extensive for individual consideration.
Bath attendants, bartenders, house servants, clerks--and so on through
a lamentably long list, have the same moral disease. The contagion is
spreading in an alarming way. Of course, the whole system is riding for
a fall.
The spurious and specious arguments of employees in behalf of the custom
and the timorous acquiescence of the public will alike yield before a
robust and elemental Americanism.
XI
THE EMPLOYER VIEWPOINT
"We face a condition, not a theory," assert those employers who defend
their adaptation of wages to the tipping custom. "The public seems
determined to bestow gratuities, and if we paid full wages in addition,
our employees would be the highest paid workers in the world."
But two wrongs do not make a right.
THREE KINDS OF EMPLOYERS
Employers who profit by tipping are classified as follows:
1. Those who pay living wages and positively forbid gratuities.
2. Those who pay average competitive wages and maintain a
passive attitude toward gratuities.
3. Those who pay minimum, or no, wages, and aggressively exploit
the propensity to give.
At present the first class constitutes almost an infinitesimal minority.
Here and there in large cities there are barber shops which advertise a
"No-Tip" policy, and occasionally a hotel or restaurant.
In the second class are most of the moderate-price places catering to
the public. The employers and employees welcome gratuities but do not
make them the prime object in their relations with patrons.
The third class includes the high-grade hotels, sleeping car companies,
expensively conducted restaurants and like enterprises. This is the
class which sets the pace through the patronage of the socially or
financially prominent.
A few of the more noteworthy employers who profit by the custom follow:
The Pullman Company,
The Hotel Company,
The Taxicab Company,
The Transfer Company,
The Steam Ship Company,
The Master Barber,
The Apartment House Owner,
The Restaurant,
The Telegraph Company.
That an organized conspiracy exists between employers and employees to
exploit the public is realized vaguely, if at all, by the average
patron.
Proof of this allegation may be found at the cashier's desk of almost
any restaurant or hotel. The waiter invariably is given change that will
make it easy for the patron to tip. He returns with the change arranged
in such a way on the tray that the patron must fumble over all of it if
he wants the full amount. The employer's and the waiter's theory is
that, rather than do this, he will leave a dime or a quarter in one
corner. In a barber shop the patron always receives small change so that
it will be easy to "remember" the porter.
Yet, such a practice is the mildest indictment that may be brought
against employers for entering a conspiracy to exploit patrons.
SELLING THE TIP PRIVILEGE
In New York and Chicago particularly, many employers went so far (and
still maintain the practice) as to sell to outside persons and companies
the privilege of collecting the tips in their places of business. That
is to say, these outside parties were to furnish waiters, cloak room
attendants and other employees to the hotel or restaurant and depend
upon the tips for their remuneration.
So large was the sum realized from tips that the hotels and restaurants
actually charged the outside parties thousands of dollars for the
concession. In Illinois a law was passed in 1915 aimed directly at this
organized phase of the custom. It prohibited hotels and others from
selling tipping privileges. The men who owned such privileges promptly
went to law to test the constitutionality of the act. To the tip-taker
anything is unconstitutional that interferes with his graft!
At the time the law went into effect, the situation was reported in the
Chicago _Tribune_ as follows:
"The state will have a fight on its hands before the Chicago tip
trust ... releases its clutch on the pocketbooks of hotel and
restaurant patrons.
"At midnight last night ... there was no indication the largess
was going anywhere else than it has gone before ever since a
commercial genius capitalized the well-known generosity of the
dining and wining public--straight into the coffers of the
trust."
The manager of one of the leading hotels said that lawyers for the hotel
had served notice on the head of the biggest of Chicago's three tip
trusts to withdraw his minions.
"Do you contemplate returning part of the money paid for the
concession?" he was asked.
"That," the manager replied, "is a detail."
"Do you think it possible (the head of the tip trust) will
resist expulsion?"
"Hardly. We'll just put in a crew of our own and that will end
it."
"Have you heard a report that the tip trusts contemplate
standing by their guns and, if necessary, charging a 10 cent fee
for checking hats and coats, anticipating the tip?"
"That's preposterous."
After such evidence, patrons of hotels and other public service places
hardly will feel as cheerful in giving tips as they may have felt before
being enlightened. Here was a typical instance of a hotel advertising
such and such rates for rooms and food with the plain inference that
patrons had no other obligation. Then the management goes out and sells
the right to exploit the patrons, thereby filling its dining rooms and
cloak rooms with employees who must exact tips if they are to be paid at
all for their work!
ARE YOU A BENEFACTOR?
A small part of the public cares nothing about this and will tip
regardless of the conditions of employment of the servitors. This
element simply enjoys the grandiloquent rôle of Bestower of Largess. But
the vast majority of Americans has followed the custom under duress.
This majority finds it repugnant to tip on the assumption that the
employee alone profits by its generosity; and to discover that the
employer as well profits by it--in fact secretly devises methods of
encouraging the tipping--will confirm the majority in the thought that
the custom is wholly bad.
Under which school of economics, or ethics, can such a system be
justified?
The assertion of employers that tipping is the spontaneous impulse of
patrons and that they cannot afford to pay living wages in addition is
seen to be without foundation in conspicuous instances. Such spontaneity
as exists they stimulate and exploit for their own profit.
Conceding that the development of tipping has thrown employment upon an
abnormal basis, the question arises, if tipping is abolished should the
increase in wages be borne exclusively by the employer?
To the extent that employers make extraordinary dividends out of the
custom the extra cost of operation through normal wages should be borne
by them without increased tariffs to patrons. Competition in the hotel
business, for example, has been adjusted to the custom of tipping and
the sudden throwing of a bona fide wage system upon such employers,
without an increase in revenues, would be disastrous.
A REASONABLE SOLUTION
The solution in certain instances might be found in a joint obligation
of patron and employer. The employer says: "I have been able to give you
food at such and such a price because I have not had to charge to it the
cost of waiter hire. If the public discontinues gratuities to my
employees, I must raise the price of food to cover this deficit." The
patron replies: "Upon proof that your food tariffs have not included
the item of waiter-hire, I will pay more for my meals if they are served
free."
The goal of a reform in tipping is to make one payment--and that one to
the employer--cover every expense of the patron.
Even if the public should have to pay more for food, lodging and other
service, if tipping is abolished, an immense advance in sound economics
and democratic ethics would be made in eliminating the double-payment
system. Where two payments are made--to employer and employee--it is
inevitable that the patron will lose.
It should be understood, however, that a large part of the $200,000,000
or more given annually by Americans in gratuities is sheer waste because
it is given for absolutely nothing in return. Such waste should be
eliminated without consideration of employer or employee.
So long as employers assume that the public will pay part or all of the
wages of employees, so long will the employees be under the necessity of
resorting to outrageous tactics--coddling the patron who does tip,
insulting and neglecting the one who does not tip--in order to obtain
pay for their services.
Employers must come to the viewpoint that tipping is morally wrong, and
therefore of necessity, economically unsound. The money they make out of
tipping is tainted money. Employees should be engaged on wages that are
adequate without regard to any gratuities that may be given.
XII
ONE STEP FORWARD
When the Hotel Statler, in Buffalo, announced that a guest need not tip
its employees in order to get satisfactory service, a sensation was
sprung upon hotel managers and the traveling public. Nothing more
emphatically shows the abnormal state of mind toward tipping than that
such an elementary right should be affirmed and cause surprise in the
affirmation.
A SOUND CODE
Following is its Code to employes on the practice of tipping:
"The patron of a hotel goes there because he expects to receive
certain things served with celerity, courtesy and cheerfulness.
"The persons who are to fetch and carry him these things will be
those whose portion it is to render intimate, personal services
to others. Since time immemorial, this class of servitors has
been of the rank and file.
"Now and then a server is found--a waiter, a bootblack, a barber
or a bell boy--who adds a bit of his own personality to his
services. Such a one shows a bit more
intelligence--initiative--perspicacity--than his fellows. The
patron finds his smaller wants anticipated, and is pleased. He
feels that the servant has given him something extra and
unexpected--and he wants to pay something extra for it.
"He tips.
"Of course there are abuses of the tip. A rich bounder wants
something more than other hotel guests, and he futilely tries to
get it by throwing money about.
"His tips are insults, and his reward Servility instead of
service.
"Or--
"An individual wishing to be thought a 'good fellow' ADMINISTERS
tips with the advice to 'buy a house and lot,' etc.
"Or--
"An infrequent traveler, having the time of his life, tips out
of sheer goodheartedness.
"These types help to constitute the 'Public.'
"It is the business of a good hotel to cater to the Public. It
is the avowed business of the Hotel Statler to please the public
better than any other hotel in the world.
"Statler can run a tipless hotel if he wants to.
"But Statler knows that a first-class hotel cannot be maintained
on a tip-less basis, for the reason that a small but certain per
cent. of its guests will tip, in spite of all rules.
"Statler can and does do this: He guarantees to his guests who
do not wish to tip, everything--EVERYTHING--in the way of hotel
service, courtesy, etc., that the tipper gets.
"Let's make that a bit stronger--guests do NOT have to tip at
Hotel Statler to get courteous, polite, attentive service.
"Or, for final emphasis, we say to Statler guests: Please do NOT
tip unless you feel like it; but if you DO tip, let your tipping
be yielding to a genuine desire--not conforming to an outrageous
custom.
"Any Statler employee who is wise and discreet enough to merit
tips is wise and discreet enough to render a like service
whether he is tipped or not.
"And he is wise and discreet enough to say 'thank you' when he
gets his tip.
"In this connection let this be said:
"The man who takes a tip and does not thank the tipper does not
feel that he has earned the tip any more than a blackmailer
feels that he has earned his blood money.
"Any Statler employee who fails to give Service, or who fails to
thank the guest who gives him something, falls short of the
Statler Standard. We always thank any guest who reports such a
case to us. Statler does not deal summarily with his helpers,
any more than he deals perfunctorily with his guests--but the
tip-grafters get short shrift here."
FOR THE BENEFIT OF GUESTS
To understand the spirit of management which could issue such
instructions to its employees in the face of the opportunity to exploit
the public, as most hotels do and so throw the whole cost of wages upon
the patron, it is necessary to consider other sections of the Code
treating of professional hospitality.
"Hotel Statler is operated primarily for the benefit and
convenience of its guests. Without guests there could be no
Hotel Statler. These are simple Facts easily understood.
"The Statler is a successful hotel. The Reason is, that every
Waiter in this hotel, every Hall-Boy, the Chambermaid, the
Clerk, the Chef, the Manager, the Boss Himself, is working all
the time to make them FEEL 'at home.'
"Hotel service--that is, Hotel Statler service--means the limit
of Courteous, Efficient Attention from Each Particular Employee
to Each Particular Guest. This is the kind of service a Guest
pays for when he pays us his bill--whether it is for $2.00 or
$20.00 per day. It is the kind of Service he is entitled to,
and he NEED NOT and SHOULD NOT pay ANY MORE."
NOT HOSPITALITY
Compare the attitude of management toward guests as revealed in this
code with the bristling, belligerent attitude of employees in other
first-class places where tipping is undisciplined! In the average hotel
where the management encourages the tipping for economic reasons the
bell-boy will make a scene if you fail to tip him after he carries your
suit-case from the lobby to your room. Every other employee has the same
spirit--he has to have it if he is to be compensated at all, for the
employer puts it squarely up to him to work the guest for his wages.
Apparently this hotel reached the conviction that this was not
hospitality.
Then the conviction was reached that a guest "need not and should not
pay any more" for hotel service than the rate paid at the desk. From
this it was logical to bring the employees to a new conception of
service and to stop the piratical practice toward guests who do not
tip.
It is particularly significant to note the assertion that the proprietor
can run a tipless hotel if he wants to. That is an interesting
declaration. It proves that those managers who exploit the tipping
propensity deliberately do so for reasons of greed.
Then the reason for not running a tipless hotel is stated to be that "a
small but certain per cent. of its guests will tip in spite of all
rules." Here is evidence that the public has its measure of blame for
the custom as well as the avarice of managers. This hotel declares that
its conception of hospitality is to leave the guest free in his relation
toward employees. But note this! _It does not leave the employees free
in their attitude toward guests._
UP TO THE EMPLOYER
The foregoing distinction is the crux of the whole tipping problem. If
managers will restrain and discipline employees so that they will not
run riot in their eagerness to exact toll from patrons the tipping evil
will be reduced to a minimum.
THE FIRST STEP
It is not the idea underlying this discussion to consider that a
satisfactory disposal of the tipping custom has been made when managers
insure equal treatment for those who do not tip in comparison with those
who do tip. Nothing short of the complete abolition of the custom can be
the goal in a republic. But as a long stride toward the goal, the Code
cited above is noteworthy. It constitutes the first immediate step that
any hotel may take.
The public would find immense relief in the general adoption of the
foregoing idea--that tipping must "be yielding to a genuine desire--not
conforming to an outrageous custom." Inasmuch as the vast majority of
Americans who tip do so only because they are afraid not to conform to
an outrageous custom, this plan, honestly enforced upon employees, will
reduce the followers of the custom to the small percentage of the public
who tip because of pride or moral obtuseness. A way can be found to
handle this element when the majority have been freed.
Once the proof is at hand that tipping can be handled the conclusion is
unescapable that the managers who knuckle to the custom are "corrupt and
contented." They are on precisely the same moral level as their
employees.
THE GUEST'S RIGHTS
In the meantime, the individual patron has the right to and should
proceed on the theory that he is entitled to EVERYTHING in the way of
service for the one payment. This is his common law right even if no
special laws regulating tipping are in force.
The public is at a great disadvantage in combating the tipping evil when
the managers leave the issue to be settled between the patrons and the
employees. A bell boy can commit an offense to a patron who does not tip
that is perfectly tangible to the patron but difficult to report to the
manager. Unless the manager takes a positive hand and instructs his
employees in a manner similar to the above Code it is likely that most
persons will continue to pay tribute rather than be insulted and
neglected.
In Chicago, the Young Men's Christian Association operates a
nineteen-story hotel where tips are prohibited, and this organization
generally discourages the custom in its enterprises.
XIII
THE SLEEPING-CAR PHASE
The Pullman company stands in the public mind as the leading exponent of
tipping. It certainly is the largest beneficiary of the custom, as a
simple calculation will show.
The company has about 6,500 porters, who receive $27.50 a month in
wages. Suppose the porters received no tips. The company then would have
to pay living wages. Assuming that the long hours of work would not
attract desirable porters under a straight wage system without at least
$60 a month pay, each one of the 6,500 would have an increase of $32.50
a month, or $390 a year.
This would mean an increase in the company's annual pay-roll of
$2,535,000!
In other words, the company saves about two and a half millions a year
through the tips given to its porters. What part of the large annual
dividend is furnished by this saving is a secret of the company's books.
Some of these porters after many years' service receive $42 a month in
wages, and this would bring down the foregoing estimate, though not to
any radical extent. The tips bring their incomes to $100, $150, $200 and
more a month! There are, of course, many runs on which the porters
derive smaller amounts in gratuities, and the best runs are given as a
reward for long and faithful service.
WHAT THE PULLMAN MANAGER SAID
The Walsh Commission, appointed to investigate industrial conditions in
the United States, in 1915 singled out the Pullman tipping practice for
investigation. Some of the testimony given by the general manager of the
company follows:
"The company simply accepts conditions as it finds them. The
company did not invent tipping. It was here when the company
began."
"What do you say to making tipping unlawful and paying employees
a living wage?" Chairman Walsh asked.
"If such a condition arises, I presume we would have to pay
wages necessary to get the service."
* * * * *
"Do you get your negroes in the South?"
"Yes, we have been looking after them in the South. The South is
a bigger field and the men there are more adapted for the work
than the Northern negroes."
"Well, be plain," Chairman Walsh said, "are the negroes from the
South more docile and less independent than those from the
North?"
"Well, no, but the Southern negro is more pleasing to the
traveling public. He is more adapted to wait on people and serve
with a smile."
* * * * *
"Can a man live on $27.50 a month and rear a family?"
"Really, I don't know. He might."
"Does the Pullman company have in mind the liberality and
kindness of the public when it fixes that rate of pay?"
"Well, I should say that tips have something to do with it. I
didn't make the rates of pay."
* * * * *
"A porter must call passengers during the night, polish shoes,
answer bells, and look after the safety and comfort of the
passengers at all hours, must he not?"
"Yes. He is reprimanded, suspended or discharged for infractions
of the rules."
"What is your attitude toward the question of an organization
among your employees?"
"I felt that the movement to form a federation of our employees
was a selfish one on the part of a few."
WHAT THE PORTERS SAID
The Commission also called several porters to testify. They stated that
they could not live without the tips. One porter with twenty-one years'
service behind him testified that he receives $42 a month in wages,
while the tips averaged about $75 a month, or $117 income from the
company and the public.
Another porter receiving $27.50 a month testified that his tips averaged
about $77 a month. He was described as wearing two diamond rings and
being tastefully dressed.
The conductors receive from $70 to $90 a month in salary, and it was
brought out before the Commission that many do not consider it dishonest
to "knock down" on seat sales. This is accomplished partly at the
company's expense, and partly at the expense of patrons--especially
unsophisticated travelers who buy a whole seat but have other
passengers sit beside them, the conductor pocketing the extra payment.
This practice is limited to day runs. There is also the opportunity to
overcharge.
That the Pullman company gives the public good service through its
porters is indisputable. The only question is whether the public should
pay extra for this service. If a porter with an income of $117, say,
receives only $27.50 from the company, the public is paying
three-fourths of his wages and the company only one-fourth. Where the
porters have incomes of $150 to $200 a month the company pays one-fifth
to one-eighth of the amount and the public pays from four-fifths to
seven-eighths!
SERVICE INCLUDED
The price of a ticket on a sleeping car is as much as a patron should
pay the Pullman company, and it should carry with it adequate porter
service.
A passenger enters a car in spick and span condition as a rule. At the
end of the journey, through no fault of his own, he may be dusty, and it
becomes the obligation of the Pullman company to discharge him in as
good condition as when he entered the car. The porter is there for this
service. Hence, to give him a tip for a "brush," or for any other
service he may have rendered to make the use of the company's property
comfortable, is a superfluous payment.
The company has a school for training a porter in which he is taught a
rigid discipline of attentions to passengers, all of which tend to
create in the passenger a sense of obligation toward the porter. Yet not
one of these attentions calls for a gratuity if they are examined
fairly.
The porter is psychologist enough to know that to create the illusion
that he has rendered an extra service is as good for producing a tip as
actually to do so. Hence he will come around with a pillow, or shine
your shoes during the night unsolicited, or execute some other maneuver
that arouses a feeling of obligation. The shining of shoes is outside
his ordinary duties, but he has no valid claim for compensation unless
specifically requested to perform this service. In his mind is the
constant reminder that if the passenger does not make a donation his
pay envelope from the company will not meet his bills.
WHAT THE PRESS SAID
Among the many editorial comments that the disclosures of the Walsh
Commission evoked is the following from the St. Louis _Republic_:
The most captious critic of the Pullman company cannot deny that
it merits a unique distinction. Other corporations before now
have underpaid their employees ... but it remained for the
Pullman company to discover how to work on the sympathies of the
public in such a manner as to induce that public to make up, by
gratuities, for its failure to pay its employees a living wage.
It began this forty years ago, when the "plantation" darky of
ante-bellum days was still abroad in the land. It used him, his
pathetic history, his peculiar attitude toward the white man,
for the accomplishment of its purpose. There at the end of the
journey, after the traveler had paid $2, $2.50 or $3 for his
berth, stood the porter with his whisk broom and his smile.
And back of him was the pathetic fact, industriously circulated,
that "the company" did not pay him enough to live on, so that he
was dependent on the gratuities of passengers who had already
paid full price for accommodations and services. We were
expected to pay him simply because the Pullman company didn't.
And we paid him. Tens of millions of passengers have paid him
millions of dollars.
It wasn't really philanthropy to the porter; it was philanthropy
extended to the Pullman company, which was glad to have the fact
of its meanness in its relations to its colored
employees--ill-informed of the rights of workingmen and
dependent by instinct--published to the world.
It was the Pullman company which fastened the tipping habit on
the American people and they used the negro as the instrument to
do it with.
It may be remarked in closing this phase of the discussion that an act
of Congress forbidding tips on inter-state carriers would effectually
reach the Pullman situation.
XIV
THE GOVERNMENT AND TIPPING
It has been asserted in this discussion that tipping is incompatible
with a democratic form of government. Yet we find officials of our
Government following the custom and allowing tips as a legitimate item
of expense of traveling to be paid out of the public treasury.
FREE AND EQUAL
This state of affairs proves that the work of 1776 and 1787 was limited
practically to one phase of democracy, namely, the political. Washington
and Jefferson lived in a day when political equality was the passionate
ideal. This they and their associates achieved in ample measure. They
gave the waiter or the barber or the bootblack an equal voice in
government with themselves.
Let those Americans who think that the abolition of tipping would be too
radical a step toward social democracy consider how repulsive the
attitude of Washington and Jefferson was to the aristocratic thought of
their day. No matter what arguments the aristocrats presented against
political democracy, their real objection was just this granting of
voting equality to persons whom they rated as socially submerged.
But having founded our government upon political democracy, the straight
line of development is toward social and industrial democracy, in order
to complete the ideal entertained by Washington and Jefferson. That both
of these idealists tipped servants and that Washington owned slaves is
indisputable, but they left records that prove that they merely
"suffered it to be so now." Washington clearly foresaw the trouble in
which slavery would involve his country, and would have freed his slaves
if he could have done so without precipitating what to him appeared a
greater evil in view of all the circumstances of his day.
The Revolutionary period did all that can be asked of one generation
when political equality was established. It remains for our generation
to finish the work of democracy by establishing social and industrial
democracy. The prospect of a street cleaner or your valet being your
social and industrial equal may seem either utopian or undesirable, but
it must be remembered, as stated, that two centuries ago the thought of
granting an equal vote to such persons was precisely as distasteful to
the aristocratic mind.
EQUALITY AND UNIFORMITY
Much loose thinking along these lines would be obviated if every one
could learn clearly the distinction between "equality" and "uniformity."
It is the thought of uniformity that makes most persons belligerent
toward democratic impulses in industry or society. They dislike the idea
of a dead level of compulsory uniformity. A bootblack and a banker are
"equal" in the right to vote, but they are not "uniform" in function or
culture. Social democracy will abolish an aristocratic custom like
tipping so that every citizen will stand upon an equality of
self-respect. It will delete the adjective "menial" from any form of
service so that a garbage collector will stand in as honorable a
relation to society as a lawyer. But social democracy will not and
cannot make naturally uncongenial minds live in a relation of compulsory
fellowship.
Thus in the United States we have only one-third of a democracy. The
other two-thirds--social and industrial democracy--must be attained
before we can consider our government as ideal. The tipping custom
stands squarely in the path of this attainment. The slavery system is
not worse in competition with free labor than is the tipping system of
compensation. In neither system are values determined by merit or
production.
In the list of the 5,000,000 Americans with itching palms were national
or city government employees like mail carriers, garbage collectors and
policemen. In the larger cities a system of giving gratuities to these
and other government employees has grown up that emphasizes the distance
we have to travel to attain true democracy.
Any one of these three classes of government employees is paid well for
the service he renders. Yet there are mail carriers who will lose a
courteous, friendly bearing toward those who fail to "remember" them at
Christmas, or at more frequent intervals, or who will actually curtail
the service they are paid to render.
MISGUIDED GENEROSITY
There seems to be something about the continual contact of a person
serving and a person served that makes the one think the other owes him
something on the side. A mail carrier will bring your mail once, twice
or several times a day for a period and then enters the feeling that he
is entitled to some substantial token of appreciation of his faithful,
cheerful service, other than the compensation paid by the government.
Often the person being served feels a generous appreciation of good
service and bestows a token of it without the person serving having
expected or wanted it. The tipping custom is not wholly the outgrowth of
greed. It is frequently misguided generosity. Where the error creeps in
is in expressing appreciation in terms of money. Self-respect is
satisfied with verbal appreciation.
As an employer the government, of all employers, should set an example
of true democracy, should practice sound economics and ethics in the
relations it permits between its employees and the public. There is no
justification from any viewpoint for giving gratuities to public
servants. If garbage collectors render slipshod service to citizens who
fail to tip them--and they do this regularly--a complaint should bring
immediate relief. It does not now because the higher officials are under
the same illusion about tipping that envelopes the subordinates.
An inspector of street cleaning in Philadelphia was investigating a
complaint against a street sweeper in a residence district. The sweeper
told him that he felt the complaint must be ill-founded and that the
people in the neighborhood must be satisfied with his sweeping, because
he had recently received from residents in one block twenty-one dollars
in Christmas tips.
How many public servants in your own neighborhood did you tip last
Christmas?
It should not be assumed that the indictment here read is against all
mail carriers or garbage collectors, or policemen. With tipping, as with
many other abuses "there are more than seven thousand who have not bowed
the knee to Baal."
THE GOLDEN RULE
At Christmas the spirit of generosity finds many curious and misdirected
expressions. Policemen on certain traffic corners are remembered by many
gifts of money and cigars from persons who have no other contact with
them than a nod from a limousine as they pass the corner daily. Why
should the feeling of appreciation run to thought of money as a token of
expression? It is because the persons who give entertain the idea that
the policeman is in a stratum of society under them and that, being an
underling, his self-respect will not be hurt by offering money. The same
persons would not think of offering a friend money and would be insulted
if any one offered them money. The golden rule is a dead letter to them.
Some clubs have handled the tipping custom by forbidding gratuities
during the year and then allowing the members to contribute to a fund to
be divided among the servitors at Christmas. This is a great improvement
over the tipping custom but it is still short of the democratic ideal. A
servant who is adequately paid for his work throughout the year has no
more call upon the generosity of patrons at Christmas than a clerk in a
shoe store from whom you purchase shoes four or six times a year.
GOVERNMENT HOTELS
The Government operates hotels in the Canal Zone, and tipping is
permitted. Guests who fail to tip are treated by the servitors precisely
like they are treated in private hotels, but the writer, who boarded
three months in one of the Government hotels in the Canal Zone, during
which time he did not tip the waiter, found that a complaint to the
manager about poor service would result in the prompt discipline of the
offending servitor. This is more than can be said of many privately
operated hotels.
In this connection, it is noteworthy that the only whisper of graft in
the building of the $400,000,000 canal was the charge made against the
purchasing agent of the Commissary that he split commissions with the
houses from which he purchased supplies. Splitting commissions is the
itching palm in commerce.
It would seem that before passing laws to regulate tipping among
citizens, the Government, state and national, should be able to come
into court with clean hands. Until the Government rids its service of
the spirit of graft the law-makers are beating around the bush.
XV
LAWS AGAINST TIPPING
Efforts to abolish or regulate the custom of tipping have been made in
the Legislatures of practically all of the States. Often after passing
legislative barriers the laws have fallen before Executive vetoes, so
that scarcely half a dozen States now have statutes on the subject.
The State of Washington adopted a law prohibiting tipping, but it was so
generally ignored that the Legislature of 1913 repealed it. This shows
that, at first blush, a social custom of long standing has a stronger
influence upon the people than a conscientious conviction registered in
a new law.
Yet, as abortive as the legal campaign against tipping has been thus
far, the constant recurrence of the issue in the Legislatures, and the
voluntary attempts at regulation being made by hotels and other public
service enterprises, show that the propaganda is making headway and
that there are great moral resources in the people ready to be called
into action.
CUSTOM ABOVE LAW
The opposition to tipping is unorganized, undisciplined and
inarticulate, while the beneficiaries of the custom, with a munificent
tribute to nerve activity, are upon a highly efficient basis of
operation. Even with a law at his back to stiffen his moral resolution,
the average citizen feels more afraid of violating the custom than of
violating the law. It is because of the intangible nature of the custom
from his viewpoint. A waiter can do so many things to annoy a
non-tipping patron that the patron cannot present in the form of a
concrete complaint, yet which are quite real and irritating. The upshot
is that the patron swallows his conscientious objection to the custom
and pays the tribute for fair service.
He knows that a failure to tip means a struggle three times a day in the
dining room for his rights and the same struggle at every point of
contact with the itching palm. Rather than have his efficiency
interfered with by the mental disturbance such rows create, he pays the
price. But this type of man will make excellent material in the regular
ranks even if he lacks the initiative of a lone hand against big odds.
When the movement against tipping reaches the stage where a spokesman
and leader is produced, all the latent opposition will spring into
effective coöperation.
THE IOWA LAW
Some of the laws are aimed exclusively at the takers of tips and others
at the givers as well. The Iowa law is in the first class, as follows:
Sec. 5028-u. Accepting or Soliciting Gratuity or Tip. Every
employee of any hotel, restaurant, barber shop, or other public
place, and every employee of any person, firm partnership, or
corporation, or of any public service corporation engaged in the
transportation of passengers in this state, who shall accept or
solicit any gratuity, tip or other thing of value or of valuable
consideration, from any guest or patron, shall be guilty of a
misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof shall be fined not less
than five dollars, or more than twenty-five dollars, or be
imprisoned in the county jail for a period not exceeding thirty
days.
This law makes the mere acceptance of a tip illegal and it also heads
off any attempt to circumvent the law on a technicality by prohibiting
the acceptance of "other thing of value or of valuable consideration."
THE WISCONSIN BILL
The Wisconsin bill, which the Governor vetoed on the ground that it
curtailed "personal liberty" was intended to penalize the giving of the
tip, and was worded as follows:
Sec. 45751. Every employee of any hotel, restaurant or public
place and every employee of any person, firm or of any public
service corporation engaged in the transportation of passengers
or the furnishing of food, lodging and other accommodations to
the public in this state who shall receive or solicit any
gratuity or tip from any guest or patron shall be guilty of a
misdemeanor. Every person who shall give or offer any gratuity
or tip to any person or employee prohibited from receiving or
soliciting the same by the provisions of this section shall also
be guilty of a misdemeanor.
"Every hotel, restaurant, firm and public service corporation
engaged in the transportation of passengers or in furnishing
food or lodging or other accommodations to the public shall keep
a copy of this law posted in a conspicuous place in such hotel
and restaurant and in the dining or sleeping cars of any firm
or public service corporation mentioned in this section. Any
persons violating any of the provisions of this section shall be
guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be fined not
less than five dollars, nor more than twenty-five dollars, or by
imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed thirty days."
The demand for this bill was so strong among the members of the
Legislature that it almost was passed over the Governor's veto. The
provision that a copy of the law must be posted in the places where the
public comes into contact with the itching palm is a most essential one.
It reassures patrons to see it and gives them a present stimulus for
standing upon their right to good service for one payment.
THE COURTS AND TIPPING
The courts, in declaring such laws unconstitutional have proceeded upon
the common law right of one citizen to give away his goods or property
in the form of money to any other citizen. A tip, the judges say,
represents a gift within the meaning of this common law right. But the
instances of such altruism are exceedingly rare.
Even the judges who so decide know that the tips they give are not bona
fide gifts out of the goodness of a generous heart. Tips are given, by
the devotees of the custom, from a sense of obligation. They pretend to
feel that the servitor actually has rendered a service for which the tip
is payment. The proof of this is found in the fact that such persons
never go about giving money gifts indiscriminately. Their gifts are
exclusively to the employees of public service enterprises, showing that
no thought of charity or generosity enters their minds.
The courts some day will come to the conclusion that a gift of money to
any serving person is a special relation that is subject to the police
power of the State. The special circumstances surrounding the gift will
be taken into consideration. Then it will be seen that the gift was made
for something the patron did not receive; for something for which he is
required to pay twice and that the motives of the gift were pride, or
fear or a sense of obligation falsely aroused.
While the courts are so scrupulous in preserving the common law right to
make gifts, they might give consideration to the equally indubitable
right of a patron to receive full value for his money, and to receive
such value for one payment.
It may be, that to write an anti-tipping law that will stand the test of
judges educated in the old school of thought about gratuities,
legislators will have to approach the subject from this viewpoint of
preserving a patron's common law right to satisfactory service for one
payment. For instance, a law specifically defining the right of a patron
to have food served, or to use a hotel room or sleeping car facilities,
in short to patronize any public service place, with only one charge,
and that to be paid exclusively to the proprietor, might strike an
effective blow at "the universal heart of Flunkyism."
The courts will assert that the foregoing right exists without a special
statute, and it does. Still the average citizen does not think of
instituting a suit against a hotel, or swearing out a warrant against
the manager or an employee to enforce his common law right to service at
one price. If there is a specific statute against tipping there is a
more tangible inducement to stand up for one's rights and there is more
likelihood that redress will be granted. The defense of tipping on the
"personal liberty" plea, like the defense of the liquor business on the
same plea, will grow feebler and feebler until judges cease to take the
aristocratic viewpoint.
THE SOUTH CAROLINA LAW
The South Carolina law goes a step ahead of either the Iowa law or the
Wisconsin bill in the provision that the employer shall not permit the
custom of tipping, in addition to provisions prohibiting the giving or
receiving of tips by patrons or employees. The law follows:
"It shall be unlawful in this State for any hotel, restaurant,
café, dining car company, railroad companies, sleeping car
company or barber shop to knowingly allow any person in its
employ to receive any gratuity commonly known as a tip, from any
patron or passenger, and it shall be unlawful for any patron of
any hotel, restaurant, café, dining car or for any passenger on
any railroad train or sleeping car to give any employee any such
gratuity and it shall be unlawful for any employee of any hotel,
restaurant, café, dining car, railroad company, sleeping car
company or barber shop to receive any such gratuity.
"By 'gratuity' or 'tip' as used in this Act, is to mean any
extra compensation of any kind, which any hotel, restaurant,
café, dining car, railroad company, sleeping car company or
barber shop manager, officer or any agent thereof in charge of
the same, allows to be given to any employee and is not a part
of the regular charge of the hotel, restaurant, café, dining
car, railroad company, sleeping car company or barber shop, for
any part of service rendered, or a part of the service which by
contract it is under duty to render. No company or incorporation
shall evade this Act by adding to the regular charge, directly
or indirectly, anything intended for or to be used or to be
given away as a gratuity or tip to the employee. All charges
must be made by the company or proprietor in good faith as a
charge for the service it renders, inclusive of the service
which it furnishes through employees.
"Each hotel shall post a copy of this Act in each room and each
restaurant, café and barber shop shall post at least two copies
of this Act in two conspicuous places in their places of
business, and each railroad company shall post two copies of
this Act in their waiting rooms and passenger rooms at passenger
stations in cities of three thousand inhabitants or more, and
each sleeping car and dining car shall have posted therein at
least one copy of this Act.
"Any person or corporation failing to post as required shall be
fined not less than ten dollars for such failure and each day of
failure shall constitute a separate and distinct offense and any
person violating any of the other provisions of this Act shall
be subject to a fine of not less than ten dollars or more than
one hundred dollars, or be imprisoned for not exceeding thirty
days."
This South Carolina law was an evident effort to cover the custom of
tipping in a manner that would permit of no evasions. It defines a "tip"
and prohibits surreptitious gratuities and makes employer, employee and
patron equally liable to prosecution. Yet, it falls short of an ideal
law because its operations are limited to seven places frequented by the
public and does not cover private places where the itching palm
flourishes, such as apartment houses and boarding houses.
To stop tipping in hotels, restaurants, cafés, dining cars, railroad
stations and cars, sleeping cars or barber shops will be a long stride
in the right direction, but the need of stopping tipping to messenger
boys, janitors and other employees of apartment houses, maids and
waitresses in boarding houses, garbage collectors, mail carriers and
policemen among government employees, trunk transfermen, guides,
steamship employees and others too numerous to cite, is fully as urgent.
THE IDEAL LAW
The ideal act will be evolved through these repeated approximations and
through experience. In a broad outline it must include (1) a clear
definition of a tip, (2) a statement of a patron's right to service for
one payment exclusively to the proprietor, (3) a prohibition against
subterfuges in the charges whereby patrons may give tips, (4) the wages
paid by an employer to be considered as presumptive evidence of his
attitude toward tipping, (5) a requirement that employers shall give
patrons a definite understanding of the service to which they are
entitled, (6) any actual extra service to be compensated for direct to
employer after being appraised and charged for by the employer, (7) the
giving of money or gifts to employees to be taken out of the class of
"charity" and "personal liberty," (8) the employer, the employee and the
patron to be subject to the same penalty for violating the law and the
conviction of any one of the three to be followed automatically by the
conviction of the other two for the same offense, (9) the law to be
applicable to any employer and any employee in any relation with the
public or with individuals, in private home or public place, (10) a
prohibition against operating any convenience for the public in which
the rate of payment shall be left to the whim of the patron, such as
cloak rooms, the tariffs to be displayed and exacted impartially of
every patron if the employer assumes that patrons must pay extra for the
service, (11) an adequate provision for acquainting patrons with the law
through posting it or otherwise directing their attention to it, (12)
the granting of licenses to operate public service places only upon
condition that gratuities are not to be permitted, directly or
indirectly, (13) the granting to a patron who has been denied fair
service of redress in addition to the punishment of the guilty employee
and employer, (14) an adequate scale of penalties, fine or imprisonment
for any violation of any part of the law.
It is not presumed that if a law were drawn to embody the foregoing
provisions that the tipping custom would be strangled. Only actual tests
in the courts will produce the ultimate intent. Of course, if employers
and employees and patrons were actuated by a desire to maintain their
relations upon a basis of self-respect so circumstantial a law would be
unnecessary, but many of them are not thus actuated and a minute
restraint will be imperative at the outset and until a normal ideal of
democracy is cultivated.
THE NEBRASKA ACT
The bill introduced in the 1915 session of the Nebraska Legislature does
not penalize the patron for giving gratuities and seems to be aimed at
the practice of "split commissions" as well as at tipping. It has a
maximum fine of one hundred dollars, or imprisonment of sixty days and
the employers only are specified for conviction. The act follows:
"No employee or servant shall accept, obtain or agree to accept,
or attempt to obtain, from any person, for himself or for any
other person, any gift, gratuity or consideration as an
inducement to perform or as a reward for having performed any
duty or service for which such employee or servant has been
employed or is to be paid by the employer or master, firm or
corporation of such employee or servant.
"No employer or master, firm or corporation shall permit or
allow any of his or their employees or servants to solicit or to
accept any gift, gratuity or consideration as an inducement to
perform or as a reward for having performed any duty or service
for which such employee or servant has been or is to be paid by
such employer or master, firm or corporation.
"Each and every employer or master, firm or corporation who
carries on business as the keeper of a hotel, inn, restaurant,
café, place for the sale of alcoholic beverages, barber shop or
place for polishing boots and shoes, or who operates a railroad
dining, buffet, sleeping or parlor car, shall post up or cause
to be posted up in at least two conspicuous places in the
premises in which such business is carried on, or in such car, a
notice that tipping, or the giving of any gift or gratuity to
any servant or employee, is forbidden under penalty of fine or
imprisonment.
"No employer or master, firm or corporation shall give or agree
to give or offer to any employee or servant any gift, gratuity
or consideration as an inducement to perform or as a reward for
having performed any duty or service for which such employer or
servant has been or is to be paid by the employer, master, firm
or corporation employing such servants.
"Each and every employer, master, firm or corporation who shall
violate any of the provisions herein made shall be deemed guilty
of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be liable in each and
every case to a fine of not less than ten dollars nor more than
one hundred dollars, or to imprisonment in the county jail of
the proper county not less than ten nor more than sixty days, or
to both such fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the
court."
THE TENNESSEE LAW
The Tennessee law was adopted upon the especial solicitation of the
traveling salesmen of the State. These men live constantly in touch with
the itching palm and find the tribute not only burdensome to themselves
but to their employers. The act is much like the South Carolina law, and
a notable feature is Section 6:
"That it shall be the duty of the circuit judges and the courts
of like jurisdiction to especially call the attention of the
grand jury to the provisions of this act at each term of the
court."
The foregoing provision makes it certain that, even if patrons are timid
about obeying the law and if employers and employees disregard it, the
fight against the custom will go right on, just as does the fight
against bootlegging after saloons have been banished from a city. The
Tennessee law also has a more elaborate scale of fines, as the following
section shows:
"Be it further enacted that any hotel, restaurant, café, barber
shop, dining car, railroad or sleeping car company, and the
manager, officer or agent of the same in charge, violating this
act or wilfully allowing the same to be violated in any way,
shall each be subject to a penalty of not less than $10 nor more
than $50 for each tip allowed to be given. If any person shall
give an employee any gratuity or tip each person shall be
subject to a fine of not more than $25 and not less than $5 for
each offense. If any of the above employees shall receive a
gratuity or tip he or she shall be subject to a fine of not more
than $25 nor less than $5 for each offense. Should any hotel,
restaurant, café, barber shop, dining car, railroad company or
sleeping car company fail, neglect or refuse to post notice of
this act as required herein, such hotel, restaurant, café,
barber shop, dining car, railroad or sleeping car company shall
be subject to a fine not to exceed $100 for each day it shall
fail."
Naturally if this law is enforced with any fidelity by the grand
juries, not to mention such actions as may be instituted by the public,
tipping in Tennessee in the specified public service place will become
extinct, or assume a guise not covered by the law. But if tipping is
restrained only in the seven places enumerated and allowed to be
practiced unrestrained everywhere else, only a limited industrial
democracy will be attained, and the part of the custom left alive will
spread by its own insidious processes to the places preëmpted.
THE ILLINOIS COMPROMISE
When the public conscience is fully aroused to the need of stifling this
custom, the legal mind will be able to draw up a law that will prevent
tipping anywhere and under any circumstances. The Illinois law is a
particular example of a half-way measure in that it seeks only to
prohibit the practice of leasing tipping concessions to employees.
"That it shall be unlawful for the owner, proprietor, lessee,
superintendent, manager or agent in any hotel, restaurant,
eating house, barber shop, theatre, store building, office
building, factory, railroad, street railroad, fair ground,
baseball or football ground, hall used for public meetings or
entertainments, or any other building, office, or space which is
a place of public accommodation or public resort, to rent, lease
or permit to be used any part, space or portion thereof, for any
trade, calling or occupation, or for the exercise of any
privilege by any person, company, partnership or corporation for
the purpose of accepting, demanding or receiving, directly or
indirectly, from the customers, patrons or people who frequent
such places of public accommodation or public resort, gratuities
or donations, commonly called tips, in addition to the regular,
ordinary and published rate of charge for work performed,
materials furnished or services rendered, _provided_, that
nothing in this section contained shall be construed to prohibit
any employee or servant from accepting or receiving gratuities
or donations commonly called tips, if such gratuities or
donations are not accounted for, paid over, or delivered,
directly, or indirectly, in whole or in part, to any person,
company, partnership or corporation, but are retained by such
employee or servant, as and for his absolute and individual
property.
"Any lease, contract, agreement or understanding entered into in
violation of the provisions of section 1 of this act shall be
absolutely void.
"Any person, company, partnership or corporation or any officer
or agent thereof, violating the provisions of this act shall be
deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be
fined in any sum not exceeding ten thousand dollars for each and
every offense, and, in addition thereto such person, officer or
agent, in the discretion of the court, be sentenced to the
county jail not less than three months and not more than one
year."
LEGALIZED ROBBERY
This Illinois law is an instance of an American Commonwealth
specifically and deliberately recognizing tipping as legal and right. It
turns loose the tip-pirates upon the public with full governmental
sanction, but stipulates that in their piracy they shall not organize
into a trust, as they had done in Chicago and in all large cities.
The Illinois law can be commended to the extent that it seeks to break
up the organized traffic in tips, but its recognition of tipping on an
unorganized basis is equivalent to the action of some European
governments in paying out of their treasuries tribute to the Barbary
pirates for the privilege of sailing the high seas. Thomas Jefferson's
democracy rebelled at this and he freed the whole world from the
outrageous custom.
IN MASSACHUSETTS
Massachusetts has a law to prohibit the corrupt influencing of agents,
employees or servants, but it is aimed specially at the practice of
"splitting commissions" and does not operate to restrain tipping in the
State. A salesman sometimes will offer to give a buyer a bonus or part
of his commission if an order is placed, and this practice is causing
the business world considerable thought, as employers realize that a
buyer who will accept favors from salesmen will not exercise unbiased
judgment. It is the itching palm a plane above tipping owing to the
larger amount involved, and is akin to the graft of public officials.
The law follows:
"Whoever corruptly gives, offers or promises to an agent,
employee or servant any gift or gratuity whatever, with intent
to influence his action in relation to his principal's,
employer's or master's business; or an agent, employee or
servant who corruptly requests or accepts a gift or gratuity or
a promise to make a gift or to do an act beneficial to himself
under an agreement or with an understanding that he shall act
in any particular manner in relation to his principal's,
employer's or master's business; or an agent, employee or
servant, who, being authorized to procure materials, supplies or
other articles either by purchase or contract for his principal,
employer or master, or to employ service or labor for his
principal, employer or master receives, directly or indirectly,
for himself or for another, a commission, discount or bonus from
the person who makes such sale or contract, or furnishes such
materials, supplies or other articles, or from a person who
renders such service or labor; and any person who gives or
offers such an agent, employee or servant such commission,
discount or bonus, shall be punished by a fine of not less than
ten dollars nor more than five hundred dollars, or by such fine
and by imprisonment for not more than one year."
Although the Arkansas and Mississippi laws against tipping are not
mentioned, a comprehensive idea of the extent and nature of the
opposition to the custom in the United States is presented in the review
of the bills introduced in or enacted by the Legislatures of Iowa,
Wisconsin, South Carolina, Nebraska, Tennessee, Illinois, and
Massachusetts. All the other States have no laws against tipping.
Considering the fact that no organization has been formed to agitate
for this reform, these spontaneous State efforts are significant.
XVI
SAMUEL GOMPERS ON TIPPING
Labor has the strongest interest of any element of citizens for seeing
the 5,000,000 men, women and children with itching palms elevated to a
normal plane of self-respect. For nothing in America more certainly
promotes class distinctions than tipping. It is essentially
aristocratic, and labor has attained its widest development in
democracy.
WAITERS AGAINST THE TIP CUSTOM
Occasionally waiters and some other workers in a serving capacity have
attempted to organize and place their work upon the wage-system, rather
than the combination wage-and-tip system, or the strictly tip system,
now existing. In New York in 1913 the waiters struck for higher wages
and serious riots occurred before they capitulated to the old system.
The hotels preferred the tipping system because it throws the cost of
waiter hire upon the public, whereas, an adequate wage system would
necessitate a readjustment of their business.
Even where the waiters and barbers have organized they have not always
shown aggressive efforts to abolish or regulate the tipping custom. The
barbers, for instance, are highly organized, and any real desire upon
their part to abolish the custom would be followed by immediate reform.
But it is evident that the tipping system of compensation is attractive
to many persons who serve the public because it yields more pay than a
wage system. In the higher strata of workers particularly the tips are
so large as to stupefy moral sense, and this minority dominates the
majority by setting a standard of "proper" social usage.
A LABOR LEADER ON TIPS
Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, has
opposed tipping as an irregular form of compensation, and in response to
an inquiry for his opinion he inclosed a letter he had written to the
manager of the Hotel Stowell, in Los Angeles, where a non-tipping rule
is enforced.
"_Hotel Stowell, Los Angeles, Calif._
"Replying to your letter of November 28th I beg to say that I
found your hotel and service eminently satisfactory and was
particularly pleased with the rule you have enforced as to no
tipping.
"While, of course, I have followed the usual custom of giving
tips, yet I have maintained the principle of tipping to be
unwise and that it tends to lessen the self-respect of a man who
accepts a tip.
"Very truly yours,
"(Signed) SAMUEL GOMPERS,
"American Federation of Labor."
This letter is interesting as revealing the attitude of many prominent
Americans, namely, that while they conform to the custom rather than be
subjected to insults, annoyance and poor service, they really consider
it inimical to self-respect.
EUROPEAN TIPS
Mr. Gompers in his letter said: "You have my permission to quote my
opinion upon this subject in any way that you may desire," and gave
permission to have reproduced here the chapter in his book, "Labor In
Europe and America," which deals with tipping in Europe, as he
encountered it in his investigations of labor conditions. The chapter is
entitled "Nuisances of European Travel" and is as follows:
"Having in previous letters given my impressions with regard to
matters of more serious import, I wish to say something about
the almost hourly sufferings of American travelers in Europe
from mosquito bites. To the sharp probes from these insects,
with the resultant pain, fever and disgust, the traveler is
obliged to submit continually--at hotels and restaurants, on the
railroad and often elsewhere--as he goes seeing the sights. To
illustrate: our party on arriving at The Hague engaged two
mosquitoes in the form of station porters to carry our
hand-baggage to the bus of the Hotel Blank, waiting at the curb
of the station exit. The station porters passed the valises over
to the hotel bus porter at a point just within the station door.
Nip! nip! by the two station porters.
NIP! NIP!
"When we arrived at the hotel door both the bus porter and the
bus driver asked me for what they regarded as their due drop of
blood. Nip! nip! Within the door of the hotel the manager
informed us that all his rooms had been engaged by telegraph,
but that he could give us good rooms at a clean hotel near by,
and we took them. Two hotel porters who had carried our bits of
hand-baggage into the hotel lobby asked me, as soon as the hotel
manager had turned his back, for their tribute. Nip! nip! Yet
another porter, after taking the things a few steps down the
street to the other hotel stood by in the hallway and waited to
give us his nip. Seven gouges of silver change out of my pocket
before we reached our rooms! But the probes of the mosquito
swarms of this hotel reached even further. The little hotel
charged us Hotel Blank rates for our rooms, about double what
would have been asked had we gone there direct and bargained for
accommodations. And the dinner at the Hotel Blank cost us half a
florin apiece more than the price set down in the guide-book. In
this incident the reader sees some, but not all, of the methods
of stinging which the hotel mosquitoes practice.
"In Berlin, just at the moment of our departure, the porter, the
gold-laced and brass-buttoned dignitary who browbeats lamblike
guests at European hotel entrances, handed us our laundry bill,
every article of which was charged double to treble New York
prices. In Vienna, tired of blood-letting to each mosquito
separately in the group of servants always assembled about the
door upon our departure--'the review' they themselves call this
evolution--I drew the manager aside and said: 'I understand
that there is a way of giving tips to all hands through the
management.' (One bleeding as it were.) 'How much extra shall I
give you?' He replied: 'Twenty per cent. of your bill.'
"BRIBE AND BE HAPPY"
"I was rather tickled than bitten the first time I got a nip in
a European railway train. One of our party suggested that as the
second-class places were crowded we should go into a first-class
compartment and await results. When the conductor, in his
jim-dandy uniform, came along, he was handed our second-class
tickets and a mark--a silver coin worth a paltry twenty-five
cents. And he took our tickets and passed on without seeing for
what class they called. The vast possibilities of cheaply
purchased privileges on future trips acted as a palliative to
this little sting. And the thought of what might happen if the
traveler in America should try to overcome the virtue of one of
our express-train conductors with a 'quarter' brought all our
party to see the circumstance from a humorous point of view.
Truth to relate, it marked the beginning of a custom we
followed--since we learned that it was general--of buying our
way past any obstacle that appeared to interrupt the smoothness
or comfort of our daily progress. With a little silver we
henceforth obtained concessions from grand-looking policemen,
soldiers on guard, vergers in churches, museum custodians. It is
a common custom for conductors on street cars in Continental
Europe to hold out their hands to receive as a tip any small
change due, but first handed over to the passenger. You may have
your choice in European travel: Bribe and be otherwise happy and
free, or virtuously decline to bribe and be snubbed, ordered
about and forbidden to see things.
BORDERS ON BLACKMAIL
"The tipping system, bad as it is becoming in America, is in
Europe universal and accepted by all classes of travelers as an
inevitable nuisance. It often borders on blackmail. Tippers go
raving mad in recounting their wrongs under the tyrannies of the
system, the newspapers by turn rail or make merry over it, the
hotel keepers and other employers of the class have their excuse
that they pay wages to their servants--but the tipping goes on
forever. Why is it? Who is to blame?
"These questions I have asked representative waiters--for
representatives these men have, many of them being organized
into benefit societies and a small proportion in a sort of trade
union. But one answer was given. The system is detestable to
every man and woman of the serving class possessing the least
degree of self-respect. It is demoralizing to all who either
give or receive tips. The real beneficiaries of the system are
the employers. An end to it, with a fair standard of wages,
would be a boon of the first order to employees, a means of
compelling hotel proprietors to put their business on a basis of
fair dealing, and an incalculable aid to the tranquillity and
pleasure of the general public.
MORAL PIRATES
"I have often talked over the system of tipping with my fellow
waiters," said an educated man of the calling, when I brought up
the subject to him. (Parenthetically, perhaps, I should say here
that since this man speaks fluently and writes correctly four
languages, has traveled much and observed well on the great
tourist routes of the world, has studied some of the serious
works of writers on sociology, and has, withal, acquired
agreeable manners, he may be called educated. Without doubt, had
he a few thousands of vulgar dollars he might buy himself a
title as Baron and marry in our best society; but he is above
that; he has a craving for walking in the light of truth.) "All
of us would like to see the system abolished," he assured me,
"except a small minority who in their moral make-up resemble
pirates, and who cruise in places where riches abound. But the
whole situation is one in which reform is most difficult.
"Among the people who patronize hotels and restaurants there is
a considerable element that, either for a week of frolic or
during their lifelong holiday, are regardless of the value of
their tips, and through their vanity enjoy throwing away a
percentage of their ready money. Then, also, are those grateful
for the little kindly attentions which a good waiter or porter
knows how to bestow. As for the proprietors and managers, their
business is based on tips as one of the considerable forms of
revenue. For instance, in many German hotels the waiters are
obliged to give the cashier five or more marks additional on
every hundred marks of checks. In Austria, at the larger
restaurants the customers tip three persons after a meal--the
head-waiter who collects the payments, the waiter who serves and
the piccolo or beer-boy. The hotel management sells to the
head-waiter the monopoly privilege of the tips. The head-waiter
then provides the newspapers and magazines on file, the city
directories, time-tables and other books of reference called for
by patrons, and a part of the outfit of the waiters. Of course,
it is an old and true story, that in the big restaurants of
Paris, and to-day of other cities and fashionable
watering-places, the waiters pay so much cash a day for their
jobs. The pestering of guests to buy drinks comes, not so much
from commissions, as from orders of the management that the
custom of drinking at meals must be encouraged. In Germany it is
usual at the larger restaurants to add half a mark to the cost
of a meal if the guest drinks plain water only.
TOO MANY SERVANTS
"European hotels generally take on more servants than are
necessary. It makes a showing of being prepared for big
business. Then the servants must redouble their artful moves to
extort tips. Porters not infrequently work without salary at
all. Chambermaids, who are paid by the month, receive absurdly
low pay. Financing a hotel or restaurant is based on the tips as
a margin yielding on the average a fixed amount. To make them
reach the required sum all the employees are obliged to maneuver
so as to put up a showing of earning the traveler's extra silver
pieces. Coppers rarely are expected as tips now. It has become
common for railway station porters to demand half a franc for
what once brought them a few sous or pfennigs.
"One outcome of running a hotel on the tipping system developed
to the point of bamboozling or worrying the guests out of petty
extras at every turn is that each year there is an emigration of
European waiters to America to get places in hotels taken by
European managers, who, depending upon their servants to work
the system at its worst for the guests, can make a business pay
both manager and landlord, where an American manager, paying
wages, would fail. While shop-keepers have in the course of time
been forced to adopt the one-price system, the drift in the
hotel business has been continuously away from the per diem
rate. Another point--the big tourist agencies for European
travel are certainly in some sort of partnership with the hotels
for which they sell coupon tickets. Those on the inside of the
hotel business in Europe know that these hotels are patronized
largely by Americans, spendthrifts on their trip staying a few
days at a time and usually speaking English only, and therefore
disinclined to hunt up stopping-places for themselves. Hence at
such hotels there is a harvest for everybody--a situation which
eventually leads to bad food, bad cooking, bad service, and a
hold-up at every turn of the guest."
A SORRY BUSINESS
In going over the possible method of a change for the better in
this sorry business, my waiter friend said that first of all he
believed that a big trade union must be formed of hotel help.
Tipping must give way to fair wages. The public could give its
share of assistance. He recommended that the guests at either
hotels or restaurants should follow these rules, notes of which
were taken on the spot. "Patronize, whenever possible, the
hotels and eating houses where tips are forbidden; there are
such places in England and on the continent. Refuse
importunities for tips, either through words or 'hanging
around,' where there has been no service. Where, for your own
comfort you feel constrained to tip give the bare minimum.
Whenever possible do not tip at all."
He added, and I felt that he had me also in mind, "Some
easy-going natured people believe that they tip the nearest
itching palm to them because of their sympathy with the poor.
Reflection should teach them that there can sometimes be real
charity without public demonstration."
True, church people might, with this purpose, give through their
own congregational agencies. In London, the American traveler
wishing to do the best with his withheld tip-appropriation,
might send it to the Westminster Children's Aid Society; In
Rome, to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals;
In Berlin, to the semi-public lodging houses. Everywhere,
trade-unionists can always give first to the genuine and
pressing claims of their own organizations. But, of course, if
the tipper, gives, not from motives of good-heartedness, but
mere vanity, all advice is thrown away on him. The hotel keeper
will continue growing rich on him and despising him. Other
folks in Europe may have good reason to tell him, what a plain
spoken Swiss citizen told a friend of mine: "You Americans with
your dirty dollars are ruining my country."
VANITY, ALL IS VANITY!
Mr. Gompers in this chapter from his book has shed much light on the
ethics, economics and psychology of tipping. The deliberate, shameless
exploitation of the public by employers and employees is revealed. No
ground to stand upon is left to the tip givers except vanity, and the
pernicious influence of the custom, to patron, employee and employer, is
so unmistakable that the doom of the custom is as certain as was
slavery, when the American conscience once squarely faces the issue.
Hotel and restaurant managers in our cities have employed European
waiters upon the theory that the native American has too much
independence and self-respect. The European waiters have multiplied the
tip-giving propensity in America and have established their undemocratic
sovereignty over our public hospitality. Inasmuch as a certain element
of Americans think that the last word in social propriety originates in
Europe, when these European servitors are transplanted, gold lace and
all, to America, they hasten to enlarge their tips to the point which
they assume these servitors consider "proper."
The astonishing feature of the European situation is that the European
patrons of hotels do not themselves tip within a tenth of the largess
bestowed by American tourists. The American tourist is fair game to the
European hotel, which trebles its regular rates the moment he appears. A
native of the country, however, can have identically the same
accommodations for one-third of the American's bill, and his tips are a
bagatelle in comparison.
The situation may be changed by an organization of employees, but reform
will come most speedily whenever the public, which pays the bill,
decides to withhold the tribute.
XVII
THE WAY OUT
Summarizing the case against tipping, the following facts stand out
prominently:
1. Flunkyism is rampant in the American democracy and this
aristocratic influence is undermining republican ideals and
institutions.
2. Flunkyism, in the form of tipping, is kept alive by the
courts on the plea of "personal liberty."
3. Tipping nowadays is of precisely the same morality as paying
tribute to the Barbary Pirates was in Jefferson's day, which the
American conscience finally abolished.
4. On the economic side, tipping is wrong because it is payment
for no service, or double payment for one service; thereby
causing the exchange of wealth without a mutual gain.
5. Tipping is ethically wrong because one person accepts payment
for a service not rendered, or for a service which the employer
already has paid to have performed. And because gratuities
destroy self-respect.
6. The hold which tipping has upon the public is due to
unscrupulous appeals to generosity, pride and fear of violating
conventional social usage.
7. The public is exploited deliberately through books on social
propriety which emphasize the custom, or which advise conformity
thereto for the sake of peace and comfort.
8. The exploitation of the public is aided by the visualization
of the custom in moving pictures and on the stage where it is
treated humorously.
9. Employees defend tipping upon the ground that it compensates
them for extra services not covered in their wages. An
examination of individual instances shows this contention to be
false in a vast majority of the number examined.
10. Employers defend the custom on the ground that the public
insists upon giving gratuities and they must face competition
based upon that condition. But it is shown that employers openly
profit by the custom and secretly encourage it.
11. One metropolitan hotel has blazed the way to reform by
guaranteeing that its guests will not be annoyed or neglected if
tips are not given. This partial step toward the abolition of
the custom is possible everywhere if employers are sincere in
their profession of antipathy for the custom.
12. Our democratic government permits its officers and employees
to accept gratuities, thereby stultifying the spirit of the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
13. The conscience of the people as reflected in the laws
adopted or offered against tipping is sound and needs only to be
led to an adequate expression. There are abundant indications of
a widespread distaste for the custom but the sentiment is
unorganized and inarticulate.
14. The head of the labor movement in America declares that
tipping is undesirable as a system of compensation for employees
and destroys the self-respect of those who give or receive the
gratuities.
15. A national organization of those interested in this reform
should be brought into being with effective state auxiliaries.
BETTER ORGANIZATION NEEDED
The last proposition constitutes "the way out" of the present
undesirable situation. When it is remembered that the anti-tipping
propaganda heretofore has lacked organization and direction it is not
surprising that the laws adopted against the custom and the spasmodic
public irritation over it have fizzled out. With the same organization
behind this movement that has been given to the anti-saloon movement, or
the suffrage movement, tipping would be vanquished in an astonishingly
short time.
There is no doubt there is sufficient latent opposition to tipping to
form the basis of an anti-tipping organization. It may be called "The
American Anti-Tipping Association," or by any other name, and it should
embrace in its membership not only those who are opposed to giving tips,
but those servants and workers who are opposed to receiving tips, and
also all other persons of any race or creed whose conception of true
Americanism does not include approval of this custom.
NOT A WAR AGAINST PERSONS
The object of such an organization should not be to wage war on persons,
but on a custom. There is no need for hostility against waiters,
barbers, porters and the like as a class. Many of these heartily oppose
the custom and will join in a movement to eradicate it. Hence, the
campaign should be to readjust the basis of compensation of those who
serve the public so that self-respect may be preserved all around.
Nothing less than a fair wage as a substitute for the present tipping
system of compensation would be considered.
Having made the foregoing point clear at the outset, much resentment
among servitors would be eliminated. No one has a desire to deprive a
waiter of an adequate compensation, but no one has a desire to give him
an excessive compensation through gratuities, or a compensation which
depresses his self-respect in the manner of receiving and humiliates the
patron in the manner of giving.
Employers would need to be informed, too, that the campaign against
tipping is not to throw an unjust burden of operating expense upon them.
It will indeed deprive them of any revenues which they should not,
economically or ethically, receive from the public through gratuities to
employees. The substitution of a wage scale will be attended by economic
changes which at first may cause some unsettled conditions, but this is
inevitable when an unsound practice has been allowed to grow
unrestrained in the business world.
PUBLIC OPINION
One of the first aims of such an organization would be to bring public
opinion to bear upon city, state and national governments to inspire
them to clean house in regard to tipping. No government employee should
be permitted to accept any compensation other than his salary or wages
from the government. Mail carriers, policemen, garbage collectors,
guides and other government employees are paid adequately and gratuities
to them from the public are indefensible, in any country, and supremely
so in the American democracy.
The public, of course, will need to revise its attitude toward these and
all persons who serve them. The feeling that a traffic policeman whom
you pass in your automobile every day should be remembered with a gift
of money or anything else substantial at Christmas, or upon any other
occasion is false sentiment. He is due nothing except courtesy all the
time from the public, which, through taxes, already has provided his
compensation. The feeling that a mail carrier whom you see daily, or a
garbage collector, must be similarly remembered is equally false
sentiment. The ideal is a relation in which patron and employee, public
and government employee, entertain mutual opinions of self-respect, and
regardless of how distasteful this may be to class sense, or
aristocratic impulses, it is the American standard and the right
standard.
PROMOTING LEGISLATION
An organization opposed to tipping would have as its further objects the
promotion of legislation against the custom and the protection of the
public in the enjoyment of its rights at law. If so many States have
adopted laws as a spontaneous expression of Americanism, it may be
assumed that with organized public sentiment, and educated public
sentiment all the States will get in line. There will be abundant
financial resources behind such an organization. Those who oppose
tipping have been silent but they have felt keenly and will contribute
liberally toward the advancement of the cause. And when such an
organization actually proves its efficacy in protecting the public, its
ranks will be augmented overwhelmingly.
The protection hinted at is the kind that would take up specific
instances of neglect of patrons who do not give tips. Thus, if a member
should be neglected or insulted in a hotel after he had failed to bestow
a gratuity, the organization, upon investigation, would assume the task
of correcting the situation at law. Even where there is no statute
against tipping, the common law guarantees the right of a patron to fair
and equal service, and the organization could enforce this right in the
courts.
Naturally, great care and good judgment would be needed to prevent an
injustice to proprietors and employees. Often patrons exact more service
than they are entitled to, and in such a situation the organization
would be ranged on the side of the employee. Those who desire a
condition where they may run rough-shod over servitors have a mistaken
idea of the anti-tipping ideal. The employer is required to have
employees who will give cheerful, adequate service, but within the
limits of reason, and the selfish, domineering, patron is an evil which
must be restrained as effectually as the waiter who surreptitiously
insults patrons who do not tip.
TO PREVENT COMPLAINT
Surveying the vast field of tipping one may wonder how any organization
could offer protection to the numberless patrons who might complain.
The answer is that the organization would be as widespread as the
custom. Every town and city would have its local organization with an
attorney to prosecute violations. But it is reasonable to presume that
when public opinion is once thoroughly aroused and organized, and a few
prosecutions have been successful, that employers and employees, who do
not voluntarily reform their practices, will see the light.
As deep-rooted as the custom seems, it really rests on insecure
foundations and will crumble before any real attack. The average
American, be he barber, waiter or porter, has enough inherent
understanding of democracy to know that the custom is wrong. He "will
get his" as long as an easy-going public will stand for the exaction,
but will not be a formidable opponent. The imported European waiter will
present more obstinate fondness for the custom, having been nurtured in
the aristocratic school, but his opposition can be handled.
The most difficult type will be the class of patrons who delight in
playing the rôle of Lady Bountiful or Gentleman Generous. Their pride
will be restrained from buying servility from other Americans. And
wealthy proprietors, who cater to this class and the intermediate class
which ape the "smart set," will cling to the custom because of their
pecuniary interest therein. But the average American and his vigorous
sense of democracy will be adequate to the task of controlling all
elements adverse to the republic.
The campaign against tipping is much more than a purpose to save the
money given in gratuities. Its idealism aims to reach the very pinnacle
of republican society--the destiny toward which 1776 started us. The
mountain peaks of pride will have to be pulled down and the valleys of
false humility will have to be lifted up, while the impulses to greed
and avarice will have to be rebuked until every American can say:
If I must build my pride upon another man's humility,
I will not be proud;
If I must build my strength upon another man's weakness,
I will not be strong;
If I must build my success upon another man's failure,
I will not succeed!
INDEX
ARGUMENTS FOR TIPPING, 26, 28
BAGGAGEMEN, 76
BARBARY PIRATES, THE, 15
BARBER, THE, 29
BARBER-SHOP PORTERS, 79
BATH ATTENDANTS, 86
BELL-BOYS, 32, 69, 104
BETTER ORGANIZATION NEEDED, 160
BIBLE, THE, AGAINST TIPPING, 45
BLACKMAIL, 150
BOOTBLACKS, 66, 78
CASTE AND CLASS, 47
CHAMBERMAIDS, 153
CHAUFFEURS, 33
CHRISTMAS TIPS, 116, 119
CLOAKROOM TACTICS, 52
CLUBS, 119
COMMISSIONS, SPLITTING, 43
COURTS, THE, AND TIPPING, 126
CUSTOM ABOVE LAW, 123
DEMOCRACY AND TIPPING, 38, 48, 114, 166
DOOR MEN, 81
ECONOMICS OF TIPPING, 26, 28
ELEVATOR MEN, 61, 81
EMPLOYEE VIEWPOINT, THE, 73
EMPLOYER VIEWPOINT, THE, 88
EMPLOYERS, can control, 102
" conspiracy by, 90
" retain tips, 86, 90, 152
" three kinds of, 88
" who profit by tips, 89, 105
EQUALITY AND UNIFORMITY, 115
ETIQUETTE BOOKS foster tipping, 58
EUROPEAN TIPS, 146
train conductors, 149
FEAR, as a reason for tipping, 55
FLUNKYISM IN AMERICA, 7
FREE AND EQUAL, 113
GARBAGE COLLECTORS, 116, 118
GENEROSITY, as a reason for tipping, 51
" misguided, 117
GENTLEMAN, what is a?, 37
" would he accept tips?, 37
GOLDEN RULE, THE, 119
GOMPERS, SAMUEL, on tipping, 144
GOVERNMENT HOTELS, tipping in, 120
" " the, and tipping, 113
GOVERNOR WHITMAN against tips, 40
GRAFT, "honest", 45
" taught by tipping, 42
GUEST'S RIGHT, THE, 104
GUIDES, 81
HARRY LAUDER against tipping, 41
HATBOYS, 82
"HONEST GRAFT", 45
HOSPITALITY, false, 101
HOTEL, The, 30
" fees, 59
" hospitality, 62, 101
" theory and practice, 32
" tipless, 97, 146
HOUSE SERVANTS, 64
HUSH MONEY, 42
IDEAL LAW, The, 132
ILLINOIS LAW, The, 91
" Compromise, The, 138
IOWA LAW, The, 124
ITCHING PALM, The, 8, 10, 19, 31, 70, 72
JANITORS, 83
LADY, What is a?, 37
" would she accept tips, 37
LAWS against Tipping, 122
LEGALIZED ROBBERY, 140
LEGISLATION, Promoting, 164
LITERATURE of Tipping, The, 58
MAIL CARRIERS, 116
MANICURISTS, 84
MASSACHUSETTS, In, 141
MERCHANTS against tips, 44
MESSENGERS, 85
"MILLIONS FOR DEFENSE", 17
MORAL PIRATES, 151
"MOVIES," the, and tipping, 69
MUSICIANS, 66
NEBRASKA ACT, The, 134
NOT A WAR Against Persons, 161
"NO TIP" POLICY, barber shops, 89
" " " hotels, 89, 97, 147
" " " restaurants, 89
OCEAN VOYAGES, tipping on, 65
ONE COMPENSATION, One Service, 35, 55
ORGANIZATION NEEDED, 160
PERSONAL LIBERTY, 10, 13
PERSONNEL AND DISTRIBUTION, 19
POLICEMEN, 116, 119
PORTERS, 147, 153
" Pullman, 108
PRICE OF PRIDE, The, 37
PRIDE, as a reason for tipping, 54
PRIVATE HOUSES, tipping in, 64
PSYCHOLOGY OF TIPPING, The, 47
PULLMAN COMPANY, The, 105
" " investigated, 106
PUBLIC OPINION, 162
REASONS for tipping, 51, 54, 55
RECIPIENTS opposed to Tipping, 39, 144, 150
REMEDY for Tipping, 55, 94, 95, 103, 158
RICH AMERICAN MYTH, The, 67
SHIP'S DOCTOR, The, 67
SLEEPING-CAR PHASE, The, 105
SOLUTION, a Reasonable, 94
SOUTH CAROLINA LAW, The, 129
SPLITTING COMMISSIONS, 43
STAGE, The, and Tipping, 68, 72
STATISTICS of Tipping
money given in tips, 8
number of tip-takers, 7
tips in N. Y. City, 17, 22
tips in other cities, 21
tip-taking classes, 19, 20
STATLER HOTEL, The, 97
STENOGRAPHERS, 86
STEWARDS, Ship, 66
STREET CLEANERS, 118
TENNESSEE LAW, The, 136
TIPPING and Americanism, 11, 87, 150
" and democracy, 7, 38, 48, 113
" and labor, 144, 145
" and morals, 96, 158
" and patriotism, 56
" and personal liberty, 10, 13
" and public opinion, 162
" and slavery, 11, 50
" and the Bible, 45
" and the caste system, 47
" and the courts, 126
" and the wage system, 75, 107
" arguments for, 26, 28
" and a training school for graft, 42
" in private houses, 64
" in "the movies", 69
" Laws Against, 123
" Literature of, The, 58
" Merchants opposed to, 44
" on ocean voyages, 65
" on the stage, 68
" psychology of, the, 47
" real reasons for, 51, 54, 55
" recipients opposed to, 39, 144, 150
" remedy for, 55, 94, 95, 103, 158
"TIP PRIVILEGES" Sold, 90, 152
TIP-TAKERS, Partial List of, 19
" numbers by cities, 21
"TIP TRUST, The", 92
"TRIBUTE, Not One Cent for", 17
WAGES VERSUS TIPS, 75, 107
WAITER, The, 27
" can he be a gentleman?, 37
WAITERS, European, 150, 156
WAITRESSES, 59
WALSH COMMISSION, The, 111
WASHINGTON LAW, The, 122
WAY OUT, The, 158
WISCONSIN BILL, The, 125
Y. M. C. A., The, 104
Transcriber's Note:
Spelling and hyphenation have been retained as in the original
publication. On page 74, "asumed" in "attitude asumed by servitors"
has been changed to "assumed".
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