Tim Hill: ‘Let’s be generous, and let’s keep the tip’

A prominent New York restaurateur has decided to eliminate tipping in his eateries. Danny Meyer wants to raise prices, raise wages, and effect a major change in the dining industry. His desire is admirable – I’m all for better pay for restaurant workers – but to eradicate tipping would be to lose a distinctive part of America’s culture, and that would be sad.



This is maybe a question of texture and tone. Whether tipping is as efficient is perhaps a moot point. Does tipping reward better service? Does it unfairly punish kitchen staff? Does it allow unscrupulous companies to pay less? We can argue this long into the night. But tipping is distinctive and it is American, and to lose it from the culture would represent a further erosion of our special national characteristics. Globalisation might have made the world smaller, but it makes things much less interesting.

In Europe, when you’ve finished a meal in an nice restaurant – or even an Angus Steakhouse – the wait staff come round with a chip-and-pin machine, standing over you as you punch in the numbers, like a bus conductor weeding out a chagrined fare dodger. In America, it’s different, and it’s much more alluring. You’ve seen it in the movies: the grizzled anti-hero thumbing through a wad of crumpled dollar bills in a low-rent, noirish diner. The New York City cop loading a gallon of coffee into his belly and leaving the counter with a stash tucked under his saucer and a wink for the waitress. It’s kinda neat, as they say over here.

Drew Nieporent, a restaurateur interviewed in the New York Times, makes a shrewd point. “Tipping is a way of life in this country,” he said. “It may not be the perfect system, but it’s our system. It’s an American system.”

And maybe there’s the rub. America isn’t perfect, and it’s not to everyone’s taste, but it is unique. European tourists who complain about tipping are maybe approaching this in the wrong way. No one’s out to stiff you by asking for extra money. No one’s not trying it on. It’s just the way the system works. And, frankly, it’s not too much to ask to leave a couple of dollars extra for a sharp haircut, or a freshly pressed dress shirt. So let’s be generous, and let’s keep the tip. It’s top.

Chris Taylor: ‘Why must we go through this queasy charade?’

I’ve got a simple request: just tell me how much it costs. I don’t care whether it’s a beer, a TV, a meal or a selfie stick. Just tell me how much it costs and I’ll pay it. Don’t show me a price and then at the last minute add tax like it’s come as total surprise to you too. And don’t invite me to guess what an appropriate surcharge would be for the added bonus of you just doing your job.

Why must we go through this queasy charade? Can we not just agree that your pay comes out of the total price?

Tipping is supposedly there to encourage good service. Leaving aside the obvious point that in that case it would be better to pay up beforehand, does this really make sense? If we were really concerned about good service we wouldn’t be wasting money on wait staff and taxi drivers, we’d be tipping our surgeons and proctologists. Those are people I really want to treat me with special consideration.

It’s not as if the obvious corollary of tipping for good service – not tipping for bad service – is culturally acceptable. (In fact, I think it’s possibly illegal in several states.) It’s simply a personal tax, set at a variable, never quite specified rate.

And no, I don’t want a smiley face on my bill (that’s the check to you) with three (three!!!) exclamation marks after the words “thank you” extravagantly scrawled at the bottom. I’ll pay up anyway.

But, you say, waiters and waitresses depend on tips to make a living. Well, whose fault is that? If restaurants simply paid their staff properly there would be no need for me to cough up for the compulsory-voluntary surcharge at the end of a meal. How did restaurateurs get to outsource their payroll department to my credit card – and yours?

What this practice creates is a semi-feudal relationship, making the customer the master and the worker the servant. Formally, at least, I’m placed in the position of deigning to drop some coins from my purse in an act of noblesse oblige. In practice, of course, failure to provide an honorarium at a level deemed appropriate is likely to result in a mini peasants’ revolt with your despicable miserliness bruited to a roomful of diners.

And that’s the real reason we Brits have trouble with tipping culture. It’s down to our achilles heel, the Kryptonite to our old world arrogance: embarrassment. It’s the uncertainty, the awkwardness, the possibility of causing offence, that gnaws at us. Should it be 10%? 15%? 20%? … Oh just take my whole wallet!

Please, don’t put us through that.



