The main takeaway of this
long article on the resilience of restaurant tipping even in the face of folks who try to do away with the practice is that...some folks actually like tipping. But why? It's always struck me as an idiotic custom. I don't tip doctors for doing a good job, but I tip bartenders for reaching beneath the counter and pulling out a Yuengling. Is good service from a bartender more important to me than good service from a surgeon? Are bartenders more responsive to economic incentives than medical professionals? It's hard to see why that would be. I tip, of course, because I understand that the tip is central to the bartender, or waiter, or cabbie's, income -- but for that very same reason, I never tip low, and don't really vary the amount I tip based on service. And nor do most folks I know. And nor, it seems, do most folks in general:
Diners generally tip the same percentage no matter the quality of the service and no matter the setting. They do so, Lynn says, largely because it’s expected and diners fear social disapproval. “It is embarrassing to have another person wait on you,” the psychologist Ernest Dichter told a magazine reporter in 1960. “The need to pay, psychologically, for the guilt involved in the unequal relationship is so strong that very few are able to ignore it.”
But that creates a fairly weird dynamic: Rather than simply paying a price that reflects a fair wage for their work, I'm instead laying down a voluntary sum and hoping others do the same. It's a wage model that's reliant on charitable donations enforced through social pressure, and in that way, a little demeaning. I think I'd feel less guilty about the interaction if I knew they were being paid fairly, and it wasn't part of their job, in theory, to vary their performance to my whim so that I might leave an extra dollar. Now, most folks in tipped professions don't seem to vary their service to ensure the tip, and I don't seem to vary my tip to reward service, and so we've hit some rough equilibrium, with the byproduct being I have to pull out my tip calculator at the close of each meal. But still: Down with tipping!
Image used under a CC license from Ararejul. 
