Gratitude can be a long-cultivated disposition to remember what one owes to the loving care of someone as important in one's life as a parent. At the other end of the spectrum it can characterize a quick response to one small favour from a person quite unknown. Tipping is an example of the second "pole" of grateful behaviour, but this does not make it a transparently simple act.
If you give a tip for service received, and do so not merely because tipping is a convention, then the tip is an expression of gratitude and as such freely given. The gratitude is for the willing, energetic, and efficacious way in which a service has been performed. It might be possible to oblige someone else to perform an action, but no one can command the spirit in which it is done: gratitude is therefore in order, although it cannot be demanded. Gratitude is a response to goodwill that cannot be exacted; there is freedom on both sides. A tip is called a "gratuity"—something freely given. Gratuity derives from Latin gratis, but also from the root of both words, which is gratus, "grateful"—so closely connected are the ideas of gratitude and freedom.1 Thankfulness is especially felt where service has gone beyond duty. Doing more than one has to is a gift;2 giving money one is not required to give, as in the case of a tip, is a gift in return.
This commonly accepted account of what happens when a gratuity is handed over is roundly rejected by those economists and sociologists who dislike any explanation that involves gratitude, freedom, or "altruism," because their model insists that human beings—despite any protests to the contrary—act only for motives of self-interest. The fact that the amount of a tip is not—or should not be—laid down in advance is all the freedom they will admit, although the reason for this provision must then be accounted for. A typical sociological definition of a tip is that it, "like the gift, is given under voluntary guise, but in fact under a constraining normative framework in situations where the mutual obligations are not exactly specified."3 Sociological researchers certainly pay sufficient attention to tipping behaviour to alert us to the extent to which this custom, "like the gift," transgresses the conventions of modernity; for them, tipping is a pervasive enigma. And certainly the naive account I gave at the beginning of this chapter requires further inspection.
To begin with, tipping is not egalitarian behaviour, apart from the freedom (should one admit that there is freedom) on both sides. For example, passing a tip to someone—as opposed to leaving one behind, on a restaurant table, for instance—is often an almost furtive movement, hand to hand. This approach is partly to spare the receiver's feelings: as we have noted, in our culture to give is higher than to receive, and therefore, openly receiving a tip, no matter how much the money is appreciated, is having one's lower status displayed. The receiver, on his side, may not look at the money in his hand, at least not in the presence of the giver: he usually likes appearing not to care and certainly not to have been longing for a tip.
In many languages a tip is called by a term that can be perceived as demeaning. It is a pittance, just enough for a drink: pourboire, Trinkgelt, propina. A tip is a small reward, which implies that the service too was small. The English word tip is sometimes said to stand for "To Insure Promptness." In fact, to tip is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century canting slang for "to hand over," and this sense also came to be applied to "tips" as secret information or private warnings: a tip is a personal and private thing, one on one.4 But the false etymology reminds us that a tip can be given in advance, to encourage lively service later: in these cases a very thin line—or none—might separate a tip from a bribe. The tip's smallness helps protect it from shading over into bribery. In fiercely egalitarian regimes tipping is regarded as an insult. A Western journalist who remembered the early days after the Communist Revolution in Russia was struck by the fact that "the waiters and hotel servants had organized and refused tips. On the walls of restaurants they put up signs which read, 'No tips taken here,' or 'Just because a man has to make a living waiting on tables, is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip.'"5
One study of modern tipping enumerates thirty-three occupations where tips are usually given. These include facial beauticians, fishing boat crews, gas station attendants, golf caddies, tour guides, hairstylists, chambermaids, concierges, doormen, parking valets, hotel transportation pickup service drivers, taxi and limo drivers, locker room attendants, manicurists, masseuses/masseurs, pool attendants, waiters, bootblacks, porters, and ushers.6 These people are not normally thought of as occupying positions of superior status, or as uniquely gifted experts in a job requiring high qualifications. People who tip them have been served by them, in a direct sense in which receiver is easily thought of as "higher" than giver. In cases of clear hierarchy, it will be noticed that, for a "high-up," giving a tip is high, and receiving a service is also high.
But inequality of status is not the only factor. The services supplied by the people listed in the study are personal, requiring direct and intimate contact with the client and the client's possessions, even involving touching the client's body; there is often total though brief dependence upon the server. A hairdresser wields scissors around your ears and face, while decisively affecting your appearance for weeks subsequent to his or her ministrations. A manicurist also uses cutting implements, on your fingers. Pool attendants and fishing boat crews could conceivably hold your life in their hands, while bad will in a facial beautician might easily ruin your day. Car valets and porters have access to expensive possessions—your car, your luggage. Chambermaids have an angle on your habits in the bedroom and bathroom. All of these people are in a position to know things about you close up. Yet we place ourselves in their hands and can only hope that they will not abuse our trust. One of the triggers of gratitude is relief. Imagination is involved, and realization: a comparison between what has been given, and what could have been withheld or gone wrong; things could have been worse.
The kinds of people we normally tip have a lot in common with professionals in the strict sense, those prestige-laced grandees in the social scale of modern life. Professionals are people to whom we give official, direct access to ourselves at our most vulnerable and who are entrusted with our secrets—who are able, therefore, to do us grievous personal and sometimes bodily damage. Our attitude towards them is one of respect and even fear. We often give them very large salaries as well, and can only hope they will do their duty. We cannot force them to have goodwill or indeed to pay sufficient attention to our case. The four original professions are the priesthood, the law, medicine, and university professorship.7 Other groups try to emulate these four since the rewards are high. Some, such as architects and engineers, convince us that we need them, even though we know full well that any mistakes they make could spoil our cities or cause catastrophe. Professionals, like people we reward with tips, can be dangerous; we are relieved—grateful—when they help rather than injure us.8 Professionals have in consequence to be "qualified." We regulate them with ferocity, and force them to spend long years getting their degrees, practising, proving themselves, and generally being initiated before they are deemed worthy to join the ranks of the professionals. They are clever; they know things we do not know. We are forced to admit this and to realize that we cannot wring from them either competence or dedication: there is no "equality" between professionals and the rest of us.
Tips are supposed to be given in addition to a salary, and only as a token of a customer's satisfaction. (Relief, the negative aspect of such gratitude, is not openly expressed: of course it might reveal the tip-giver's weakness, or it might insult the server.) The customer pays the tip to the server "one on one": the employer should have nothing to do with it. Neither customer nor server hides this action from the employer: this is another way in which tipping differs from bribery. Indeed, the employer frequently uses the tipping custom for his or her own ends. Waiters often depend heavily on gratuities, unpredictable as they are, to make up unconscionably meagre wages. The amount a customer should tip the waiter may be shamelessly stated on a restaurant bill. (It is said that waiters for their part have been known to pursue angrily into the street customers who "stiff," or fail to leave a tip.) Or "service charges" are added, a percentage of the amount owed. In this manner employers compel waiters to use their only power, their personal contact with diners, to make clients spend more and so benefit from the percentage of a larger bill themselves. A service charge, being utterly unfree, is in no sense a gratuity, but merely an addition to the bill. Where tips are part of a worker's salary, there may also be tax evasion: because they are gifts, tips are unofficial and therefore unaccountable.
Personal contact is what may or may not give rise to gratuities for a service worker. Social scientists have found that restaurants make ideal laboratories for showing how tips—apparently freely given—are in fact deliberately coaxed out of unsuspecting customers. All kinds of ingenious experiments have been contrived whereby servers, secretly directed and monitored by the scientists, have elicited tips from diners.9 A waiter may introduce himself or herself by name while taking special care to look attractive (for example, wearing a handsome waistcoat, or a flower in her hair), keeping up a kindly expression and a carefully modulated voice, smiling often and broadly, touching clients on the shoulder and even on the palm of the hand, and otherwise making "verbal and nonverbal signals" of personal friendliness. It can be profitable, if a waiter scents the possibility of a large tip, to make a number of "non–task-related" trips to and from the table; frequently asking whether everyone is enjoying their meal is one way of doing this. Some waiters go so far as to squat down beside diners in order to advise them and listen to their wishes, so displaying energy and youth, intimacy, deference, and perhaps a satisfying inferiority.
Waiters may handwrite the word thank you on the backs of bills before giving them to customers "back-side up so that the first thing the diners will see is the server's expression of gratitude." This is apparently a common practice, and sometimes embellished by the addition of a quick drawing of a round smiling face. Experimenters tried the writing of thank you plus the waiter's first name—which had, of course, been provided during the introduction phase of the operation—but customers, oddly, did not give more money as a result. In other instances, however, we are told that "expressing gratitude to targets can increase actors' influence over them. [Influence here means the kind of allure that might elicit bigger tips from 'targets.'] Gratitude is likely to increase actors' likeability and appearance of friendliness." The waiter's presence gains "increased salience," which raises the amount she is given.10 In these experiments, some clients received these attentions, others did not, and the sizes of tips were correlated. The results establish, of course, that personal contact and perceived goodwill are what tipping is about. People apparently now reject the Jeeves model in waitering, which was once considered real excellence: swift, efficient, able to anticipate a diner's least requirement, but unobtrusive, the server's mien deliberately impassive. A strenuous attempt to achieve personal contact would definitely have been frowned upon—and considered abject in the waiter.
Waiters have always known that it matters, as far as tipping is concerned, who the client is. Men tip more generously than women do, especially if they are trying to impress; not only are tables with children hard work, but parents tend to tip less. Women and parents can be unimpressed by serving since they do so much of it themselves, and also usually have less money to spend than single men or men on dates. The size of a dining party apparently affects gratuities more than proportionately, and alcohol consumption increases generosity. People who are frequent patrons of a restaurant, however, are unpredictable tippers: either they give a comparatively large tip because they "expect future interaction," or they give less for the same reason. It is clear from the research that waiters use intricate skills and sharp judgment about what makes people give, in order to survive in the métier.11
A gratuity is a small monetary present. It is disqualified, however, as a gift on three counts. First, it is usually given immediately after the service has been done: the time lapse said to be essential to the gift is missing. Second, a tip is money. And third, a gratuity ends the transaction: there will be no equalizing by means of reciprocity, no friendship instituted.
The lack of a waiting period between service and tip arises from the practical fact that the client will soon leave. Most people tipped will never be seen again by the giver—and immediately the idea that a tip might be a gift receives a setback. Gift and return gift, as we saw, travel the invisible trajectory formed by bonds linking people, creating and strengthening ties of friendship. The time taken between receiving and returning is time to reflect, to appreciate, to think of something one wants to give back. To give a tip immediately after service makes this "return" resemble payment.
The same is true of the nature of the gratuity: money. Cash is payment, cold, abstract, impersonal, and often considered, therefore, inherently unfriendly. It is the stuff of contracts, not a meaningful, carefully chosen expression of thoughtfulness and esteem; money is not a "proper" gift. There is, of course, no time to go away and buy a gift, and even if there were, the attendant is usually only a slight acquaintance, and the giver cannot know what gift-object might please her. Money is what the server wants, anyway; and money is necessarily what is given because there is no time, and no tie.
Finally, a tip is not a gift in that it ends a relationship. There may be gratitude, but like the acquaintance it is ephemeral and without fruit; it resembles somewhat the English custom we looked at earlier, where saying "Thank you" can mean "Good-bye." Canny waiters may give clients a subliminal nudge towards producing more money by performing some sort of rudimentary "personalizing" action. But the last thing a tipper is likely to want, in fact, is a real, ongoing relationship with the server—and vice versa. The waiter will not make a return gift; the client will leave and forget the waiter's existence. Tipping, then, can be mere automatic convention, or something close to a bribe, or a form of payment and as such a semi-contractual matter, or a sign of superiority—all of these being satisfactory explanations for economics and social science. But there remains the possibility of freely given, not duty-bound, effort on one side, and the free expression of gratitude for it on the other.
A special kind of tip, one that maintains a continuing relationship, is the regular annual Christmas gift, or bonus, which could be classified in part as the "To Insure Promptness" type. By means of these presents the giver keeps and encourages personal contact with often-encountered service providers, such as postal workers, who are acquaintances but rarely friends. In rural France members of the fire brigade, in full uniform, arrive every year bearing the gift of an irresistibly picturesque calendar for the coming year, depicting the fire brigade. They expect a solid sum of money and a lengthy conversation with the inhabitants of the house: the fire fighters are very knowledgeable about what goes on and who everybody is. (The round of visits, and the conversation-period, are on company time.) Gratuity-givers are happy to know personally the people upon whose benevolence much could depend, at any moment. The object given, a calendar, is a lasting and concrete reminder of the time ahead, during which services might be needed.
The more each person thinks a relationship with a server might be too equal to give rise to a tip, the more embarrassed either party, or both, will feel. A tour guide, for example, who has pointed out in minute detail the capitals in a Romanesque cloister and explained their meanings, is someone whose superior knowledge often makes a tourist feel uncomfortable about giving her a tip: he often tries to give it unobtrusively, with perhaps a complicit smile, to show he has been listening, and as though "we two" were the ones in the group best able to appreciate the art. On other occasions it is hard to know whether or not to give a tip at all—in case one might offend either by giving or by omitting to give—and how much a tip should be. In the modern West, knowledge of this kind is not very often a sine qua non for daily existence, with rules accordingly clear and unequivocal, as is the case in many closer-knit and hierarchical societies that are less pressured and overshadowed by market exchange. Yet we apparently do feel we ought to try, despite the clumsiness and the anxiety. We know that gratefulness, where felt, should be expressed, in this case through giving a gratuity. (And some of us might reflect that even where services have not been very successful, any effort shown is still a matter for gratitude.)
A different explanation for tipping is that it performs what some psychologically inclined researchers may call "an ego massage" for the giver. The tip dispenser, from this point of view, is forced to give by the pressure of social norms, but persuades himself that he is giving as an individual and exercising free will. He partakes for a brief moment in the power (disguised as freedom and generosity) that used to be wielded by an aristocrat, and derives pleasure from seeing the gratitude he appears to evoke in one lower than he is. If he is a rich tourist in a foreign land, he enjoys flexing his monetary muscle—when he is not feeling guilty for being so rich and experiencing various inner compulsions, therefore, to tip more heavily than necessary.12 Status and force, once again, cover the field as the explanations offered.
The tipping custom and its puzzles have nevertheless laid bare for us the impossibility of discussing gifts and gratitude without considering their constant dialogue with notions of freedom and obligation, equality and rank—the subject of the next section.