The Ethics of Tipping

Looking back on my time in retail reminded me of another odd recurring event: getting a tip. I’ve worked for tips a few times, mostly on even less pleasant jobs, but every so often in retail I’d help someone carry something out to their car, tie something to the roof, get an odd-shaped (or very large) purchase out the loading dock, or in one spectacularly weird case, put out an engine fire in their car, and the customer would want to give me a tip – which gave me a bit of a problem…

You see, as the Assistant Manager of the drug store, I was prohibited by corporate regulations from accepting any form of gratuity from a customer. Technically, so were the rank-and-file personnel, but since the officer responsible for enforcing those regulations was me, and there was no way I was going to call anybody making less than $8 a hour (which wasn’t much even then) on it, the only person in the store with any customer contact duties who was ever likely to face disciplinary action for accepting a tip was me. And, since a drug store never has enough line personnel to go around, the Assistant Manager is also the person most likely to take on any extra duties (like helping someone get their order loaded into their car) and thus the most likely to be offered a tip in the first place…

Of course, the larger ethical issue surrounding tips is when to offer one – and how much you should offer. On the one hand, many customer service personnel (notably waiters) are paid at below minimum wage (sometimes effectively nothing) because they are assumed to make their living on tips, and the government allows their employers to screw them out of a minimum wage on the grounds that it’s better for the business. On the other hand, we’ve all heard stories about (and most of us have experienced) people whose service was horrible who still expect a fat tip at the end of your transaction, whatever it happens to be. Some of them will get really aggressive about it, and retaliate for bad tips whenever they can…

I don’t have a lot of problems with this myself, mostly because anything egregious enough to make me want to stiff someone on a tip will also be bad enough that I’ll ask to speak with their manager and do something (potentially, at least) much worse. Or, in extreme cases, I’ll cancel my order, pay for anything I’ve actually received thus far, and walk out, never to return. If I’ve stayed all of the way through dinner without raising a stink, I’ll give somebody a base-level tip just for effort; and if they’ve made any effort at all to do a good job I’ll try to reward them for it. But that’s just me; you’ll see a similar behavior pattern in anyone who’s ever worked for tips…

The thing is, the people who object to having to leave a tip on purely financial grounds are kidding themselves. If we abolish the laws that allow employers to pay sub-minimum wages to their personnel, all that will happen is that menu prices will rise to cover the higher wages (and massive payroll tax increases), lowering the number of people who can afford to eat out and eliminating any chance these employees might have had of earning a better living. Your tip responsibility might be smaller, but the price of your dinner will be larger, and all of the same people will go on being screwed…

In the long run, businesses that take care of their employees do better than those that do not – and I could show you the research that proves it, if any of you actually cared. For myself, when I was the Assistant Manager of the drug store and someone gave me a tip I’d usually use it to buy snacks for my crew, which led to the practice of keeping a “munchies fund” in the break room, where all of the management team (including the line supervisors who reported to me and the store’s higher-level managers) contributed “found money” like tips to a fund that kept our people in cookies and chips -- which led to a measurable increase in morale whenever I was on the manager’s desk…

It’s worth thinking about…