...except after "C"

(or How We've Resorted to Bribery for Decent Service)

Webster, in all his great wisdom, defines gratuity as "something given voluntarily or beyond obligation usually for some service." Until recently, I was under the false impression that this was true. How sad was I to find out that a tip is not just a polite gesture as a way to show appreciation to someone for going above and beyond, but it is a nearly universally accepted practice of extorting more than the stated price for a service out of a consumer.

When I was a little kid, I thought that tips were basically only given to wait-staff at restaurants, and generally given in proportion not so much to the cost of the meal, but to the value of the service provided. In a cafeteria-style establishment, therefore, no tip would be left. In a buffet-style, a small tip would be appropriate if a server brought drinks, napkins, extra silverware and such. For someone who was delinquent in taking your order, delivering your food, or expediting the payment of the check, the tip would be withheld or at least reduced.

When I got my first paper route, I began to personally benefit from the tipping phenomenon. It was clear to me even as an eleven-year-old that courteous personalized service equated to happy customers, which frequently turned into extra money in my pocket. It was then that my views on gratuity began to be ingrained, and I formed by tipping habits accordingly. Here were my two general criteria for when to tip:

1. If you are paying primarily for a product, but receiving an additional personalized service in the delivery of that product, it might be appropriate to tip, e.g., you pay to purchase the food in a restaurant and tip the person who serves it to you, or you pay to purchase the daily newspaper and tip the person to brings it to your doorstep.
2. If personalized service is included in the price you are paying, but the individual does something rather extraordinary that is not included in that price, you might consider offering a small gratuity, e.g., the garbage collectors are paid to pick up your waste from the curbside every week, but you ask them to also throw an old water heater in with the regular trash.

However, I was not accustomed to shelling out extra cash to every person in a service industry for performing the work that is expected in what I am paying them for. I paid someone to cut my hair, and there was no product rendered other than the fact that when it was all said and done my hair was shorter. This is what I paid them to do. Why should I tip them? The postal delivery person is a well-compensated federal employee who is paid to bring the mail and put it in my box. Why should I feel compelled to give a gratuity for the service provided that is identical to every other postal customer's?

This brings me to the question of holiday tipping. As a paper boy, I saw a huge boon during the Christmas season as I made my collection rounds. Then again, I was an extraordinarily good paper boy. I had almost as many special requests as customers. Between the doors, in the mailbox, under the mat, in a bag, with a rubber band... if someone had asked me to fold it like a pterodactyl, I probably would have accommodated them. As much as I appreciated the income at the time, it somehow did not translate into me feeling responsible to line the pockets of every grocery bagger, gas pumper, or burger flipper between Thanksgiving and Christmas. What's next, when we get a particularly well-performed telemarketing call, should we say, "No thanks, please remove me from your calling list, but go ahead and charge my card for a couple of bucks for yourself for a job well done... after all, it's the holidays"?

Call me Scrooge.
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