The practice of tipping first emerged in Great Britain in the 16th century when Englishmen offered money in the hope of ‘insuring promptness.’ Shortened to the acronym, ‘TIP,’ the practice spread to America sometime after the Revolutionary war. What started as the emulation of high status eccentricities was quickly recognized as an avenue for business opportunity. The service industry quickly institutionalized these habits, which subsidized a significant portion of the industries labor costs.
An entire mythology emerged which justifies and explains the nature and reasons for tipping which have almost zero relation to reality. 40 years of research across multiple disciplines has documented that tipping has no effect on the quality of service received. That the amount tipped has no correlation with the quality of service rendered; even if ‘its the worst service a person has ever received’ 70% of Americans would still be too ‘embarrassed not to tip.’ Tipping is not a magical incentive system acting as a ‘check and balance’ on quality but rather a social norm followed out of fear of retaliation. All modern nations except America have largely done away with the practice.
Most service employees actively argue against their own, individual self-interest: the vast majority of the industry remains in favor of tipping. Yet 40 years of research has demonstrated the uncontested fact that a fixed wage would offer a higher yearly sum (with the only exceptions being extreme outliers). The explanation for this behavior can be found in compulsive gamblers addicted to slot machines or lottery tickets. The reward schedule of both tipping and gambling is variable ratio, variable interval: which is why people get addicted to them. In the same way that the gambler fixates on the big win, bartenders fixate on the big tip and develop a culture built around and fetishizing surface characteristics of people who will give them the big score and in doing that they complete the circle of dehumanization: they are being dehumanized for being put into this situation by the power structure (system justification theory).
When a person buys a lottery ticket what they are really purchasing is hope. Likewise, restaurant employees cling to the tipping model out of the prospect–unlikely as it may be–of improving their material position rather than setting definite limits on it.
Anyone who disputes the tipping hypothesis would need to not only overcome basically four decades of consistent data, they would also need to answer the question: Why do people often get better service at Chick-fila than a fine dinning restaurant?
By instituting the practice of tipping, restaurants turn a communal relationship into a transactional one.
Communal: communis, 'shared by all or many’
Transaction: transigere, 'the adjustment of a dispute, a negotiated agreement’
Money=>coin=>cuneus, ‘wedge’=>wecgan, ‘to move, agitate.’
Over the course of evolution, eating a meal has by and large been a communal affair. The problem comes from inserting a ‘wedge’ into the relationship at the point of contact which transforms (‘moves’) it into a transaction, while maintaining the façade of community. Communal relationships involve an expectation of a long-term relationship, whereas exchange relationships are almost necessarily short. All parties involved know, at least unconsciously, that they are participating in a charade and its not uncommon for unspoken contempt to emerge on either side.
Each customer is evaluated according to how much money one anticipates. Contentiousness among the staff over 'regulars' who leave large tips become an everyday occurrence. This radically alters the institutional culture of the establishment as a whole. Stereotypes involving the tipping practices of outgroups are often–but not always–used to evaluate individual customers. These practices can become so engendered that staff members belonging to the perceived outgroups, routinely adopt these same filters, take them as reality, and apply them to the same groups.
On average, perceived outgroups receive horrendous service. They become conditioned through experience to anticipate bad/non-existent service as a fact of reality. It is not uncommon for these people to become angry or on edge before they step foot in the door. Emotional anticipation of abuse is a learned behavior and a natural reaction to its occurrence.
Modern restaurants are essentially closed, self-perpetuating systems whose fundamental principles are established on dehumanization and status conflict. American restaurants contain deeply rooted inefficiencies, systematic group conflicts, widespread externalities, and gross incompetence. An entire culture exists to rationalize these realities and push them out of consciousness. Often through the use of language itself–a lexicon which retains the external vocabulary of hospitality, its signs and symbols but without real substance of any kind.
Restaurant employees are routinely asked to be experts but without any means of acquiring expertise. What is called “training” often consists of following an employee around like a dog on a leash for a set number of hours. If the employee desires information or knowledge beyond what can be ascertained through osmosis they are required to endure the costs. Systems that demand expertise without providing an outlet to acquire it, create in their place, a default status hierarchy which is navigated through posturing. “Once hierarchy exists,” Robert Wright notes, “status is a resource.” Learning a culture is like learning a language. If you learn that language first it will always be your primary language: its the default setting. Once a status hierarchy is set it becomes self-perpetuating.
Another curious practice of American restaurants is intentionally overstaffing. Once the employees arrive at work, the metrics are considered (data of customer volume on similar days from previous years, the number of reservations etc) and an open invitation is then offered by the managers for a few people to go home. In a typical restaurant, hardly a week passes without this occurring. A habit begins to emerge among the staff, who come to know that on any given day they can walk into work and go straight home. Before long, much of the staff arrives at work with a desire to leave (while never knowing in advance if they will get to).
In restaurants that have abandoned all pretense of standards, the official closing time becomes relative to the volume on a given night. These establishments routinely close down the business, well in advance of its stated operating hours. Low volume becomes associated with the ability to leave work and the staff starts to anticipate its occurrence. Often actively discouraging business, as anyone who has arrived at a restaurant 30 minutes before close has discovered.
The modern American restaurant is best conceptualized as engendering a culture of dehumanization that operates in a closed loop. This ‘circle of dehumanization’ is transmitted from the owners to the managers, the managers to the kitchen and the kitchen to the wait staff and finally from the wait staff to the customers who then pass it back to owners and/or managers.
‘We get in the habit of living’ Camus writes, ‘before getting in the habit of thinking.’ Habitual behavior is often unconscious behavior. When such habits are institutionalized the most obviously absurd practices can quickly become common place.
People typically evaluate by comparison. The ‘best’ is relative to a persons experience and in environments where quality is almost universally absent, Apple Bee’s can become the model of ‘casual dinning’ while getting the public to pay its labor costs.
Perhaps this situation should not be surprising when one considers the etymology of the word service,
service=> serf-ise=> servitium=> servus: latin, ‘slave’
The robots are coming and it is doubtful that these paper tigers, haunted by the ghosts of Feudalism will survive the fallout, barring a full blown exorcism.