The Itching Palm Part 4

FIRST INGREDIENT, GENEROSITY

This is a subtle element and merges into a sense of obligation on slight provocation. You feel that your position in life is more fortunate, and pity enters your thought. If an extra service is given, in reality or in appearance, the servitor has pitched his appeal upon the ground of obligation. Few persons can rest easily until a sense of obligation is discharged through some form of compensation. The opportunity to balance the account comes when cash is being pa.s.sed between you and the person serving. You offer a cash consideration proportioned to your sense of obligation.

Inasmuch as the whole argument in favor of tipping is based upon the allegation that the servitor actually gives a value in extra service, the element of obligation will be examined closely.

The Pullman porter or the waiter who can succeed in making a patron feel a sense of obligation knows that he has a.s.sured a tip for himself. The company or the restaurant business is a vague fact, while the man hovering over your berth or table is a most tangible relation. His art is to make the patron feel that he is responsible for the careful attentions. In a subconscious way the patron knows that the price of the ticket or the food includes the service (wages of the porter or waiter) but the obsequious alertness of the attendant overshadows this knowledge. It is present personality versus an abstract ent.i.ty known as company or restaurant. Hence, though the price of the ticket or the payment of the check pays for the porter's or waiter's service, the patron has been made to feel a second obligation which he discharges with a tip.

CLOAKROOM TACTICS

Thus tipping involves two payments for one service. Servitors understand clearly the psychology of the sense of obligation from experiment even though they could not read understandingly a book on psychology. A trial in Detroit over the division of the tips in the cloak-room of a restaurant furnished the following proof:

"'How do you make people "cough up"?' queried the judge.

"'When they are going away I brush them down, and if they don't give me something I take hold of their lapel and say, "Excuse me," and brush them again. I pretend that's the only English I can speak. If they don't give me something then I hold on to their hats until they do give me something. I made $12 the first day I worked at the place.'

"'Why did you pretend you could not speak English?' demanded the judge.

"'The more English you know the less tips you get.'"

This morally obtuse hat-boy knew that the average person does not want something for nothing when dealing with serving persons, and he exploited this trait to the maximum. Pullman porters and high grade waiters are more polished in the use of the same method, but it all gets back to the idea of creating a sense of obligation by actual or pretended service beyond the expected.

Undoubtedly, a rigid adherence to the letter of duty would result in service that would be unsatisfactory, but this is to be surmounted rightly by the employer requiring flexibility of service from employees--not by the public paying extra for affability, courtesy and attentiveness.

SECOND INGREDIENT, PRIDE

Anxiety to cut a good figure before servants or allied cla.s.ses of personal workers is a rich vein of pride which they do not fail to work for all it is worth. This kind of mind is always agitated from fear that the tipping has not been done handsomely enough. The satisfaction of having a fellow creature servile before your largess is a factor. The gratuity emphasizes your position in the social scale. It stamps the giver as a gentleman or lady. The smirking attentiveness of the servitor is balm to vanity.

Truly, if it were not for vanity there would be no tipping system.

THIRD INGREDIENT, FEAR

The power behind the tipping custom is Social Convention and the fear of violating it. The so-called social leaders, actuated by aristocratic ideals, establish the custom and the crowd follow suit in a desire to do the "proper" thing. The "what will people say" mania holds the average person in an iron obedience to a custom which is innately loathed. It makes you conspicuous to be a dissenter. The serving persons understand this psychology perfectly. To drift along with the current of social usage is easiest, whereas, to go against it requires the highest order of courage. The mult.i.tude simply rate it as one of the petty vices and let it go at that.

THE REMEDY

Now what is the method of meeting and mastering this situation?

Precisely the same reasoning employed by the Americans in 1801 against the custom of paying tribute to the Barbary pirates.

First, establish clearly in your mind that tipping is wrong. The slogan is: ONE COMPENSATION FOR ONE SERVICE. With this premise, you can answer, _seriatim_, every argument which arises in favor of the custom.

To the plea of generosity or obligation the reply is, full compensation for all service rendered is included in the bill you pay at the hotel desk, at the ticket window, to the barber-shop cashier, for the taxi-meter reading, and so on. Any extra compensation implied by the person serving is an imposition and has no justification either as charity or obligation.

Second, the promptings of pride must be recognized frankly and mastered by democratic ideals. When a tip is given, not only is an individual wrong done, but a blow is struck at republican government and the ideals upon which it is founded. Patriotism, as well as faithfulness to self-respect requires that all customs which promote cla.s.s distinctions shall be held in check. In entertaining a democratic att.i.tude toward all Americans you are strengthening the government under which you live. You will not become less of a gentleman or lady if the socially submerged cla.s.ses rise to a normal plane of self-respect. In declining to place a false valuation upon them you are promoting the true mission of Americanism.

"To thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Third, the fear of violating a social custom is overcome when you understand its pernicious nature. The general observance of it gives the custom neither rightness nor authority. With full a.s.surance that the custom is wrong and with a measure of the courage Decatur showed before Tripoli, an apparently formidable, but really vulnerable, custom can be destroyed.

VIII

THE LITERATURE OF TIPPING

Writers of books on etiquette uniformly accept tipping as the correct social usage. They state just the amount that it is proper to give on various occasions and thus do their utmost to rivet the custom upon the people.

A few extracts from such books will be given here to show how the custom is strengthened by the arbiters of etiquette. Those ma.s.ses of Americans who are aspiring to a broader culture naturally turn to these books, and have their Americanism poisoned at the very start. They are educated to believe that tipping is essential to social grace. The feature departments of newspapers in answering queries about tipping usually confirm this impression, though now and then a side-swipe is delivered at the extortionate att.i.tude of the serving persons.

HOTEL FEES

Taking up the hotel first, the following advice is from "Everyday Etiquette":

"A porter carries a bag and he must be tipped; another carries up a trunk, he must be tipped; one rings for ice water and the boy bringing it expects his ten cents; one wants hot water every morning and in notifying the chambermaid of this fact, must slip a bit of silver into her palm. The waiter at one's table must be frequently remembered, and the head waiter will give one better attention if he finds something in his hand after he shows the new arrival to a table, and, of course, on leaving one will give a fee.

"It is usually best for a transient guest to fee the waiter at each meal, since another man will probably be in attendance at the next one. The usual rate is to give 10 per cent. of the sum paid for the lunch or dinner--ten cents being the minimum except at a restaurant of humble pretensions, where five will be gladly accepted by the waitress."

If the waiters and other hotel employees had written the foregoing themselves could they have put it more strongly? Note the advice to tip the waiter at each meal because a new one may be on hand at the next meal! This implies that the failure to tip is a grave offense, and that no risk of giving it must be taken. The patron may rest a.s.sured that a new one will be on hand at the next meal, for the head waiter shifts them about for exactly that reason--to make the patron tip again.

However, in this same book, there is a reluctant note, as shown by the following extract:

"We may rebel against the custom and with reason. But as not one of us can alter the state of affairs, it is well to accept it with good grace, or reconcile oneself to indifferent service."

Hotel managers will read this with entire approval. And yet, consider what a contradiction it is for a hotel to advertise its service at such and such rates and then subject its guests to "indifferent service" if they do not cross an itching palm at every angle in the building!

TIP--OR BE INSULTED

Any one who conscientiously objects to tipping knows how true it is that in the "best" places, with one or two notable exceptions, not only "indifferent service" but positively insulting deportment may be expected from the servitors if the tips are omitted.

The servitors are aggressive because their remuneration depends upon what they can work out of the patrons. The employer had hired them on the understanding that any compensation they receive must come from the gratuities of patrons. In certain hotels the management carries the exploitation to the point of charging the servitors for the privilege of working the patrons. The tipping privilege in one hotel has been sold as high as $10,000 a year!

The economic pressure of tipping upon the patron causes one authority on etiquette, "Good Form For All Occasions," to exclaim:

"Women of frugal mind endeavor to call on these functionaries as little as they can because the cents readily mount into dollars.

The elevator-boy receives fewer tips than his peripatetic brother and need not be feed after a short stay."

Here is proof that those who from economic or ethical reasons do not wish to tip are persecuted. They are advised that the easiest way to avoid the displeasure of servitors is to call on them for service as little as possible! The two dollars or more they pay at the hotel desk for a day's domicile must be exclusively for the privilege of sitting in a chair or sleeping in a bed. The moment they require the service of any of the employees about the building, they are under a second obligation to pay. And yet, hotels prate about their "hospitality." The Barbary pirates were hospitable in the same way--after you paid the tribute!