Tips have long provided a convenient way to foist payment obligations onto others, according to Zach Helfand, as he wrote in ‘The New Yorker’ magazine.
Kerry Segrave, the author of the comprehensive history “Tipping,” identified the gratuity’s potential origins, in Europe during the late Middle Ages.
By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay “vails” to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues.
The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with “To Insure Promptitude.” Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to “tip.” By the end of the nineteenth century, some business owners demanded their employees’ tips.
Some cafés charged waiters a fee for the privilege of working there. In France, tips were placed directly into a wooden box called le tronc, controlled by the proprietor. French waiters went on strike in 1907, identifying two of the great evils of their profession: le tronc, and a ban on mustaches.
(“Women are quite determined to starve with their children rather than see the whiskers of their husbands still fall under the razor,” one newspaper reported.) They eventually prevailed on both counts.
American visitors to Europe brought tipping back to the United States.
Perhaps no entity did more to spread the practice than the Pullman Company. George Pullman preferred hiring formerly enslaved Black men as railroad porters. He paid them as little as possible, and used tips as a subsidy. The system spread as far as the train lines.
By the nineteen-twenties, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters estimated that the policy had saved the Pullman Company a hundred and fifty million dollars. The porters had long fought to eliminate tipping. Their efforts had been rebuffed by the Pullman Company’s president and, later, chairman, Robert Todd Lincoln.
Once the practice gets its hooks in, it can be hard to dislodge. In New York, at the turn of the twentieth century, some enterprising concessionaires paid restaurants thousands of dollars a year to run their coatrooms.
These concessionaires became known as the tip trust. At least one dressed young women in theatrical French-maid outfits to collect coats, hats, and tips; the young women turned over all revenues to the trust. (When skimming was discovered, the trusts banned pockets.)
Men joked that they bought a hat for five dollars and paid seventy-three dollars a year to wear it. A hat manufacturer sold roll-up models that men could hide inside their coats. The greatest of the tip-trust barons, known as the Hatcheck King, brought in the equivalent of sixty million dollars a year. The trusts were powerful politically.
Today, businesses in New York are not allowed to take their employees’ tips, with one exception: hat-and-coat checks.
Across Europe, minimum-wage standards were raised, and tipping largely disappeared there. In 1966, the United States Congress lowered the base wage businesses had to pay tipped workers. Nationally, it’s still just $2.13 an hour.
Each method of tipping has its own rituals. The phone number left for the waiter or waitress on the bill, below the tip line. The palmed maître d’.
I’ve had barbers who’ve requested that I denote my Venmo tips as “pizza,” to facilitate some minor tax fraud. The most recognizable, these days, is the iPad pirouette, evoking an upturned palm. Gerard Knight led the design team at Square, one of the major tablet-payment providers, when it first rolled out its tipping feature. “Turning around the interface to say ‘Give me money’ can be kind of an obnoxious gesture,” he told me.
Originally, the designers used a Trojan horse, of sorts. “The idea was you turned it around anyway, to capture a signature”—most credit cards at the time required one—“and in that process you prompt that customer for a tip.” They considered options besides the three-choice menu. “Things like sliders, where you slide from ten per cent to twenty per cent,” he said. “All of those things just seemed gimmicky.”
-As seen in ‘The New Yorker’, by Zach Helfand
