Good Job

September 18, 2013 12:52 PM

In a “third-world” city, a self-styled tour guide might be tipped in return for leading a group of sightseers. In Italy, a Neapolitan street urchin might offer to protect a parked car in return for a gratuity.

In both cases, the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you. This thinly veiled extortion is the subtext to much tipping: if the propertied individual doesn’t comply with the demands of the semi-employed, something terrible might happen to them or their things. So tipping began essentially as a way to stave off violence by the indigent, forgotten people; it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.
posted by four panels (41 comments total)

In Guatemala folks would do an interesting thing--lay claim to parking spaces on the street. As you would approach a parking spot (and there are no meters in the country), someone would come running up and start waving you in, often offering (unneeded and unsolicited) parking direction to get you into the spot. They expected to be tipped, and yes, the implicit understanding was that something could happen to your car (or even to you) if you didn't.

Also, people in indigenous dress would often ask for money if you took a picture of them, especially in heavily touristed places. Which, you know, fair enough. Until one little kid ran up to me and said, "take my photo!" I did. Then she stuck out her hand. "Now give me a quetzal!"
posted by oneironaut at 1:06 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Much as I hate tipping, I won't take a stand against it by stiffing anyone.
posted by ocschwar at 1:08 PM on September 18, 2013 [5 favorites]

Tipping makes us into slaves and masters simultaneously in a confused, kinetic, and highly kinky social model.

"Kinetic"? "Kinky"? What do these words mean in this context?

The service industry model carries over into the bedroom with the modern emphasis on oral sex and “servicing” one’s partner.

Oh, that's what they mean. Uh, what? How is this sexual?
posted by Edgewise at 1:14 PM on September 18, 2013

highly kinky social model

Apparently I've been tipping waitstaff the wrong way all this time.
posted by kmz at 1:19 PM on September 18, 2013 [19 favorites]

Tipping makes us into slaves and masters simultaneously in a confused, kinetic, and highly kinky social model.
Hegel and "kinky" in the same sentence. Urgh.
posted by Bromius at 1:24 PM on September 18, 2013

Didn't we just do the whole tipping discussion back in the thread about the restaurant that didn't allow tips? Anyway I would be fine with getting rid of tipping if there was a law that said that 20% of the gross revenue that a company generates has to be given to individual contributors (rather than management) as a bonus on top of whatever their hourly wage is.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:25 PM on September 18, 2013

Methinks the author is confusing tipping with tupping.
posted by benzenedream at 1:35 PM on September 18, 2013 [4 favorites]

Warren Buffett, for example, likely calls himself middle-class.

Warren Buffett is on the record (in the New York Times, no less) calling himself ultra-rich.

(I support paying people a living wage and doing away with tipping -- I will happily patronize restaurants like Noodles and Company where that's the policy. And I refuse to patronize places like Coldstone where servers are forced to sing for their tips. But this Jacobin article is just silly.)
posted by pie ninja at 1:35 PM on September 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

a failure to pay [the tip] will result in public shaming or even fisticuffs.

Where is this happening, and can I get any kind of "fisticuffs or your money back" guarantee? *I* promise to tip.
posted by epj at 1:36 PM on September 18, 2013

And people wonder why I have reservations about foreign travel.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:40 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also ubiquitous in Brazil.
posted by lbebber at 1:58 PM on September 18, 2013

The best (fictional) variation on this was when an urchin tried to do the car protection thing to the Joker. The Joker responded by cheerily paying him, instructing him to be there when he got back. The urchin then went mad, as he had no way of knowing if the Joker was seriously expecting him to still be there, meaning that to leave his post could mean his doom, or if the Joker was just going to kill him when he got back, meaning that leaving his post would be his only escape.
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:05 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is pretty common all over the world. Just do what the locals do and you'll be fine. Local says no? You say no. Local pays, you pay.
posted by Keith Talent at 2:19 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

...apparently I'm supposed to go down on my waitstaff? This gives dining out a new and weird connotation.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:23 PM on September 18, 2013 [4 favorites]

Insert a "just the tip" joke here.
posted by onehalfjunco at 2:31 PM on September 18, 2013 [6 favorites]

Tipping makes us into slaves and masters simultaneously in a confused, kinetic, and highly kinky social model. The service industry model carries over into the bedroom with the modern emphasis on oral sex and “servicing” one’s partner

I like George Orwell's take:

The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of
his skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him
the mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in
sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He
has the pleasure of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always the
chance that he may become rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor,
they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafes on the Grand
Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the waiters actually pay
the PATRON for their employment. The result is that between constantly
seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to
some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in
style, because he feels that he is participating in the meal himself.
posted by KokuRyu at 2:37 PM on September 18, 2013 [9 favorites]

And people wonder why I have reservations about foreign travel.

Well, if you don't make reservations for foreign travel, it costs a lot more (even leaving out the tipping). Also, the TSA gets interested...
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:38 PM on September 18, 2013 [6 favorites]

Also, people in indigenous dress would often ask for money if you took a picture of them, especially in heavily touristed places. Which, you know, fair enough. Until one little kid ran up to me and said, "take my photo!" I did. Then she stuck out her hand. "Now give me a quetzal!"

Life-sized Elmos and Hello Kitties do this in Times Square. And they're licensed.
posted by headnsouth at 2:47 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Real life imitates Ankh-Morpork
posted by schmod at 2:59 PM on September 18, 2013 [6 favorites]

ok fine jacobin i'll stop tipping
posted by rap and country at 3:03 PM on September 18, 2013

Shut up. What do you mean you don't believe in it? Come on, you, cough up a buck, you cheap bastard. I paid for your goddamn breakfast.
posted by The White Hat at 3:12 PM on September 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

In a “third-world” city, a self-styled tour guide might be tipped in return for leading a group of sightseers ... the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you.

Huh? What bizarre and sort of faintly racist opening. I've seen tour guides using this business model in India and they're not violent extortionists. They're offering a service for free initially in the hopes customers will be impressed enough to pay for it. Just because they don't work out of a shopfront or have a website doesn't mean they're not professionals who know a great deal about a site. Nor are kids offering shoeshines running violent protection rackets either.

WTF, white guy.
posted by dontjumplarry at 3:42 PM on September 18, 2013 [6 favorites]

"...it is unconscionable that a rich country like the United States has made access to higher education so difficult for those at the bottom and middle." Joseph E. Stiglitz.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:45 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Then there's the one about the rabbi who didn't charge for doing a briss... he only took tips.

You will never think of tipping the same way again.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:49 PM on September 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

Way back in my 20s, walking just 4-5 blocks from the MARTA Decatur St. station to the King (MLK) Center in Atlanta got me an escort from a very large dude who assured me I needed him by my side. I denied that I needed an escort and mostly ignored him, but he stayed right at my side until we got to the King Center. He then requested a "tip", and knowing that I had to walk back to the MARTA station later that day, I obliged. I felt extored and a little stupid.
posted by Lukenlogs at 4:10 PM on September 18, 2013

by Ian Svenonius

Wow, guess he has been doing something since NoU...
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 4:20 PM on September 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

You've got a nice army base here, Colonel. We wouldn't want anything to happen to it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:35 PM on September 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

I was in Indonesia (Jakarta) for a month, working. Many of the major roads used concrete dividers, which meant that if you wanted to turn left, you had to keep going until you found one of the rare breaks in the divider, pull a U-turn, and head back towards your destination (which would then be on your right).

At many of these breaks, a guy would post up with something sharp, cheap, and nonlethal... like a key, or more often a jagged stone. If someone pulled into "his" U-turn area with a halfway decent car, he would make a move to scratch the paint unless you handed him a few coins. (Rough work vehicles were, of course, roundly ignored.)

So, yeah. One example, at least, of straight extortion, without being "thinly veiled" or "inferred": give me money right now or I will key the shit out of your car. Or I suppose you could make six eventual right turns in order to avoid making that single U-turn.
posted by rodeoclown at 4:36 PM on September 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.

This is crazy. We don't tip people for providing a service, we do it because we fear and disdain them? What would we do if we liked them? Guess that's where the oral sex comes in!

Oh, sorry, apparently we Americans do appreciate service. It s just the rest. Of the world that has it wrong.

Just...sheesh, does anyone really subscribe to the theory in that Jacobin link? I feel like it's the kind of bullshit you'd write in college just because. You know, when it's two in the morning on the same day it's due, you've been up all night sick and you just don't give a damn what you say anymore as long as it sounds good and meets the requisite word count.
posted by misha at 4:44 PM on September 18, 2013 [6 favorites]

Ian “The Psychic Soviet” Svenonius is good reading if you like your Marxism macaronic and tendentious, with extra heapings of Freud and a dash of rock'n'roll occultism for taste. He's sort of like a more gonzo and/or undergraduate Žižek.
posted by acb at 5:24 PM on September 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

(I support paying people a living wage and doing away with tipping -- I will happily patronize restaurants like Noodles and Company where that's the policy. And I refuse to patronize places like Coldstone where servers are forced to sing for their tips. But this Jacobin article is just silly.)

I don't have enough words for the stupidity of the Jacobin article.

As for Coldstone, I despise the notion of them singing for their tips, so I make a very firm request when I order "If you do not sing, I will tip you double." Works great. I get my ice cream, the kids behind the counter don't have to perform like trained monkeys, and we all get a little bit of quiet.
posted by MissySedai at 5:53 PM on September 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

By coincidence, only seconds before reading this article, I had just finished watching this video of two guys in Utah randomly giving out $200 tips.

I'm not sure it's all that cool to go around filming people at work to get YouTube hits, but somehow, the heartfelt joy that people feel about it and the obvious impact that amount of money has on these folks is a much more profound and humane critique of the economic, moral, and sentimental aspects of tipping than some random screed blaming the poor for their slave mentality.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 6:15 PM on September 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

Just...sheesh, does anyone really subscribe to the theory in that Jacobin link? I feel like it's the kind of bullshit you'd write in college just because.

Yeah seriously, this is a terrible article, every paragraph asserting a reality that bears small resemblance to the one I know. It's hard to get past that opener, and, yeah, we all have similar stories about pseudo extortion that we could share, but it seems only tangentially related to the other arguments he makes in the article. Maybe we could get past that and point out such howlers as asserting that Buffet thinks himself as middle class or that Protestants won the French Revolution.
posted by bumpkin at 6:32 PM on September 18, 2013

The best (fictional) variation on this was when an urchin tried to do the car protection thing to the Joker. The Joker responded by cheerily paying him, instructing him to be there when he got back. The urchin then went mad, as he had no way of knowing if the Joker was seriously expecting him to still be there, meaning that to leave his post could mean his doom, or if the Joker was just going to kill him when he got back, meaning that leaving his post would be his only escape.

I was just thinking about this! This is from the excellent Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?.
posted by wayland at 6:35 PM on September 18, 2013

When paranoid types generalize their own inferences to the rest of the population. Even generosity or charity become suspect.
posted by srboisvert at 8:29 PM on September 18, 2013

Sometimes the established practice of tipping is invoked to put an acceptable face on what actually amounts to extortion; but it's a tremendous leap, not argued for at all here, that extortion is therefore the essence and origin of tipping.

When rail travel was young, old gents would make a point of going to thank the engine driver and perhaps slipping him a coin. Was it because they were afraid he would otherwise seek them out and beat them up, or that future trains would be stopped or diverted if they didn't? Or was it just because they'd been taught that that was the way nice people behaved?
posted by Segundus at 1:08 AM on September 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

A guy parks his car near Anfield on matchplay and a local kid come out and says to him, "'Ere mate, fifty pee and I'll watch your car ?"
"Get lost", the man says, "I don't need you, I've got a big rottweiler in that car and if anything goes off, the dog will deal with it."
"Oh aye," says the kid, "Puts out fires, does it ?"
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 2:22 AM on September 19, 2013 [6 favorites]

I tend to agree with those who say that this reflects the anxieties of the the privileged much more than the actual intentions of the underprivileged. The "threatened" figures here are always diners, tourists, and drivers and the "extortion" arises when they encounter someone less well off than themselves.

To fear in every instance that the waiter will spit in your food, the friendly "local" will lure you into danger or scam you out of your cash, or the valet will deliberately scratch your car if you don't offer them a small cash bribe first reflects an inability imagine a non-exploitative interaction between classes. More than this, it's the fear of revenge from those exploited or locked out entirely.

There's also the conflation of tipping, where the customer is asked to supplement the wages of a service worker so the employer doesn't have to, and being charged for ostensibly unsolicited services by someone who is essentially working on his or her own. These really aren't the same situation, and often "ostensibly unsolicited" means something more like "expecting automatic service with no payment required from those charming underclass sorts."

I was just thinking about this! This is from the excellent Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

Sort of. In that one, the Joker makes it clear he won't kill the urchin, remarking, "I only kill people when it's funny, and what could possibly be funny about killing you?"
posted by kewb at 3:35 AM on September 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

I haven't read the article, but anyone who's read nineteenth century fiction will be used to the 'i'll guard it and you'll tip me or else' tipping model, and the unwanted-escort-you-have-to-pay happens in so many travel books (ie the sort written by people who go places without many tourists) that i'm used to that idea too. The 'servicing your partner' argument is that the language of service has infiltrated personal relationships and our concepts of them - but they forget that 'service' is the term used for mating animals - 'i'll bring my boar over to service your sows'. Possibly even worse origins, but more obvious, and i've heard it in speech.

My own experience is that anything your 'mummy' does you have the same irrational angry reaction to not being done for you and lack of gratitude for having done and it's invisible, you don't see it. So chefs etc, that's a public, male role, and you get the whole ridiculous show of compliments and gratitude and showing off, but cleaning is 'supposed to' happen, if something is dirty it's the cleaner's fault, and there's no thanks or tipping. I base this on working in one hotel where i worked bar, waitress and cleaning rooms. In one year, one thank-you note to cleaners from the whole 120 beds. Every person nearly, thanks to the chef and wait-staff at the end of their stay. In the bar, constant friendliness. The chef got obsequious treatment. Most people, if they found me cleaning their rooms, said things like 'why're you in here?' or 'i didn't know you cleaned our rooms' they just expected their hair to disappear from the shower because this role, in their original experience, is done by their mother, it just happens.

We - speak for myself - have an irrational angry reaction to things we take forgranted being done, eg things done by our mothers, whereas we are truly grateful to other people and forgive them if it doesn't happen just based on our not expecting them to, not taking it forgranted, that they'll do it. It's something about dependency, vulnerability, love, but intense anger if that's let down, which starts in relationships where the other person lets themself be taken forgranted, and which transfer to certain jobs. God knows if that's clear.

There's a common debate about quality of service, where it's often mentioned that service staff are supposed to 'really care' and other illogical things. To me it's just a job, and usually a minimum-wage, zero-hours job, why do some people writing in the media get really upset that a coffeeshop waitress 'seemed a bit distant' when serving them and treat this as the height of rudeness? I don't mean people should be rude, but there's a very psychologically weird expectation of service people doing emotional work in relationship to customers that makes no sense and didn't go on when i was younger.. Why is someone in a cafe meant to make you feel good? I don't understand. Surely you have needs you're not admitting and which you need to get fed in the realm of intimacy, not shopping?, is my first reaction.

I really mean, i just find it strange, not, customers are horrible or something.
posted by maiamaia at 5:33 AM on September 19, 2013

Read the article and think it's wrong. My own experience is that the modern economy lets you be servant, at work, and master, out shopping etc. You sort of take the role-play in turns rather than always being one or the other - hence its seductiveness. (Ok, speak for myself.)

As for tipping generously to display virility, in the UK i heard from many foreigners the complaint that we are not generous. For instance, if you take out your visiting-from-a-foreign-country in-laws for a meal, in any other country you pay everything. It's "i will take care of you", "i am grown up and able to stand on my own two feet and help you out", "i am generous and reliable". In cultures in the West, you can boast and grandstand and show off openly. Such behaviour isn't just anti-social in most cultures, it'll get you despised and ridiculed and ignored. The way you show off is to provide, give. I kind of 'get' that, and i think it's a bit present in our culture.

On Steiglitz, america places a discernable heavy emphasis on individual-to-individual charity and virtually bans systematic analyses. As i'm used to Marxist analysis, of course i side with that, but i think the american approach breeds sympathy and emphasises personal feelings and experiences, which is also true, now that i'm old enough to see past the ideas i was raised with.
posted by maiamaia at 5:42 AM on September 19, 2013

So, 10% or 15%?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:55 PM on September 19, 2013