Do waiters and baristas need to see their tips?

By Ed Goldman

By the time we’re five years old, most of us have been introduced to guilt tripping, a practice that grows, along with many of our bodies, exponentially.

When we’re little kids, fiendishly clever parents opt to guilt-trip rather than yell at us, by saying things like, “What you just did (or said) hurts Mommy’s (or Daddy’s) feelings.” Or “Don’t you know that Santa will be mad at you for calling your teacher a poopy brain?”

In our teens and young adulthood, the tripping gains some sophistication but remains both effective and toxic. We suddenly find out our parental units have feelings very much like humans—and when they tell us we’re breaking their hearts by not going to the college of their choice, not marrying their friend’s son or daughter and, worst of all, not having any interest in taking over the family’s animal husbandry business, we find that we, too, may have feelings.

Okay, enough of this. Today’s column is about something far more heinous than guilt tripping.

It’s guilt tipping. It’s being piloted in restaurants and coffee houses. And it genuinely sucks.

In restaurants, because we’re increasingly being presented with electronic tabs instead of paper checks at the end of our meals, the waiter gets to see what sort of tip we plan to leave for him or her. At least the meal is over by that point should we feel inclined to leave a small tip (or none at all—a cruel gesture but I’m betting it’s a practice that will soon be on the rise).

This also happens at coffee joints, where the waiter is also the cook—excuse me, the barista—and hands you your order only after the transaction is completed. I’m not sure what angry baristas would do if you decided to stiff them but I suspect they can still knock the cup of steaming liquid out of your hands from across the counter.

I was once told that tips were given to service industry people—waiters, yes, but also bellhops and concierges—before they delivered their service. In the telling, “tip” stood for “to insure promptness.”

I must tell you that, armed with this data, I’ve had great service in hotels, especially in Europe—though part of that may have to do with my complete inability to understand currency differences.

For example, I had no idea when I was in Greece decades ago that its drachma was worth about a fifth of our dollar. So when I tipped a bellboy five American dollars for carrying up five bags when I arrived at a hotel very late, I had no idea I’d given him the equivalent of 50 bucks. Had I known, it would’ve been no surprise when he returned at 6 a.m. to retrieve my bags for a boat trip I was about to take. “You work a long shift,” I said in my pigeon Greek. In perfect English, he smiled and replied, “No sir, I came back, sir.”