But of course neither Amy Vanderbilt (1908-1974) nor Letitia Baldridge (1926-2012) ever knew today’s world, where you’re invited to tip at a retail checkout counter where the only service is to ring up a charge and perhaps bag a few items, or at a self-checkout machine where no service is provided at all. Tipping is in effect a new form of “junk fee,” with the only difference that paying or not paying is left to the customer’s tortured conscience. Even when you’re promised the proceeds will go to employees, the boss is clearly shifting some labor costs onto the customer, which is infuriating. The greatest abuse is the subminimum “tipped” wage, introduced in 1966 as the political price for extending minimum-wage protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act to hotel and restaurant workers, who previously had been excluded. Back then the tipped minimum was 50 percent of minimum wage. Today it’s 29.4 percent, thanks to a deal decoupling the tipped minimum from minimum-wage increases brokered in the 1990s by future Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain when he was president of the National Restaurant Association.
Today, etiquette, to the extent it persists, dictates that you absolutely should tip just about anybody who asks unless the person who asks makes morethan you do. But the ethical case for tipping (as opposed to the employer simply paying workers more money and raising prices accordingly) has never been strong. The tipper is invited to use money to pass judgment on the quality of the service they receive. No worker’s livelihood should be hostage to such whims. That may sound like a modern opinion, but tipping was held to be sufficiently condescending at the turn of the twentieth century that you risked insulting a white man if you offered him a tip; tips were perceived as being for Black porters and other Black servants, who (Fourteenth Amendment or no Fourteenth Amendment) were not widely recognized as the white man’s equal. The race taboo fell away, but not tipping’s expression of class superiority; in 1916 one William R. Scott, in an anti-tipping diatribe titled The Itching Palm observed:
In an aristocracy a waiter may accept a tip and be servile without violating the ideals of the system. In the American democracy to be servile is incompatible with citizenship.
Every tip given in the United States is a blow at our experiment in democracy. The custom announces to the world that at heart we are aristocratic, that we do not believe practically that “all men are created equal”; that the class distinctions forbidden by our organic law are instituted through social conventions and flourish in spite of our lofty professions.
One clear reform to reduce customers’ tipping leverage and force employers to shoulder their burden is to eliminate the tipped minimum wage. That may happen next time Congress gets a shot at raising the minimum wage above the current measly $7.25 an hour, where it’s been stuck, unconscionably, since 2009. In the meantime, seven states have eliminated the tipped minimum wage: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. In addition, Washington, D.C. eliminated the tipped minimum by voter referendum in 2022, and is phasing in an increase to the full minimum wage. (The current hourly wage minimum in D.C. is $17.) Chicago followed suit earlier this year; the hourly minimum wage there is $15.80.