No tipping point

I'm not talking Malcolm Gladwell here. I'm talking about the final act in a restaurant or bar. Yes, I know you're thinking about the final trip to the restroom after the big slosh but get over it. I'm onto the question of tipping waiters.

The discussions around tipping, in my circles at least, can get tedious. "You're actually thinking of 15%? Are you out of your mind? We're not earning here, we're students." But there's always a counter: "What goes around comes around, it all evens out. Socialism has its values." I've even had emotional blackmail thrown at me: "Some day you may take up a part-time job as a waiter, surely you'll want to make some cash."

Somehow I've never bought these theories. There is a person here doing a job. He or she is getting paid. If he does a great job, I would commend the restaurant for hiring this guy. I'll definitely recommend it to people. I'll surely come back again. So everyone is benefiting. If he does a bad job, none of the above will happen and if many people feel that way, the place may not exist anymore.

When I was employed, I didn't get paid for every article I wrote, however good it might have been. I never expected readers to pay me 10% of the amount they spent on reading the article (which would include the cost of internet, electricity etc). If I wrote a good piece in a magazine that cost 50 bucks, I didn't get even 1/100th of it as a tip. I just made do with my salary. So how does the logic work differently here?

OK fine. "Sitting in an air-conditioned room and rattling off 800 words is way easier than pleasing a hundred hungry people." But what about the ones who make your bills in retail stores? What about the guy at the bookstore who patiently ferrets out the edition you want. In fact, what about the guy who's cooked all the food you're eating? He's surely done more work than the waiter. Why do we leave these guys out while tipping?

Of course, my stern tipping policy is also usually linked to my shoe-string budget. The Spanish waiters must still be cursing the Pips after what happened a couple of months back. Every place we went, we paid by rounding off to the nearest Euro. So if the bill was 9.97, we ended up paying 10. If it was 9.01, we still ended up paying 10. My logic was, it's evening out anyway. Someone was gaining more, someone was gaining less and we were losing anyway.

But we probably took on sensible decision on that trip. We never visited any place more than once. Never.

Read more about the tipping phenomenon in Neal Templin's Wall Street Journal column.