the year was 1754 the scene a Fleet
Street coffeehouse in London where a
bowl tastefully set in the middle of a
table read
to ensure promptitude t IP thus the
English word tip was born the date and
location of the story are actually
important in many ways the modern
practice of tipping started in the
Industrial Revolution which began in
England around this time as the
aristocracy made more money in the
productivity boom they were more likely
to dine out stay in hotels travel on
trains and come into contact with poorer
people who are serving it became normal
to tip good service by the riffraff and
so tipping trickled downward from the
one percent to the ninety-nine in the
last hundred years though Europe has
slowly moved away from tipping with laws
that force restaurants to pay waiters
higher wages in the US by comparison
tipping has become more and more
mainstream some states only require
restaurants to pay two dollar minimum
wages expecting the rest to be made up
by our generosity each year Americans
spend forty billion dollars on tips
that's more than we spend on foreign aid
and more than we spend on gambling and
like gambling it's not entirely clear
that tipping makes any sense in the
first place there's absurdly little
evidence that tipping makes people
better at their jobs the vast majority
of people don't work for tips and they
seem to be doing just fine it might make
sense if tipping were performance-based
but it's not large party tips tend to be
lower credit card tips tend to be higher
we tip waiters more when they draw a
little smiley faces on our cheque or
touches gently on the shoulder most of
us just tip a certain percent out of
habit one study found that good or bad
service only adds or subtracts as little
as 1% of the total tip the custom of
tipping seems random
yep there's a method to it tipping
started amongst the aristocracy and to
this day we tip when we feel
aristocratic we tip and we have our
shoes shined when we have food brought
to us when we get massages or have our
bags carried but by tipping the people
that make us feel like kings we ensure
that they're paid like paupers Americans
imported tipping from the Europeans
maybe we should copy Europe again pay
people livable wages and stop tipping
altogether