Miscommunication in Tips

I was at Starbucks today and left a $0.96 tip for the baristas. I had ordered a grande white chocolate mocha, totalling a bill of $4.04 and thus the $0.96 was my change. Therefore, when you consider that you tack gratuity before tax, I had tipped nearly 25%. No. I had tipped more than that. This is a ridiculous percentage, especially for those drink monkeys at Starbucks who aren't waiters at Black Angus.

Ah, and here is the point of this whole thought process: tipping is not gratuity. There is a grave misconception in the service sector that a person who does not leave a tip is a dick. But, frankly, why should he leave a tip? He has paid for his order and has every reason in the world to believe that his server (barista, waiter or whatever) is being reimbursed for services rendered by the establishment. That is to say, the server is an employee and therefore paid for the work they are doing by the employer.

The word "gratuity" is derived from the Latin word gratia, which is literally translated as "grace." Any hack can define grace as "unmerited approval." Nothing merits "gratia." You don't earn grace. You do not earn a tip. A tip is something given out of the genuine compassion of an individual.

Why, then, do we have a "customary" tip level? Because somehow grace became a social institution. For some bizarre reason a person is expected to be kind with his money even if he can bark at a waitress for getting his order wrong. Getting an order wrong earns no tip, but getting an order right--something the waitress is already paid to do--earns her extra cash. There is something wrong here.

And I think I know what's wrong. The whole idea of customary tipping is based on a--wait for it--Christian view of society. For 1500 years in Europe, Christianity was the unquestioned supreme religion. Islamic imperialism knocked on the doors a few times, even overran a good deal of Christendom (it's Istanbul, not Constantinople), but Christianity remained at the heart--both physically and metaphorically--of Europe and therefore the Western world.

Central to the worldview cultivated by this society was that a person, Christian or not, lived in a state of perpetual grace. They were given life that they did not deserve, got a day of life-giving rain they did not deserve, and a day of sunshine to dry the wet land that they did not deserve. The response to such divine benevolence was to respond in kind by imitating that grace and bestowing on others that which they did not deserve, such as a tip for services rendered.

And then came this strange age in which the whole of Christian philosophy is swept aside, but the social institutions it left behind are gobbled up by the secularists.

I am not sure what this all means, but it is thoughts I have on "tipping." I never calculate a tip because I think it's an insult to the concept of gratia.