Here's a tip for you...don't.

Hello all. I'm back from California and a basketball camp for adults (both of which will hopefully be the topics of upcoming blog posts) and ready to get back to blogging. I thought I would start off with my long standing frustration with how society views tipping. Enjoy.

Unless you think you have underpaid or the person serving you has done something well beyond their job description,….don’t tip. Don’t do it. Don’t give in to the pressure society puts on you to protect the owners of service related businesses to pay slave wages while you are “required” to not only pay for the service or product, but also pay an additional voluntary tax. It’s madness I tell you and it must stop.

I know, your first thought is “this Stump guy is one cheap (expletive)”. I doubt you’re really thinking “expletive”, but sometimes I just can’t print the foul stuff you think. Anyway, basically, you are right. I can be cheap. I don’t like to pay to heat my house. I don’t like paying for sports tickets after years of getting them for free from various friends and employers. I don’t like paying for side dishes in restaurants that sell things a la carte. But this is not a cheapness thing. It’s just time to stop the insanity of a once good practice gone horribly wrong.

I don’t mind paying for good service. In fact, most of the time I will happily pay more for the same product if I can get good service and I am always happy to pay a little extra for better quality. There are some things that I don’t want to spend money on and if that makes me cheap so be it, but my stance (actually more like a zealous campaign) on tipping has nothing to do with being cheap.

Here’s a summary of my personal philosophy about tipping. First, I tip waiters and waitresses; guys who get my bags or car at a hotel; Gina at Hair M who cuts my hair on a regular basis and sometimes cab drivers and pretty much no one else. Second, I will regularly not tip even those people if all they did was there job. Third, I think you should only tip in two situations: (1) where someone working in one of the anointed tipping jobs has gone above and beyond the call of duty to do something nice for you; and (2) when you have legitimate cause to fear reprisal if you don’t tip.

Let me take those one at a time. Who we tip is a funny thing. I have yet to hear a coherent explanation about who should be tipped. Are there rules for this somewhere? I know some people that tip anyone that wanders within 5 feet of them. Some guy says “good morning” on the sidewalk and some people will slip them a “5 spot” with the customary, if not obligatory nod and wink that comes along with it. Otherwise sane people leave money in an envelope for a maid at a hotel they’ve never seen even when they forget to pick up the dirty towels.

(Tangent Alert, Tangent Alert)

Have you noticed that in hotels now they ask you to reuse your wet and dirty towels to help do your part to protect the environment? Has there ever been a lamer more obvious attempt to exploit concerns about the environment for some other motive completely by anyone not named Gore? If Hilton cared so much about the environment they would do something about the horrible visual pollution that is Paris and Nikki. They don’t care whether some species of frog is wiped out because of all the detergent in the water, they just don’t want to do so much laundry. I’m still waiting for my wife to catch on to this and post a sign over what is now our laundry pile at home that reads: “Help us do our part to protect the environment, please just hang up your underwear at night and reuse them until your entire wardrobe is declared a Superfund site by the EPA.”

(And we’re back…)

People also tip the hostess at a restaurant, the bus boy, the guys at the car wash, stewardesses, the hotel concierge, Walmart greeters, water meter readers, 8th grade assistant math coaches and on and on. I would love to know, by the way, from anyone reading this, who is the weirdest person they or someone they know has tipped. I know a guy who claims to have tried to tip an airplane pilot once for an especially smooth landing, but was turned down.

My favorite though, is the tip cup by the register at a coffee place, deli, or the like. What am I tipping for there exactly? Was it the particularly efficient way they punched the buttons on the cash register, only asking me 6 times if I wanted large or medium? Was it the clever saying on the tip cup itself (“Change will do us good”, “How ‘bout a tip? And we don’t mean advice”)? Was it the fact that they almost gave me correct change? They didn’t even walk the food out to me. They just handed me something and took more of my money than I wanted to give them and then have the nerve to ask for more. Ridiculous!!

No joke, last week I got the oil changed on my car and went in to pay at “Jiffy Express Lube in a Flash” or whatever it was, and there was a tip cup on the counter. What? For what? Who gets that money? The woman at the counter who has the grueling task of ripping the edges off of that dot-matrix, triplicate printer paper? She actually deserves extra for that? Or maybe the guy who has never in his life seen an air-filter that didn’t need replacing. Maybe he gets the 49 cents in the cup. Whoever gets it, they didn’t get any from me because…well…I haven’t completely lost my mind.

The second prong of my tipping philosophy is the apparently radical notion that a tip is something you pay when someone gives you something beyond the product or service that you have already paid for. If it is someone’s job to take my order from me to the kitchen and then pick up the food and bring it back to me and then check on me from time to time to see if I need anything else, and that is exactly what they do, why should they get extra money? Like most people, I get paid to do my job. When I send a bill to a client, they never, and I mean never, ever, ever, never, send back “a little somethin’ extra” with they’re payment of the bill no matter how friendly I am or how great a job I do.

So what’s the difference between a lawyer, a doctor, an account manager, a sales person, a marketing director and a waiter? Here’s what people (that think I am pure evil for my views on tipping) tell me when I pose this question. “Waiters have to work very hard and don’t make much money.” That may be true and may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Ok, not really, Bill Walton says dumber stuff in every game he calls, but it’s close. Ask yourself this. Do you work hard? Do you feel adequately compensated for what you do? How about public school teachers? Do you think maybe shaping the minds of our future leaders and neighbors while having to be teacher, parent, friend, counselor, etc., might, just might be about as tough as remembering to bring someone a drink refill? And is there a group of people less properly compensated than teachers? Well, when was the last time you tipped a teacher?

The other problem I have with this argument is since when is what someone else gets paid for their chosen profession my fault or my problem? If being a waiter doesn’t pay well, get a better job, don’t ask for handouts from me. Or, go to the person whose job it is to pay you and get them to do a better job of it. I have no doubt that most service people get paid little to do hard work, but that is an issue to take up with their employers, not with their customers. I would much prefer them simply raise prices and pay better wages, because at least then I would understand what I’m paying for. I recently ate at a restaurant where someone commented that our waitress deserves a big tip because she had to go up and down stairs to get to the kitchen. So, let me get this straight. I’m already paying $3.00 for a Pepsi that cost the owner about 4 cents, I’m forking over $25 for twice as much food as a normal human could eat because portion sizes are so ridiculous, and now I have to pay extra because the owner chose to put the kitchen upstairs? What about if my waiter has to walk to work, should I add another 5% to the tip? What if the heater in their apartment stops working, are we now up to a 35% tip? This line of thinking makes less sense than the Oregon law that forbids you from pumping your own gas….and that’s saying something.

When someone goes out of their way for me, I tip and tip well. When someone simply does their job, with nothing else, I tip nothing or a token because I am a slave to society’s pressures. When someone gives me really bad service I tip a quarter. That way, they can’t just tell themselves I must have forgotten the tip, but face the fact that they did a horrible job. Almost no one I know practices this same thinking, but I have yet to hear a justification for tipping 15-20% regardless of what the actual service was like.

So when should you tip? There are really only two situations. First, when someone does something for you beyond what their job requires. The classic example for me is when a restaurant requires that I pay an additional $3.00 for every Pepsi I order, but the waitress just keeps refilling without charging me. That person gets a fat tip. Though, again, I don’t know what makes wait-people so special. For example, if your elected official does something a little extra for you, slip him something extra for his effort…oh, wait…that’s called something different. Forget I said that.

The second situation is what my wife calls “extortion tipping.” When you have to go back to the same hotel/restaurant/barber/etc, again and again, tip them no matter what. Good service, bad service, just tip them and walk away. They expect to be tipped and you don’t want to risk foreign substances in your food, unwashed sheets neatly tucked in just to fool you, or a haircut that looks like Donald Trump (what does he say when his barber asks “what you want done this time Mr. Donald?” “Oh just make it look as fake as possible and we’ll go with that.”)

One more thing before I go. The included gratuity is the final insult. This is just a tax, plain and simple, and it doesn’t even fix roads or pay for more police. I was just in Miami and noticed that every restaurant included 15% gratuity with the price for any size group (not that that should matter). My head nearly exploded. How can you make me tip before I even know whether the service has been good? Even better, though, was the fact that they still had a line on the receipt for me to add additional gratuity. Oh there was plenty I wanted to add, but none of it was money.

I think we are approaching a time when a bellhop or waiter will simply sit you down and say, “look, I need an extra $250 from you to make it through the week. Do you want to pay it or shall I sneer at you for being cheap and then spit in your salad?” We already have tip cups for people that do nothing and included gratuity, we aren’t that far away. And what sours me more than anything is the fact that people are so snooty about their tipping. Most people seem to believe that leaving a large tip makes them a better person. I have sad news for you. It just makes you someone who enjoys giving away their money for no good reason. Maybe in your mind that makes you better than me. But then again, I’ll have my whole family in their winter coats under a blanket in our living room before turning on the heater, so maybe I am just a cheap…hey, watch your mouth.