TIPPING POINT? |
One of my favourite movie scenes kicks off Quentin Tarantino’s ’Reservoir Dogs’. A group of bank robbers are ready to pay for breakfast in a diner but one of them, Mr Pink, played by Steve Buscemi, refuses to leave a tip, stating that he doesn’t “believe in it”. The group goes on to debate the pros and cons of tipping before Mr Pink is pressured by the others into leaving some cash for their server. It is a great piece of writing that Buscemi later confirmed is “pretty much exactly how Tarantino feels about tipping”. In the US, it is not so much a question of “to tip or not to tip?” but rather “how much to tip?”, or – in my case – “how small a tip can I get away with?”, especially now that establishments are harnessing technology to extract larger tips from customers, but more on that later.
My experience of tipping in the States has been softened by the fact that both times I visited the country I was with an American friend who took charge of a kitty that we all paid into and who took care of the tips wherever we went. It made my holidays there a lot less stressful and only once did I have to negotiate the tipping process alone, an incident I managed to mess up. My friend dropped the whole group off outside a bar and went to park, instructing me to get drinks in. While everyone settled down at a table outside, I went in, ordered the drinks, carried the drinks outside, went back in and paid. When the cashier handed me the change, I waved at her magnanimously and told her to keep it, thanked her, turned and went back outside. When my friend got there from parking the car, he asked me if I had remembered to leave a tip. Of course I had, I said with a sigh, I know how it works. But he pressed me and when he found out exactly how much I had left – a few dollars in change – he looked a little startled, rose and went inside “to put things right”. I imagine he told the cashier that I was a bit slow and from England and that he shouldn’t have left me on my own. My insistence that I had tipped, and that anyway I’d done all the work, fell on deaf ears. We drank up and left under a cloud of shame.
Tipping is a serious business in the States and during that last visit a couple of years ago I noticed that most bars and restaurants had a tablet they presented you with after paying with suggested tips from the lowest to the highest percentage (at least 15% and rising to 25%, or even 30%). In other words, the choice is no longer whether to leave a tip, but how much you are going to leave, regardless of the quality of service. I didn’t see any when I was there, but I was told that even some vending machines will now ask for a tip.
Thank heavens we are not under that level of stress in Europe, where we can pay in a bar or restaurant without feeling like a tightwad who is deliberately trying to prevent the waiter from getting on in life. But then, when I was in London a few months ago, I went to pay in a bar, and as I turned to leave, the cashier reached out and spun round a tablet perched on top of the till. On the screen were three tipping options to choose from. Oh no, I thought, have we reached a tipping point, as it were, and is the relative peace we are used to in Europe about to be shattered by importing America’s absurd tipping system?
THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT
THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT
Catalonia Today 11-01-2026, Pàgina 31
THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT
THE CATALANS WERE RIGHT