Just as a point of reference, I’ve traveled extensively in places where servers and hospitality workers are indeed paid a living wage and tips are in no way needed for them to help make ends meet.
They still very much appreciate a tip for service well done.
Tom Douglas, the Seattle restauranteur and generally all-around nice guy, was originally strongly against Seattle’s minimum wage increase and strongly in favor of tipping, but he now says he was completely wrong and he’s phasing out tipping at all his establishments in favor of a standard 20% service charge.
Has nothing to do with being better. Has everything to do with paying for a service, which is what I do when I pay the bill.
I don’t know what you do when you’re in a hotel. I sleep in the bed, and that’s about it.
That’s the other thing to keep in mind about tipping – it scales.
If you’re basically sleeping in a bed, not making a mess, etc, then all they need to do is some basic sweeping, trash, linens, etc. Leave them a buck, they’ll appreciate it.
If you’re a family with kids who threw cereal everywhere then you really should throw them more money. You’re taking their time.
I’d love to, but I can’t even remember the last time I actually encountered the staff cleaning my hotel room. I somehow don’t even encounter them in the halls. (My stays are usually very short and I’m not spending a ton of time at the hotel itself.)
I leave a quick thank-you note with the tip, to make the interaction a bit more personal and intentional. Best I can do. /shrug
Thanks for the reply Orenwolf. I think if boingboing is going to post on a topic like this they should address the conversation they started in previous posts, otherwise it is just like the other clickbait that the internet is filled with. Nothing saying you can’t come up with a different conclusion but you should at least address the concerns your publication has already posited.
Now in addressing your point, I completely agree that everyone who works deserves a living wage and if the business they are in can’t support that then maybe that service is too cheap. If no one will pay a living wage for a service maybe that service shouldn’t be done by anyone. The practice of tipping allows business and governments to sidestep the responsibility of paying someone a living wage. I don’t think that expanding the classes of people we tip is helpful.
Why are we choosing this industry specifically? Do you tip when you order fast food? Certainly people working there are low wage. Do you tip at the grocery store checkout? What about all the underpaid people in the commerce chain before product or service reaches you? Why do we tip the waiter and not the people preparing food or the dishwasher? Fighting for a living wage brings everyone up.
Such is the wonder of a collective of many minds. They each provide their unique perspective on a subject, from multiple angles.
As indeed, an issue rarely is one-dimensional.
I am lucky enough to live in a part of the world which offers universal healthcare, free prescriptions for children, and a $14 Minimum wage. However, I often travel to regions where this is not so, and do indeed fill the tip jar at every establishment I can when I do so.
In my opinion it does, though.
A person who readily acknowledges the humanity and struggles of other people in subservient positions is a better caliber of human than one who takes such people for granted and/or actively resents them.
You’re replying to a straw man. I specifically didn’t address restaurant staff, because we all slid down that slippery slope already a long time ago (ie society has already accepted that the actual price of the meal is the menu listed price plus tax plus tip, which is understood to be a relatively fixed percentage of the bill. In essence this is no longer a tip but a simple if indirect pricing system. And anyone who does not leave a ‘tip’ is simply not paying the full socially accepted price for their meal).
Most of the rest of your post addresses ‘extra work.’ No problem rewarding someone individually for extra work at all. But thetrs a big difference between rewarding someone for extra work vs institutionalizing a ‘tip’ system in yet another industry. The original post was not advocating a reward for individual extra work; it was advocating a generic system of tipping hotel staff. To which my point remains, if we should tip hotel staff automatically, then why not the other positions mentioned in my post? No link to ‘extra work,’ just a system where anyone who performs any service should receive ‘tips’ from those who benefit. If you are a city worker working in a manhole every day cleaning up the sewers, and you are not receiving tips from random passersby, and you save up enough for a weekend getaway, why should you pay more than the hotel rate to someone doing their job, just like you do every day?
And counter to the argument that being against tipping is somehow stingy, the opposite is true. Workers in any position deserve a stable, transparently applied income, they deserve to be protected by a minimum wage, and if for any reason someone does want to reward them for extra work, they deserve to keep the reward or share it as they please. But this is not how the institutionalized tipping structure works.
Regarding acknowledging someone’s had work, sure, why not? No relation to formalized tipping.
Should read ‘hard work’ in last line
Tipping has been a part of the hotel industry for a good long time. When I worked in one, behind the front desk, there were basically two people a guest might encounter but not be expected to tip: me, and the house dick. That was 40 years ago.
And here I thought I was the only one that did that. I feel really weird about having some stranger come in and clean my room. Maybe I’m weird but I like my mess being in place how I left it when I come back to my room.
ETA I’ll still leave a few bucks for the cleaning staff before I leave.
Wait, you’re supposed to tip the person at the front desk too?
You note that there were 2 people in your hotel who would not tip; if I understand your comment correctly, both of these were hotel staff? In which case 100% of guests tipped?
That’s certainly an outlier, as the latest surveys I found note that ‘less than 30% of guests tip’.
http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/11/21/tipping-hotel-houskeeping/
I’m not that far off from the author of this article. And the general points still remain: od tipping is a nice gesture from one person to another, awesome, more power. If it’s institutionalized, then it becomes part of a staff’s wages, but without the transparency, stability, or legal protections to the staff that regular salary has. One reason that institutionalized tipping actually benefits the owners is that they are passing business risk to the staff. Wages must be paid whether customer traffic is good or not. But tips are directly correlated to customer traffic. For business owners this is naturally attractive, but for staff and guests, they don’t usually seem to understand the actual function of the tip.
It’s like when Walmart organizes good drives for their staff: this appears heartwarming until the underlying implications become clearer.
I know it seems to have a mind of its own, but calling it another person is a bit…
No, I was one of the two people you’re not expected to tip.
No, there were 2 employees you were not expected to tip. The dative case: not just the latest product from Samsonite.
Tipping is not a requirement, you never have to do it, but if you don’t tip (or undertip) the restaurant wait staff you’re an asshole (Judy Collins, I’m looking at you), if you don’t tip the housekeeping you might have not realized it was a thing but might be an asshole, if you don’t tip the bellhop or concierge after using their services nasty things might happen to your luggage or car or theater reservation.
Okay, so can you make a list of all the people we are supposed to tip?
I get the feeling that I am secretly supposed to grease everyone’s palms like some mafia guy, but that seems dirty and wrong. Why the fuck can’t we just pay people once?
But why shouldn’t we tip people at the front desk. They are probably under-paid too! Those poor people need more money too. We should make it a social obligation to tip everyone who doesn’t make a liveable wage. /S
Look, I get the gist of this article, I just can’t get behind more tipping. Tipping is an annoying and irrational system that we created halfway between bribery and blackmail. It doesn’t improve service, it isn’t fair to workers, and is just a mess. That is when it is used as intended to tip for service.
Starting a social campaign that we should fix shitty pay with tips is insane. We shouldn’t shoehorn in our worst pay system into a new industry to help a social problem!!!
Now, that being said:
If you have a threesome with a wookie in your hotel room, leave some extra money for housekeeping. Always been the rule.
If you have 2 kids at Disney who glitterbomb the room, leave some money.
These aren’t “a tip”. This is an acknowledgement that you did something awful that wasn’t covered under the traditional social contract of housekeeping service.
It’s always fascinating to me how belligerent some people get about the idea of thanking other people monetarily. This really isn’t that difficult a concept, honestly. It’s customary all over the world, not just the USA, to acknowledge service through a few bucks here and there.
This is the basic thing to keep in mind: service people are massively underpaid, across the board. Yes, you’re paying $200 to stay in a hotel room, but you’re not giving $200 to a maid. Yes, you’re paying $30 for that cab ride, but you’re not literally paying your cabbie $30. Yes, you’re paying $40 for your meal, but I hope you aren’t thinking that your waiter is pocketing $40. They get a tiny slice of that. A few dollars, cash, is a way to directly say “thank you” to the people helping you out and be a nice person. That isn’t “bribery”. You are not being forced to tip. But refusing to tip absolutely makes you a bad person, yes.
My pay was fine compared to most of these other employees, and my job was much easier. So was the detective’s pay; I think the hotel manager was a little afraid of him.
There were other employees who were grossly underpaid but had no contact with guests so couldn’t expect tips, as much as they deserved them; this included, for example, the kitchen night cleaning staff who were mainly illegal immigrants and very vulnerable.
I wil get on the “don’t tip!” bandwagon as soon as the US adopts a relative earnings limit or similar law. Until that time, I will tip, and view those who don’t roughly the way I view people who don’t pick up their dog’s poop when out walking.
