From the Editor’s Desk: Tip (Premium)

With the holidays already upon us, a friend and “vecino” in our apartment in Mexico City asked us to contribute to a year-end tip that we collectively give to the gentlemen who provide 24/7 security to the building and its residents. This is still unfamiliar territory for us, but a no-brainer, and of course because it’s Mexico, the amount we pay is so small it’s embarrassing.

This request was also timed coincidentally between two recent episodes involving friends and family members who don’t know how to tip properly, one of my many pet peeves. On the one hand, we have the two who overtip obscenely and on the other an individual who never tips enough.

I’m not sure which one is worse.

I referenced the over-tippers this past August, but now they’re routinely doing this in a restaurant we all go to regularly, and I don’t get it. On our most recent outing, we each had to pay about $60 for our share of the meal, and they each rounded up the bill to an even $100, leaving me in a bit of a bind: I tip generously, or at least I think I do, and now consider 20 percent to be the minimum assuming no issues. But they vastly over-tipped, to a waiter that none of us knows and who didn’t provide notable service in any way. If I had left nothing, he still would have gotten a roughly 45 percent tip. But who am I punishing here? I left him 20 percent, but I walked away from the table in a funk.

Then we experienced the opposite end of this spectrum, again during a group dinner, and in this case, I ended up leaving our waitress, who was amazing, $20 extra in cash. Granted, I had seen this one coming, given our past. During the pandemic, I had driven with the person in question to a restaurant to pick up food we had ordered, and he picks up food rather than have it delivered to save money on the delivery charge and the tip. But I was still surprised when he paid but didn’t leave a tip, and when I asked about this, he said it was unnecessary because all they did was hand him some bags of food. I argued that we were literally living in a pandemic, that it was dangerous for them to be doing what they are doing, and that we should thank them for even being open, and I ended up leaving $20 in the tip jar. Same thing: It felt wrong, and I walked back out to the car in a funk.

For a variety of reasons, tipping has become a hot-button topic this year in the U.S., and I suspect it’s related to the pricing escalation, both real and imagined, that we see most clearly in our little corner of the world in subscription services. But the outrage I see expressed everywhere to what seems to be more and more places and times when tips are requested is, I think, misplaced. Worse, it’s clear to me that the very people who are most outraged by this are those who can best afford it. This bothers me.

Despite having just averted what would otherwise have been a recession, we are all experiencing higher prices and associated costs (interest rates, for example), and pretty much everywhere. What the entitled seem to forget is that this issue impacts those in service-based industry more than it does them. And that the increasing number of times in which one is confronted by a request for a tip is growing often because of technology changes, not because people are looking for more handouts: We don’t pay with cash that much anymore, and so we’re now confronted by tipping choices on screens and other electronic payment points.

The Washington Post—which continued its insane anti-Pixel AI photo editing editorializing well past the time I wrote about it in October—has taken a similarly distorted stance on the tipping drama by writing about this topic again and again. And if I have to read one more article in which an entitled idiot complains about being asked to tip when all the person on the other side of the counter did for them was to put a tea bag in hot water and hand them the cup, I’m going to cancel my subscription. That person makes far less money than the tea drinker and the cash tips they used to rely on, which that customer found easier to ignores, are no longer making up the difference. This isn’t rocket science.

The under-tipper I note above is such a person, of course, a complainer. And I’m reminded now of the time we once delayed our entry into a local fair when we visited together because, as they explained to my wife and I, the tickets were free after 2 pm. We had wanted to go earlier, and would have happily paid the $8 entry fee to do so. But we went later, and saved $16. And as we walked around the fair, I commented to my wife that this person who insisted that we dodge the fee almost certainly earned more money than every single person we encountered that afternoon. It was depressing just thinking about it.

I know things are different elsewhere, and that readers from Europe, especially, will chime in with how unnecessary this all is. And I get that. As a long-time international traveler, I love that waiters and others in the service industry there typically earn a living wage and are otherwise supported with health care and retirement funding the likes of which we’ll never see here in the U.S. But things are just different here, and of course we run into issues with international travelers who come to the U.S. and either don’t know—or, more likely, pretend to not know—how tipping works here. It’s just the way it is.

So I try to do my part. And only my part, unlike my over-tipping buddies. This is a good time of year to remember the people who are on the periphery of our lives, helping us by delivering things to our house, serving us food in restaurants, cutting our hair, whatever. And let them know that they matter. Because they do matter. And you can afford it.

PS: Vecino is Spanish for neighbor. The person in question routinely starts group texts with “Hola vecinos!”, which I find curiously endearing.