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.

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