Tipping: How Gratuity Replaced Fair Wages in U.S. Restaurants

Summary

When you dine out at a restaurant, you tip your server. It’s the expectation and an essential part of how restaurant workers earn a living. A guest’s tip subsidizes wages for most of America’s restaurant workers. It’s a reality that only exists in North America—the United States and Canada. In most other parts of the world, tips are not expected—and in some cases, it’s considered rude to tip. Most customers don’t think twice about leaving a few dollars on the table or selecting a percentage on a tablet. And most people don’t know the complex and controversial origins of tipping that precede them. History of Tipping: How did gratuity become integral to our restaurant culture? The practice of tipping is straightforward—money in exchange for work or a service. But its roots in America are where the story becomes complicated. (The word itself has been said to be an acronym for “To Insure Promptitude,” but that is merely a myth). Tips were left in European taverns to ensure quick and good service. Wealthy Americans discovered it for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s while traveling in Europe. Tipping in Europe was born in the middle ages, a master-serf custom where servants would receive an extra gratuity for excellent performance. American travelers brought it back to the states as a way to feel aristocratic. But tipping did not take off immediately in the U.S. There was a high level of resistance to it, and tipping was deemed “un-American”. Eating out was already expensive, so why would struggling Americans have to pay more on top of the bill? It also seemed to enforce classist tendencies, where the upper class left a small gratuity for those in the lower classes that worked in the service industry. A January 1915 issue of The Seattle Star about Anne Morgan’s anti-tipping efforts. “Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape. It is a cancer in the breast of democracy,” wrote William Scott in 1916. Despite this resistance, tipping...