What is – or is not – the right amount of tip? This is the question of all time, perhaps even greater than ‘What is love?’, or ‘How heavy is Sachin’s bat?’, or ‘When does Shah Rukh Khan sleep?’ (Never.) Every nation has an analysis on tipping, a theory, an ethics mandate based on the DNA of its citizens. And how it treats the working classes.
Ours, for example, is a culture of last-minute negotiation. At any train station, you’ll agree on a price, and when the [fill in whatever the politically correct word for ‘coolie’ is here] would have delivered the said bags, you would renege on the original price, saying you never offered it, while he would renege on it, saying he never accepted it. Much chaos and melodrama would ensue, and a settlement would be reached.
At posh restaurants, there’s just a classier way to have this same argument, veiled in the guise of polite questioning. ‘Is service charge included?’ would be the opening gambit. ‘No ma’am’, would be the waiter’s reply – the subtext being, ‘I work in a terrible place with horrible pay. Tip me’. And the lady would leave a tip which in India could vary from ₹9 to ₹9,000, covering the extent and range of insanity, self-educated understanding of restaurant pay scales, and diverse economic thinking.
There’s also, ‘Why have you included a service charge?’ angle, meaning the patron is not happy at a pre-decided tip. He or she would like to display their Marxist understanding with their own calculation of the ephemeral value the waiter brought to the experience.
By comparison, in France, for example, the waiter pretends he is doing you a favour by serving, when his real skills lie in art, where he will leave Van Gogh in the dust, as soon as he’s done clearing up your espresso. In Britain, there’s a 10-15% assumption. But it seems like the wait staff are paid well enough. So, they won’t shoot you if you didn’t tip and ran.
Then there are places like Dubai where the waiters and drivers and attendants look far wealthier than the patrons they serve, and often you think, based on their clothes and what they drive and other shallow things, whether you should quit your job and do what they are doing. When the taxi is a Ferrari, I’m not sure the 5% tip would create a huge economic wave for the driver. All of this, of course, leads me to the OG of the tipping debate gripping the world (by which I mean me). Recently, on a trip to the US, I walked up to a Starbucks and ordered a coffee. A person asked me what coffee I’d like. I mentioned it. And a little screen was put in front of me asking for a tip. A similar thing happened at a post office, a bus ride, a grocery store, and a hotel check-in. This led to a conundrum I wasn’t expecting. Should there be a tip for a person just doing his or her job? And should the organisation employing them not pay them enough so that customers have to? Would the next step be tipping pilots, doctors, Broadway actors, immigration officers?
As a confused frightened foreigner, I tip everyone unsure of what the amount should be and most certainly not being able to afford it. One isn’t sure what the consequences of not tipping would be. Would the coffee not arrive? Would the bus not leave? Would my post not reach? Or would it reach later than the person that gave 20% extra to the postman?
Luckily, I write this column in India where money and journalism have long separated and divorced. If I was in America, I’d be saying: You’ve read this, now tip me.