TIPPING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 July 1938, Page 8

TIPPING

VICIOUS AMERICAN PRACTICE. Because the American new-rich promoted the practice of tipping everybody to buy special services others could not afford, tipping became our > unwelcome guest, writes Alvin Harlow in “The Forum.” You are liable to | open and flagrant insult today if you don't tip at all or if you don’t tip lavishly enough for the proud modern menial. You get no service at all, or get a grease spot on your coat to remind you that it is the servant who runs the show, not the customer, who has to pay for the meal and pay blackmail as well. Hat-check services and public telephone call stations are illustrations of the vicious circle through which tipping moves. Your excuse for tipping is, “These people get such small salaries I know they need the money.” You are to blame for their small salaries because you have developed tipping to the point where employers rely on it. Today the telephone company expects patrons to pay the operator’s wage at a call station with their tips, and the hat check concession of night clubs has become so valuable that £1,250 and more yearly have been paid for it in New York night club. The girls who tend them are paid a salary and forbidden to touch a penny of the tips. Employers pretending to supply you with food or service at a stated price know you will give the employsee who serve you the rough equivalent of what the employers save in wages. Tippmg nas been raised to . its present absurd importance by the showoff mentality of 99 to 100 Americans who fear being thought pikers by their fellows. In New York, where senseless tipping reaches its peak, you will see clerks and sale-girls eating Is lunches and tipping 6d or 3d. Patross of the “automat” who receive no service drop tips from force of habit for other diners to pick up. The barbers, the bootblacks, and the taxi drivers get plenty; the latter alone in 1930, when the depression was on, took in £6,500,000 in tips, or 1J- times the total passenger revenue of the B. and O. Railroad that year, twice that of the Erie, and five times that of the Reading or the Lackawaina. Metropolitan women earning £5 to £7 10s a week hand out 15s in tips in two hours of shopping. Sales-girls -who get £4 10s a week will tell you that, they can’t afford a permanent wave because, besides the 25s charge, there’d be a 7s 6d tip. “They’d throw it in your face if you tipped less,” they say. In Hollywood some of the world’s wildest tipping goes on. When they finish making a picture the stars and the headliners tip exerybody who has taken part in the production, handing out £2 here, £lO there, and £lOO to a favourite cameraman. Here the tip has become a vested right. A certain star gave her dresser a car and supplied a chauffeur to teach her how to drive it! Beauty-shop operators who catch the fancy of a woman star may be given a house and lot or set up in business on their own.