Tipping

Generally, unless I'm under an enormous amount of some kind of social pressure that I succumb to like a pathetic, dickless little squid-man, I don't tip. Explaining this to people tends make me feel like I'm explaining why I don't think people in Africa deserve fresh water and basic medical care just yet (although all jokes aside, those dirty little fuckers have done nothing to prove to me that they deserve it at this point. Why should you have fresh water or a place to live when all you do is sit around feeling sorry for yourself and looking sad on Oxfam adverts? If I made those faces nobody would speak to me.) This is what people think I am saying. In actual fact I'm very kind to Africans and every time I see one on the tube or the bus I offer him my seat and make sure everything is okay with him. After this I often follow him off when we get to his stop and make sure he uses his Oyster card correctly. If there's a local greengrocer or a market nearby I'll usually buy him some bags of fruit, because that's what they like to eat. If you are going to do this I would suggest mangos because they absolutely LOVE mangos.

Anyway, in regards to tipping, the general consensus seems to be that the debate is more or less over, and that tipping is just The Right Thing To Do. Anyone saying anything to the contrary is petty, cheap, or just a straight up selfish dick. We pretty much reached our peak with that scene in Reservoir Dogs that changed my life when I was 12. For those of you that haven't seen it, here is the full scene in Spanish:

Putting aside the fact that he sounds like the pre-recorded Spanish-speaking steward of questionable sexuality on the plane safety video, you know, the one in the gay suit that tells you to keep your trays down or risk getting stage 3 melanoma on your dick (at least that's what I always assume he's saying, I don't speak very good Spanish and I often get scared and put earplugs in halfway through because I can't tell if it's a warning or if he's threatening me), what Steve Buscemi is saying in this clip is completely correct. He doesn't say all of what I'm thinking, nor does he say none of it. He sits safely in that huge grey area along with Adolf Hitler and a host of others. Maybe I just think the autobahn was a very good idea that he put a lot of effort into, or maybe I think Jews are the cause of all the worlds problems and get really upset when black people win at The Olympics. Nobody will ever know.

With most jobs and staff and customers and face to face conversations and dealings and horrid real life every day things that make me want to become a Wu-Affiliate and cut off my own dick, the price for things is standard (at least in this part of the world), and the only additional currency exchanged on top of that is faces and voices and tones and dickhead remarks. For example, as a gardener, if my work was unsatisfactory, I would know because people would usually say incredibly douchey things and make incredibly douchey faces, and if it was satisfactory I would know because they would say absolutely nothing and not react to me any differently. This system isn't great, but it's preferable to a vaguely standardized, condescending cobbling together of coins for some self-pitying pisspants who would literally shit on your head if it would make their iPhone run slightly faster. As long as they didn't have to look at your stupid shitcunt face while they did it.

I'm not saying all waiters and waitresses and barstaff are bad people, I'm saying most people are bad people, and a waitress isn't your friend just because she smiles politely at you and you like her tits. For all you know she has sex with cats and beats her children. Obviously though it would be extremely unlikely that she would do those things if she was hot, and if she was hot you would probably forgive her a lot quicker for doing them because you're a disgusting little grub. You might even find the cats thing kind of a turn on. Anyway, who knows what these people are like behind their nice smiles and alarmingly well fitting around the arse black trousers? The terrifying reality is that none of us do.

This saucy little cunt doesn't do his recycling, do you still want to give him a tip?

I've seen enough people to know that you aren't neccesarily nice just because you smile at me and bring me salty food that makes me feel temporarily like everything is okay. I know your game. I've seen what people are like, I'm one of them, and I live next to loads of them, and I come from a whole family of them, and I've worked with them, and I see them in shops, and on the tube, and on TV all the time, and on the radio, and around the house, and out the window, and they're in the way when I try and buy things, and I have to look at them all the time and sometimes I think about just ending it all to be honest with you.

The tipping argument really makes no sense whatsoever. It basically hinges on "don't be a cheap fuck!", and the fact that not everybody is either me, or Jewish/Indian/Black/Polish. None of it makes any sense.

"You should tip because they usually only earn minimum wage!"

Hey, guess what cocksucker? Loads of people earn minimum wage, and most of them don't act like big fucking cry babies about it, they just do their shitty job and take their shitty pay and get spoken to like dogshit by everybody, the same way waiters and waitresses and barstaff do, except usually waiters and waitresses and barstaff don't manage to do it without shitting in their pants and crying in front of everybody about how people just don't understand and that they LIVE off tips. Oh, whoops, dangit I'm such an idiot, I'm so sorry you live off tips, please forgive me. While we're on the subject, recently I've been LIVING off of £50 notes from strangers, so I'm kind of gonna need you to give me a £50 note. I don't want it in change. I want a nice crisp £50 because that's what I've been LIVING OFF recently. I've gotten really used to buying the most expensive brand of olive oil and hiring mid-level escorts every day and I need you to fund it. Yes I know you have less money than me but I would like you to give me some anyway or else all these people will look at you like you're dirty. I've tried asking my work to pay me more but they won't so you have to instead.

"You should tip them because they're serving you!"

Whoops, my fault again, I didn't realise they were serving me. The thing is, the people at the game shop that listen to that stupid music all the time are providing a service, the people at BT provide a service (when they feel like it), people that drive buses and trains are providing a service (somehow cab drivers are providing a special kind of service more worthy of free money), people that fix my computer when I get jizz in the vents are providing a service, even the guy that hands out The Evening Standard is providing a service, and yet there is no inordinate amount of social pressure on me to give any of those people a tip. Some of them work for minimum wage too. I've worked for minimum wage for people before and never got tips. Maybe I should have made my tits more visible instead of hiding them and being embarrassed. Maybe then people would have realised I was serving them, and then they'd have put coins out on a little plate for me to pick up and stuff in my pocket like an entitled little grub.

The reality is that most of us don't have the money to tip everybody that from some perspective possibly deserves it to some small degree. If we were to do that we would never have any money, so instead it's a select few that we give tips to and use to feel good about ourselves. We're all just so great with staff, aren't we?

The only half plausible argument for tipping I have ever heard is that in some parts of America it's not always a requirement for people that recieve tips to get standard minimum wage, which is $7.50, instead it's usually at around $2.13, which sounds completely outrageous and unfair until you learn that they are only able to be paid less than minimum wage if the total amount they make including tips is at least the same as minimum wage. This tells you two things, one, that people make an absurd amount of money from tips on the hour, and two, that the people in the Amy's Baking Company episode of Kitchen Nightmares are really, really bad people. It also tells you that other than in extreme and extenuating circumstances, these people always make AT LEAST minimum wage. A lot of people earn minimum wage without the "at least", and with a lot less patting on the back from snotty grandstanding cunts who want to piss and moan at you about the plight of the people that pour coffee in the developed world for a living.

I found some of this out in a rather interesting article on the appropriately named website Jezebel.com. A blogger on there who is a lot less funny and interesting than me has a post named Fuck You if You Don't Tip Your Server (See? Already she's a lot less funny and interesting than me.) In the article, she humourlessly outlines the struggles of waitresses and waiters everywhere, and explains how you should never go to a restaurant if you can't afford it, because to do that and to not tip as a result is outrageous. Never mind the people who maybe also earn minimum wage without tips and would like to occasionally pretend to be like other people by going out for a nice meal on their birthday without being sneered at by feckless, self-important nobodies for not leaving a little offering at the end of the dinner in exchange for a person doing their job at hopefully at least a basic level of competence.

Anyway, there's some great stuff in this article, and by "great" I mean awful, trashy and condescending. Here's some corkers:

"If you can't afford to tip at least 18 percent, then you cannot afford to eat out, period."

Well, no, that's not necessarily true. There's a very pertinent whole 18 percent of the meal cost there that you're just sort of ignoring, you big dumb idiot.

"I'm not trying to beat you up for being poor."

You sort of are a bit though, aren't you? If we're really going to nitpick then I suppose you're trying to beat us up for not un-beating you up because your boss beats you up.

Because really that's the problem, shitty fucking bosses who don't pay people properly. Anybody who runs a succesful business and willingly pays somebody a flatrate of $2.13 an hour whilst asking already paying customers to cough up the rest of their staffs wages is a cunt, no two ways about it. Not only that, but most of these people would pay less than $2.13 if they could. They would pay you in beans if they could get away with it. Some of them probably started out waiting tables too, serving, whinging about how people that serve are so mistreated, and then they open their own restaurants and underpay their staff and ask the customers to cough up extra on top of the 1900% markup they pay on their shitty MSG filled plates of dogshit, contributing to the whole rotten cycle of shame and social pressure and cheapness. The real tight-arse cunts here are the people not paying their staff properly. The fact that they are allowed to not do that and that their customers habitually bail them out doesn't mean that they are any less shitty for doing so. Theoretically I am allowed to not tip, unless I go somewhere where they add it to the bill like a bunch of assuming cunts.

 She then posts a picture from a story published in Gawker recently, saying the following about it: "As Chelsea Welch, the waitress who was fired from Applebee's last week after posting a picture of a receipt, on which an idiot customer wrote "I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?" as her "tip," has spoken out in a new post for the Guardian:" It doesn't really take a genius to look at the picture and see that that's not what it says. Neither version of it really make any sense but the picture is literally right next to her sentence and you'd think she could have at least looked at it before writing about it.

Whoops.

You shouldn't have to clean up other people's mess and you shouldn't be shamed for not righting the wrongs of others every single time you go out to eat. There is literally no reason whatsoever why you have to tip except that everybody does it and you're a pussy and you don't want to look cheap. So few people don't tip that it's impossible to not tip without it seeming like some kind of act of aggression or a statement. I don't care though because it's not for me to correct somebody's sub-par packet, I have my own shit to worry about and dinner is usually expensive enough for my tastes in the first place. Here's a thought, pompous bloggers and entitled waiters and waitresses, how about ask your boss for some more money? How about get a new job? I understand those things aren't always possible but if they aren't it isn't my fault, and I shouldn't be blamed for it every time I pay £8.00 for a £0.50 dinner and shit service from smug pricks and leave without paying extra. The fact that there is a problem with the world does not immediately mean the blame has to fall to the most immediate available person whose face you just saw. There is no other area of work that has this bizarre standard, somehow it's a cultural meme that has only infected the world of "service".

If you're going to tip anybody it should be the people at Tesco Express that also earn minimum wage and have to spend all day standing in the same place, beeping things across a little scanny thing, saying hello to people and giving them prices, and looking at endless droves of gross, entitled, miserable people standing impatiently like pleasure-crazed Romans at an orgy queueing up to dip their penises in fondue cheese and have it licked off by small boys.