America imported tipping from Europe — and then took it too far

In the years after the Civil War, when tipping first sunk its teeth into the American economy, many took a dim view of the practice. Critics rightly viewed it as a European import, borrowed from aristocratic households and continental restaurants and hotels, where it was customary to tip servants, servers or porters. Tipping was a reminder of societies with established classes, hierarchies that detractors said had no place in a democracy.

In his book “Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities,” author Kerry Segrave notes that by 1905, “it was not uncommon in restaurants in cities as large as St. Louis to see signs proclaiming, ‘No Tipping! Tipping is not American!’”

More than a decade later, author William R. Scott published a broadside against tipping, “The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America.” “Every tip given in the United States is a blow at our experiment in democracy,” Scott wrote in the 1916 book. “The custom announces to the world that at heart we are aristocratic, that we do not believe practically that ‘all men are created equal.’”

In the 21st century, tipping has become as American as pickup trucks, Walmart and burgers on the grill. At every turn - and every turn of the countertop tablet - Americans are confronted with a decision on whether to tip - and how much. Restaurant servers, fast-casual counter workers, bartenders, baristas, ride-hail drivers, babysitters, hairdressers, apple orchard owners, impound lot operators and even self-serve kiosks at the airport all want a cut of the action. One of my favorite record stores in Washington, D.C., asks for a tip when I swipe my card. Last year, a Pew Research Center survey indicated nearly three-quarters of American adults say tipping is expected in more places than it was five years ago.

Experts call it “tipping fatigue,” but I sense the phenomenon stretches well beyond fatigue. Americans talk of tipping confusion, tipping anxiety, tipping frustration and even tipping hostility. Countless publications and companies, whether The Washington Post or Toast, have created tipping guides to help consumers wade through this morass of money grubbing.

For the second time in as many months, YouGov asked Americans about their tipping habits, first in a restaurant etiquette survey in April and again in May with a larger poll on the practice. In at least one case, the results show how different our opinions can be from our behaviors: In April, 51 percent of Americans found it “acceptable” to leave no tip after receiving “bad service.” But when asked how much they’d tip for “poor service” at a full-service restaurant, 30 percent of Americans said “nothing.”

More telling perhaps were the 13 scenarios that YouGov posed to nearly 1,150 Americans, curious if diners would tip less than they normally would due to any one of the situations. Half of the respondents said they would tip less for “poor food quality.” Nearly a third said they’d tip less for “overpriced menu items.” Nearly a quarter said they’d tip less for a “long wait time for seating.” Nearly half said they’d tip less if the “restaurant is dirty.”

Notice a common theme? The wait staff has little or no control over the situations, depending of course on who is responsible for the cleanliness of a restaurant. (I’ve been told bussers are responsible; I’ve been told managers are responsible; and I’ve been told everyone on the floor should be aware when a restaurant and its bathrooms take a turn toward the dark side. Whatever the scenario, it’s not always, or even primarily, the servers’ fault.)

American diners, in other words, continue to view tipping as reward or punishment for things that go well or poorly inside the four walls of a restaurant. They don’t see tipping for what it really is in the majority of states that still have a sub-minimum wage - as low as $2.13 an hour - for tipped workers: a way to offload labor costs to customers. We, the American dining public, are responsible for covering much of the payroll for front-of-the-house workers. It’s been this way since the Pullman Company hired many formerly enslaved Black people and paid them substandard wages, requiring them to live largely off the tips they earned catering to White travelers.

The American dining public’s arbitrary checklist of rewards and punishments reminds me of something I read in Segrave’s book: The 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defined a “tip” as a “small present of money given to an inferior, especially to a servant or employee of another for a service rendered or expected.” The 1989 edition relied on the same definition, Segrave noted. (Incidentally, the online OED edition, in 2024, defines the word this way: “A small sum of money given to a porter, waiter, taxi driver, servant, etc., in thanks for a service rendered, to reward good service, or in order to obtain an extra service.”)

For all the progress that the United States has made toward realizing its lofty ideals that all men - all people, rather - are created equal, some of us apparently shift-shape into little tyrants when we pull up a chair at a four-top. Little seems to have changed since 1905 when Elizabeth Banks wrote a piece for the New York Times, under the headline: “Tips Versus Social Equality and Self-Respect.”

Confessed Banks: “I, good American as I consider myself, do look down upon certain persons as my inferiors, and those persons are the ones who accept tips from me, and I expect and demand that they shall treat me as their superior.”

Banks had the cheek to say the quiet part out loud. As a society, we don’t talk in these hierarchical terms anymore - not without a dog whistle - but some of us still play the part when signing the credit card receipt. If we don’t get treated exactly how we expect over the course of an evening, we will exact a toll on the person “serving” us. Those expectations may be reasonable. They may also be arbitrary, such as a perceived “lack of enthusiasm from staff,” which if encountered, will result in lower tips from 45 percent of Americans, according to the YouGov survey.

The attitudes that we carry into restaurants can carry dark undercurrents. Many of us, I suspect, have seen the reports that Black servers are tipped less than their White counterparts, and female servers are sexually harassed on the job - by diners who somehow feel entitled to such behavior. And who can forget how, in the middle of a pandemic, male diners frequently asked women to remove their masks - requests that put servers at risk but increased their odds for a decent tip (when tips were hard to come by).

One activist organization has made the argument that discriminatory tipping, in which people of color earn lower wages than White people, is a violation of the Civil Rights Act. If you read up on its history, tipping has frequently resulted in lower pay for servers who aren’t White. In 1903, an informal survey showed that Black waiters earned between $18 and $22 per month, including tips, while White servers averaged $30 to $35 per month, Segrave wrote in his book.

Tipping, in short, was basically broken from day it was adopted.

Many people and organizations have tried to fix this broken system. It’s a system that much of Europe, that trailblazer of tipping, has already discarded in favor of living wages or service charges, with tips added on top, if a diner is so inclined.

Americans have been railing against tipping from the start. William Howard Taft was “the patron saint of the anti-tip crusaders,” according to the New York Times. The Anti-Tipping Society of America, formed in 1904, asked its members “not to give a tip to anyone for 12 months,” according to Segrave’s book. Little more than a year later, the society went dormant. In the early years of the 20th century, several states created laws that penalized employees, patrons and sometimes employers for accepting or giving tips. All of these statutes were dead by the Roaring ‘20s, if not earlier.

More recently, before he stepped down as chief executive of Union Square Hospitality Group, famed restaurateur Danny Meyer eliminated tips in 2015, only to walk back his decision five years later during the pandemic. Groups such as One Fair Wage are working to end the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, with some success. The Raise the Wage Act of 2023, introduced by both chambers of Congress, would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over five years; the current federal minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - has been in place since 2009. The act would also gradually phase out the tipped minimum wage without eliminating tips.

President Biden has supported the Raise the Wage Act and its efforts to end a sub-minimum wage. Former president Donald Trump, on the other hand, recently said he would eliminate taxes on tips during a campaign stop in Nevada, a state that relies heavily on service workers.

Any effort to eliminate the sub-minimum wage will be an uphill climb. Too many rely on it, not the least of which is the U.S. hospitality industry. The National Restaurant Association has pushed back repeatedly on attempts to eliminate it. So have many servers, who fear diners will tip less if the price of their meal increases as a result of higher payroll costs. Then there’s the whole mess of service fees, which many restaurants have adopted in places that have started to phase out the tipped minimum wage. Consumers are confused and frustrated about these fees - and who benefits from them, even though restaurants are often required to explain where the money goes. One Instagram account in Washington, D.C., tracks how well restaurants are doing in explaining their fees.

But I think it’s important to differentiate between a tip that’s necessary for someone to survive - and a tip that’s a little extra on top of a server’s full pay. The former is a cruel theater of the absurd, where patrons pay only if they like the performance. The latter is a thank you. I’m pretty confident we can live without the former, no matter how painful it’ll be to get there.