As Carl Spackler once said in recounting his day caddying for the Dalai Lama, “HEY! Lama! How about a little something for the effort?”
Sometimes people need to be reminded about leaving a tip.
But nowadays, it seems those reminders are everywhere -- and in places you never expected. That evolution has spurred some backlash from customers and an overall conversation about who deserves a tip and who doesn’t.
In doing this story, I was not surprised to learn that this recent boom of asking for tips for non-traditional tip things like making your coffee or punching in a food order has lowered tips overall by 16%. That can really hurt people who depend on tips for a living.
It also makes you wonder what role corporate America (read: Starbucks) plays in this trend because it essentially lets companies skirt pay raises and acceptable wages because they may now factor in tips as compensation -- even though many customers refuse to tip baristas and the like.
The founder of the Detroit Academy of Etiquette, Danielle Kovachevich, chimed in for this story as well and boiled it down to this: if you can tip, you should tip.
Perhaps that means there will be no money but instead some fortune-cookie wisdom like, “On your death bed, you will receive total consciousness.”
So, hey, you have that going for you . . . which is nice.