Maybe he thought you were a counterfeiter.
I absolutely can't imagine a manager telling their staff that they can't accept tips if the customer is insistent, so I think it's the kid's own doing.
I can. My parents' store is the same.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not 'kids these days.'
The kid was told he would be fired for taking a tip and you put him in a bad spot by insisting.
Really? What jerks. I could see a manager saying, "Decline the tip, but if the customer overrides you, accept it politely" but it seems super jerky to make them really REALLY say no.
On a different note, I spent too long puzzling over the second graph here.
My theory is that they've got a rigid rule in their head, "Tipping is for restaurants", and not a more general, "tipping is for the service industry" rule, because they basically haven't been in any service situations besides restaurants. And so since they're unaware of the larger cultural custom, it feels like awkward charity.
I think this is right. The list of service people who get tips is kind of odd. Cab drivers. Hotel room cleaners. Hairdressers. A teenager in your town will have experienced tipping in a restaurant 100 times more than all these put together.
In NYC, I saw tip jars at some supermarket checkouts that I assumed were for the cashiers and baggers*, but I don't think I've seen them elsewhere.
*Probably not for the cashiers, but cashiers did some of the bagging, so.
Baggers probably (hopefully) aren't paid below minimum wage because they are expected to get tips.
I hate tipping (in the eighteenth century, btw, they called it "vails"). I probably sometimes give "too much," because the whole transaction makes me feel guilty and uncomfortable, and then I overcompensate.
I'd rather every worker earn a decent wage, with a guaranteed minimum income, and universal benefits (housing, health care, education) for all.
But given that this is America: yeah, you really should tip generously. It can be awkward, though, which is why I support a nanny-state Soviet Canuckistani system.
At my parents' store, the pharmacy will give my parents full pill boxes (sorted into the right space in a four space per day, seven day container) every week. They don't charge for it and provide all the boxes. This must take them half an hour (my parents won Medicare Part D).
Grocery stores compete on customer service is my point (except the ones that compete solely on price). I think they're afraid they'll lose business to Wal-Mart if customers thought the service required a tip.
At the grocery store in GTMO, there's a sign at the check-out saying that the baggers are only paid with tips.
I worked at Publix for a few years, and the store had a very strong anti-tipping policy. They paid us slightly more than minimum wage to compensate.
I would have tipped generously if someone could round up all the school supplies and put it in a single container for me. I don't understand why the grocery store doesn't do that - they have the district wide supply list right there, and they've highlighted all the correct items on the shelf, and your supplies don't stay with your kid anyway. They could stock the bag with the store brand items.
#15 they don't group the stuff 'cause they want you to wander aimlessly through the store and have your kid ask for sc noted markers and the like.
What is up with mandatory school supply sharing, anyway? When I was in grade school, all my crayons and pencils were mine, and if I ran out I had to bring more.
Wait, I think I figured it out. It's so those who use their crayons liberally will be subsidized by those who conserve their crayons, isn't it?
4 is probably right and he thought you were a narc.
11 is correct, the sooner tipping dies a fiery death the better. It also promotes racism and sexism. In enlightened topless (really, saw it again yesterday) countries it's much less common.
When we went to buy school books for the kids- sadly you have to buy your own here, even for kindergarten- no going around to shelves to find them, you just tell the cashier what school and grade, he looks it up in a book, you pay a deposit and come back in a couple weeks to get them and pay the balance. This was very useful for dealing with multiple kids all in different grades.
Definitely agree with the anti-tipping sentiment. I tip generously but hate having to do it. At least I live in a state that doesn't exempt tipped employees from the minimum wage (which does lead to higher prices but I'm fine with that).
I always tipple generously.
First, I was a dick and didn't tip on the grounds that they were already getting paid.
Then I realized they weren't really getting paid, and started tipping.
Then, I moved to another country, and was confused.
I feel that I represent in my person the life-cyle of left-liberal progressivism.
OTish but 84 hours between parking my car at the airport and getting back in it again was the longest break I've had in almost six years of parenting and thus amazing, even with the sleeping-in-an-airport piece. Tipping when I'm happy is easy, but I'm not always sure who expects or is supposed to get a tip in less-familiar contexts.
I was sure 23 was going to end, "And then I got a job as a waiter and there was no one left to tip me."
I endorse 2 and 5. I have actually been chased down the road by a waiter in a no tipping establishment to return the cash I left under my plate.
24: Don't tip the TSA agents. They take it poorly.
6: My friend who bagged at a supermarket told me that they had a strict no tipping policy.
24: You left the kids in the car for six days?
When I worked at a grocery store putting bags in cars, there was a firm "no accepting tips" policy and supposedly someone got fired for taking a tip from an 'undercover' manager (family-owned small chain so the owning family had lots of scions everywhere)
30: Am I that bad at math? Thursday afternoon to early-in-the-morning Monday. And no, they have another parent who can care for some of them in annoyingly tiny intervals, plus my parents stepped up. I need to make things like that happen more often, go to the next giant blog meetup or whatever. Also sleep, sleep should happen more.
24/30/32: 84 hours doesn't add up to six days, not the way I do math. However, if you were parenting again the minute you got to your car, presumably your kids were in it. Either your kids were in the car in the airport parking lot for six days, or even though you parked your car yourself someone else drove it away with the kids in it afterwards, or you glossed over the time between dropping the kids off with someone and getting out of the car, or the car itself counts as a kid.
33: Stop giving Thorn such a hard time! I'm sure she left the window open a crack.
Oh, crack parenting, like that's any better.
I was just talking to a friend who works in restaurants about tipping. Her comment was that when restaurants are forced to pay "living wage" and eliminate tipping, worker wages go down, not up. She recommended against patronizing the one faux-social justice (faucial justice!) place in town that does this, because the workers make less than anywhere else.
This is what I'd always suspected based on a little bit of mental math but upper middle class people had always told me that I was wrong and that getting rid of tipping would boost wages.
(Not that I'd object to paying a real living wage - let's say about $17/hour here in MPLS assuming 40 hours a week and benefits - rather than tips, but that's usually not what's on offer.)
I think it depends on what type of place it is. Certainly somebody good at a higher-end restaurant does better than $15/hour, but I think it would be a mistake to think of that was the entirety of the "tipped" workforce.
Her comment was that when restaurants are forced to pay "living wage" and eliminate tipping, worker wages go down, not up.
When you say, "workers" does that include dishwashers, etc . . ., or just servers (my impression is that tip-sharing is fairly unusual and that, in general, servers do significantly better financially than many other restaurant jobs) ?
33: I was only counting the car time. The parenting time is different, praise the gods of daycare!
You could tip them. Except probably only at Christmas as far as I ever saw it done.
Tipping grocery baggers has always been verboten everyplace I've been where they have baggers.
I figure the logic of the policy goes like this: bagging your groceries and schlepping them out to your car for you keeps the checkout lines moving faster, gets the carts returned to where they belong instead of becoming parking lot obstacles, and makes the customer feel like they're getting extra service.
As soon as that service has an expectation of a tip attached to it, it feels to the customer less like a service and more like another way to increase the cost of a shopping trip. So anyone who is actually happy to bag and schlep for themselves will refuse the service, leaving the bagging labor unused, and removing the efficiencies that the service acheived for the store.
So stop trying to break the grocery store, Heebie.
I don't think that many places outside of the US do the whole bagging-and-schlepping thing (although I speak from a fairly small sample). Now that I live someplace that doesn't, I miss it, primarily for the keeping-the-line-moving aspect. I get kind of stressed out when I fall behind the checker and my unbagged stuff starts to build up.
Here is a US behavior that drives me nuts: Friendly checker scans item after item, piles them up or carefully fiddles into bag. Wealthy shopper stares into smartphone, refuses to touch groceries but occasionbally expresses preferences for how items should be put into the fancy bags that they brought.
The whole line moves faster if you bag your own fucking groceries. This seems to me especially pronounced in fancy stores, though possibly that's false because I am more irritable there.
In topless enlightened europe, the checker snarls at you and just shoves your stuff downstream, if you need a bag say so before she finishes or you get the evil eye. The little markets where you order over a counter bag for you, but not big ones.
The whole line moves faster if you bag your own fucking groceries.
I don't think this is right, because you have to take a break from bagging to pay (with a card, as is common) or the transaction takes longer, and if you prioritize the card over the bagging then you're annoyingly still bagging while the next person moves to the register and glares at you for not moving your shit. I think it's no-win generally, but slightly better to have a second person bagging on balance.
(Also this is the one thing I am truly neurotic and phobic about: angry people behind me in line. I can barely joke about it, it's so stressful, and I'm really fucking fast in general, to the point of rudeness. If I ever do kill myself, it will be after accidentally pressing "no" for "$95.42 ok?" while paying for a sharp knife, loaded firearm, or cyanide capsule at the crowded suicide mart.)
44: Isn't that what the beloved David Foster Wallace commencement speech is about?
So stop trying to break the grocery store, Heebie.
But this was an unusual service! I had already not tipped my cashier and bagger like a good consumer. These guys were loading groceries in ponchos in the pouring rain.
43:
Here my part of the US, 80% of lines are self-checkout now. The only people using human checkers are old people who want to chat as much as get groceries, and people buying beer.
You're in a high-tech wonderland. They're pretty rare in Pittsburgh. And Nebraska doesn't have many of them at the stores my parents go to.
The stores we've gone to the last few weeks you have to buy bags- 10 to 75 cents depending on quality (reusable or not)- and as far as bagging they have this little divider they flip back and forth between each order so that you can still be bagging when the next person is having their things scanned. I'm not sure what happens if you take so long that the person two behind you needs the space- presumably the ubiquitous security guard grabs you and it's off to the communist salt mines.
Here, self-checkout is always 10-20 items or less.
If you have nine things, buy one more and try the self-checkout.
47: I'd say 40 percent of the checkout lines at the two grocery stores I go to are self-checkout. Maybe it's up to 80 percent if not counting the checkout lines that aren't staffed in off-hours, but physically the registers are there.
I prefer the human checkers. For one thing, if I'm getting anything from the produce section or bakery, it's much harder to ring those up myself than it is to ring up all groceries if it all has bar codes. For another, it's just a pain to do everything myself. With a human checker, I can start bagging my first groceries while they're still ringing up the last of them. A third reason is space. Bagging my groceries is often complicated because I often do my shopping by bus or bike, so it's helpful to spread out the bags a bit or grab a different bag for a different type of grocery, and it's a lot roomier around the human checkers.
And finally, at one of those two grocery stores, the line for the self-checkout is always longer than at any with a human checker. What's the point? I may not like people but I don't actually go out of my way to avoid them.
the grocery store i frequent is the smaller, more more walk-friendly option of the two in my neighborhood, so that may bias things against the "100+ item monthly shopping-trip-in-the-SUV because driving to the store takes 30 minutes" events that I imagine in the suburbs, which would entail more human checkers.
"100+ item monthly shopping-trip-in-the-SUV because driving to the store takes 30 minutes"
Monthly, haha.
Heebie is correct- the people at Costco know me pretty well because I'm in there almost the same time every weekend.
Carrefour has implemented the mathematically proven optimal method of single line, then go to next available checkout. It's also better for my blood pressure because I'm always convinced I've chosen the line with biggest moron who can't handle checking out like a human. But not you, lurid, of course.
I find the bagging thing perplexing mostly because it's inconsistent, even at the same store. One visit, someone's already there bagging; another, nobody's there; another, somebody's there but seems to be waiting to see if I start doing it myself so they can head off to another register.
45. I have lots of compassion for people who deserve it. Also, I thought the point of that sermon was to think about water, which is indeed a subtle and worthwhile object both of contemplation and of the relentless application of reason.
38: But I assume that back-of-the-house workers don't make $2.50/hour plus tips anyway, since they aren't tipped staff?
Let's say back of the house workers make $10/hour (which gets passed off as a living wage around here - there's certainly a struggle for $15, but that's not what's getting paid) and the wait staff get the $2.50 plus tips, and therefore actually do make $12 or $13 per hour. (And a lot of that is cash - not that I would ever advocate that low-income people break the law, but I am reliably informed that some people feel that another disadvantage to the semi-living wage is that it's all taxed, unlike tips.)
Basically, if it's all "living wage but no tips", the best that happens is that back-of-the-house wages go up a bit and front of the house wages go down a lot.
And again this is all wrapped up in faux concern for wait staff - there's nothing that prevents a restaurant from paying its back of the house staff $15/hour and its front of the house staff something like $10/hour plus tips.
Restaurants wouldn't do the "no tip" thing if it didn't make them money, either.
My friend is a barista, so we're not talking about working at a fancy restaurant and routinely getting tipped on $200 checks or anything.
I don't know about that. Barista-quality coffee is kind of high end though. Or it seems frivolous to me. Coffee for the price of beer.
Though bartenders drink coffee from the fancy places, in my experience.
Anyway, I have no direct involvement with this stuff anymore, but I also wasn't aware of anybody trying to stop tipping except for the fight for fifteen people.
I mean, I tip. But I don't get tips anymore.
Restaurants wouldn't do the "no tip" thing if it didn't make them money, either.
Somebody posted this link a while back, from a restaurateur, about why he instituted a no-tipping policy. In that case it was presented, explicitly, as something to equalize back and front of the house employees and, essentially, boost morale (I'm glad to have a reason to look it up again, it's a good argument and I'd forgotten some of the details..
1) Due to poorly cohering laws in many Western US states, using a service charge has typically been the only legal way for a restaurant business to balance wages between servers, bartenders, cooks and dishwashers. That's why restaurants like Chez Panisse instituted such a policy. Subsequent court decisions in the Western US have opened up the possibility that other arrangements are legal, but the service charge is still the safest model.
2) Because tips cannot legally, in most cases, be controlled by the employer, they are typically distributed (or not distributed, as the case may be) according to a social compact among the employees. To the extent that the rules of the compact are enforced, enforcement is through social means, like ostracization. In either event, the systems for both acquiring and distributing tips are easily gamed by members of the serving staff who are intent on doing so.
...
4) Our ability to make sure team members in all parts of the house were taken care of, and to remove tip-related squabbling from our business, gave us a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace; this in turn allowed us to serve a much higher quality of food and take lower margins on it. Basically, it was because of the much-lower-friction monetary flow through the company that we were able to survive as a true, deep farm-to-table restaurant in San Diego for so many years. Other operators in town, fully aware of how tips poison restaurants, knew we were enjoying an edge. Some of our colleagues resented this, and lashed out in some ways, including that of telling local journalists and bloggers that we were lying about the food we were serving. I assume that this is because those restaurants couldn't serve the kind of food we did and still take tips, because tips are so wasteful. And if they couldn't do it, than they assumed/said we weren't doing it.
5) Once established, the tipless/service charge model made us more successful in every dimension. Having a sister restaurant that used the traditional model was helpful in evaluating this -- at our second restaurant, for instance, we could never achieve a consistently high quality of service. We believed the block came from the sense that, once the guest delivers a tip, the quality of service has been validated -- even though studies clearly show that, across a large sample, guests tip basically the same regardless of quality of service. Meanwhile, our revenue was always higher at the tipless restaurant, I think because quality of food and service were both better due to the more consistent pay system (which at the Linkery was much closer to that of a normal, non-hospitality business than that of most restaurants, where server pay varies with a lot of randomness). With higher revenue and more consistent pay system, our retention was better. This continued to be a "virtuous circle" of benefits we saw from having a tipless/service charge model. On a personal level, it was much more fun to work with the non-tipped team; in that environment it was easier to build a focus on doing great, worthwhile work, and doing it well, when those thoughts weren't being interrupted every couple minutes by a guest deciding how much to pay a team member for their last few minutes of services rendered.
55: If i ever write a malcom gladwell- type book, it will be about how orderly queuing is the true measure of societal health.
64 After living over here for over a year I think I'm inclined to agree. I'm not sit if I've posted some of my queuing horror stories or not.
65: Feel free to repeat yourself; I love queueing horror stories.
Carrefour has implemented the mathematically proven optimal method of single line, then go to next available checkout.
If I could find a supermarket here that did that it would have my exclusive business. Post offices and banks manage it, so I don't see the problem.
67: I could see an argument that single-line is more awkward when you have large cart to push around. Then again, airport check-in is often single-line.
My local drugstore went from single-line to multiple-line and a clerk there acted with distain that they ever had single-line. I have never met another human I was less able to empathize with. Thankfully, they've gone through one or two store redesigns since then and they've gone back to single-line.
One of the things that makes McDonald's so hellish is they tend to use the poorly-demarcated probably-multi-line layout, designed for maximum frustration.
Wellcome does this too, though sloppily. Also, I found vermouth right round the corner. Shoe-leather FTW.
Then again, airport check-in is often single-line.
Single line for people without first class/preferred/whatever status.
One of the things that makes McDonald's so hellish is they tend to use the poorly-demarcated probably-multi-line layout
Yes, that and the food.
66 I probably shouldn't. But anyway...
A friend and fellow compatriot was at the bank in front of one of those machines that spits out a number so you can go to one of the tellers. He's right in front of the thing when an arm shoots around him and grabs it just as it comes out of the slot. Nepali guard saw this and give my friend an old ticket with a lower number so the scofflaw did not profit from his anti-social behavior.
I stood out in the sun for 2 hours early in the morning in front of the entrance to a driving school to sign up for the exam with only a couple of people in front of me. When the door opened I was pushed out of the way by a rush of the crowd that had gathered behind me. Maybe 50 or more got in ahead of me.
I don't understand why the British built railroads and shit all over the region but didn't instill the proper queuing behavior.
Maybe anti-queuing bias is a form of resistance. Anyone here know if queuing is treated in subaltern studies? Because the subaltern does not queue.
Joke, don't know if it's true: Who died on the Titanic? The bourgeoisie: the rich bought the lifeboats, the poor jumped the queue.
Basically, steerage-class men did better than second-class men but steerage-class women did so poorly relative to other women that second class was safer than steerage.
Thank you, Moby, both for the link and for the gentlemanly plural.
Boy howdy did I fall for that one.
Shooting queue-jumpers would certainly be the most benign form of racism.
When you get to "really racist," I'm here for you.
Ok, fine, the least malevolent form of racism. Do I pass now?
You'd think Germans would be good at queuing, but in my limited experience, they're not great. I wonder who'd win a queuing Olympics.
Tough to judge. Also the TV rights might be less than lucrative.
Having watched way too much to Cartoon Network's line-up for young boys/stoner college kids, I'm not sure you're right on that.
The Soviet Union used to have a nationwide training program.
How are the mighty fallen, and the queues of GUM perished.
When I did the Eurail youth pass thing years ago, I used to take a ticket at train stations when I wanted to reserve something and then walk around looking at the counters to see if anyone had abandoned a lower but yet to be called number. This worked surprisingly often.
I had to deal with this at a bank a couple weeks ago, had to pay a fee on a certain gov doc and this was the only bank that would do it. The take a number was a little screen that asked what you wanted done so it knew which type of teller you needed. Then it asked if you were a customer. No? Would you like to become a customer? No? You get a special loser number that they call when they have no other numbers to call, or 90 minutes, whichever comes first- even if people come in after you, if they're customers they're ahead of you. We called just short of the 90.
|?
Maybe related to queueing and education:
Randall Collins, reviewing Bowles and Gintis Schooling in Capitalist America, immediately following a review of Bourdieu's Reproduction, in a collection of papers.
Second, turning to contemporary quantitative evidence, Bowles and Gintis show that the association between education and career success for individuals does not stem from cognitive skills that education may develop. When achievement-test scores are held constant, they note, the relationship between education and economic success remains virtually unattenuated. The same is found when I.Q. is held constant. Education's contribution to individual careers must be found elsewhere.What education does accomplish for the economic system, Bowles and Gintis declare, is to reproduce the structure of authority relations in the workplace from one generation to the next. Drawing heavily upon Melvin Kohn's (1969) work, they show that the experience of authority in different types of work creates distinctive class cultures, which in turn affect parents' values in rearing their children. Drawing upon their own group's research, they show that personality factors--above all diligence and submissiveness to authority--are highly associated with school grades and that these factors account for the association between school and economic success. The schools, in short, socialize a compliant labor force for the capitalist economy. Those students who are most completely socialized gain the most from their education in terms of careers.
Most interesting is that these were written all around 1975.
(Of course, I think the "submission to authority" and "completely socialized" compliant labor force, along with the decline in unions, tracks the entry of women into the labor force and their predominance in educational attainment.)
|>
Oops, supposed to go in priorities thread. Won't paste it there.
Don't matter. Should have read a little further, Bowles and Gintis get explicit:
the progressive education movement of 1900-1920.Here Bowles and Gintis show the upper- and upper-middle-class domination of this movement, sketch the development of vocational education as an effort to break the power of union apprenticeship programs, and describe the development of I.Q. and other standardized tests. The third crisis period, they suggest, began in the 1960s and continues to the present. Now we have advanced, affluent capitalism, responding to the labor-force incorporation of rural blacks and women, and the loss of autonomy of independent professionals. These circumstances have caused the ferment of campus protest and two types of response: on many campuses, a shift to more subtle controls appropriate for students who will become highly bureaucratized white-collar laborers, and an abandoning of the liberal ideal of universal education in favor of explicit hierarchization and fragmentation of advanced schooling.
1975. This too, is neoliberalism, the commodification and exploitation of the language and forms of individual empowerment. Women in white shoe law firms or warmongering Asst Secretary of State as rebels.
