Let me preface this post with the point that I despise the general notion of tipping service people. This is partly because I dislike the notion of service people, period. That is, I don’t like people “serving” me (which may partly explain my antipathy to nanny government). Whether it’s the Jew, or Scotch in my ancestry, unless I can’t, I’d rather do it myself, if I have to pay for it. I hate to pay people to do something that I can perfectly well do myself (when loading luggage into a courtesy van, or checking into a hotel, I feel like a driver being extorted by a squeejee guy, being expected to provide a gratuity for a service that I hadn’t requested).
Now, having said that, I understand the economic model behind restaurants. The waitpeople are underpaid as a base salary, and expected to supplement their meager income via tips performed for better service. I get that.
What I also get is that it is a subtle implied form of extortion. If you’re a regular, if you’re a lousy tipper, don’t be shocked if over time your food becomes adulterated with the bodily fluids of the staff, and takes forever to get to you, and is cold when it arrives, and may not even be what you ordered. On the other hand, if you tip great, you’ll be treated like royalty from the planet Krypton.
But let’s talk about a different form of service. I’ve been on the road a lot lately, and not just for a night or two in a given place, but for days and weeks at a time. I’ve never (OK, not never, but rarely) done this, but my understanding from reading travel mags and such, is that it is also de rigeur to tip the people who clean your hotel room. On one of our many trips to Golden, CO over the past three months, we stayed at a Marriot Residence Inn, at which on Valentine’s Day, the maid left a chocolate with a note wishing us a good one. It seemed an obvious plea for a tip.
But here’s the thing. There is a difference, and a crucial one, between serving you food, and changing your sheets.
In one case, there is an ongoing personal interaction, and in the other case, there is…not.
When you go out to eat, the waitperson is your personal interface to the establishment. The establishment recognizes this when it encourages said waitperson to be chipper and cheery and say, “Hi, I’m Lance (or Kristi!), and I’ll be your waiter/(waitress) this evening.” There is a personal relationship, perhaps more so than you want, but it’s there regardless. And you know and they know, that if your order is taken, or dinner delivered, too late, it will be reflected in the additional compensation on the bill.
But cleaning a room is different. It generally happens when you’re not present, and you don’t even know the gender of the person doing it (though there’s generally a good guess), let alone their name or what they look like, or how chipper and perky they are. There is no personal relationship.
But isn’t there the same extortionate potential?
I suppose. They could fill your little shampoo bottles with hydrofluoric acid (though the containers would be unlikely to survive until you get back to the room and can pour it onto your noggin). They can short-sheet the bed (which I find that lot of them do as a matter of policy…).
But basically, there’s not a lot of variation in the possibilities of what they can do for your room, other than giving you little gifts (like chocolates) in the hope that they will be more than sufficiently compensated via your gratuity.
It seems to me that there is a basic service (like cable), that shouldn’t require bribes to get. In my ideal world, you should expect to get such service without having to a) pay more than is on the menu or room rate and b) try to figure out just how much more you should pay. Tipping waitpeople should occur only if the service is really great, not just adequate (and they should hope for some adverse event that they can overcome to really earn their additional pay). And this really makes it hard for hotel servicefolk, because there is so little opportunity for the personal interaction that can really provide opportunities to earn tips. I’d really rather live in a society in which basic service was included in the bill, the prices on the menu (or hotel rack rate) reflected the full cost of hiring people to provide the services being paid for, and any additional compensation was a result only of extraordinary (break that word down, folks) service.
But apparently I’m in a minority. Or else, this is one of those perverse situations in which everyone hates the system, but doesn’t see any good or safe way to transition to one better.
Wow, now you know how every Australian who goes to the US feels.
BTW – when I’m in the US, I tend to be on the company dime, so I tip gratuitously. When I’m there on my own dime, though, I tip when necessary.
In the case of hotel staff, for many years I had no idea I was supposed to tip them.. no-one told me. I doubt this had any effect however as the first think I do once I’ve gotten to my room is put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and that sucker stays hanging on the door until I leave.. but I do leave $5 with a thank you note, I think it’s a nice way to rub it in.
I’ve worked for many years on the road, usually staying in long term motels, and I’ve never tipped for the cleaning services, nor did most of my co-workers. OTOH, we tend to be extremely generous tippers in restaurants.
I’ve also worked as a driver for a major pizza chain, and we do depend on tips, since we drivers are providing the service of delivering food to the buyer, often during extremely bad weather.(I live in the upstate NY snowbelt). When the weather gets bad, the calls come in. We drivers had to pay our own gas, repair bills(cars constantly stopping and starting tend to have more repairs required), as well as enduring obnoxious customers and cretinous supervisors, as well as the less than minimum wage pay. Yes, the store had driver insurance, but getting a claim to be paid by them is harder than getting paid by Geico Insurance. And if the customer stiffed us, the store took it out of our pay, unless we raised a fuss(I never let a customer stiff me, even if I had to return the item to the store).
I agree with your premise about fully paying people for what they do. Some restaurants have a no tipping policy, and pay their waitstaff accordingly. But their food prices tend to be much higher, and they often lose out to other restaurants that pay low, but encourage tipping.
This is the first time I ever heard about tipping hotel maids.
And no, I am not about to start.
If this is “one of those perverse situations in which everyone hates the system, but doesn’t see any good or safe way to transition to one better,” then obviously I am not part of “everyone.”
I’ve never consider tipping cleaning staff. I also agree that I loath the assumption that a tip is necessary. My wife’s a nurse, nobody tips her. When she worked Medsurg floors, she might help bring your food, change the sheets on your bed, and if necessary change your bed pan. If she managed to get you what you wanted from the menu while keeping your sheets and butt clean, she got no extra money. Did she make over minimum wage? Sure. But are tips supposed to be motivators for good service or a means to circumvent wage rates.
On a more recent trip, we stayed at a very fancy hotel in Florida. Parking there was $12 a day or you could opt for valet at $20. I paid valet, and the first time I went to the car, it was obvious the guy was trying to play up a tip. He first asked if I had anything he could load (I didn’t) and then he asked if I needed any directions (I didn’t). So beyond getting my car, he did nothing for me. Why tip him? I know some will say because he got my car, but the hotel gets $8 a day for him to get my car. And if the hotel doesn’t pay him sufficiently, why stiff the guest with an extra charge and the employees? I should point out the hotel wasn’t my choice, and along with other absurd charges and poor amenities, I will do my best to avoid it in the future. But the thing that made things uncomfortable from the beginning was the expectation that every activity I did in that hotel required a little extra cash from me.
I do tip well for restaurant wait staff. But I also demand the good service and refuse to patronize restaurants with bad service. Good service means that I don’t have to wonder when I will get a drink refilled, the food comes out as I order it, and no time is lost waiting for a check to arrive. The latter is a pet peeve of mine. I just don’t accept it. Neither the restaurant owner, I, and the wait staff if they think about it are served by me sitting at a table waiting to pay a bill.
A required gratuity is an oxymoron. It’s a way for bosses to stiff their workforce. “Oh, you’re getting a tip, eh? Well, I’ll just dock your pay and flow it down to me. Har har!” That it’s codified in the minimum wage laws is just another incestuous corporatist relationship. It dilutes the whole purpose of tipping, and heaven forbid you don’t tip enough – then you’re like the dad that ruined Christmas by not getting little Suzy that doll she wanted, so now she’s going to spit in your food next time you show your mug in her joint. Eff that!
Dude, I think you are in serious need of a vacation (bring your own hair care products).
I used to travel for a living and I’ve NEVER tipped the maids, but I’ve a simple question, do you do it daily?
When I traveled like that, we worked odd hours and often we were in the room in the AM when the rooms were cleaned. The rooms are not assigned to “X” maid, all of them are not full time employees and some of them double in other capacities within the lodge.
That means unless you tip daily, given a multi-day stay of course,your tip may go to someone who has NEVER been i n your room before.
I did find and tip one lady, even though she unintetionally trashed me. I dropped my magnetic money clip as I was getting dressed, and didn’t realize it until lunch time. I thought it was just gone AND the $93 with it.
When I got back to me room that night, she had very nicely placed it, with a note saying it had been found between the tub and toilet, on the room desk. Great, right? Nope, to ensure that I found it, she laid the MAGNETIC money clip on top of a stack of floppy discs, I’d left there.
I tracked her down and gave her $20 for being honest and I threw the clip away.
I don’t tip the maids(never heard of it) and I don’t use room service unless I am staying more than four nights. I hang a DnD sign on the door, tell the main desk I do not require service for the duration and get towels and sheets as necessary.
I don’t want the staff in the room rummaging thru my stuff.
Titus is correct; “It’s a way for bosses to stiff their workforce.” Many folks have to settle for the work they can find these days, and many companies are totally willing to shaft their workers. I don’t like all the tipping that goes with hotels, food service, and so on, but I know that their well-paid management’s pockets are padded with the money not paid to those workers. If I can’t afford to tip I won’t use the services-if I can’t give at least 20% to the pizza delivery-person, I won’t order the pizza. This chronic underpayment shows me why ending slavery was such a battle; the number of wealthy people who will exploit their employees is larger than many honest folks would like to think…
It is hard to get away from the idea that tipping has gone way too far, especially when people hover over you until you tip them for doing nothing more than the minimum required.
Coming from NZ where tipping is, well was, rare it is seems to me that it also results in some very annoying distortions, not the least of which is the way bars and pubs operate in the US. Specifically the need for the customer to sit in your seat and wait for the server to get to you to take your order, go to the bar, chat with the single bar-person, retrieve your order and get back to you, eventually. The bar gets to present the illusion that better service is being provided, because they have a bunch of waitstaff and the client gets stiffed waiting endlessly for a waiter to turn up, notice them, bring them their drink. Of course the bar can do this ‘cos they are not actually carrying the cost of the staff, tips are. And woe betide the customer who gets impatient and goes directly to the bar, you are messing up the whole system and earn the resentment of your server which is unfortunate it the barperson refuses to serve you and instead sends you back to your seat.
It is well past time that minimum wage laws applied to waitstaff. If the restauranteur has to actually carry the cost of the employee then they will be more particular about who they hire and maybe even start rewarding those staff on the basis of performance and ability. And I might finally stop being bothered by an oversupply of servers and an undersupply of barstaff at pubs.
I used to always wonder why the car hops at Sonic would kinda stand there for a moment after they hand you the change. I just give them a nod and a, “thank you” and they just turn and stroll off. Then a friend, who is a waiter of course, scolded me for not tipping the hop. I was like, “Your kidding right? Do I tip the drive thru dude at McDonald’s too?”
Of crazy things to tip for I’ve also heard that your supposed to tip the garbage men $20 around the end of the year too. I offered them a beer one time, but they didn’t seem too interested.
My rule of tipping food servers is if they can’t provide me a re-fill, I am not going to tip them. This applies to Sonic.
The very idea of tipping hotel maids is outrageous to me. I first heard of it about ten years ago and instantly dismissed it as Endarkenment horseshit. No way in the world.
I usually don’t let ’em into my room, which I keep like the Bat-cave.
I can be generous at a restaurant table, but don’t *ever* bring me a stale cup of coffee. Just don’t fucking do it.
Well, there is something a lot more prosaic the cleaning staff can do other than messing with your shampoo. They can simply steal anything you leave lying around on your bedroom. In fact, it happens fairly frequently, considering cleaning staff is usually very poorly paid, with a high turnover, and they have the master key to every bedroom in the whole place.
As for the “do not disturb sign” I once put it out so I could take a shower and got a cleaning lady barging in the room. Just as I was leaving the bathroom so I could put my clothes on.
In Oregon folks aren’t allowed to pump their own gas. Its against the law.
The folks we were visiting said the Oregon state legislature believes it helps with unemployment.
What I saw was long lines at gas stations.
There’s an excellent chance your motel chocolate was actually the policy of the local management, I’d guess.
And me, I never tip cleaning staff unless I’ve left an extraordinary mess, such as after a room party at a convention of some sort.
Bill: Yes, it’s freakin’ absurd, and most people think it’s a complete waste of time, money, and effort, at least when I ask them.
The few times it’s come up to a vote, though, it always gets held up. After all, you wouldn’t want all those middle class high-school kids to be unemployed!
Well, count me as exactly 180 degrees out from you. In my ideal restaurant, the waitstaff would get nothing whatever from the owner and/or management.
You come in and want to buy food. If the waiter is working for you, he [male pronoun used for convenience; substitute female or neuter, according to preference] knows what the kitchen has today that’s good and can recommend it, then negotiate with the cooks and management to get it for you. If he works for the restaurant, he knows what the kitchen has today that’s in excess and/or bad and needs to be gotten rid of, and he is very likely to earn his pay. (This was, in fact, my regular experience in Oz.) If you’re paying him, he has an incentive to get you a good table with clean flatware; if the owner is paying him he has an incentive to shove you in anywhere you’ll fit, and keeping the dishwasher hot and powerful enough to clean the knives costs money; his employer is pleased if he minimizes the expense.
One of the reasons you support private space is the incentive structure. If the private company’s rocket works they get paid; the Government gets paid whether it works or not. Why have a different standard?
Regards,
Ric
In Oregon folks aren’t allowed to pump their own gas. Its against the law.
I saw the same thing in New Jersey. I only did occassional business there, so I don’t know fully the law. I do know where I was, Camden, that was the law.
An interesting side effect, a coworker, who lived in New Jersey, once got a call from his wife. She had driven into Pennslyvania and was running low on gas. She was 30+, but never had to pump the gas, and so didn’t know how to pump the gas. I’m not talking about “what side is the tank”. She didn’t know how to operate the pump either.
Ric-
That almost sounds close to the business model that barbers have used for years. As long as the contracted barbers can create enough satisfied customers to cover their daily chair fee, the rest of the money they make is theirs to keep.
This business model treats the “employees” as independent business contractors, who have to have at least some semblance of business acumen in order to continue to make money.
Obviously the “chair fee” in a restaurant would include the cost of food , plus a small per-table fee to cover dish-warshing overhead, and wait staff could choose or bid on tables or sections of the restaurant, seating customers themselves, and providing service from start to finish. Any time I’ve become a “regular” at a restaurant, I know that I end up picking a “regular” wait-staff-person (who usually happens to be older than a teenager), and I will gladly wait for a table in their section because I know that I’ll get good service.
Of course, as Sigivald mentioned, this might provoke a revolt from the middle-class teenagers who are used to getting paid $3/hr to chit-chat with their friends and act in a churlish manner before they go to a kegger and return home to their rent-free digs, but I would imagine that such a business model could easily survive as a niche before it expanded to “revolutionize” the restaurant industry.
John —
I was told of, but never personally experienced, the next step beyond that.
According to that story, there was a short street in Hong Kong that was closed off in the evenings and then became a totally libertarian restaurant.
The space itself was provided by the city, so was “free”. If you wanted a table and chairs, you went to a guy who had those and rented them. Then you went round to the various pushcarts, selected what you wanted to eat, paid, and took it to the table (or not, if you chose to stand up). Most food vendors provided simple bamboo chopsticks as part of their offering, or you could rent Western utensils from (what else) another pushcart.
And if all that was too much trouble, you could hire a waiter from one of those standing around. Your “boy” would dicker for table, chairs, eating utensils, etc., ask what you wanted to eat, and scour the pushcart vendors for those items. He wanted to be paid, of course.
I see no reason it couldn’t work. No doubt it’d be a bit confusing for Rand 🙂
Regards,
Ric
“As for the “do not disturb sign” I once put it out so I could take a shower and got a cleaning lady barging in the room. Just as I was leaving the bathroom so I could put my clothes on.”
Any place I stay has security cameras. As I said, I also notify the front desk.
That said, if someting is missing from my room and the camera shows them entering for 5 minutes, that is plenty for the Police to work on.
“As for the “do not disturb sign” I once put it out so I could take a shower and got a cleaning lady barging in the room. Just as I was leaving the bathroom so I could put my clothes on.”
That would be a good way to meet my Glock 19.
Also, I secure the secondary lock when I am in my room.
On my last day in a room when I leave the keycard on a table I also leave whatever pocket change has accumulated over the days of my stay. I suppose this doesn’t prevent the acid in my shampoo and I may never be back that way again but it seems right to me.
I tip or not without any consideration of it’s expectation with no problem at all. Counter people at the airport are often surprised when I give them a tip as they never expect it.
I work at a Timeshare/Hotel where the management pays well above the industry standard for all positions – and the Housekeepers still shill for tips (on top of doing a lackluster job – don’t get me started).
IMNSHO it has more to do with an Entitlement mindset – I cleaned your room, you owe me.
I think the tip for hotel staff is like the tip for the guy who “watches your car” at the parking lot. It’s a racket that you participate in with the expectation that you will be less likely to be victimized (by the staff or anyone else). So it might make sense to pay at the beginning of your stay rather than the end.
Of course you don’t know if you are really buying any protection. The staff may know, but they have no incentive to tell you and thereby either reassure you into not paying or scare you away.
I once had a waitress in Tokyo chase me down at the taxi I was getting into to hand me the money I had left on the table. I tried to explain “it’s for you,” but she looked at me like I was crazy, so I reluctantly took it back and thanked her, which made her ever so happy.
Bart: yes, it’s completely different in Japan. I usually stay at The Okura in Tokyo, and they simply would not hear of a tip anywhere in that whole place. It wouldn’t occur to me to insult the maids there like that.
I was at The Mulia in Jakarta twice, about six months apart. The first time, I became chatty with the guy who cleaned my room, and discovered that he had a new son. The second time, I brought along a Morgan silver dollar for the kid, on the chance that I would see that guy again, which I did. I had to squeeze him hard to get him to accept it as a gift from my heart. It almost didn’t work.
They work their asses off in the East, quite without these sorts of ambiguous expectations.
Tips are pure capitalism – no regulations, no government coercion.
Yours,
Tom