You arrive at a pizza place to pick up your order. The credit-card screen asks if you would like to tip and gives some choices. It seems strange to tip the cashier, who did nothing but hand over the pizza. But it also seems a little harsh to select “no tip” instead of one of those more generous options.
What’s the right thing to do?
Start with the situations where our instincts are clearest. Tipping is normal at restaurants, in taxis or after haircuts. We don’t usually tip when we buy fast food, ride on a bus or have the plumbing fixed.
What explains the difference? One way to think about it is through economics. A server’s pay, in effect, is split in two: a salary paid by the restaurant, and a tip paid directly by you, the customer. But why do you get a say in the server’s pay when you don’t have that role in other cases?
The logic is simple: you’re in a better position than the restaurant owner to judge the quality of the service.
You know whether the server was fast or slow – so your tip rates it as baseline, above baseline or below baseline. A low tip, though, can feel confrontational: you’re delivering your verdict in front of the person you’re judging.
And it’s not just restaurants. A cab company knows how far the driver went, but not how well the car was driven. You know that, so you leave a tip. The owner of a hair salon knows how many customers were served, but not whether they were served well. Or take housekeepers at a hotel: you don’t watch them work, but you still know something the hotel doesn’t know: how big a mess you left behind.
The common thread is that you know something the employer doesn’t. And that gives you a role in deciding how much the worker gets paid.
But what about the places where we don’t tip?
You don’t tip the cashiers at a fast-food restaurant. Why? The company trains the staff to say the same things every time, then watches them. You don’t see much that the company doesn’t. And the cashier works behind a counter where the pressure to keep moving is already strong.
When you ride the crosstown bus, you don’t usually see anything important the bus company doesn’t, and the prospect of being tipped probably wouldn’t change what the driver does. So you don’t tip.
Or a company sends you a plumber. You might know whether the problem got fixed, but not whether the plumber worked efficiently or cut corners. Since you don’t know anything the boss doesn’t, there’s no reason to give you a direct role in setting the agent’s pay.
Compare this with a case where the plumber has to climb long stairs to reach you or face off against a scary dog. Here, you do know about hidden hardships – hidden from the plumber’s boss, that is – so tipping is a sensible economic gesture as well as a kind one.
Still, the theory only gets us so far. Why don’t people usually tip employees of airlines, front-desk workers at hotels or baggers at the grocery store?
Maybe it was a mistake to imagine that there’s one explanation for tipping rather than many of them – and that they change across time and place. In some cultures, there’s little or no tipping, and a tip might even be considered an insult.
In fact, our theory above was a better fit in the United States 20 years ago than it is today, because invitations to tip have become more common in places where customers know little that management doesn’t already know.
So why is the pizza place asking you for a tip in the first place?
Some people imagine that the business is trying to get out of paying its clerks what it should; it’s foisting that job on to its customers. But that’s probably the wrong way to look at it. Clerks decide whether to take jobs and keep them based on the total pay they take home, wherever it comes from. Adding tips to their pay, in the long run, will probably hold down the base salaries that they’re paid.
Look at it this way: if all tipping were banned tomorrow, you’d expect the base pay of servers to go up soon afterwards, along with prices on the menu. Otherwise the loss of tips would just be a pay cut; and if restaurants could pay less to their servers without losing them, they’d presumably (alas?) be doing it already.
More likely, the takeout place just needs to somehow raise its prices. They think you’ll react better to an invitation to tip than you would to a more expensive menu, though it comes to the same thing. You’ll use the menu to decide what to buy and won’t think about the tip. Then when tipping is invited at the end, you won’t tell yourself the cafe raised its prices. You’ll just think the culture is changing: everyone wants a tip nowadays! But in effect, the invitation to tip is just a price hike that the owner is hoping you won’t view that way.
There’s another oddity: the timing of the request. An unfamiliar invitation to tip sometimes comes early, when some of the work you’re buying hasn’t been done yet. This might give the server a chance to see your tip before performing and then retaliate on the spot with sluggish service if you seem ungenerous, or do a good job if you’ve been nice.
This order of operations isn’t very consistent with the idea that you’re tipping in order to rate the quality of the work done.
So what should you do when the screen asks you to tip?
In those new settings – bakeries, coffee shop, fast-food places – your choice can function as a kind of vote – not on the quality of service, but on tipping itself. Leaving a tip accepts the invitation to help set the pay and encourages the arrangement to continue. If you don’t tip, you’re saying that you’re against using tips as a way to divide decisions about pay in this situation.
But once tipping is customary – not auditioning for acceptance, but entrenched – then you should tip, at least usually. The obligation isn’t set by law, but you consent to it when you eat at the restaurant. The owner is saying, in effect: your obligation to pay for this meal will be a combination of laws (that make you pay the check) and norms (that make you pay the tip).
You should play by the rules that the business has set or not play at all, even if the rules might seem to defy your theory, or any theory, of when tipping serves a good purpose. But when deciding what to order or where to eat, just remember: 20% of the cost (or whatever the customary tip might be) isn’t shown on the menu.
To put this more generally: if you run into a norm that you aren’t sure you like, ask whether you’re in a position to help shape it or whether you can only decide whether to go along with it.
The bottom line: tipping for takeout doesn’t make sense as a custom. It should be resisted unless it’s entrenched, at which point it’s best viewed as part of the bargain.
Put differently, we would vote against the idea; but having lost the vote, we go along with it.
Ward Farnsworth is a professor at the University of Texas school of law, and Saul Levmore at the University of Chicago law school. This is an edited excerpt from their new book, Should You Tip for Takeout? Solving the Puzzles of Everyday Life, out now
