In 1908 when William Howard Taft, class of 1878, ran for president, he boasted that he never tipped his barber and was lauded as the head of an anti-tipping “crusade.” Earlier adherents included Mark Twain who notoriously refused to tip a cab driver. During and shortly after the Taft administration, six states — Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington — outlawed tipping. This era also saw the publication of William R. Scott’s polemical “The Itchy Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America.” Tipping was depicted as servile, undemocratic and therefore un-American, associated rather with Europe’s feudal legacy of masters and serfs.  

Things have changed. Now tipping is rare in Europe where restaurants include a service charge and tend to pay adequate or at least minimum wage to wait-staff. There you can buy coffee at, say, Café Florian in Venice or Procope in Paris without being confronted with a tip screen.  

Compared to the early twentieth century, recent campaigns against tipping have been less vituperative but no more effective. In 2015, the restaurateur Danny Meyer, owner of several high-end New York restaurants — Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café, to name a few — eliminated tipping, raised the wages of wait staff and raised prices for diners. One of the reasons advanced was to fix the inequity of compensation between face-to-face servers and those who labored in the kitchen and behind the scenes, who did not receive tips. It is also obvious that restaurant owners pay low wages in expectation that the customers will make up the difference.  Tipping, it is often argued, lends itself to discrimination unrelated to service — based on race, looks or responsiveness to what can easily slide into harassment.

Because Meyer’s restaurants were regarded as wonderful places to work, he could reasonably expect to retain staff, but particularly with COVID-19 and its aftermath, his establishments had trouble retaining or hiring front-of-the-house personnel. The fact is that particularly at fine-dining restaurants, tips are substantial and are underreported to the tax authorities. Even at that, both presidential candidates are on record as advocating the formal exemption of tips from income tax.

Customers complain about the recent rise in tip expectations. For much of the twentieth century, 10 percent was adequate and 15 percent generous. Now 18 percent seems to be the bare minimum, below which is considered insulting. There is also widespread “tip fatigue” as it seems that retail transactions, even for minimal service, semi-require gratuities; you have to be brave to decline. At least half the bakeries and ice cream shops in the country present customers with a hard-to-refuse set of tipping “options.” Nevertheless, customers as well as servers seem to be more comfortable, in restaurants at least, with a system of tipping. Why? In theory, wouldn’t it be easier to know exactly what you are going to pay and avoid the measurement of service or demand for extra compensation? Apparently not in practice. There is the suspicion that without a reward transaction, service will be terrible, or perhaps there is some peculiar comfort in being the one dispensing that reward.

Restaurants are a special case because workers did not benefit from federal minimum wage legislation when it was enacted in the 1930s. They can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour as long as their gratuities bring their hourly pay up to the federal minimum of $7.25. Connecticut mandates a $15.69 minimum wage but allows restaurants to compensate servers at a rate of $6.38. Everyone knows that restaurants struggle financially, that many go under every year and that with few exceptions it is not a path to riches. Nevertheless, the diner is paying a large proportion of the staff’s wages without quite realizing it. Personally, out of custom and habit, I am comfortable with this arrangement, but it is odd when you think about it.

PAUL FREEDMAN is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History. He can be reached at paul.freedman@yale.edu.