Vox Sentences - Tips on tipping

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Good afternoon,

I want to know what you think about the great tipping debate. Are you tipping more these days? Or are you just annoyed at being asked seemingly everywhere and anywhere? If you depend on tips for work, how do you feel about all this? Email me at dylan.scott@vox.com.

Here’s the agenda today:

UP FIRST: To tip or not to tip

CATCH UP: Trump's New York fraud trial resumes

— Dylan Scott, senior correspondent

People, it’s just a tip

Paige Vickers/Vox

Tipping is making Americans collectively — and unnecessarily — a little bit unhinged. It used to be easier to ignore the tip jar hiding among all the other clutter at the cash register. But nowadays, it seems every time you’re cashing out at a coffee shop or a sandwich joint or even the grocery store, you’re confronted with a prompt on a digital screen that makes ignorance an impossibility: Would you like to leave a tip?

“People are feeling social pressures to leave tips in circumstances that they wouldn’t ordinarily expect to tip,” Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University, told my colleague Emily Stewart. What started as a show of solidarity for service workers in the darkest economic days of the pandemic has now become a fraught point of contention between workers, businesses, and their customers. 

If you’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, you surely recall the opening diner scene, in which the titular band of bandits debate the merits of tipping. Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink is needled by his fellow criminals because he refuses to tip their waitress. He is on an island in that scene. Whatever moral scruples his compatriots may (or may not) have, they take it as a given that you should tip your server. 

But today, it seems, a lot of people may find themselves nodding in agreement with Mr. Pink when he says: “This tipping automatically, it's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doing their job.”

Personally, I do find myself tipping more these days and it is indeed because tipping has become a ubiquitous part of the checkout process. I tip partly because I know many of these workers should be paid more, but I’ll admit to feeling a tinge of guilt too. Am I really going to turn down throwing in an extra 75 cents when I buy my cup of coffee?

But everyone should follow their own heart. You can always say no. And it seems many people are. Payroll data suggests some workers are making more money, but that is almost entirely because they are making higher base wages (likely the result of a hot labor market) rather than getting extra tips. If anything, tips seem to be down slightly.

Emily’s real point is that tipping doesn’t really need to be such a hot topic. But we should, of course, consider the person on the other end of this interaction. Baristas, Uber drivers and the like told her that tips can make “a huge difference” in their pay — even if they, too, feel the awkwardness now that customers are asked to tip every time they check out.

Read the rest of Emily’s thoughtful column on tipping here.

Trump's New York fraud trial nears its end

David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

Donald Trump is in court on Thursday as his New York state fraud trial nears its conclusion. An expert witness, testifying in his defense, told the court that he had seen “no evidence whatsoever for accounting fraud” in the Trump Organization’s valuations of its real estate properties that are at the heart of the case, according to CBS News.

• The witness, New York University accounting professor Eli Bartov, dismissed the one clear case of inflated property values. Particular attention has been drawn to Trump’s penthouse in Trump Tower, which Forbes reported was one-third of the size that Trump had claimed. Bartov acknowledged the inflated value of that apartment, but then dismissed that as a calculation error rather than any kind of intentional fraud.
• Trump was already found liable for fraud. The former president’s innocence or guilt isn’t at issue here; the current trial is meant to adjudicate what exactly the consequences of that liability should be.
• New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking $250 million in relief in the fraud case. The lawsuit is civil — and separate from Trump’s criminal charges — but could imperil his namesake business; James is asking for financial penalties against Trump personally, for his legal team’s “frivolous” tactics in the case, as well as claiming damages on behalf of lenders and others who were defrauded by the inflated real estate values.
• Trump is set to take the stand next week. Trump has already made a spectacle of himself at the trial, drawing $15,000 in fines for comments critical of the presiding judge and forcing the court to issue a gag order. His children have already testified in the case, and Trump himself is supposed to be the final witness during a hearing next Thursday.

• Hospitals are churning poor patients through lucrative weight-loss surgeries. The mad dash to perform more and more of these procedures even has surgeons asking anesthesiologists to lessen the medication given to patients so they wake up sooner — even though that has, at times, left patients waking up in intense pain. [New York Times]
• 2023 will be the warmest year on record. With November being the warmest known November, it is now certain that this year will be hotter than any other year for which we have records. [Copernicus]
• Texas judge permits woman the right to have an abortion. The case of Kate Cox had become a flashpoint when she challenged the state’s abortion ban after learning that her fetus had genetic defects that would lead it to die shortly after birth. [NPR]

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Today’s crossword

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