Strands of Genius: Tipping is Weird, TikTok Heating, The Profitability of Trust
Plus: 4 stories about how weird tipping can be
WRITING FROM | Atlanta, GA
WORKING ON | catching up on all those “let’s circle back after the holidays” emails and asks ;)
LOOKING AHEAD
Jan 5-19 | Beersheba Springs, TN
Jan 19-Feb 16 | Atlanta, GA
Feb 16-20 | St. Simon’s Island
Feb 20-26 | Nashville, TN
Feb 26-March 10 | Long Beach and New York, NY
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
We’re here in Atlanta, Georgia staying with my cousin John and catching up with all our friends based in the South. As Faris said, “it’s your season!” While we have friends all over the world, we have a clustering of some of our closest friends and family in and around Atlanta, GA and Nashville, TN (and then in London, too.) If summer is our European season, then Winter is our Southern season. Rosie’s whole body may be freezing but her heart is warm.
The year still feels new, hope you do too.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
my cousin John, who is hosting us at his gorgeous home in Atlanta, the Dekalb farmers market and all of the goodies, ginger sparkling water, Rachel&Mike, Alex&Collin, Drew&Lena & YOU!
:: THE LINKS ::
TIPPING IS WEIRD NOW
And if you’re not American, maybe it always was? [Rosie here] I still remember when my parents would give us money to go out to dinner with friends. My mom always told us that we could not afford the item on the menu unless we could afford a 20% tip. She taught us how to do the easy tipping maths: “Move the decimal one number to the left and then double it.” So for me, tipping has always been second nature. Or at least an engrained practice from early on. But, I’m married to a Brit. And we frequently travel to places outside of the US. Let’s just say, we talk about tipping a lot. So I was particularly fascinated by the latest from Charlie Werzel exploring how the pandemic and technology have impacted tipping. More on this in the section below :) (Galaxy Brain)
TIK TOK CONFIRMS ITS OWN EMPLOYEES DECIDE WHAT GO VIRAL
As Forbes wrote, “Tik Tok’s secret Heating Button can make anyone go viral.” Previously, it was said that the algorithm was what created such a powerful “For You Page” but staff at TikTok and ByteDance also “secretly hand-pick specific videos and supercharge their distribution, using a practice known internally as heating.” We used to talk about the democratization of social media, but as Evelyn Douek a professor at Stanford Law School points out, with heating: “To some degree, the same old power structures are replicating in social media as well, where the platform can decide winners and losers to some degree, and commercial and other kinds of partnerships take advantage.” It also means that what comes up on your For You Page isn’t just what TikTok thinks you will like, but what TikTok wants you to see, because it benefits them. Which is where it gets kinda yucky. None of this “heated” content is flagged as an ad in any way, even though it has very much been boosted internally. Hmm. (Forbes)
THE PROFITABILITY OF TRUST
The world’s largest PR company is, unusually, an independent agency that, due to its scale, works with most kinds of clients in most places. As an independent it trades on its name and its values rather than its corporate parenthood. In the last few years Edelman has anchored their name to trust and the trust barometer, a massive annual piece of research that usually suggests trust in institutions of all types is in long term decline. Critics suggest that the firm is unwilling to follow its own advice and exhortations as evinced by its extant client list. The founder’s son, Richard, who is CEO, recently wrote that “Trust is my legacy to the PR industry” but the piece brings up the tension of an #everythingisPR culture: “This distinction – between how a company makes money and how it talks about how it makes money – sits at the heart of Edelman’s decades-long trust campaign.
World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, may have summed up the elite monetization of public trust most transparently in a 2014 op-ed. While Schwab celebrated the fact that “companies are increasingly acting with a sense of social responsibility”, the real message was found in the article’s headline: “The profitability of trust.” (The Guardian)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: TIPPING ::
As Charlie Werzel writes for the Atlantic, “Tipping is weird now.” And I’d add, if you’re not American, maybe it always was?
I still remember when my parents would give us money to go out to dinner with friends when we were young, before we could even drive. My mom always told us that we could not afford the item on the menu unless we could afford a 20% tip. She taught us how to do the easy tipping maths: “Move the decimal one number to the left and then double it.” She explained how most servers make $2/hour, and quite literally rely on tips to survive. So, tipping has always been second nature. Or at least an engrained practice from early on.
When I worked at Starbucks as a barista in college, we also got tips, though our base compensation was as much as I made babysitting and tips were simply a bonus, on top of our hourly wage. We had regulars who would dump the change in the tip jar, and others who would pay with their credit card but drop a dollar in the tip jar for us. And then we had our favorite regulars who, in addition to tipping on their drinks, would drop in a hundred dollar bill around the holidays. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most difficult people rarely tipped — and the most enjoyable people we encountered almost always did.) At the time though (and remember, this was 2005-2008), tipping in these kinds of scenarios wasn’t *as* common. On average, we made an extra $1-$2/hour from tips. So, mostly, people didn’t tip, or tipped a small amount.
Then I moved to New York City and started dating a Brit. Faris knew it was a cultural standard to tip in America, and as that’s where he lived, that’s what he did. But we would talk about tipping a lot: Should we tip at the bagel store, where they literally just put a couple bagels in a bag? What about when we got a canned ‘yoga bunny’ drink from Pret a Manger? “Why can’t they just pay their staff a living wage?” was something that Faris would ask frequently.
As you likely know if you’re reading this, we’ve been traveling for just shy of 10 years now, and so we’ve encountered tipping around the world, and it’s led to a number of conversations about what tipping is and how to navigate social norms in other countries. My personal perspective is that tipping is an easy way to directly impact the local economy, and I can only remember one person turning down a tip, ever… so it seems like people are also fans of free money.
I have four stories about tipping I want to share, to illustrate just how weird tipping is, already. And then I’ll conclude with some thoughts from Charlie Werzel, who summed up the confusion so very well.
2010: That time our foreign friends didn’t tip, because they didn’t know they needed to. I remember one time we went to brunch with two Londoners who were visiting, and we were literally *chased* down the block in Soho because our friends treated us to brunch, but didn’t tip. They were shocked that a waiter would leave their place of work to come find them and shame them for not tipping. They had rounded up to the nearest something or so, but had tipped the equivalent of maybe 5%. The waiter wanted to know what she had done wrong, and what had happened, since we had been chit chatting with her the whole time. I think it’s fair to say that we were all incredibly embarrassed and we covered the tip (because my husband is one of those people who *always* has cash on him. ALWAYS. But that’s another several stories for another time) and explained to them that they should assume a 15-20% tip with each meal out. From then on, they did tip, albeit grudgingly and always asking us to tell them what their tip should be.
2013: That time we did a border crossing in Cambodia or Thailand and accidentally bribed, erm, tipped, the border crossing guard. I didn’t realize that the equivalent of a $20 bill but in local currency had been tucked in my passport. And let’s be clear: I would have never *dreamed* of tipping or bribing a guard at the border. But he happily took my $20 bill, and Faris and I were waved through quicker than anyone else. We laughed giddily and then joked maybe we should start tucking more cash into our passport.
2018: That time some Brits complained to me about tipping in India. I was speaking at a conference in India, and the other two keynote speakers were two Brits. They were complaining about the cost of their taxi ride, which was a whopping $3, and the fact the driver asked for a tip on top of it. I pointed out that for an hour cab ride in London, they would have paid probably 10x that, if not more. They pointed out that the average rickshaw driver made only $15-$20/day, and that their fare was a big portion of what they would make in a day. I pointed out that they made money in British Pounds, presumably, and could have made the drivers day by throwing in an extra $1. And then they told me that I was “being American” and said something to the extent of it being surprising I hadn’t been ripped off more in my travels. My point was that I didn’t feel like I was being ripped off, I was opting into directly supporting an individual through tipping. And so what if we were paying a “tourist tax?” We are, um, tourists. But it soured the whole conversation and I made sure to sit at the opposite end of the dinner table at the speaker’s dinner.
2017: That time we realized tipping was just reverse bribery? We were in Kerala, India, and we had struggled to find a place with decent wifi near where we were staying. And then we found a cute little cafe. We’d order breakfast, and an endless stream of masala chai and soda water and stay until we’d finish our work for the day. And yeah, we’d tip. Not only was the chai good, the servers were nice to us and seemed cool with us staying all day. And because of the currency differential/foreign exchange rates, we were generous in our tips. It was the third or fourth day that we were visiting the cafe, when the waiter came over to say hi and take our order. There was a table next to us, with four individuals from France who piped up with an “Excuse me, we were here first and we’ve been waiting.” I was surprised to hear French accents complaining about the service because I’ve never encountered worse service than in France (but c’mon, the country is great even if every waiter makes sure you know they are inconvenienced and unhappy by you being there) — but the sentiment made sense, more generally.
The waiter said he’d be right back with our order and then take theirs. I made some sort of half hearted apology to their table, explaining that we had been coming every morning — but apparently they had, too. At which point, we assumed it was because we were better tippers? Or maybe just nicer? But probably, it was related to money.
And that led us into a conversation between Faris and I about how tipping and bribery are kinda the same thing, just happening at different times. (In India, parts of Asia and North Africa there is a term for this: baksheesh, which means bribe, tip and charitable donation.)
We felt pretty sure that we were getting exemplary service because we had tipped on previous days. But we weren’t sure: Were we getting great service as a thank you for our previous tip? Or were we getting great service so that we would tip generously again?
So I was particularly fascinated by the latest from Charlie Werzel exploring how the pandemic and technology have impacted tipping. He writes:
It’s clear, in any case, that tech has upended tipping, creating a pervasive sense of cultural confusion about parts of the practice. And it’s been exacerbated by societal upheaval from the pandemic, mounting cultural and political frustrations, and broken business models. Employees and consumers are caught in the middle of these larger forces, and the result is a feeling of uncertainty at the moment of transaction.
There are a couple of factors at play that have created this cultural confusion:
Minimum wages across the USA are still *staggeringly low* (read: they are not living wages.) We’re all aware of this, but should we be the ones, as individuals, to have to fight against this? Increase in tipping benefits workers in the short term, but what does it say to employers?
Those in the service industry are dealing with more difficult people. Consumers have been “behaving much more aggressively” since 2020, more generally.
Some categories have standardized tipping expectations, whereas others are much more muddy.
Technological limitations are at play, too. Square terminals offer three fixed dollar amounts when tipping on a bill under $10. But, once the total increases over $10, it switches to a percentage. And store employees at cafes that sell, for example, coffee AND merchandise, say it can be awkward that customers are forced to see a tipping screen just to get their receipt — even if the employees aren’t expecting a tip based on a t-shirt purchase.
It’s also worth considering that tipping is inherently unfair - some people are more likely to get tipped than others irrelevant of service - there is a variety of research based and anecdotal evidence that blonde women wearing red lipstick get more tips (from men).
Werzel sums up the confusion saying:
I’ve begun to think that modern tipping’s awkwardness comes less from our desire to compensate for service and much more from the fact that the practice sits at the center of a very complicated cultural, socioeconomic, and political Venn diagram. People who work service jobs are exhausted, frequently exploited, often underpaid, and caught in a precarious, damaged industry model. They’ve endured laboring through a global health crisis, during which they’ve been dubbed essential, but have often been treated as expendable and undeserving of hazard pay. At the same time, plenty of consumers have felt tremendous guilt for the privilege of working from home during the pandemic and renewed respect for the people who deliver packages to their doors and put food on their shelves.
Some of these sentiments were reflected in the pandemic’s tipping boom, whose residual effects we may still be experiencing. Consumption has never been easier, and that has the added effect of making some consumers feel queasy about where their money goes and who benefits. Tipping, in some ways, acts as a barometer for all of these complicated feelings, and the technology forces workers and consumers to confront them more frequently than ever. In a sense, we are watching cultural behaviors change in real time in a volatile cultural and economic environment.
Tipping feels weird because everything feels weird in America in 2023.
I’m curious to see how/if brand reputation is impacted by tipping and tipping practices. It was only late last year that Starbucks finally rolled out digital tipping, and that was because workers unionized in Buffalo. It was the most requested thing from the unionized workers. But customers haven’t taken it as well.
Where do you stand on tipping? And how do you think it impacts brands’ reputations?
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Interesting article on tipping. As a Brit, I too find the tipping culture in the US surprisingly strict/ aggressive. However, one other cultural difference to add to your list is tipping in Japan. I went to a Japanese restaurant in London with two friends who had both recently returned from living in Japan. When paying the bill, I asked them how much we should add for service. They both said not to tip at all as the waiter would be offended. Apparently, the Japanese culture is that you are paying for good service as part of the overall price, and therefore no tips are needed (the waiter confirmed this). Much simpler for the customer and links back to your point that if workers were paid a fair wage, then tips should not be required.
Great piece about tipping and how/why it's gotten so weird. Really appreciated the personal stories over the last decade plus, certainly enlightening to think about it within a global context. Former high school / college waitress, thanks for sharing!