Pinking Up For Service

When it comes to tipping, I'm with Mr. Pink.

In the classic opening scene of Quentin Tarantino's 1992 movie Reservoir Dogs the would-be robber is sat in a cafe eating breakfast with his partners on the morning of their heist. When asked to chip in a dollar for their waitress, he explains that he doesn't believe in tipping.

"I don't tip because society says I have to," he says. "I'll tip if somebody really deserves a tip. If they really put forth the effort, I'll give them something extra. But I mean, this tipping automatically, it's for the birds."

I'm still adjusting to Bermuda's tipping practices. In restaurants in the UK and much of Europe, ten percent is an acceptable tip.

In Bermuda, give anything less than 15 percent and people start wondering if you're Canadian (a stereotype that, incidentally, I'd never heard until I moved to Bermuda).

The number of jobs that Bermudian society deems tip-worthy is also greater than I'm used to. For example, when there's someone at a UK supermarket checkout to pack your groceries for you, it's all part of the service: no tip is expected.

In Bermuda, the checkout aisles are manned by a small army of schoolchildren who will cheerfully pack your eggs beneath your potatoes or omit the plastic cutlery you need to eat your lunch, but do so with the expectation of receiving a little something for their effort.

I don't mind tipping when they do a good job, but it's hard to keep an eye on them while you're unloading your basket onto the conveyor or fishing for your EasyLink card.

Some tip-worthy roles here don't even exist in the UK. Visit a gas station there and you'll rarely find anyone to fill your tank for you.

Self-service pumps may be becoming more popular in Bermuda but I'd wager that most people here still have their gas pumped for them and tip the person doing it.

Some Bermudians have also adopted the American practice of tipping bar staff for serving you a drink. I believe that you tip to reward good service; as it's difficult to do a good or bad job opening a bottle of beer, this has never struck me as a tip-worthy profession.

Some argue that they need the tips because their basic pay is so poor. Wouldn't it be better to simply pay them more?

In recent years, some of London's fashionable bars and restaurants have introduced bathroom attendants to hand you soap and towels when you wash your hands. Of course, they also expect a tip. Thankfully that's one practice that doesn't yet seem to have made it to Bermuda.

Don't get me wrong. What irks me most about the growing number of roles where tipping is customary is not the additional demand it places on my wallet. It's that having people do things for me that I'm perfectly capable of doing myself makes me feel uncomfortable.

I hate standing idly by while my car is filled with gas, my bags are filled with groceries or my hands are filled with soap. I hate walking back to my car two steps behind a child pushing a trolley laden with my shopping that's larger than he is.

Let me do it myself! Except that I can't. If I told that child that I'd rather pack my bags and take them to my car myself I'd be considered just as mean as if I let him do it and then didn't give him a tip.

Even if he broke my eggs, I'd probably still be considered miserly if I didn't tip him. Tipping, it seems, is no longer about rewarding good service, it's about avoiding social disapproval.

Restaurants obviously realised this some time ago, when they started automatically adding a fixed service charge to your bill.

If the tip was a way for you to provide an incentive for good service they'd let you choose the amount yourself, wouldn't they?

Michael Lynn, associate professor of consumer behaviour and marketing at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, has spent over 20 years researching tipping behaviour.

He has found that countries with the most extroverted and neurotic citizens (the United States leads in both, by the way) tip the largest amounts to the greatest number of professions.

Lynn believes that this is because an extrovert likes the attention that a large tip compels a server to pay him, while a neurotic does it because of guilt over perceived status differences between himself and the server.

Moreover, Lynn has found that the quality of service rendered does indeed play little part in the size of the tip. That's hardly surprising: how many of us, if we received terrible service in a restaurant, would actually have the guts to ask for the service charge to be removed from the bill?

Mr. Pink clearly would. But then, he's a homicidal jewellery store robber. However much I may agree with his philosophy, when it came to the crunch I'd probably still just pay up.

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Phillip Wells' web log is: www.limeyinbermuda.com.

He writes every Thursday in The Royal Gazette.