On Tips and ‘Class’

[from a fb post in early 2021]

I’m really not into tipping culture. No worker should feel dependent on the discretionary good-will of customers to earn a decent living, and no customer should have to do the ethical calculus of deciding how worthy of payment the workers who serve them are. So I try not to judge customers based on whether they tip or not, and save my bitterness for the bosses…

But…

On a quiet or particularly miserable night (which tonight wasn’t, in all fairness) tips can be the difference between feeling your time spent working was worth the stress, the danger, the burnt calories, and so on, or a wasted evening. It’s also something to think about while cycling from A-B. You get quite good at predicting who is going to tip and who isn’t.

Anyway, to get to the point, the lad on the top floor of the nice Hyndland tenement, ordering organic vegan superfood curry from the trendy healthfood place in town was never going to tip (and neither was he ever going to walk down the three Glasgow tenement height flights of stairs to save me the last 30 seconds of my journey).

The bloke ordering a bottle of Buckfast and a box of Amber Leaf from the Crow Road Londis petrol station to the middle of Maryhill, on the other hand, not only tipped generously, as expected, but waited outside to wave at me and save me squinting at house numbers.

— —

[and in response to a comment]
In all fairness, if I had to guess the occupation of the two customers, I’d say the superfood guy was probably a PhD Student or researcher (it’s obviously a ‘desireable’, and there are always expensive looking cars about, but I know frm experience that plenty of the flats are shared student flats. There were other people in the flat but he only ordered for himself!). I’d guess the other guy was a labourer or tradesman (going mostly by the size of his hands ), and I reckon his house was a relatively cheap ‘starter home’ for him and his family. The second guy was in his early 30s (I had to input his dob for the bucky), and I think the first guy was probs a similar age.

So, Mr Organic is quite likely earning fuck all with very little job security, and paying most of it in rent, while the bucky bloke could be earning relatively decent pay and part way through paying off a mortgage.