We've had an ongoing debate here at the Insider for quite some time about tipping. Do you automatically tip 15% unless the service is absolutely odious? Do you ramp it up to 20% or 25% for really fabulous service? When do you not tip?
One of our readers seems to be having some similar concerns about Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker's recent 3% raise and 4% performance bonus, worth about $7,000 and $8,000, respectively. The reader said:
DATE: Saturday, January 17, 2009 1:55 PM
SUBJECT: Comment concerning City Manager bonus
TO: Claremont Buzz
I bet other people commented on that already, but the more I think about the manager's "performance bonus" the more upset I get.
Following reasons: Wasn't Parker hired to do a job, because he was supposedly best qualified for it. And didn't the city provide adequate compensation that he does his best job for the city based on his qualifications and experiences. Otherwise, why not hire somebody else...?
What kind of signal do we give city employees, if the city hands out "performance bonuses" or should we rather call them bribes. Does this mean that the city staff gets their base pay for just showing up for work and occupying expensive office space, and in order to get anything productive and well done from the staff, we need to pay them a bonus. Can't the citizens of Claremont not expect good work from staff, which are in my opinion overpaid already.
Using the same logic, will we soon have to pay teachers a bonus, so that they will teach our kids adequately or can we only expect good policing if we pay bonuses to police officers as well.
A concerned citizen of Claremont.
Questions about the need for tipping, by the way, have been around for a long time. New Yorker writer James Suroweicki had a column in 2005 about tipping, and he dredged up some pretty old arguments against the practice:
Restaurant workers in the United States make more than twenty-five billion dollars a year in tips, so it’s natural that people think of the custom as quintessentially American. But it wasn’t always. Tipping didn’t take hold here until after the Civil War, and even as it spread it met with fervent public opposition from people who considered it a toxic vestige of Old World patronage. Anti-tipping associations were formed; newspapers—including the Times—regularly denounced the custom. Tipping, the activists held, fostered a masterservant relationship that was ill suited to a nation in which people were meant to be social equals. William R. Scott, in his 1916 polemic “The Itching Palm,” described the tip as the price that “one American is willing to pay to induce another American to acknowledge inferiority”; Gunton’s Magazine labelled the custom “offensively un-American,” arguing that workers here should seek honest wages “instead of fawning for favors.” The anti-tipping campaigns were so effective that six states actually banned the practice.
Suroweicki seemed to come to the conclusion that tipping really is an irrational process:
People tip even though they don’t have to. Since they tip after they’ve been served, they’re not buying good treatment in advance. Nor are they just buttering up their regular waitresses—studies show that people tip about as well at out-of-town restaurants as they do at their local Bennigan’s. Americans are paying money that they do not have to pay, then, while receiving no obvious benefit as a result.
So why tip? When people are asked, they usually say that they tip to reward good service. Yet how much people tip is determined mainly by how much their meal cost, and the cost of a meal at a given restaurant is usually only tenuously connected to the work required to serve it. (It’s just as easy to open a hundred-dollar bottle of wine as it is to open a thirty-dollar bottle.) In an extensive survey of tipping studies, Michael Lynn, a professor at Cornell, found only a weak correlation between the quality of service that people report receiving and the tips they give. On average, exceptional service raised tips by about 1.5 per cent, which, Lynn argues, is too small for waiters to notice. And countries where there’s no tipping—like Australia and Japan—don’t have worse service than the United States.
It’s instructive to consider the sort of things that tippers actually respond to. In one study, a waitress received fifty per cent more in tips when she introduced herself by name than when she didn’t. In another, waiters sharply increased their tips by giving each member of a dining party a piece of candy and then, seemingly spontaneously, offering each person a second piece, too. Squatting by the table instead of standing, writing “Thank you” on the back of checks, and touching customers on their shoulders all measurably improved tips. And waitresses at an upscale restaurant who simply put flowers in their hair boosted their tips by seventeen per cent.
These tricks may seem cutesy, but they help personalize the relationship between the customer and the server, which tells you something important about the nature of tipping. The practice really belongs to what sociologists call a gift economy rather than to a market one. The free market, at least in theory, is all about impersonal exchange—as long as you have goods to sell and I have money to buy them, we can make a deal, regardless of how we feel about each other. But, when it comes to tipping, who we are and how we feel matter a lot, because a tip is essentially a gift, and we give better gifts to people we like than to people we don’t. Tippers aren’t trying to drive hard bargains or maximize their economic interests; they’re trying to demonstrate their status and to reciprocate what they see as good behavior.
You get the impression that the market for municipal employees really falls into the same "gift market" category as tipping. How else was former City Manager Glenn Southard able to not only survive but thrive in Claremont for 17 years with crisis after crisis dogging him? How does current City Manager Jeff Parker get a raise and bonus in a year of financial and real estate crashes, in a year when his staff made a $250,000 blunder by bulldozing the Claremont Wilderness Park, or a little over a year after that same staff cost the city $1 million as the result of a misworded deed when they bought Johnson's Pasture?The answers are very simple. People - at least three out of the five councilpeople who counted - liked these guys, so they got the tips, whether they deserved them or not. The trick, then, if you're a high-level municipal employee, is to make sure that you do whatever that council majority (and the influential people who support them) wants. You have to do this whether it's right or wrong, whether it's good or bad for the town, whether or not you ought to be counseling the council against something you know is a potential misstep, because your financial self-interest dictates that you absolutely need to be liked by them.
So, Mr. City Manager, you support a downtown trolley even when you know it's a colossal waste of money at a time when you're well aware your budget can ill-afford such toys; or, you let your staff push an affordable housing project that's located on the worst possible site in town, even though you know the proposed project is doomed to fail. And so on and so forth. This good behavior gets you the rewards you seek with little or no rational thought involved in the process, just as Suroweicki's tipping piece noted. Real quality of service has very little relationship to the rewards lavished on municipal staff, at least that's the way it's worked historically in our fair city.
Of course, there's a very important distinction to note in this analogy: with tipping, it's your money to give; with a city raise or bonus, it's still your money, but you're not the one doing the gifting.
Your City Council
(in no particular order)
(in no particular order)
Left to right: Sam Pedroza, Ellen Taylor, Peter Yao,Linda Elderkin, Corey Calaycay
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