THE CHAUFFEUR
It would be possible to run through all the classes tipped and prove that the extra compensation is unearned. The chauffeur is a latter-day instance of the itching palm. Like the barber, the chauffeur is paid well for his work. He does nothing for which the patron should give him a tip. The taxi-meter charges the patron roundly for all the service given, yet tipping chauffeurs is as common in the larger cities as tipping barbers or waiters. It simply shows the spread of the practice to workers who have no other claim upon it than their own avaricious impulses—and the extreme docility of the public. Every tip given to a chauffeur is so clearly a bad economic transaction that further argument is unnecessary.
So widespread has the practice become that tipping is, individually, a problem, as well as collectively. The traveler has a formidable cost to face in the tipping required. When the total passes $200,000,000 a year, it becomes a problem which the American people will find more difficult of solution the longer it continues unchecked.
The whole argument is summed up in this. Tipping is an economic waste because it is double pay for one service—or pay for no service. It causes one person to give wealth to another without a fair return in values, or without any return. The pay that employers give to their employees should be the only compensation they receive. All the money given by the public on the side is unearned increment.
The best condition for a fair exchange of wealth is where standards are known and prices are definite. Self-respect and sound economics flourish in such an atmosphere, whereas, if values are hazy and compensation is indirect and irregular, as it is under the custom of tipping, the bickering that follows degrades manhood.
From an economic viewpoint, all businesses are on an abnormal basis which figure minimum wages, or no wages, to their employees on the assumption that the public will, through gratuities, pay for this item of service.
"One service—one compensation" is the only right relation of seller and buyer, of patron and proprietor.
VI
THE ETHICS OF TIPPING
The moral wrong of tipping is in the grafting spirit it engenders in those who profit by it; in the rigid class distinctions it creates in a republic; in the loss of that fineness of self-respect without which men and women are only so much clay—worthless dregs in the crucible of democracy.
In a monarchy it may be sufficient for self-respect to be limited to the governing classes; but the theory of Americanism requires that every citizen shall possess this quality. We grant the suffrage simply upon manhood—upon the assumption that all men are equal in that fundamental respect.