The effect of these scenes upon the public is dual. It either confirms their impression that all servants or officers are "approachable," or it creates among the unsophisticated the idea that tipping or graft is the customary and proper method of dealing with such classes of citizens. The worldly wise gain the first impression, and the spread of the tipping custom is assured by the second impression.
Moving pictures have extended this influence to every nook and corner of the country. The result is that persons who live in the smaller and more democratic communities are educated to the big city development of the itching palm. And the effect upon children and young people is pernicious in the extreme.
IMPRESSING THE YOUNG
A boy who sees a tipping scene in a moving picture gains the impression that it is smart to exact such tribute. Or he gains the impression that he has been overlooking a rich vein of easy remuneration. The photo-play directors, either consciously or unconsciously, are doing great damage to democratic ideals by featuring such scenes. It will not be surprising if, among the other evils fostered by moving pictures, the next generation displays a marked increase in the grafting propensity. The young people are being educated to think it natural.
Thus, aside from the human impulses of pride and avarice, it is apparent that literature and the stage are strengthening the custom of tipping by their representations of it as humorous. People will not combat anything at which they laugh. The itching palm has two doughty champions in the books on etiquette and the theaters.
Actors, it would seem, have enough contact with the itching palm among stage hands to make them ardent advocates of reform, to say nothing of their contact with it in hotels. On the vaudeville stage especially the carpenter, the electrician, the property man and their co-workers must be "seen" with regular and generous donations to insure a smooth act. In many theaters the stage hands have a definite scale of tips for regular duties that they perform—and for which the management also pays them.
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THE EMPLOYEE VIEWPOINT
From a waiter, or a porter, or a janitor's point of view, tipping is wrong only when it is meager. They regard this form of compensation as not only just but usually too sparingly bestowed.
Unquestionably, with any reform in the manner of compensation to persons engaged in domestic or other serving capacities, must go a reform in the attitude of the public toward servitors. The patron who abuses his privileges, who exacts of employees far more than he has the right to ask, who treats them as automatons without sensibilities or self-respect—such a patron must be handled simultaneously with the change in manner of compensation.