Their position is not tenable. A patron pays the company to get his trunk from wherever it may be and to deliver it to its destination. Whatever operations are necessary to get the trunk are the natural duties of the company and its employees. The charges of the company are, or should be, based on the complete service. The exaction of extra compensation in the form of tips by the employees, therefore, is an imposition. In calling the company no person, tacitly or openly, agrees to the argument that the trunk is to be moved from curb to curb.
The understanding is that your baggage is to be removed from its customary place in the home to the customary place in the station or other destination. It would be as reasonable for baggagemen to dump a trunk outside a station and demand a gratuity from the railroad for bringing it inside, as to demand a gratuity from the patron for taking the trunk up or down stairs. Tipping to baggagemen is unnecessary. If the company pays inadequate wages the remedy lies not from the patron through tips but from the employer through the payment of increased wages.
BOOTBLACKS
Of late years the custom has grown up to tip bootblacks. This is in addition to the regular charge paid for the service and has no justification except in the false plea of the servitor that if the patron does not tip him he will have no compensation. Here it may be stated that the thought that the tip constitutes the only compensation the employee receives is the chief influence in the mind of the patron. He feels a pity for the employee even though he objects to the bad economic system that enables employers to engage workers on such a basis. The employees exploit this thought in the mind by leading the conversation with the patron into the channel of compensation. At some time during the service he lets the patron know that the tips he receives are his only compensation and this arouses the sense of obligation in the patron who does not like to have his shoes shined for nothing, even though the payment at the desk covers the transaction.
Any one who has patronized a restaurant regularly, or a bootblack stand, or a barbershop, or manicurist, or any public place, will recall how invariably the servitors bring up the subject of tipping and always with the suggestion that they would be disabled financially if it were not for the generosity of the public.
This is all a carefully and skilfully planned campaign to exploit the patron.
BARBER SHOP PORTERS
Patrons who do not tip barbers frequently tip the porters who brush them down. On the surface it seems that the porter's attentions in a barber shop are extra and deserve extra compensation. Yet, theoretically, no master barber would admit that a patron of his shop has any other charges to pay than the regular tariffs. The porter is there as an extra measure of service from the shop. Practically, however, the shops all proceed on the assumption of tipping. The porter is a much-aggrieved individual if he is overlooked. In any sound economic system, the porter's compensation should come exclusively from the shop. If his attentions are decided to be extra, there should be a regular scale of compensation, as for a hair cut, which the patron should pay. So long as his services are furnished by the shop without being included in the regular shop tariffs, the patron owes the porter nothing for his attentions.
The solution of the whole tipping problem lies in the foregoing postulate—that if any employee is in a position to render an extra service there should be a regular scale of charges for such service. It is the irregular compensation, depending upon the whim of the patron, that makes the practice economically unsound. No hotel, or other employer, should have on the premises any employee whose compensation depends upon chance. If a hotel stations an employee in the washroom he should be there distinctly as part of the service for which a patron pays at the cashier's desk. A porter in a barber shop should be engaged exclusively at the shop's expense as part of the complete service for which a patron pays to the cashier. Employers, however, are much too shrewd to scatter employees around on the formal understanding that the patrons are to compensate them. They pretend that they are engaged as an extra measure of courtesy or service from the employer and then are educated to exact, through tips, their compensation from the patron.