The Last Straw: Staying at a hotel in the west of England recently, I noticed that staff in the restaurant added a "discretionary" 12.5 per cent service charge to my dinner bill, writes Frank McNally.
Since they didn't consult me before adding it, I assumed that the discretion referred to was theirs, and at first I was grateful to be let off so lightly. If they'd been really stuck for money, I reasoned, the discretionary charge might have been 25 per cent, or even 50.
But, after a polite inquiry, I learned that the discretion mentioned on the bill was mine. A waitress explained that I was entitled to deduct the 12.5 per cent if (a) the service had been unsatisfactory and (b) I was a lowlife cheapskate who had no plans to visit this town again. She only said the second bit with her eyes. But needless to say I paid up anyway, secretly wishing I'd had the courage to exercise my discretion, if only by adjusting the tip to 11.75 per cent.
So I was fascinated to read in the Financial Times last week that the whole custom of tipping began in England, in the 16th century, when brass urns marked "To Insure Promptitude" first appeared in coffee houses and pubs. Meanwhile, a practice also developed whereby visitors to private homes made compensatory payments to the servants of the house for the extra work caused. These were discretionary to start with but soon became expected, and a visitor who skimped could find "his horse injured". The custom was so resented eventually that the gentry banded together to abolish it.
Nowadays, tipping is a global phenomenon and, according to the FT, one that presents a problem for economists. The problem is that it undermines a basic assumption about the rationality of economic man: that he will not pay more for things than is strictly necessary. Broadly speaking, tipping falls into that area of economic activity known as "bribery". But what bothers economists is that in modern times, most of these bribes - to taxi drivers, hairdressers, restaurant staff etc - are paid after the event, when they cannot influence quality of service.
The only incidence where tipping makes economic sense is when the tipper is a regular customer of the tippee. My paying the "discretionary" restaurant charge had some rational basis, therefore, in that I was staying in the hotel for four nights (it was during the Cheltenham festival) and eating in the restaurant every evening. As a rational economic man, noting that the food was prepared out of my sight, I had good reason to build up a relationship of trust with staff, or at any rate to avoid antagonising them.
Rationally, I should have tipped for the first three nights, but not the fourth, by which time I'd safely eaten my last dinner on the premises and knew I'd probably never be there again. But of course I paid it then too, even though it seemed to me that the service had peaked on the second night, and went downhill after that.
This is apparently typical of the behaviour of tippers worldwide. Even in the US, the relationship between tips paid and quality of service is so weak as to be negligible. A Cornell professor who studied the subject for 20 years has found that most people tip the same amounts everywhere. When figures are averaged, only 4 per cent of a tip is influenced by quality of service. The sun has about the same level of influence, since customers are known to be more generous in good weather.
The Cornell man concluded that tipping has little to do with reward or motivation, but is simply a payment to reduce consumers' anxieties about the service relationship, and specifically the guilt they feel because the person serving gets paid less than they do. Servers can exploit this in ways that have nothing to do with service. The same professor has published a booklet on how restaurant staff can get bigger tips. Touching customers, squatting next to them, and wearing something unusual are guaranteed to increase earnings. If you're a waitress, drawing "a happy face" on the bill can also increase tips (it doesn't work for waiters).
But probably the surest way to get tips to is to add them to the bill yourself and call them "discretionary". If it's March and your hotel is near Cheltenham, your customer may be subliminally worried that if he doesn't pay, you'll injure his horse.
And even if he doesn't have a horse, he'll probably pay anyway. Yes, he'll be annoyed at your misuse of the word "discretionary". But chances are he'll conclude that discretion - in a phrase that also dates from 16th-century England - is the better part of valour.