Tipping U.S.A.

We like quirky little history lessons of obscure subjects. This is an excellent example:

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.

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