Anyone who's seen the Preston Sturges movie The Palm Beach Story may recall a line from Rudy Vallee, as uber-millionaire John D. Hackensacker, namely:
"Tipping is un-American."
The reason for this quote is, of course, the story from an Applebee's in South STL recently, which went viral after being reported on the Consumerist website, and which was noted on DK
here. The waitress who got fired for posting the photo on Reddit, Chelsea Welch, got space on
The Guardian's "Comment is free" blog
here, which expands on comments reported in the parent Consumerist on-line article that started the social media ball rolling. Joe Holleman of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch has a separate blog post on the incident
here. More (loserly, of course) ruminations on tips and tipping 'neath the flip.....
I thought back to try to figure out how many jobs I've ever had where I earned tips. I realized that I've had only one such job in my life, if one accepts being a paperboy in 7th grade as a "formal" job. I obviously had to deliver the papers and pay the newspaper their cut, but I got to keep tips, if any. Some residences tipped OK, others a bit more than OK, others not at all. A few in the last category did throw in something around Christmas time, at most. But for about a year, I earned enough to start a bank account. (Maybe that's why I'm so money-conscious, sometimes to my social detriment.)
Nowadays, when I get a haircut or eat out, my own general guideline is a 15% tip. Compared to some of the comments on the DK story, I'm probably in the lower category. If the service was OK, I'll go with 15%. Less than OK, I'll go lower. More than OK, I'm happy to go higher. In fact, one recent restaurant that was more than usually attentive to me got a 25% tip. The flip side of that was that at another place, where because I had trouble understanding what the server was asking (very thick accent), I ordered a much more expensive version of a drink (fruit juice, if you must know) that I originally wanted. Admittedly, that mistake may have been me screwing myself more than the server, but from that, and that I judged that it didn't really cost the server that much more effort to make the juice compared to the less expensive version, I lowered my % of the tip. (Tips were in cash, BTW. I'm starting to think about making that more regular practice when eating out, namely charging the meal but tipping in cash.)
With the barber shop, if I get a coupon for a discount haircut, like a recent 50% off coupon, I'll tip on the original full price, of course.
In the case of Chelsea Welch, it was a stupid oversight on her part not to crop the picture to remove Alois Bell's signature initially. So she's not quite 100% blameless here. Simply leaving the word "Pastor" would have been embarassing enough, in a general sense. That slip on Welch's part does not, of course, mitigate the fact that Alois Bell has shown herself to the world to be more than a bit of a douchebag. Admittedly, the right-to-privacy side of me understands when a person's privacy has been violated, even if said person is a hypocritical cheapskate who hides behind religion as her excuse. But then there's the schadenfreude part of me, of course, that revels in douchebags being exposed as douchebags. I know people like that at work, unfortunately, but we don't have the luxury of exposing them to well-deserved public humiliation, except strictly in-house, among colleagues.
The story is only a few days old, so I don't have any updates as to whether the situation for Chelsea Welch has changed very recently. It may say something, however, that on her blog post at The Guardian, the number of comments is >1000. Interestingly, if you type in her name on the P-D's website, this story doesn't come up. But a search of her name reveals the picture shown here. I haven't the slightest idea if the person in this same picture is the same Chelsea Welch.
So, with that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, although I would suspect that most people's loser stories for this week don't quite approach the one covered above.....