Two Cheers For Miss Manners
Navigating the moral and practical labyrinth of tipping in the age of tip screens is not for the faint of heart.
People who know me will be astonished to learn that I own three books of etiquette. They will be less astonished to hear that I purchased none of them. Two were bought, or anyhow acquired, by my late first wife, Marjorie Williams, who worked for a time in publishing and therefore received a lot of books free of charge (which is not to say she didn’t buy them; I just don’t know). The third was acquired by my second wife, Sarah McNamer. The most interesting of the three is The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette as updated (after a fashion) by Letitia Baldridge, onetime social secretary to Jackie Kennedy. That was Marjorie’s. The other two are Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior and Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium. The first was Marjorie’s and the second is Sarah’s. If I’m not clubbable it’s not for lack of reference material.
These last two book are by Judith Martin, who in the late 1970s adopted the Miss Manners persona in the ironic style of that period (“born a perfect lady in an imperfect society” says her web page) but was, and remains, deadly serious about manners; I discussed them with her once at her formidable Mount Pleasant dinner table. Miss Manners has published 16 books of etiquette and, at 85, continues to write a thrice-weekly syndicated Miss Manners newspaper column, now in collaboration with her children Nicholas and Jacobina. (I know Nick a little bit; lovely guy.)
In my latest New Republic piece, a guide through the ethical and practical thicket of tipping, I consult Amy Vanderbilt but not Miss Manners. Her broad views turn out to approximate mine. “Here is an instance,” she writes in August 2022,
where it is wrong to practice what you preach. Miss Manners also deplores the tipping system, for many reasons, but she still leaves tips. As you say: reality. Not doing so would not influence a change in policy, but merely penalize the underpaid staff.
I also like what Miss Manners says about withholding a tip when you receive lousy service. Granted, “blatantly bad service should be reported,” she said in October 2018.
But before penalizing someone merely for having a bad day at work, one should reflect about whether one’s own income is affected by an occasional lapse.
On the question of how to address tip jars and expanding expectations from people who didn’t used to receive tips, Miss Manners is less helpful. In the same 2018 column she writes:
Tip when you think it is right. But do not have qualms about not doing so only because the business is trying to make you feel guilty if you do not.
That doesn’t give much in the way of specifics.
When tip screens on tablet computers proliferated during Covid, Miss Manners raged against the machine. Here she is in May 2021:
One does not, Miss Manners assures you, have to fear being rude to a machine…. She makes an exception for precarious times like this, when workers are risking their health and well-being for ours. In that case, Miss Manners is inclined to be generous. But she still does not like being bullied into that generosity by a machine.
In January of this year, with the Covid emergency largely passed, Miss Manners reiterated her distaste for pushy computer screens:
Even though Miss Manners may occasionally be intimidated by all the new electronic devices in her life, she does not accept etiquette advice from them.
The trouble with this view is that although yes, it’s a machine that’s doing the asking, AI hasn’t advanced to the point where computers desire tips. It’s the workers who are soliciting, through the device of a tip screen. In my New Republic piece, I try to offer a few rough guidelines on how to navigate this labyrinth, based not on the service provided but on how your bank account compares to that of the worker behind the tip screen, and also based on whether there’s a service charge that really and truly replaces a tip. You can read it here.