The subtle art of giving a tip

How much should you tip? To whom? When? Using what notes? What is the best way? That and so many other questions around the complex act of leaving a tip. But no answers.

There was this one day a while ago when I was hungry but not hungry for home food, but also not hungry for anything elaborate. It happens; it’s a very specific kind of hunger where you want something simple but not boring. The perfect meal for such a situation, I believe, is a dosa (or a McDonald’s burger, but people get very incensed when I say that).

I was in Mumbai at the time and I ordered a masala dosa from one of those local Indian fast food places that functions like a dysfunctional, codependent family — everyone hates everyone but they can’t live without one another. All the people there are really old, even the youngsters are old. They’re rude to customers. They’re ill-mannered with each other. But the food is always impeccable and served at turbo speed. So on it lives — an anachronism in an industry supposed to run as much on service as quality. They don’t even know what Zomato is; you have to call them up on the phone like a caveman.

Anyway, the food reached me in, like, 15 minutes. It was a hundred bucks, and I handed the guy 120 rupees, the excess amount being his tip for delivery. He looked at me like I was an idiot. Why are you paying me more than you’re supposed to, he asked. I had to gently explain it was for him. He was disgusted. He took the money with great contempt, shook his head, and left.

Another delivery fellow got scared once; he said it was “company policy” not to accept tips. I told him he could just take the money and not tell his boss; not like I was going to snitch on him. But he still refused. Thanks but no thanks, he said.

Tipping is such a fraught activity. It comes with so much baggage, so many questions. I honestly never know the right way to do it, how much to pay, how cool to play it. We don’t have the percentage rule here, so the amount has to ‘seem’ right. If it’s too less, then that makes you a total cheapskate. A good rule to have is that it’s always better to over-tip than under-tip, though I still want to find that sweet spot. And what if I’m on a date? What then? There’s a woman across the table that I’d like to impress; she’s judging my every move, so I have to pretend to have a big heart, but I also shouldn’t come across as showy, you know.

Then you have all these other questions: is it cool to tip using old, decaying notes? Or tenners instead of 50s and 100s?  What do you do when the server turns out to be a full asshole? (I’ll still tip, of course, but only begrudgingly.) In case I’m paying by card — earlier you could just write a number on the slip they gave and sign it, but that technology no longer exists — and I don’t have cash on me, then?

The thing is, tipping should be the norm, just a thing you do, and not an act of generosity. It should be thought of not as conditional kindness or display of largesse but standard protocol. In the class and cultural context I exist in, there’s considerable talk of privilege and equality, which is useful and necessary. Because of greater awareness and progressive, lefty politics, the general trend leans toward appropriate tipping and working class rights.

Important as that focussed approach is, it often tends to overlook the intangible aspect. Tipping in India has traditionally been viewed with an uncertainty and suspicion, aided by the many inequalities in our society. By both the giver and receiver, it can sometimes be — inaccurately — seen as a kind of handout, or an act of magnanimity.

To avoid that muddle, a certain tact needs to be practised, where you don’t emphasise the act of doing it, or make it seem like a favour or a reward. And the inverse too, which is far worse: that the absence of a tip is a punishment, signalling a sort of unequal equation, a power imbalance. Instead, it needs to be an ethical commitment, not a contingent transaction.

So it must be downplayed a bit. Just doing it isn’t all there is to it; it demands subtlety, craft, respect. It should be no more nor any less than an exchange of money for services, a relationship between equals. It’s fraught, basically.

What about when you’re staying at a hotel and you plan to have a few meals there? Do you leave a regular tip after every meal or one big tip at the end? And who gets it: the server who’s toiled for you or the maître d' who conveniently pops up at your table to ask you how the meal was when it’s time for the bill? What if, and this is a tough one, they serve food with a loose piece of plastic or metal or, like, an insect in it? (I personally don’t care if there’s a stray hair or two in my food, so that one’s not a real concern.)

Once, I ordered a vada that had a screw inside the dough. I understand that it’s not the server’s fault, and that the tips they receive act as crucial supplementary income, and of course that tipping has to be the default and not based on quality of service or whatever, but these aren’t moments where rational thinking comes into play.

There are so many moving parts to this whole process; I hate it all. One of my biggest fears — tipping-wise I mean, not in real life — is what happens if I leave a tip, get up and leave the restaurant, and the waiter doesn’t see it? Maybe someone else from the staff picks it up; meanwhile the person who was assigned our table and did a great job will forever think they were tending to a bunch of ungrateful cheapsters. I don’t want that untruth on my conscience.

Even with food apps, on Zomato and Swiggy, it’s not quite as straightforward as merely selecting a tip amount. That too is a complex decision. For starters, the workers at these companies are, by all accounts, not treated particularly well. So a certain moral dilemma arises just in using the apps for their convenience. I assuage that guilt by assigning a monetary value to it, and shutting my brain off to the larger questions. But then, do they even get to know if they’ve been tipped for the order? And how much? Or do they get all their tips together at the end of the week? I don’t know — I’ve heard contrasting reports — and it worries me. They should at least know I’ve added a generous tip because I’m such a good person.

I could, of course, just hand them cash tips. But A), I never have cash on me, and B) COVID. That’s the big one, isn’t it? The one that’s really fucked up the tipping scene. Earlier, tipping didn’t have such moral weightage attached to it. If you did it, it was a standard-to-good thing to do. But no longer. It’s now a necessary, principled, and moral act.

Delivery people are essential workers today, frontline workers. It’s not like they want to bounce around from home to home and get angry calls by people who can’t wait an extra 10 minutes for their shawarmas. Especially not when there’s the very real threat that they could contract the virus on one of these (not) joyrides. There’s legitimate risk involved to what they do; they’ve been thrown to the wolves. And yet they soldier on.

Today, it’s not just that tipping is standard or good. That was always the case. More than that, not tipping is actively villainous. It makes you a bad person. This is a pleasant development — it indicates a society that’s at least progressing (albeit at an excruciatingly slow pace) and belatedly acknowledging the struggles and value of the gig economy workers. The secondary, far less important thing, though (if at all), is that this places such a great emphasis on the hows and whens and whos and whys of tipping. I long for that brief phase in between where they’d just include the tip in the bill as “service charge” and I didn’t have to worry about all these things. It was voluntary, yes, but you’d have to be a really small and petty person to fight with the management to get that amount removed. But people whined about it so much, so persistently, that they just stopped doing it at most places. And now we’re back to square one.  

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