Should tipping a person for good service continue to be considered social etiquette? From the heart of the West Coast through the bumpy ride of owning a restaurant in San Diego, Jay Porter explains how he adopted his new restaurant policy and gives wise examples from a six year long restaurant-owning experience. .
Michael Lewis is one of the best writers and editors at Vanity Fair magazine, and the author of several famous books including "Liar's Poker" (1990), and most recently, "Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood" (2009) and "The Case Against Tipping," which was published in the New York Times Magazine (1997). Jay Porter is the founder of the Linkery restaurant in San Diego, himself and his staff came up; with new a policy for his restaurant to make more fairness between servers and cooks, he started; adding a service charge of 18% to every dine-in bill. Michael Lewis feels that the tipping concept may create direct physical and indirect mental problems in the culture, and debates the idea of whether tipping is customary. On the other hand Jay Porter supports the idea of a "tipping free" culture and believes that in principle illuminating tips makes it easier to provide good service and illustrates the idea of the service charge to replace tip revenues and distributing the same to all staff on an equal basis. Lewis's claim against tipping draws attention to two essential elements reflected as a natural behavior of human beings. .
The first element is related to mental analysis where a person doesn't want to be thought of as not doing his/her job well, or being one of those people who feel bad that they did not tip the server at the counter for getting them a cup of coffee. For example: the beggar cup on the counter with a dollar bill in it would give a positive effect in the mind of the costumer to make him believe that tipping would support and protect the server from a bad economy, and by doing this the costumer is under the impression that he is taking his role in the society by sharing responsibility among others.