A Few Tips About Tipping

For a whole second or two, it looked as if most Americans really cared about restaurant servers and their tips.

Oh, happy day.

Having spent considerable ink on tipping practices during the past few years, I was downright giddy. It felt almost like an uprising, all these serious journalists and average Americans championing the lowest-paid hourly workers in the country.

NPR, ABC, CNN, NBC, Fox and the AP covered it. So did newspapers across the country, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. A boatload of bloggers weighed in, too.

All of them asked the same question: Did Anita Esterday, a waitress at the Maid-Rite diner in Toledo, Iowa, get stiffed by a customer?

Unfortunately, the customer in question was Hillary Clinton, and so the coverage morphed into yet another character test for a presidential wannabe. Indictments were delivered and verdicts gleefully rendered in the time it took bloggers to type h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e.

The question seemed straightforward enough: What kind of person doesn't tip for good service?

The answer, though, came out in dribs and drabs, and the facts were far less titillating than the speculation. The real issue — how we treat those we're allowed to mistreat — was lost.

It turns out that Clinton's staff did tip Esterday and her fellow servers, although how much is still in question. The campaign says it left a $100 tip on a $157.46 bill. The manager, Brad Crawford, told reporters there was a tip, but he refused to say how much. He also didn't know whether the campaign staffers meant for the tips to be distributed to all the servers who helped. Apparently some got tips and others didn't.

"If something happened with the disbursement (of the tip), it's probably my fault," he told The Associated Press. FOX News reported that Crawford's wife said the campaign staff not only tipped, but helped out the restaurant workers, too.

The good news in all this is that, for a little while, people across the country thought about why tips matter. Let's build on that molehill, shall we?

Esterday wanted no part of attempts to depict her as a victim, in her job or in her life.

She is similar to hundreds of servers I've met in recent years. Most servers are women, usually mothers, and often single. Many of them work more than one job, and most have no health care. Unless they work in upscale restaurants, they depend on tips to earn far less than a living wage.

That's who they are; how we treat them says a lot about who we are. As my mother used to warn us, "Don't marry him until you she how he treats the waitress."

With the party season upon us, now is a good time to review who and why we tip:

— If your tip is for more than one server, let each of them know — preferably in front of the manager responsible for divvying up the money.

— Don't assume a "gratuity" or "service charge" added to bills for larger parties goes to the servers. Some restaurants and party centers give servers only a percentage of that automatic charge. In a few instances, I've discovered the servers don't get a cent.

— Whenever possible, please tip in cash. Some restaurants withhold the tips from servers for a week or more, and some employers deduct the credit card service charge from the tip.

— Never assume a tip jar on a counter is there for the person working behind it. At some places, management keeps those tips, a reprehensible practice that ought to be illegal. If there isn't a tip jar, ask the person serving the drink, parking your car or checking your coat whether they're allowed to accept a tip. Usually they're allowed to take it as long as they aren't the ones bringing it up.

One more thing: Always assume your server is one of the smartest people in the room. That was certainly the case with Esterday, who was appalled at the media flurry after Clinton's visit.

"You people are really nuts," she told a New York Times reporter. "There's kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there's better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn't get a tip."

Great advice.

And free, too.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.