A Tip Toward Making a Difference

There are many reasons to be chest-thumping proud of Cleveland, and my own list is long.

But my travels around the country remind me time and again that above all, what makes my heart swell is Clevelanders' inherent sense of fairness and their willingness to act on it, particularly for hourly wage earners who check our coats, serve our food and pour our beer.

To state the obvious: Life in America is not always fair. That surely is true for too many living in northeastern Ohio. There are many days in many lives when the most we can say at sunset is that we took our best shot at the fire-breathing dragon and we're still standing.

What makes this lakeside patch of the Midwest so mighty, though, is the number of people who still believe in the promise of America and think we all have a role to play in making sure we keep it, especially for those who can't slay the beast on their own. Nothing has illustrated this passion for justice more simply or vividly than our community's response to the issue of restaurant tips.

Since early 2004, I've been writing about tips and the various ways some owners and managers try to skim them. And since early 2004, readers have expressed outrage and done something about it, too.

Here's what I've learned about a lot of fellow Clevelanders:

You care that coat-check clerks and bartenders keep the tips you leave for them. When you tip servers, you expect them to keep the full amount because management already got its due when you paid the bill.

You care about transparency, too. If your generosity is exploited to rip off an employee, you want to know about it.

Recently, I wrote about how a local chain started making servers pay a portion of the service charge for tips left on credit cards. One of the owners insisted that this was none of the customers' business. You let him know otherwise, and I know this not only from the amount of angry reader response but also from the dozens of servers who wrote or called to tell me about the big uptick in customers who left tips in cash and often registered their disgust with management.

Your activism on their behalf made a real difference, and not just because of the tips. What mattered just as much was the irrefutable evidence that you cared about them as human beings.

Over time, readers in the Cleveland area have changed how a lot of servers get their tips. I always ask about tipping policies when I dine out, and if I'm asking in northeastern Ohio, the servers usually say they answer that question a lot.

I usually get a different response from servers working just about everywhere else in the country. Just this past week, I was in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and every time I asked about the tipping policy, the server looked surprised — and grateful.

"Nobody's ever asked that," they often said, and frequently their stories got worse from there. As I've said before, no hourly wage earner in America is more vulnerable than the one who must depend on tips to make minimum wage.

As tips go, here's one for newspapers across the country: You'll provide a great service to your readers, not to mention restaurant servers, if you read our Plain Dealer package on tipping practices at www.cleveland.com and then embark on an investigation in your own town. Most people want to make a difference in the world, and educating them on unfair restaurant practices is a great place to start. It's also a terrific way to show why newspapers still matter.

Back here in Cleveland, there are still plenty of reasons to keep asking who keeps the tips. Some chains refused even to answer reporters' questions about tipping policies.

If I know Clevelanders, that won't be the end of it. Not even close. And that's a good thing.

I am reminded of a young woman who served me coffee on Cleveland's near west side earlier this month. I asked her whether she gets to keep the tips in the jar.

She grinned and nodded.

"I do now."

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.

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