Tipping is un-American?

My ties to tipping continue.

You can listen to a Marketplace public radio commentary here (look ma, I'm blogcasting) in which I go further than ever in suggesting that we should think about doing away with this institution.

And thanks to a tip from Jonathan Simon, I just watched a great 1936 movie, The Petrified Forest.”

The movie is set almost exclusively in a diner on the edge of a desert that has a prominent sign proclaiming:

Tipping is un-American: Keep Your Change

The owner of the diner is a throwback, a literal member of vigilante group. The fact that the owner is still fighting the anti-tipping battle in the 1930’s is yet another signal that he is out of step with modnernity.

A lot of people did think that tipping was un-American twenty years earlier. As detailed in my Yale Law Journal article with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakaraya, 6 states and the District of Columbia criminalized certain types of tipping and more than 100,000 people joined the anti-tipping league.

But by the 30s, most of these criminal provisions were judicially or legislatively repealed. And the tipping norm was much more accepted as at least an acceptable option.

Indeed, seeing the movie makes me think that the happenstance of depression itself may have contributed to the flowering of the tipping norm. During these trying years, there might not have been as much of a stigma involved in taking a gratuity.