Big Tips

It is Christmas morning in my extremely gay, extremely friendly, and extremely Jewish city. I walk into my café, the one I’ve already written odes to on rainy days (and mentioned briefly in this post). Liquid dnb is playing. Like any other day, there's near a dozen dogs, young regulars, retiree regulars and the occasional uniformed soldier who looks like a convincing AI thirst trap. I order my 16-shek Americano and tip 20. The staff act like I’ve just funded the cafe to make it one more day. My knee-jerk reaction is to say “it's no biggie” and pass it off like a regular occurrence.

I am thinking about tips... again. How Jewish.

Note: I’ve written before that a more reasonable way to tip would be based on how often staff offer or refill your water — because that actually reflects attentiveness and care more than what you physically ordered.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, knows tipping culture is stupid. We heard the nauseating monologues about the iPads with those predefined amounts, and how it's so awkward to put in your custom amount. We heard about Casa Bonita. But really, the more you think about tips, the dumber it gets.

Let's start with how tipping is a tax on niceness. The nicer you are, the more you spend. In an ideal system, bad restaurant and bar patrons would be paying more. In our system, the nicest people are spending more. And so the empathetic blue collar worker who has experience as a barista, bartender, delivery boy or whatever, gives a 30% tip (and stacks their plates), while the financial analysts and investment bankers brag about not tipping (unless flirting).

Then there's the paradox of the difficulty of work behind the service: Bartenders are heavily tipped heroes of society, while baristas—people who perform ballet with milk—get spare change. As someone who has worked behind bars, receiving plenty of $5 tips for just opening a beer and passing it over the counter, I can confidently say that the average cafe drink is harder to make than the average bar drink. Yes, there are blatant exceptions. But pouring soda into Aperol is not harder than drawing a fern or cute animal in latte foam, just for the customer to take an iconic Instagram pic before stirring their art away.

Baristas require precision. Bartenders get paid more for messing up a recipe with extra booze.

Psychology explains some of it. You just have to accept that psychology is about how dumb man is, not good explanations for our behavior. We tip bars because it’s customary and don’t tip cafés because… it isn’t. That’s it. We decided on a bad system and we're sticking to it.

Vodka and tonic? Yes. Shaken espresso with brown sugar and oat milk? No.
By the way, both are roughly 50 times more expensive than if you made them at home.

Then there's the worse paradox to contemplate: we reward vice and chaos with gratitude, while we ignore the people who help us function and get through work. Think about how many have had a regrettable night from ordering too many drinks. Bartenders, whether at a pub or club, aren't exactly known for cutting people off, you know, until it's too late and someone's puking or causing a scene. Baristas aren't causing societal problems like that.

Remember that day you regretted ordering too many iced chai lattes or matchas? Nobody does.

Then there's image.

Bartenders have a cultural brand. In our collective imagination they are clean-cut, handsome, flawlessly groomed professionals in vintage jackets and sleek aprons, working in dimly lit speakeasies surrounded by Edison bulbs and perfectly curated vinyl playlists. They look like they moonlight as baroque violinists or philosophy lecturers.

Reality? A lot of bartenders are degenerates. They clean only when necessary, wipe things down mostly when someone important is watching, and if we’re being honest, an average dive bar is one Lysol wipe away from becoming a CDC research site. If any café operated at the hygiene standard of even a mid-tier bar, it would be shut down in 24 hours and people would die of listeria. But somehow we don’t care. Bars can be filthy and “cool.” Cafes must be pristine and spotless to even exist.

Meanwhile, baristas actually maintain cleanliness standards. Coffee machines need to be cleaned obsessively. Milk systems require constant maintenance. The environment has to stay hygienic. But we treat the bar scene like gritty charm and the cafe like it’s lucky to receive attention at all.

Back in reality, baristas and bartenders likely have similar ambition. Baristas just wake up earlier. Why do they get the punchdown jokes about being liberal arts majors with green hair? I mean, it's only true like 40% of the time. And it's not like every bartender is known for being the highest contributor to our society.

Look, I don't write this blog to cover the same hack-y jokes about iPad tips and green-haired baristas as open mic-ers. And yet I already have touched on these tropes. So finally I'll get to the point: You should tip. A lot.

Tipping is messy. It punishes empathy. It rewards guilt. It makes generosity feel like a tax on being decent. The more logically you examine it, the worse it looks. It collapses instantly under economic scrutiny like a badly built soufflé.

But here is the twist: We need to like tipping. We need to get joy from it. We need to pretend like we did something nice by making our barista do a little jig and thank us. And we need to pretend like we are even nicer when the worker doesn't notice the tip, and we don't make a big deal of it. It doesn't matter that none of this is true, and we are just perpetuating a really bad system.

Let's appreciate the five seconds two people acknowledge each other’s existence in a world determined to automate that out of us. It’s irrational. But it's human.

The system makes no sense at all. But it is our system for a reason.

When you consider how great your local cafe is, it doesn't really matter that tipping makes no sense. The ambiance and acceptance of our strange humanity makes it worth it. People don't make economically informed decisions, they make fun ones, thinking, "If I die tomorrow, at least this person gets my 20 sheks instead of the banks." And so we need to make sure tipping is a fun activity we choose, not a burden.

“Big Tips” isn't going away. Let's embrace it. Let's be proud of ourselves for perpetuating a stupid system. There are people who really can’t afford to tip. If you're reading this, you're not one of them.