The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [53]
The most plausible hypothesis of modern tip motivation was promulgated by Louis Reverdy, a French lawyer, in his thesis, “Le Pourboire,” for the Doctor of Laws degree of the Sorbonne in 1930. Reverdy says that men first tipped for display. Now, he thinks, they tip from a sense of duty, since they realize that the tips constitute the tippee's means of livelihood. This is true even when the customer knows that the cloakroom girl works for a concessionaire and when he feels that it is the duty of the restaurant to check his coat free. For he knows that the individual girl will lose her job if nobody tips her. By withholding his tip, he would sacrifice an amiable individual to a cold principle. The chances are that he is inspired to even greater sympathy if the girl happens to be comely. Concessionaires, of course, are aware of this and pick their girls accordingly, but they place no premium on actually beautiful girls. “A girl who's a real knockout gets herself a guy in a couple of weeks,” Abe Ellis once explained, “and then you got to break in another girl.”
The contemporary tipper gets little positive pleasure from tipping. Less than one per cent of the patrons at the French Casino tipped fifty cents, and there was no significant correlation between the amount patrons spent in the restaurant and the size of the tips they gave in the lobby. Most men oscillate between the dime and quarter levels, the average tip at a large Broadway place being sixteen cents. Girls report that at East Side clubs like El Morocco there may be a slightly higher ratio of quarter tippers to dime tippers. But fiftycentplus tippers are as rare on the East Side as on Broadway. Perhaps twice a week, in any club doing a large volume of business, eccentric patrons tip girls five dollars or more. The recipient is allowed to keep half of any tip in this class, turning the rest in to the concessionaire.
Men in the hat-check business admit that the customers don't enjoy tipping. But, they say, nobody ever went to an unpopular place merely because of free hatchecking. And conversely, when people want to attend a certain club, they don't stay home because of the cost of checking their hats. They are fond of telling how the Cafe Savarin on lower Broadway once abolished tipping, only to have the patrons force the money on the girls, and how the Hotel Algonquin had the same experience.
At private banquets in the Astor, hosts sometimes stipulate there shall be no tipping of cloakroom attendants. Keating, the concessionaire, used to cite one such affair attended by the late Nathan Straus, the freemilk man. Mr. Straus gave the girl a dollar. She handed it back to him. The thwarted philanthropist threw the dollar behind the counter and walked out. The experience of the Hotel Pennsylvania conflicts with these happy reminiscences of concessionaires. The Pennsylvania and all the other Statler hotels abolished hatcheck concessions and hatcheck tipping in 1933. Far from resenting this change, the Statler people say, patrons now check thirtythree and a third more articles per capita than they ever did before. At the restaurants Longchamps, where the hatcheck tip is included in the tenpercent service charge, most patrons seem content to let it go at that.
The most skilled operatives of the concession business are not the young women of the cloakroom or the hangers who work behind the counter but the cigarette and novelty girls. They need salesmanship to maintain their level of sales and tips, and tact to avoid arguments with customers. If a girl is the subject of a complaint to the management, she generally loses her job. The worst sin a girl can commit is to recognize a man accompanied by a woman and remind him of a previous visit. The woman may be his wife and his previous companion may not have been. Standard brands of cigarettes sell for twentyfive cents in night clubs, and a girl's tips are expected to