The Land of the Fee (Throwback)

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tipping is a norm in the United States—and it's always been controversial. The practice took off after the Civil War, as employers sought cheap labor from formerly enslaved people: if tips were expected, companies could get away with paying laughably low wages. But the practice was always controversial, and has been vehemently challenged since it first came to the U.S. from Europe. We speak with Nina Martyris, a journalist who's written about the history of tipping in the United States, to find out how tipping—once deemed a "cancer in the breast of democracy"— went from being considered wholly un-American to becoming a deeply American custom.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Organic Valley, the farmer-owned cooperative dedicated to providing ethically sourced food from small organic family farms.
0:09.5	Discover how you can support local organic farmers at o v. coop slash ethically sourced.
0:16.0	Hey Ramteen. Hey, what did you have for lunch? I just had lunch.
0:20.0	Yeah, I haven't had lunch yet. I'm waiting on mine. My stomach is growling.
0:23.2	What are you going to eat? I actually ordered delivery.
0:25.2	Ah, yeah. Yeah. I say that with guilt. Do you hear the guilt?
0:29.1	Yeah, totally. No, I do it all the time. I feel afterwards but it's like what can you do sometimes
0:34.3	what is you what I'm like I'm like I want to support local businesses yeah yeah
0:38.7	but then I'm also like these delivery apps do they pay people well and then I think about the tip because I'm like should I go
0:44.0	extra with the tip you know what I mean to like make up for it? But then I'm like are they getting it?
0:48.0	No totally and it's it's super weird because I find that the more money I spend on food, the less generous I am with the tip.
0:56.1	I always try to give 20%, but if it's like I'm spending less money, I sometimes will give more.
1:00.9	But something's so weird about that right well it's arbitrary right it's
1:04.7	really arbitrary it's really up to like how you're doing that day yeah how much of
1:08.6	money you've just spent on whatever you just bought right and it seems like a system that could have a lot of problems
1:15.6	in terms of fairly compensating the person who is performing the service for
1:19.6	you. In this case, delivering your sandwich. Yeah, because I always think about like why is it so dependent on like the generosity of the customers?
1:27.6	Because I always think back to when I visited Europe for example, or a lot of, you know, the Middle East,
1:31.7	like I just think about how like tipping in the way that we think of it here
1:35.6	Doesn't exist in the same way like it seems more built in yeah exactly in that that that origin that you just talked about that's a mystery at least for me and I think for most people so I actually
1:46.4	That has something that could make for a really interesting historical investigation into like how we even got this
1:54.3	System that just seems not really compatible with all the other labor practices in most of the world.
	...

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