Call me a Curmudgeon. Go ahead, get it out of your system, cause you’re probably going to disagree with me on this post.
The “Tip Jar” has gotten way out of hand. Everywhere I go, there seems to be a tip jar on the counter. From Starbucks, to the local pizza joint, to the freakin coffee shop in my building at work, everyone’s got a tip jar out. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to tip people working in a capacity where tipping is customary and usual. This is especially true where someone’s base salary is below minimum wage because they are expected to make the difference up in tips. But come on people, not everything in life deserves or requires a tip, especially if you aren’t doing anything but filling a cup of coffee or putting a slice of pizza on a paper plate for me to take to my table – and subsequently bus – myself.
At the risk of sounding like my grandfather, when I was a teenager working in a sub shop the idea of putting out a tip jar on the counter never even occurred to me, because I wasn’t performing a service that deserved or required a tip – I was making sandwiches, which was in actuality, my entire reason for being behind the counter. Tipping me for making a sandwich would have been ridiculous. And even if I had thought of putting a tip jar out, my manager would have summarily dismissed the idea and threatened termination of employment if I’d done it.
This is part of what I call modern society’s “entitlement syndrome.” Everyone seems to think that they are entitled to something. Apparently, now everyone is entitled to be paid extra for doing their jobs.
I’m putting a tip jar on my desk. Feel free to put a five-spot in it the next time I create a VLAN for you.
Two years ago, I read One Square Inch of Silence by George Hempton. I wrote a rather critical reaction to the book on this blog. One of Hempton’s arguments is that we no longer hear our footsteps when we walk, and he attributes this to the fact that there is too much ambient noise in our environment. When I read this book, there were many things that resonated, and not being able to hear our footsteps was one of them 
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