Should We Be Tipping Flight Attendants?

Filed in archive Buying Stuff on October 4, 2006

A few weeks ago I worked myself up into a lather about tipping, and how it's impossible to know when you're "supposed" to tip and how much.

Catching up on my reading at the Freakonomics blog, I found this tasty entry: Why Don't Flight Attendants Get Tipped? A sampling:

"...it's very odd to me that so many service people who perform similar functions get tipped and that flight attendants don't. Especially when they often work so hard for so many people, running back and forth with drinks, pillows, headphones, etc."

He's actually thinking of tipping the flight attendants!

In our daily lives, every one of us does things for others, which our employers pay us to do. (Or our customers if we are self-employed.) We don't get extra cash for every person we help. We get a salary or hourly wage

Now here's the genius of tipping. The smartest industries have learned how to reduce risk by putting much of the onus of paying employees on the customer. In effect, your waitress, bellman, etc. is being paid like a commissioned salesperson, with a laughable base salary but the ability to earn more if they sell well. Unfortunately, they only have so much power to "sell"--they can do a good job for the customers that come through the door, but they can't make any more customers appear, and yet they are penalized when traffic's lousy, while the owner of the establishment gets to pay meager wages to keep these people around for the times that people do show up.

And, as customers, we subsidize this.

Think if every industry only paid its employees when customers showed up. We could all work as commissioned salespeople, yet many of us would have no ability to affect the number of customers that come through the door. What if Dell started paying its technical support team subsistence wages, but they got extra money whenever someone called for support, and that bonus would come from money that Dell charged the customer who was calling for support. Would Dell be able to survive with this business model? Would employees or customers stand for this?

Not likely, and yet both employees and customers give a pass to the industries that have managed to work this model into their traditions. I say we make it stop.