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قراءة كتاب The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America
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The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America
precisely on the same level as a buyer (paid to purchase in the whole market), who concentrates his orders with one house for a fee.
A clipping from The New York Times shows the attitude that employers are taking toward split commissions:
"Several wholesalers in this market received a letter yesterday from a prominent dry goods retailer in the middle West saying that their buyers would be in this city to-day and that each one had signified her acceptance of a rule against taking petty 'graft.' The retailer asked that the salesmen try not to make this rule difficult to observe. The rule follows: 'You must not accept entertainment of any kind, even luncheon or dinner, from any one in New York. We will make an allowance, sufficient to cover all expenses, including entertainment.'"
This retail merchant had discovered that a free theater ticket or dinner could create such a sense of obligation that his buyers would not be able to exercise the freedom of choice that was necessary. The New York salesmen offered the tickets and dinners in the form of gracious hospitality, but knew all the while that their real intent was to bind the buyers to them through a sense of obligation without regard to the merits of the goods.
Thus the spirit of "honest graft" is spreading out in America. It grows with what it feeds upon. It is a moral miasma, the fumes of which are permeating all strata of society.
THE BIBLE AGAINST TIPS
Following are only a few of the many citations in the Bible against tipping, gifts, gratuities, greed and like practices and impulses:
Exodus 23:8. And thou shalt take no gift; for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.
Ecclesiastes 7:7. Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart.
Proverbs 15:27. He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that hateth gifts shall live.
I Samuel 12:3. Behold here I am: witness against me before the Lord, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it you.
Isaiah 33:14-15. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?... He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly ... that shaketh his hands from holding bribes.... He shall dwell on high....
Job 15:34. For the congregation of hypocrites shall be desolate, and fire shall consume the tabernacles of bribery.
Luke 12:15. And he said unto them, Take heed and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
VII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIPPING
Why the custom of tipping should be followed so generally when it is palpably a bad economic practice and ethically indefensible is a psychological study with the same aspects that the slavery issue presented before the Civil War.
The Puritan conscience allowed that institution to grow to formidable proportions before arousing itself decisively, and it has allowed this equally undemocratic custom to attain national ramifications.
CASTE AND CLASS
In its broadest statement, the psychology of tipping presents the two antipodal qualities of pride and pusillanimity. The caste system is not based upon the superiority of one class over another, but upon the pride that one stage of human development feels over another stage of human development.
A democracy cannot do away with different stages of development in the human mind. But it does do away with the belief of one stage of development that it is worthy of homage from another stage of development. Democracy does not concede that one man working with his brain is superior to another man working with his brawn. Democracy looks beyond the accident of occupation, or the stage of human development, and sees every man as originating in the same divine source. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
In a monarchy, the craving of the human mind for approbation—the quality of pride—is cultivated into the class or caste system. Those citizens who have attained a larger measure of culture than their fellow-men allow the false sense of pride in that culture to creep into their ideals and actions. They seek for some method of visualizing this assumed superiority, of obtaining the acknowledgment of it from their fellow-men. With an unerring instinct of human nature they play upon the cupidity of those whom they desire to place in a servile relation. A gift of money wins the social distinction they covet.
Thus the tipping custom has its origin in pride, and it necessarily involves humility as a correlative condition. If all men are created equal, as we aver in our basic political creed, they cannot become unequal except artificially, except by an agreement of one set of citizens to play the rôle of servitors for a consideration from another set of citizens. One set of citizens will become abased—that is, they will surrender their birthright of equality—in order that another set may strut around in a belief of superiority and indulge a sense of pride.
NO SUPERIOR CLASS
In a democracy, the gradations of culture exist, but it is not permissible for one class of workers to assume a superiority over another class. That they do assume it is evident, and that for all practical social purposes we live and move and have our being on that assumption is evident, but in granting manhood suffrage, in allowing the proud and the humble to have an equal voice in government, we declare the social system a fungus growth.
At the moment of the highest power of the institution of slavery it was not less wrong than at the moment the first ship-load of slaves was landed. No mere accumulation of material property can vitiate a principle of right. Hence, the very widespread acceptance of the tipping custom lends no authority to it. If 95,000,000 Americans are engaged in tipping 5,000,000 Americans, and if both the givers and the receivers apparently concur in the rightness of the custom, it does not thereby become right. We must go back to first principles to find the answer.
TIPPING AND SLAVERY
The American democracy could not live in the face of a lie such as slavery presented, and it cannot live in the face of a lie such as tipping presents. The aim of American statesmanship should be to keep fresh and strong the original concepts of democracy and to beat back the efforts of base human qualities to override these concepts.
The relation of a man giving a tip and a man accepting it is as undemocratic as the relation of master and slave. A citizen in a republic ought to stand shoulder to shoulder with every other citizen, with no thought of cringing, without an assumption of superiority or an acknowledgment of inferiority. This is elementary preaching and yet the distance we have strayed from primary principles makes it necessary to prove the case against tipping.
The psychology of tipping may be stated more in detail in the following formula:
To one-quarter part of generosity add two parts of pride and one part of fear.
FIRST INGREDIENT, GENEROSITY
This is a subtle element and merges into a sense of obligation on slight provocation. You feel that your position in