I love tipping. Do you want a tip? Come on – perform the slightest service for me and I’ll furiously
over-tip you.
Do you tip? Or are you like that famous refuser, Mr Pink from Reservoir Dogs? Do you rub your thumb and forefinger together as you say, ‘This is the world’s smallest violin playing just for the waitresses.’
Before we go any further on this topic, I should point out that I’m aware it’s very nice to be in a financial position to tip and that many people simply can’t afford to do so. So, before you start writing into the Sunday Mail with the whole ‘AYE, IT’S FINE FOR NIVEN IN HIS GOLDEN TOWER TO TALK ABOUT TIPPING PEOPLE BUT WHAT ABOUT FOLK WHO CAN’T AFFORD IT?’ stuff, you can consider my privilege checked.
The varying attitudes to tipping as you go around the world (remember that?) have always fascinated me. In Australia they think it’s nice but not essential. In the Caribbean they’re fine with 10 per cent. In Japan they’re mortally insulted if you try to leave anything. In the UK, as we all know, rather than a strict percentage, a couple of extra pounds is often considered fine. And in America – where my privilege often takes me – they will literally chase you down the street with a butcher knife if you don’t tip.
In the US, around 15 per cent used to be standard. These days, certainly in New York or LA, you’re not even getting a smile if you tip less than 20 per cent.
And tipping has just become even more of a thing in our household: we are without the ability to cook any food for the next few weeks as we’re having a new kitchen installed. (Again, before you write in, my privilege is well checked.) So, for the first time ever, we’ve started using Well Known Food Delivery Services. I took to social media to ask about the procedures for tipping these people. Is it best to add it to your order on your credit card? Or give it in cash to the delivery driver?
The answers were a mixed bag. Some people said the driver might not get a fair share of it if you put it on the card, some said drivers might not accept cash because of the pandemic. Some people said they don’t tip, some people said they do. Some people said tipping only encourages poor wages. Some said these delivery drivers make very good money, some said they’re really badly paid, and so on and so on.
I didn’t care too much about all this stuff. The way I see it, if you’re driving to my door with a steaming package of food through the sleet and rain of a freezing cold January night, you’re getting tipped. But what did astonish me was how many people were intimately familiar with the kind of food delivery services we’d never used before. How many people never seem to cook…
I learned to cook twice. First in the mid-80s when I was a poor student at Glasgow University and there was no other option. You learned the very basics back then. Me and The Bull and Reidy and Paolo, in the kitchen of the flat on Gibson Street, slaving over the spag bog or baked potatoes. Paolo, being Italian, showed us how to make risotto.
Then I learned to cook all over again in my mid-30s. After I left my job in the music business after nearly a decade of expense account restaurant dining, I spent a couple of very lean years while I was writing my first novel. This time it evolved to things like Thai green curry, fishcakes from scratch, how you roasted different meats, how you cooked fish and many pasta dishes.
I wasn’t going to give Albert Roux a run for his money but I loved doing it as I gradually discovered that if I ate something I liked, I could just about approximate it at home. It becomes part of your life. The process, somewhere around 6pm, of pouring a drink and starting preparing ingredients is as natural to me as getting out of bed in the morning.
And I always enjoy mum’s horror when she walks into the kitchen and sees the dinner prep beginning just a few hours after the lunch things have been cleared away and she cries, “Aww my god, son. You’re no starting cooking again?”
So I’ll miss it badly, for the next few weeks. But in the meantime, whether the guys on the mopeds are coming to your door because you have no kitchen or because you’re a can’t cook/won’t cook type, for God’s sake… give them a tip.
