The Only Winning Move

So, if you order two beers, you pay for two. And if you want to walk out of the grocery store with two bags of chips, they customarily want you to pay for both of them. Of course, if you pick up a pair of shoes, then you get a left one and a right one for one simple price, but that’s just ’cause the typical case is that people want both at once. Well, airline tickets seem more like beer and chips than shoes. You use one seat, you pay for one seat. And yet - somehow - it manages to be controversial that if someone takes up two, he has to pay for both of them. Which is what Kevin Smith does full time now that he’s a millionaire, apparently - complain about having to pay for two seats if he needs two.

Well, OK. It started because he got charged for two seats but booked on a flight with only one and then kicked off of that flight. That is indeed on Southwest. But Tweeting to hoardes of like-minded fat people that the policy of charging people who take up two seats for (what else?) two seats - that’s just whiny. You use two, you pay for two. Why is this difficult? If I want a bag-and-a-half of chips, I can’t go to the store, rip open the second bag, weigh out the quantity I want, divide by the weight of the bag and multiply by the price to find the “proper” markup. There’s just no markup option! Chips come in bags. You buy a bag, or you don’t. If you want some fraction of a bag, you gotta buy the whole bag. To absolutely NO ONE is it controversial that the chips company gets to decide how many chips to put in the bag and what to charge for it. Likewise, the airline company gets to decide how many pounds go in a seat and what to charge for that. You can’t buy fractions of seats, so if you’re over the weight limit, you gotta buy two. Simple, fair, and indisputable, right? So WHY IS THIS CONTROVERSIAL? Are there no gyms? Are there no bike lanes?

For the past two days, it’s been snowing in Bloomington, and you know what that means! Native Hoosiers get to do what native Hoosiers do best: be deliberately annoying on the road. The state hobby here - and the number one reason, honestly, that it would take a pretty steep salary (or possibly tenure) to get me to live here on a permanent basis - is getting in front of people on one-lane roads and then slowing way down. Well, that and braking right before they go through a yellow light just so that the person behind them can’t get through. One could be forgiven for thinking that winning the lottery takes a distant second in these people’s minds to that gilded moment when someone finally - FINALLY! - rearends them and they get to get out of the car slowly and give a patient lecture on the dangers of tailgating. So snow is like a godsend - because they can get away with going EVEN SLOWER THAN NORMAL.

That said, I have to say that what’s even more annoying than Hoosier driving is people from Michigan (they’re never from Minnesota or North Dakota somehow) going on about how driving in the snow is no big deal. Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking to a woman who decided that everyone in Bloomington is a wiener (she actually used that word) because businesses close early when it snows. Well, why shouldn’t they? If no one can be bothered to drive in the snow because they’re afraid to, then isn’t the responsible thing for a business faced with losing money on labor to do to close its doors? Not to mention, if people from Bloomington KNOW they suck at driving in the snow, isn’t the responsible thing for them to do to - well, NOT do it? Which is what they’ve been doing - erm, not doing - so good on them!

But what’s really annoying about this is just that it’s a self-defeating argument, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a self-defeating argument (for reference, see “healthcare reform will pay for itself,” or “buying local saves jobs”). Because, see, on the one hand, for this to work, snow has to be really easy to drive in, else what is the basis for saying that people just need to suck it up and - in the words of a Michigander friend - “drive like it’s not there?” But then, on the other hand, they need driving in the snow to be an acquired skill, else what is the point at all of puffing up with pride at their astounding ability to drive in snow? What it all comes down to, of course, is the blindingly obvious fact that people who get a lot of practice at something - like driving in the snow for people from Michigan (a place which truly should be uninhabited - and, actually, is rapidly headed that way) - tend to be a lot better at it, on average, than people who don’t. It’s a bit like if Lance Armstrong were to say “What the hell’s the problem? You just get on the bike and pedal!” To him, it probably does work something like that. But it only works like that now because of all the arduous practice he’s already done. So, let’s take an informal internet poll. Here we have a driver who drives on actual snow 4 or 5 times a year. And here we have another driver who does it nearly every day for four months out of the year. Place bets on who’s better at it.

OK, well, I guess if we do an internet poll we’ll get answers like “Henry Ford was a racist who stole mass marketing from Egypt” - but you get my point. Driving in snow may come easy if you get a lot of chances to do it - but no one, not even a member of the Michigan Master Race, just gets behind a wheel one day and says “blimey! snow! Well, first time for everything: I choose to drive like it’s not there” and that’s just that. Nope. It’s only easy because you do it for two weeks in a row, and then it sticks with you. If it’s one day in January, then two in February, then maybe one in March? Yeah.

But OK, we’re talking about people who voluntarily live in a place where you sometimes have to crawl out of second-storey windows to get out of your house.

There’s a post that’s making the rounds about the perennial issue of tipping. Apparently 15% is no longer enough, and people should start thinking of 20% as the base rate.

That’s no problem for me, since I’ve been thinking of 20% as the base rate for years now. I tip 20% by default, rounding up or down a bit depending on how the math works out, or how much is in my pocket (which, here in the modern world, means how my accumulated credit balance looks on that particular card). I leave 15% or even 10% for crappy service, 0% for extremely crappy service, and as much as 30% if the service was really stellar (though that’s rare, usually it’s 25% when I’m impressed). But I only do this because I was once a server and I empathize. In reality, these prices are entirely too high for service, and the tipping system just makes for deceptive pricing. It’s the same kind of annoyance as sales tax, only on a much higher scale. When you see the price listed, it’s helpful if that’s the actual price you’re charged, not just the base to which you have to add all kinds of taxes and service charges.

It’s an interesting question why the base tip rate raised from 15% to 20%. When I was in Canada, I was actually told it’s 10% there. I have no idea, obviously, how generally accepted that is. One of my (Canadian) friends took me to breakfast and left a Toonie on the table, and, seeing the look on my face, felt the need to explain that servers only expect 10% there. Whatever. I have the impression, actually, that tips are lower up here in the North (Indiana) compared to at home (North Carolina) too, so maybe it’s a graded geographical effect, to which I assume New York and Chicago form exceptions. Another concept no one up here seems to have heard of is the minimum tip. I’ve always had the impression that you tip a minimum of $2 no matter what the price of your order - just because you’re occupying a table and some of the server’s time. That’s true whether you order just a glass of tea or a full meal, so it’s polite to tip $2, even if that’s roughly the price of your tea. But no one I’ve met from outside the South seems to have heard of this, so maybe it’s a Southern thing. The overall point being that I have some annecdotal information that tipping customs vary greatly by region, so maybe the 20% tip isn’t as national a baseline as this author thinks, and maybe tip inflation has only happened in some parts of the country.

It’s interesting that tip inflation is separate from general price inflation. Since tipping is a percentage, there’s no need to adjust for inflation: the total amount received on a 15% tip keeps pace with the rise in menu prices. However, I think the linked article may be dismissing general price inflation as a cause here prematurely. It may be that when menu prices started to rise some of the cheaper customers started tipping less than 15% as a way to make up the difference - perversely taking it out on the server rather than the restaurant - and so everyone else started raising their tipping percentage by way of compensation, and it all met at 18-19% (supposedly the national average now). It would be an interesting thing for an economist to study: do gratuities inflate faster than other prices?

Regardless, I’m writing this to make some of the standard grumbles about tipping as a method for compensating servers. First, as I said, it’s just annoying in general to be presented with nominal prices on a menu that aren’t the actual prices you’re going to end up paying. That’s true for consumption taxes too, and I really wish we could switch over to a system more like in Japan, where stores are kind enough to add the sales tax on to the price tag, so you just pay what’s written.

Second, tipping enables cheapskates, and that’s really frustrating. It just presents cheap people with an opportunity to opt out of paying for something that they’ve received without feeling like they’ve stolen anything. The price on the menu is not negotiable - you either pay it or dine elsewhere. I don’t see why the same can’t be true for service. Related to that point - tips send mixed signals. In theory, they’re a good way for customers to communicate with their servers about how good the service was. But that only works if everyone is on the same page about how much to tip, and in reality servers have a hard time “reading” tips just because people have very different ideas about how to do it. Some people tip 20% even when they’re angry at you. Some people have recently come into money and get a kick out of leaving generous tips. Some customers are planning to be regulars and are tipping to establish a reputation as a generous tipper, so it’s more of a downpayment on future service than feedback on their current server. Some people are just cheap and skimp on tips no matter what. Some people plain don’t tip. Some people are members of ethnic groups who have a reputaton for not tipping and are trying to overcome the stereotype by overtipping to compensate. Some people are genuinely unaware that tips are 20% now. Some people are drunk and can’t count. Etc. etc. etc. It’s broken as a signaling system.

Tipping is also anachronistic. I don’t know this for certain, but I can well imagine that tips evolved for services that the enterprising unemployed offered to make ends meet on coming to the city and finding themselves unable to quickly land a job. So, maybe you hover around a hotel offering to carry bags or whatever. The hotel owner doesn’t mind since he doesn’t have to pay the guy, and upper class people get services performed on their own terms, etc. Once the practice becomes accepted, even regular hotel employees will come to expect tips, etc. Now that what is expected in terms of service is largely a negotiation between the establishment and the customer, however - now that service is “in house” rather than farmed out, as it were - what need is there of tipping? Customers can simply complain to the manager about bad service, and the manager can fire repeat offenders.

Tipping leads to irrational pricing as well. This is related to the earlier point about the $2 minimum tip that seems to exist in the South but nowhere else. If you sit at a table and order tea and continue to drink your free refills for hours, you might technically only owe $0.40 on a $2 tab, but the server had done A LOT more than $0.40 worth of work for you - especially when you consider the opportunity cost if you’re occupying a table in an otherwise busy-ish restaurant that could’ve been filled by people ordering more expensive items. It’s also sort of perverse that a waiter who delivers a hamburger gets paid the same 20% as one who delivers gumbo, even though the gumbo might cost twice as much - meaning that for the same amount of work (carrying a bowl of gumbo is no more difficult than carrying a plate with a hamburger on it) the one server gets paid twice as much as the other. Now, to the extent that the restaurant turns a larger profit on the gumbo, I guess that’s fine as it creates an incentive for the waiter to try to sell expensive items. But if the profit margin is the same on the hamburger as on the gumbo? Or even less? A higher menu price doesn’t necessarily mean the restaurant is making more money off of the item; the price may be explained by more expensive ingredients.

Further, it obscures the relationship between the server and the restaurant. I suppose the trick to any customer service position is making the customer happy within the limits set by management. There’s always a tension there: sometimes what’s right for the customer is not allowed by management. But this tension is especially accute when you’re a server since the management isn’t paying you directly. As a server, your wage really does depend on making customers happy, and in my personal experience this just made me resent it all the more when management asserted some sort of arbitrary new authority over dress code or drink refill policy or whatever else. Out of one side of their mouths, management sells serving as a job that gives us an unlimited ceiling on earnings, but then every time they institute a cost-cutting measure that benefits the company, waitstaff feels the pinch. It’s unfair.

For another thing, tipping makes shift changes awkward. A server can spend a bunch of time on a table only to find he stays past the end of his shift, and then it’s just ugly because either he gives up his tip to the next guy, or he stays on longer for only a modicum of marginal compensation.

Finally, tipping creates annoyances for customers - at least, customers of a certain type. I’m the kind who likes to be left mostly alone. The server should hover about, but otherwise be as unobtrusive as possible. You know, fill my drinks, tell me what the specials are, come and take my plate away as soon as I’m finished - that kind of thing. I strongly dislike all the things associated with tip-seeking, though - the stupid chit-chat, the constantly checking by to see if everything is OK, etc. There is the kind of service the customer wants, and the kinds of things servers do to remind you they need to be paid, and these two groups are often at odds.

So tipping is just a bad system all round, and I wish it would go away. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to - not so much becuase it has an ardent defenders, but more just because we’re stuck in a local minimum: geting away from tipping would benefit everyone, but no involved party has an immediate incentive to get rid of it. So how do we go about it?

My suggestions are these:

(1) Fancy restaurants should not get rid of it. Tipping is appropriate to upper-class establishments, where patrons have money to spend on service and would like to be able to purchase it at variable cost, as suits their needs. The best servers can start small and graduate to these establishments, which afford them an opportunity to make decent pay for extra efforts. The signaling system is not broken in these establishments because wealthy patrons are familiar with the customs, and neither the pricing nor manager/employee relationship distortions exist since top-dollar establishments don’t need to engage in as much cost-cutting to compete and don’t typically worry as much about profit margins. Everyone wins.

(2) Mid-range restaurants could take the first step by offering two pricing options: one with tip included and one without. They could also add service charges to meals below a certain amount - since losing “campers” (customers who occupy tables for a long time without ordering much) has never adversely affected anyone’s bottom line. Either the menu could contain two prices, or the receipt could contain a suggested tip (with the service charge for orders under, say, $10 included automatically) of 18% or so. The suggested tip could be calculated according to profit margin rather than nominal price, eliminating the price/payment distortions.

(3) After (2) has gained currency, it would be easier for restaurants to switch to an automatically-included service charge. This could simply be built into the prices with something written on the menu explaining that tipping is discouraged. There is nothing stopping restaurants from instituting a bonus system for more items sold so that effective servers can continue to get paid more than ineffective ones. If several establishments in a locality passed through step (2) before going to this step, I think most restaurant-goers would find they prefer just paying what it says on the priceline, and business would not be affected.

A modest proposal.

A friend sends an article claiming that it is comforing news that less than 1% of American teens need cholesterol medication. Apparently, we are supposed to conclude from this that reports of childhood obesity in America are overstated. The friend then adds that he and I have agreed that there is too much obsession with weight in this country.

Actually, I’m not sure we ever agreed on that point exactly - but it didn’t seem worth splitting hairs over. In fact, I DO think a lot of Americans are way too fat, it IS disgusting, and I DO wish those people would do something about their weight (and I also think that in the overwhelming majority of cases it is within their power to do so - in other words, don’t give me the “it’s their hormones” bullshit). Where he and I probably agree is on two points: (1) other people’s weight is not a political issue and (2) just because Americans are fat it doesn’t follow that no one else is.

It’s this second point that I want to rant about. The first point is obvious: the government shouldn’t regulate people’s weight or health in any way - and this includes charging me for other people’s medical bills a la Obama’s dream of a single-payer Canadian style healtthcare system. In my ideal country a person’s weight would be his own concern, meaning that people who suffered health problems due to their lack of self-control when it comes to eating would be forced to pay for their own lifestyle choices rather than charging me for their stupidity, self esteem problems, and general lack of foresight. But I’m well aware that America is not that country, so that’s another discussion for another day.

I wanted to rant about the idea that obesity in America is somehow unique - or uniquely excessive. In fact, most of the countries that chide us about our weight are not that far behind us here. Europe - I’m talking about you. Canada - I’m talking about you. When I worked in Korea there was one Canadian who managed to be even more annoying than all the other Canadians complaining about Americans’ weight - this even as he stuffed his face with convenience store cake claiming that he didn’t have time to eat a proper lunch. Was he obese? No. Was he overweight and unhealthy? Definitely.

So memo to the rest of the world: just because US citizens are on average bigger than citizens of your country, you are not ipso facto off the hook. Either you are interested in health or you are not. If you are interested in health, then exactly how much more obese Americans are than people of your nationality is inconsequential to you as you already have your work cut out for you at home.

The same is largely true of global warming. Assuming that there is, in fact, a global warming problem (and I find that highly dubious, frankly), then it seems to me that foreign countries have the right to criticize the US for contributing to the problem only when they themselves no longer are. IF global warming is real, then reducing your emissions to something below that of the US’ doesn’t help anyone if you’re still above the emissions rate which scientists claim is harmful. It’s sort of like defending yourself at a murder trial by saying “well, yeah, I mean I stabbed him a COUPLE of times, but nowhere near as many times as Tyrone, so Tyrone is the real killer here.” Poppycock! The law bans stabbing, period. Or like those entirely pointless debates about whether Stalin or Hitler was worse. Who fucking cares? Once you’re killing in the millions, killing a few million less than your neighbor doesn’t make me feel any better about you as a person, sorry. If global warming is a clear and present danger as so many claim, then it isn’t enough to be better about it than the US. Your country is still an earth-killer until you’re not - period. And your population is still fat until it isn’t - period.

I am not a Christian - or a religious believer of any kind - but some of the Bible stories I heard in church as a kid make more sense to me as I get older. There’s that one, for example, about the rich man who comes to Jesus essentially asking for an exemption from paying taxes since, after all, God is his king and not Rome, right? And Jesus points to the picture of Caesar on the coin and says that since the money comes from Caesar, he has to pay his taxes, sorry. As a kid, this story didn’t make much sense to me - because what they taught us in Sunday School, after all, was that God was more important than the government. But as you get older you realize what was going on. God may come before the government, but just because God outranks the government doesn’t mean we don’t need a government. Quite the contrary - we DO need a government … for all those people who don’t believe in the same God we do. In fact, the man seeking an exemption from his taxes probably didn’t really believe in God at all, and Jesus wasn’t about to let him use God as an excuse to get out of his obligations to fellow men, etc. Likewise the even more famous story about stoning the prostitute - where Jesus says “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Again - as a child this seems ridiculous. Surely he can’t be saying we’re never allowed to criticize anyone? As you get older you realize that what the story is concerned with isn’t so much making sure that everyone is perfect as making sure that they criticize in good faith. You can only criticize others when you realize that doing so doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to improve yourself as well.

And I think when I talked to my friend in the past about obesity it was probably THAT point that I was making. In fact, Americans are fat, and I make no excuses for them. What frustrates me is this idea that the fatness of Americans somehow means that Canadians who stuff their faces with cake can never ever be obese. It’s nonsense. What I object to isn’t complaining about fat Americans, in other words, it’s complaining about fat Americans as an excuse to complain about Americans. I myself am an equal opportunity employer here. I think fat people of all nationalities should lose weight, and the only conclusion I draw from the fact that there are more fat people in the US than in Europe is that some people read too much into statistics.

There’s a lot of talk about computer security these days. You know, what with all those evil hackers and identity theives out there, it’s important to keep your data secure.

There’s especially a lot of talk about computer security here at IU. It seems like every time I open my inbox, there’s a new letter from UITS about some class they’re offering me to keep things even tighter than they were already keeping them the last time they mailed me. And indeed, the cycle of business around here seems to go something like this: some administrator has some friend who owns some software company that would like to sell IU some software. So bi-annually they replace the somewhat functional system we were using with an even less functional system and sell it as a “security upgrade.” I think that was the official explanation for the steaming pile of poop we bought from PeopleSoft, anyway.

Anyway, all this got me thinking about many ways that a software system can fail to inspire confidence in its security features. One of them goes something like this:

Say you download a bunch of stuff from an undisclosed school repository using wget, which means you sent it your password in the clear, oh, about 20 times. Probably no one was watching, but you know, these things get logged on the server, so eventually some admin might come across it in log files. So you go to the appropriate site - let’s call it http://passphrase.iu.edu just for kicks - to set a new passphrase. You go through all the painful hoops, and along with the normal “this won’t take effect for as many as 20 minutes,” it sends you a bunch of error messages. For days, you go around using the new passphrase, sure that your 20 minutes have passed, only to be told again and again that it isn’t valid. So you use the old one instead, which magically works, despite supposedly having been reset. Gradually you begin to suspect that your passphrase hasn’t been changed at all and will never be changed. So you cheefully go back to using the old one. Until one day, two weeks later, you can’t get into your library account anymore. After about 25 tries of typing REAL SLOW WITH YOUR TWO POINTER FINGERS JUST TO MAKE SURE, it becomes obvious that it’s just not cooperating. From somewhere buried deep in your subconscious, you have this vague itch of a memory of having tried, unsuccessfully, to change your passphrase. And what the hell, right? Why not - nothing else is working - so you type it in and it works.

Yes, folks, it took the IU system TWO WEEKS to register my passphrase change. But it isn’t just that - it’s that as far as I can tell, it’s only the library computer that’s bothered to notice. Email, Onestart, all that other stuff still happily accepts no substitute for the old one.

It occurs to me that this is the kind of thing that might tend to deflate one’s confidence in the security of a particular software system.

So - the moral of the story is this:

Dear People Responsible for Third-party Software Purchases at IU -

You are to your jobs what tubby 60-year-olds are to the world of stipping. You maintain a system the way Mike Tyson engages in foreplay. Your attention to detail is like unto a stick figure I would draw with finger paint.

Sincerely,

Someone Who Can Do Better