If I was given that tipping option.. I'd have pulled a 180 pirouette that would have made the most highly trained and graceful ballerina blush like a school girl... and headed right back out that door!
I've appreciated some of George Carlin's political satire, but I've also been suspicious of him, or perhaps rather the way he proved useful to the same powers he seemed to mock. Just like I'm suspicious of any public figure or celebrity who's promoted as anti-establishment by the establishment, like corporate media, manufacturing mock freedom of speech in which the exception proves the rule. Even as s/he, too, like any other upper class collaborator, gets richer at our expense, laughing all the way to the bank by getting us to laugh, cynically, powerlessly, at what becomes taken for granted as the way things are. Comedy Central represents the corporate consolidation of such self-defeating, self-destructive humor. Carlin's occasional if not frequent contempt for working class people, caricatured in Archie Bunker or Joe Sixpack terms, and women in particular, reduced to misogynist stereotypes, only served to underscore this cooptation by controlled opposition.
I can't recall exactly when tip jars and their like started showing up more in the exchange relations of the unfree market. I'd wager that roughly coincided with galloping de-industrialization of the manufacturing base for the economy from automation and layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. and corresponding reduction of labor to service industries. By now, with endemic stagnation and decline of wages (as productivity has increased and the resulting lionshare of wealth has been stolen by upper classes), the precarious conditions of labor in the gig economy, and every atomized individual a self-entrpreneur desperately selling themselves and scraping together what crumbs they can in an 'informal' if not underground economy, tipping has become (ab)normalized as one means of survival, even while popular perceptions persist that it's lagniappe.
The great masses of us here in the U$, Inc. and across the world are working class commoners to kleptocrats who all the more profit and are empowered by our compliance with their divide-and-rule ruses. A primary one, too often forgotten as the (enforced) status quo of the market uber alles, is the basic buyer-selller division personalized in relations between employees and customers, whereby the employee serves as a front, and target, onto which customers may (mis)direct inevitable dissatisfactions from their own exploitation, as by inflation, price gouging, bait-and-switch wheeling and dealing, and generally shoddy merchandise as well as service following upon downsized, 'streamlined' bizzness operations. Employers, especially within corporate chains of command beyond what little remains of small businesses, remain unaccountably indifferent behind telemarketing scripts, online algorithms, and the typical 80/20 rule of all such bureaucratic buffers and runarounds.
In short, we can get entrapped in assigned market roles across 'service' counters and exchange relations which are antagonistic, forgetting our common oppression and interchangeability of positions, and how this is largely determined by control from owners of the economy. It too often proves easier to make an enemy of another across from us to the advantage of the generals behind the front lines of c(r)apitalism's class war.
We can be led as customers to forget, for instance, that tips cover for substandard, nonliving wages of wage slaves desperately driven to depend on tips, which in turn are also stolen like wages by employers deploying exploitative schemes like pooled tips off which they skim. And in turn we can grow ever more resentful in our commodification as labor of customers who embody the same indifference, if not contempt, of employers to our plight. This and more by design of such Taylorized or scientific management as industrial psychology.
What remains imperative, as always, is to build the class consciousness, resistance and solidarity which is necessary to escape any and all of our respective prison cells within the unfree market.
So the easy way out is pay cash. The tills here at the supermarkets like to add the option to tip to some charity or other these days and the only option to pay cash is fast becoming the 'manned' counters rather than the automatic ones. The good news is that out of the supermarkets, which are also taking copious film footage of you walking around their stores, cash is still taken willingly albeit sometimes surprisingly.
Well, I pay cash for almost everything...always have.... and as far as TIPS...remember, it stands for To Insure Proper Service..... my husband tips over and always...I don't...he gets uncomfortable.....I remind him that TIPS are earned.... if they come to my table once after bringing my food I am not going to tip high as if they came over filling drinks, bringing desserts, etc... he needs to learn to tip properly so that it doesn't ruin it for the rest of us AND it doesn't make it a guaranteed thing.... also, we need to stop caring what others thing and stop comparing and doing what the herd is doing..... and to your point...if you pay cash, then you are in control of the tip...if any..... it supposed o be earned.....
Inflation is kept in check through taxation. That is the only function of the income tax.
I paid exact change at a dive through window yesterday and the teller was surprised.
If I was given that tipping option.. I'd have pulled a 180 pirouette that would have made the most highly trained and graceful ballerina blush like a school girl... and headed right back out that door!
I've appreciated some of George Carlin's political satire, but I've also been suspicious of him, or perhaps rather the way he proved useful to the same powers he seemed to mock. Just like I'm suspicious of any public figure or celebrity who's promoted as anti-establishment by the establishment, like corporate media, manufacturing mock freedom of speech in which the exception proves the rule. Even as s/he, too, like any other upper class collaborator, gets richer at our expense, laughing all the way to the bank by getting us to laugh, cynically, powerlessly, at what becomes taken for granted as the way things are. Comedy Central represents the corporate consolidation of such self-defeating, self-destructive humor. Carlin's occasional if not frequent contempt for working class people, caricatured in Archie Bunker or Joe Sixpack terms, and women in particular, reduced to misogynist stereotypes, only served to underscore this cooptation by controlled opposition.
I can't recall exactly when tip jars and their like started showing up more in the exchange relations of the unfree market. I'd wager that roughly coincided with galloping de-industrialization of the manufacturing base for the economy from automation and layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. and corresponding reduction of labor to service industries. By now, with endemic stagnation and decline of wages (as productivity has increased and the resulting lionshare of wealth has been stolen by upper classes), the precarious conditions of labor in the gig economy, and every atomized individual a self-entrpreneur desperately selling themselves and scraping together what crumbs they can in an 'informal' if not underground economy, tipping has become (ab)normalized as one means of survival, even while popular perceptions persist that it's lagniappe.
The great masses of us here in the U$, Inc. and across the world are working class commoners to kleptocrats who all the more profit and are empowered by our compliance with their divide-and-rule ruses. A primary one, too often forgotten as the (enforced) status quo of the market uber alles, is the basic buyer-selller division personalized in relations between employees and customers, whereby the employee serves as a front, and target, onto which customers may (mis)direct inevitable dissatisfactions from their own exploitation, as by inflation, price gouging, bait-and-switch wheeling and dealing, and generally shoddy merchandise as well as service following upon downsized, 'streamlined' bizzness operations. Employers, especially within corporate chains of command beyond what little remains of small businesses, remain unaccountably indifferent behind telemarketing scripts, online algorithms, and the typical 80/20 rule of all such bureaucratic buffers and runarounds.
In short, we can get entrapped in assigned market roles across 'service' counters and exchange relations which are antagonistic, forgetting our common oppression and interchangeability of positions, and how this is largely determined by control from owners of the economy. It too often proves easier to make an enemy of another across from us to the advantage of the generals behind the front lines of c(r)apitalism's class war.
We can be led as customers to forget, for instance, that tips cover for substandard, nonliving wages of wage slaves desperately driven to depend on tips, which in turn are also stolen like wages by employers deploying exploitative schemes like pooled tips off which they skim. And in turn we can grow ever more resentful in our commodification as labor of customers who embody the same indifference, if not contempt, of employers to our plight. This and more by design of such Taylorized or scientific management as industrial psychology.
What remains imperative, as always, is to build the class consciousness, resistance and solidarity which is necessary to escape any and all of our respective prison cells within the unfree market.
So the easy way out is pay cash. The tills here at the supermarkets like to add the option to tip to some charity or other these days and the only option to pay cash is fast becoming the 'manned' counters rather than the automatic ones. The good news is that out of the supermarkets, which are also taking copious film footage of you walking around their stores, cash is still taken willingly albeit sometimes surprisingly.
Well, I pay cash for almost everything...always have.... and as far as TIPS...remember, it stands for To Insure Proper Service..... my husband tips over and always...I don't...he gets uncomfortable.....I remind him that TIPS are earned.... if they come to my table once after bringing my food I am not going to tip high as if they came over filling drinks, bringing desserts, etc... he needs to learn to tip properly so that it doesn't ruin it for the rest of us AND it doesn't make it a guaranteed thing.... also, we need to stop caring what others thing and stop comparing and doing what the herd is doing..... and to your point...if you pay cash, then you are in control of the tip...if any..... it supposed o be earned.....