Restaurant tipping: short-circuiting the morality of the market

Current theoretical frameworks within economics have so far been unable to adequately explain why people tip. This chapter synthesizes anthropological method and theory into a symbolic interactionist approach, attempting to access, through ethnography, the negotiated meanings underlying and actuating tip payment in Vancouver restaurants. Customers tip for a variety of reasons, including (1) for good service, (2) to follow a social norm, (3) out of sympathetic feelings, (4) to demonstrate or enhance social standing, and (5) to secure a specific preference. The disconnect between common rationalizations for tipping, which are often reflections of formalist economic canon, and how customers actually tip, that is, according to social, cultural, and moral factors, suggests that the popular distinction between “economic” and “non-economic” exchanges is ideologically maintained. Tipping illustrates the existence and contours of what Hart (2005) refers to as the two circuits of social life – but also that these two circuits are ideological constructs.