As IF Times

So, tipping at restaurants.  By now, everyone has been exposed to the modern zeitgeist on tipping at restaurants.  This is one of those social customs that has crept up on the populace without anyone realizing what happened.  All of a sudden, certain tipping amounts have achieved status as the new normal.  Throughout most of my life, a gratuity was always seen as a discretionary amount left at the table after a meal in a restaurant.  As bizarre as it may seem now, 5% was not unusual in the 70’s and those really big spenders would even leave the princely amount of 10%.

Today, the absolute minimum has crept up to 15% while many electronic pay devices give you the freedom to add 18, 20 or even 25% to the total bill if you happen to be on drugs.

It’s not as if we should do away with the idea of tipping; it represents a gracious way of showing approval for a conferred service. It’s the expectation of a gratuity that has gone wildly out of control.   As most people know, the culture of tipping is most rampant in Western nations, notably in the US and Canada.  In Europe, no such social expectations are demanded upon restaurant diners, although that is likely to change as American values get adopted worldwide.  In Japan, tipping is not expected and is in fact considered insulting to servers there.

Ironically, according to foodwoolf.com the practice of tipping had roots in the taverns of 17^th century England when aristocrats left a few coins for servers “to insure promptness”, hence TIP.  Apparently, it was less a gesture of largesse as it was a means to show off their wealth and class.  When this custom first came to the US, it was considered the ‘vilest of imported vices”. Nevertheless, Americans adopted this custom and to this day, gratuities are not only present at all restaurants; at some they are mandatory.  Thus, tipping has evolved from being a not so subtle bribe to becoming a not so subtle mandatory tax.  There is often no relation between the minimum acceptable tip and the service.

Today, tipping culture has spread to include virtually all service industries.  Besides your food server, you are expected to tip your barber, your manicurist, the doorman, the garbage people, the mailman, the golf caddy, the pizza delivery guy, the tour guide, the bellman,  the hotel maid, the lap dancer, the parking attendant, etc etc, etc.

Again, nothing wrong with a small consideration for services offered, but the expectations are wildly out of kilter.  As the attached image shows, the expectations are that the value of the gratuity is expected to be a function of the value of the food served.  This makes no sense at all since it takes just as much effort to place a plate of fries at a table as it does to place a plate of foie gras. It takes as much effort to pour from a pitcher of water as it does to pour from a bottle of Chateau Lafitte.  Yet we are pressured to pay a gratuity based on the value of the food product.

This makes as much sense as paying a tip amount based on the value of the car that you bring to a parking valet.  Should we pay a percentage of a KIA’s value versus the value of a Mercedes?  Of course there are those that sniff that if you’re not willing to pay the expected gratuity, then you should not be dining out.  In fact, this is likely to happen as costs escalate and people get discouraged from paying a significant excess over services received.  This is of course, the Marie Antoinette attitude and eventually, only the very well-heeled will be able to afford to dine out.

It’s going to be tough to put the genie back in the bottle as they say, but at some point the threshold of resistance will be reached.  Once you get to the 25 to 30% level on gratuities, the food had better be damned good.

After three years of fighting, the spotlight has returned to the ongoing war between Russia and The Ukraine.  With human losses on both sides continuing to mount along with the financial toll, a possible end to fighting is now at least on the horizon.

But even as some kind of détente is being negotiated, an even more serious war has emerged among players who were notionally ancillary to the actual conflict. What is surprising is that the conflict is now among heretofore allies in geopolitics.  Schisms have now appeared within the fraternity of the ‘Western nations’.

There is great umbrage in the West among those with dated notions of the East versus the West carried over from the alliances after the last Second World war, now 80 years past.  For these people, East is still the enemy and the West are the good guys.  They still think, better dead than Red. Any kind of détente between these two ideologies can never be accepted by the black and white mindset of those thus convinced.

If we consider the fundamental reason for the division between the East and the West, it is grounded in the vastly different political ideologies pursued by either side.  The East, principally Russia, are presented as authoritarian states without the benefit of free democratically held elections,  without freedoms of expression and the general constriction of individual freedom of movement.  They are widely perceived as surveillance states in which citizens are under constant watch and forbidden to criticize the government.   They are portrayed as bleak, sad places where people are kept in poverty and oppressed.  Though Putin is still the strongman of Russia, the nation is in fact a Christian one without the rampant religious related crime plaguing the West.  We don’t see the squalor in the large cities as we’ve become accustomed to in the advanced West.

Thus, it was with great furor among the heretofore champions of the Western nations, the UK, France and Germany among others, when they responded to what can only be described as a wake-up speech by Vice President J.D. Vance at a security conference in Munich. Vance boldly pointed out that the principles of civilization that made living in the West preferable over living in communist regimes such as Russia, had been abandoned by the erstwhile champions of freedom.

Ironically the very things for which Russia is criticized were being implemented upon their own domestic citizens.  The City of London has the 3^rd largest number of surveillance cameras in urban centers in the world. This statistic is even worse when you see that virtually all of the other ones in the top ten are in communist nations.  Russia doesn’t even appear on this list.

Why are these cameras necessary? The only reason is to monitor the explosion of crime that has taken place in London and other British cities over the past decade or so.  Who is responsible for all this crime?  What has changed in the past few years?

It’s certainly clear that in most European nations, the populations have changed significantly by the addition of immigrants from non-Western nations.  But to even suggest that there is any link between this and the uptick in crime is to risk being set upon by the national governments since this may be considered hateful speech.  Such was the gist of Vance’s speech: That the influx of so many immigrants that do not share and will never share the values of the West are endangering the very existence of Western culture.  As most are probably aware, even being seen to be practicing a silent Christian religious observation is considered an offense in today’s Britain.

Thus we have the reality of Western nations suppressing the opinions of those that would protest against the dilution and diminishment of their native societies.  They are threatened with censure at the least and imprisonment at the worst. After Vance’s speech, a German official labelled it as being unacceptable. The irony of not supporting freedom of speech, the foundation of Western societies was totally lost on him….as well as most of the EU nations.  We now have governments monitoring individual’s social posts for language deemed offensive. There is even a movement to ban the X platform from the UK if not Europe for its role in spreading hate speech.

Thus we have the many EU nations circling the wagons to defend ‘Western values”, which includes defending the Ukraine, but which they don’t defend in their own nations.  It’s lost on most EU leaders that they have become the totalitarian  society that they have always considered the enemy Russia to be.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the US didn’t leave the West; the West left the US.