Tips For An Ailing Economy

I’ve been meaning to write this particular blog for a month or so now, but it’s simply gotten away from me. So here we go…

Last month, our government released to us our “economic stimulus checks”, or more accurately, the largest infusion of Chinese-loaned money ever to land in our pockets and leach into our economy. Now, don’t get me wrong- I am not against doing business with China, or any other non-American entity, as we operate in a global economy and to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world would be foolish. To a point, I’m not even against BORROWING money from China, though someday I will write a blog about my thoughts on the unfortunate “debt culture” we find ourselves in. What I do find to be a crappy deal is when we are giving money that we don’t have in the form of “tax cuts” or “stimulus checks”, with no well-thought-out means to pay it back. That’s a no-brainer. Anyway, I digress from my point.

I believe, being the hook-line-and-sinker Obamanian that I am, that WE are the solution to our economic problems, but not in the way you might think. The other day, my wife came home and told me about a bumper sticker she had just seen. It read:

“CLASS WARFARE …Brought To You By Yuppies Who Don’t Tip”

I thought about this for like two seconds before it affirmed my feelings about this whole economy going in the toilet thing. Not that yuppies are the root of the problem or anything; it’s the people who don’t tip period, regardless of class or status, that really irk me (though in my 5 years of coffee shop experience, it seems as though the people who have less money and status tip better). I guess I view a tip as a thank-you, a hang-in-there, and one of the few concrete signs in the service industry of how much you actually mean to the person you are serving. To give me a tip is to tell me that you appreciate my service to you; that you believe it is not your birthright to be served by another human being, but a privilege that you pay for. And I will do my best to insure that you get fast, friendly, “legendary” service (in Starbucks-speak), not just a simple cup of coffee. So aside from the philosophical aspect of the whole deal, I think this tipping thing is one of the keys to turning our economy around, without cramming another tax down our throats.

The shortened version of my theory of our current economic problem is that peons like me don’t have enough money to buy stuff. That the top 10% of the population controls like half the wealth in this nation. Don’t quote me on that stat, but I’m sure it’s not too far off. Here’s my overly simplistic solution to the problem: tip. Tip well. Wherever you’re at, if they accept tips, tip well. I’ll share with you my rule: at coffee shops, a dollar in the tip jar, or whatever change is left in my pockets (leaving myself just enough for a refill if they charge for them, and if I won’t have enough for a refill, it all goes in). At restaurants, 20 percent is my minimum. Up to 25 percent for good service, and sometimes as high as 30 percent for great service. I know the classic minimum is 15 percent, I was taught that. But I think, at least in the case of tipping, crappy service should be rewarded with the bare minimum, not below that. I don’t give out many 15 percents, because I don’t often get crappy service. Call it karma, what-goes-around-comes-around, whatever… but I think the best way to guarantee your own security is to give security to others. And if financial security is what this country needs right now, then there is no better time to be tipping like it’s going out of style.

Here’s my case study. At the drive-thru Starbucks I work at, we earn tips by taking the total dollar amount of tips we’ve earned throughout the past week, dividing them by the total number of labor hours we’ve worked, and then are assigned a dollar amount based upon how many hours we worked that week. So in any given week, it usually comes out to somewhere between $1.30 and $1.50 per hour (non-drive-thru stores make a lot more; draw your own conclusions). Now imagine this scenario: out of the 500 or more customers we serve every day, just half of them, 250, tip us a dollar. That’s $250 a day, multiplied by 7 days in a week. That’s $1750. Divide that up amongst us baristas, and you’ve got somewhere between $4 and $5 dollars per hour, which is 4 times what we make right now. So, a person working a part-time, 20-hour work week (as most Starbucks employees do), makes between $80 and $100 per week. Now multiply that $100 by 120,000, which is my approximate number of people working hourly for Starbucks in the U.S. (8,000 domestic stores times an average of 15 employees per store), and your dollar a day becomes $12 million per week, $624 million per year. And that’s just using part-time hourly numbers. Even running with 100 customers tipping a dollar every day, you still arrive at an extra $250 million per year of cash money floating around in the economy. And that’s just Starbucks employees. Imagine that extra dollar or two tipped in every restaurant in the country. We’re talking billions, easily… maybe even trillions, I don’t know. But you get the point- it’s probably more than any economic stimulus package can provide.

Anyway, I think I heard somewhere that between 10 and 15 percent of U.S. citizens work in food service jobs. Imagine 15% of us having extra money… money to pay off credit cards, loans, mortgages. Money to buy food, clothing, gas (ha), pay our electric bills. Money to buy some stuff we don’t need, sure, but isn’t that what the economy runs on, anyway? As tight as times are right now for most of us, we need to be okay with giving more. And tipping is a good place to start. It makes sense to me. So next time you get the check after your dinner date, or you eye that tip jar at Starbucks, consider that one extra dollar out of your pocket might just be a dollar toward your own financially-secure future.