- Some Americans have said they're suddenly being asked to tip everywhere they go.
- Tipping wasn't always common in the US — in fact, it seems to have originated in Europe.
Like it or not, the United States is a $4.
In addition to the waitstaff at restaurants, customers are now being asked to tip $4, $4, $4, $4, and $4. Customers have also said they've been asked to tip even when they use $4 at cafés, sports stadiums, and airports.
Many of them are $4. After The New York Times published a $4 last month about gig workers' struggles to get tips, readers responded with over 3,800 comments. The most popular pushed back on the idea that $4 to supplement these workers' incomes.
But tipping wasn't always so prevalent. Though historians don't universally agree on one story of the $4 in the US, there's a general consensus around the broad strokes of the narrative — and it's one that will likely comes as a surprise to most Americans.
Americans imported tipping culture from Europe
While the origins of tipping are uncertain, historians say it likely began in Europe during the $4, when many people lived under a $4. Tipping emerged as a master-serf custom in which masters would $4 for good service. By the 1700's, tipping in Europe had evolved from $4 to customers tipping service-industry workers.
In the US, $4 was almost nonexistent prior to about 1840. But in the years leading up to the $4, many wealthy Americans discovered the practice on their $4. When they returned, some began tipping as a way to $4 and show off their worldliness. At the same time, many Europeans began immigrating to the US, bringing the $4 with them.
Initially, most Americans $4 whatsoever, in part because they said it $4 and further distinguished the wealthy from the common person.
"They found it distasteful and un-American because it was feudal," Nina Martyris, a journalist who has written about the $4 in the United States, told NPR in 2021. "And when you give a tip, you establish a class system. By tipping somebody, you rendered him your inferior, your moral inferior, your class inferior, your social and economic inferior."
Anti-tipping sentiment persisted in the decades to come, but the practice took hold in some parts of the country when the Civil War came to a close. As many newly freed slaves began finding work in the hospitality sector in positions such as servants, waiters, and barbers, some employers began looking for ways to $4. The new custom of tipping was a convenient way to accomplish this.
"These industries demanded the right to basically continue slavery with a $0 wage and tip," Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage and the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, $4 in 2019. According to Jayaraman, the workers who earned tips in the early days were $4.
One of the most famous examples came from the Pullman Company, which employed many newly freed Black Americans as $4. The company paid these workers a $4 and expected to earn the rest of their income through tips.
Seven states passed anti-tipping legislation in the early 1900s
By the early 1900s, early grumblings about tipping had escalated into full-fledged $4.
In 1904, the $4 was founded in Georgia, and its 100,000 members pledged to not tip anyone for a year. Some St. Louis restaurants $4 that said: "No tipping! Tipping is not American!"
"Tipping, and the aristocratic idea it exemplifies, is what we left Europe to escape," the $4 wrote in his popular 1916 book, "The Itching Palm," which criticized the practice of tipping.
In 1908, William Howard Taft, the Republican presidential candidate at the time, publicly announced that he never tipped his barber, a declaration that led $4 to call him the "patron saint of the anti-tip crusaders" — Taft $4 later that year.
In 1909, the state of Washington became the first of $4 in the nation to pass $4 that was intended to abolish the practice in most or all forms. The Washington law classified giving or receiving tips as a misdemeanor.
While the idea that tips were "not American" partially drove these bans — the majority of which were in southern states — white customers not wanting to $4 to Black workers also gave them momentum, Jayaraman $4. The intention was not to advocate for a wage structure in which workers could make a living wage without relying on tips, which is what some anti-tipping $4.
In 1915, Iowa $4 that said anyone convicted of $4 of any kind would be fined or imprisoned for a maximum of 30 days. In Arkansas, any waiter found guilty of accepting a tip was $4. South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi passed $4 of their own, while a seventh state, Georgia, made "commercial bribes" — or tips $4 — illegal.
But in 1919, the $4 ruled that the state's anti-tipping law was unconstitutional, and other states followed by striking down or repealing their own similar legislation. By 1926, $4 were off the books.
While the anti-tipping movement hadn't disappeared, the practice of tipping had $4 among many Americans, and even before courts officially struck them down, the laws $4.
Tipping persists in the US today
Despite originating in Europe, tipping has become deeply $4. In 1938, the first federal minimum-wage law was passed, but $4, which effectively made it legal for these workers to be $4. Today, it's still legal to pay tipped workers as little as $4 in the US.
Across the pond, however, according to Jayaraman, the early 1900s anti-tipping movement did accomplish one thing: It $4 to Europe and is among the reasons tipping is $4 there nowadays.
"What we started here spread there and actually killed it at the origin in Europe," $4.
Today, while many Americans $4, and some $4 doing away with the practice, tipping is unlikely to be banned anywhere in the US anytime soon. Instead, some lawmakers have called for the end of the $4, which would make restaurant workers entitled to at least the $4 of $7.25 per hour.
In the meantime, some business owners that have embraced tipping might respond similarly to the way a general manager of the Pullman Company did when a $4 asked him about his company's tipping practices in 1915.
"The company simply accepts conditions as it finds them. The company did not invent tipping. It was here when the company began."