I got a little mad. As I was meant to, I started clicking. My Twitter feed had included a quote tweet that was (click) agreeing with a quote tweet that was (click) disputing a reply tweet that was (click) disputing a quote tweet that had (click) attacked a tweet and video from CNBC, which had said, “This simple tipping trick could save you over $400 a year.”
The simple tipping trick was to tip less money, as you might expect. It was sort of about tipping on the pre-tax restaurant bill rather than the after-tax bill, with a bit of other padding about how to replace the easy eyeball calculation of 20 percent with some arithmetic on the tax line to get 18-ish percent or whatever: less money. If you systematically pay less money to the people who bring you your food and fill your glass and take away your dirty dishes and the greasy napkin you’ve been wiping your mouth with—then over time, you will have more money than you otherwise would have, and those people will have less, because you didn’t give the money to them.
Boy, was there a lot of other stuff going on yesterday! The vicious swine running Homeland Security were all being forced out, reportedly because they were insufficiently willing to escalate their levels of viciousness and swinishness. The Secret Service, intercepting a suspicious foreign visitor to the president’s Florida private-club retreat and finding the intruder in possession of a suspicious USB drive, had inserted the suspicious USB into a Secret Service computer, where it proceeded to start executing files, as anyone not in charge of protecting the president’s life and the security of United States currency could probably have told them it would. But CNBC was telling you to nickel-and-dime your waiter.
The real tipping rule is to tip generously while pushing for the abolition of tipping.
The real tipping rule is to tip generously while pushing for the abolition of tipping. But the real real point was that (click) CNBC had freshly tweeted out a story and video from 14 months ago. That was why the persons-on-the-street in the video, saying dumb things about tipping while standing out on Times Square, were bundled up in heavy coats. It was noise in the recirculation machine, a timeless bad opinion. It had already happened; it would always be happening again. People would forget about it and see it the next time and react.
Who among us hasn’t done it? Who doesn’t want to reach new readers with the stuff you’ve already done, or old readers who are ready to read it again? You get a little something more, without putting in any new labor. Over time, the savings accumulate.
