As a dog walker, I understand tipping fatigue AND why people should tip anyway
As a dog walker, I understand tipping fatigue AND why people should tip anyway
WFFH: Greedy service companies messed it up for everyone else
Writer’s note: “Work Fluently From Home,” or WFFH, is a series within “Window Shopping” geared toward entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, gig workers and startups.
I’ve never been hung up on earning tips. Then again, I’ve had less than a handful of service jobs. In fact, almost all of my seasonal and permanent employment during my teens and twenties were in the radio research, retail, financial or real estate field. At one point, I was a switchboard receptionist and a mystery shopper. And in every job, I was either salaried or pulling in a steady hourly rate. So it took me some time to really understand the significance of tipping.
Quite a bit of what I learned was from hanging out with my grandfather, who would tell me exactly how much he would tip the waiter based on service. My father was fairly private about it, and I never paid much attention to what my mother was writing on receipts. We ate. We paid. We left. So I started off as a really bad tipper. I remember going to a spa for a $70 wax job and tipping the esthetician $5. Even worse, I told her to split it with the manicurist. Brutal. When she stormed off without saying a word, I genuinely did not understand what I’d done wrong. Sometimes people are cheap. Other times they simply don’t know they’re bad tippers.
None of my friends or family worked in restaurants, so I didn’t even have a disgruntled waiter friend to tell me about all these horrible tippers. What finally made me fully comprehend tipping was group lunches with an editorial team. There were a couple of team members in our textbook publishing group who would order several things on the menu, some of which were notably expensive, but stare at the ceiling when the bill came. They either thought it was a business expense or didn’t give a damn. And when it wasn’t a company lunch and we paid for our meals separately (of course the most expensive eaters were highly opposed to separate bills and wanted us to divide it all evenly), I kept wondering, “Who is going to pay the tip?”
I was definitely not raking in serious money, specifically because I was also paying for grad school. But something about stiffing the waiter because of cheap eaters with expensive tastes bothered me. I started consciously being aware of being a good tipper. (That spa closed down so I never got to apologize and correctly tip that esthetician.) But my early, bad-tipping days are why I rarely if ever get upset when someone doesn’t tip me for being a dog walker (or dog boarder and dog sitter before I adopted my own dog).
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First, I’m getting paid more than $7.80, the minimum cash wage in Illinois. Second, I actually enjoy this side gig, so it’s not like I’m dragging myself around to walk pets. Third, because I’m such a loyal Yelper and former mystery shopper, I put a helluva lot more emphasis on my reviews than I do tips. Give me a four out of five-star review, and I’ll have an attitude. But give me a five-star review and no tip, and I’ll shrug it off.
No one is obligated to tip you, but common decency should tell you to
I’m not always indifferent to tipping though. If I did something that was above and beyond, I damn sure want to be compensated for it. For example, last month, I walked into a pet owner’s home and saw a trail of trash from the kitchen to the living room. The dog had apparently torn a trash bag, ate a bunch of raw meat that fell off the counter and threw up in three spots.
I’ve got a stomach of steel, thanks to my own dog not getting along too well with dental treats. So, I walked the dog first to make sure he didn’t vomit again. Then, I came back to the pet owner’s house, grabbed paper towels, the multipurpose cleaner and a broom, and cleaned everything up. What was supposed to be a 20-minute drop-in became a 30-minute job. I would hope somebody would do this for me instead of leaving my own dog in filth until I came home. The response? The pet owner “forgot” to tip me. It was both frustrating and karma for that esthetician. I laughed. Me getting mad wouldn’t change anything.