Gratuities Are Accepted

In which I complain about tip requests, KC traffic and unwarranted excitement about draft picks...

When I tip I generally tip 20% because unless I catch my waitress spitting in my food, 10% doesn’t seem like enough and 15% means I have to do some slightly more complicated math and apparently I’ll tip an extra 5% to avoid that.

Before the pandemic I tipped for stuff most of us tipped for like: service in restaurants, haircuts and Uber rides, but then the pandemic hit and everybody was scrambling and I didn’t want my favorite restaurants to close so I also started tipping when I picked up carryout orders.

But if you think about it – and I have – I wasn’t getting any service unless you count taking my money and handing me my food which is exactly how much service you get at Taco Bell or McDonald’s, two places we don’t tip.

Then the pandemic kinda, sorta ended and things went kinda, sorta back to normal, but businesses got used to us tipping extra during the pandemic and now want us to keep tipping extra because then they can pay their employees less.

According to the following article, in the state of Missouri an employee who receives tips can be paid as little as $6 an hour which is half the state’s minimum wage, in Illinois it’s $7.80 an hour – 60% of their minimum wage – and on a federal level, tipped employees only have to be paid $2.13 an hour and that’s the law in 15 states and three territories and it kinda sounds like at least one of the territories includes a gulag.

Right about here I’d normally make a joke about states that allow businesses to charge their employees to work for them, but I don’t want to give Ron DeSantis any extra bad ideas because he already appears to have more than he can handle.

Also, we’re almost at that “we’ll-charge-you-to-work-here” point already because now businesses love using unpaid interns who are expected to do their jobs for free to gain “work experience” and the work experience they gain is finding out every employer they ever have will try to fuck them over whenever possible.

Anyway…

If tips do not get their employees to minimum wage levels then the businesses are expected to make up the difference and businesses really don’t want to do that which is why customers are being guilt-tripped into leaving extra tips.

And now they have those credit card scanners that allow a business to set tip amounts like “15%” or “20%” or “No tip because I’m such a cheap bastard.”

Despite all the extra tipping I don’t see prices coming down and employees are being paid less than minimum wage, so it seems like someone somewhere is keeping that extra money we’re tipping for themselves.

Turns out a lot of people are fed up with all the extra requests for tipping and more and more people are refusing to tip when they haven’t received any service and I’m one of them.

If this helps you find the courage to say no to Corporate America’s guilt-tripping which allows them to screw over their employees, feel free to show your appreciation by subscribing to my blog and maybe you’d like to leave a tip. (I’d suggest 20% because the math is way easier.)

https://www.kansascity.com/news/business/national-international/article275580646.html

Semi-recently the NFL Draft was held here in Kansas City and while a lot of people were excited about it, my main reaction was that I would have to avoid downtown KC until it was over because it was going to be an NFL-themed shit show.

Downtown was already a mess because they seem to be rebuilding every street in Kansas City at the same time and they’re in no hurry to finish, so there are orange cones and closed lanes everywhere and I didn’t think adding a few hundred thousand visitors was going to improve the situation.

Also…

When a city gets one of these events, the people who bring it to their city will brag about how much money will be injected into the local economy which sounds good, but in reality some businesses did great and some got screwed over.

For example:

The woman who cuts my hair (and I tip her 20% because I don’t want her shaving her initials in the back of my head) had to shut down for a week and lose that income because she didn’t think her clients could negotiate all the closed streets or find places to park, plus some greedy people decided the NFL draft would be a great opportunity to charge visitors $50 to park their cars.

OK, second reason I wasn’t excited about the NFL draft:

Fans get excited or bummed out by their team’s draft pick, which is pretty much like getting excited or bummed out by your Christmas gifts before you open them. Nobody – and that definitely includes the teams doing the drafting – knows how their picks will work out.

Take baseball:

Hall of Famer Wade Boggs was a seventh round pick, Hall of Famer Goose Gossage was a 9^th round pick, Hall of Famer Andre Dawson 11^th round, Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan 12^th round, soon-to-be Hall of Famer Albert Pujols 13^th round, Hall of Famer John Smoltz 22^nd round and Hall of Famer Mike Piazza was the 1,390^th pick in 62^nd round of the 1988 draft.

None of those Hall of Fame ballplayers were considered worthy of a first-round pick and every Major League Baseball team had the same opinion.

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, there are 17 undrafted players in the pro football Hall of Fame and Tom Brady (who off the top of my head seems to have a pretty decent chance of getting a bust in Canton, Ohio) was the 199th pick in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft.

And the list of first-round picks who never had any impact (unless you count their childhood hopes and dreams crashing and burning) is endless.

A Royals front-office exec once said the hardest thing to for a team to project is make up. A kid might be Johnny Baseball and date his high school sweetheart with no below-the-waist petting and help old ladies cross the street and teach Sunday School to orphans, right up until he signs a pro contract and gets a $6 million dollar signing bonus and is turned loose in New York on a Saturday night and is now having girls in the stands give him their phone numbers and guys who have way too much access to drugs invite him to parties.

Now who is he?

Plus some of these kids have never played against anybody just as good as they are; how will they react to that? Do they get their back up and say they’ll show everybody they’re still the best or do they go into a shell, shocked that they aren’t having the easy success they’re used to?

Turns out, there’s a lot of psychology involved in being a pro athlete and figuring out who to draft and that gets us to a movie recommendation.

Now here’s a tip for you: watch Draft Day

The message of Moneyball – both book and movie – is that everything you need to know is in the numbers a player puts up and you don’t need to know anything at all about someone’s personality, which is (how do I phrase this politely?) complete horseshit.

Numbers are important and you need to know them, but can also be deceiving and you need context to understand what the numbers mean.

On a friend’s recommendation I watched Draft Day starring Kevin Costner and the movie shows Kevin trying to figure out who these kids are and how they’ll react to being drafted because the numbers just don’t tell him enough.

OK, time to wrap this up because I still have to draw a cartoon and get my haircut and check to make sure I don’t have any extra initials shaved into the back of my head and be done with all that in time to watch the Miami Heat who are one game away from sweeping the Boston Celtics for the Eastern Conference Championship and the Heat are doing it with seven undrafted players.

A feat that might deserve an essay of its own because the undrafted players are just the “tip” of the iceberg.

(OK, that last joke was so lame you can forget leaving me a gratuity.)