Passage 23
Gratuitous Gratuities
Everybody loathes it, but everybody does it. A recent poll showed that 40% of Americans hate the practice. It seems so arbitrary, after all.
In America alone, tipping is now a $ 16 billion-a-year industry. Consumers acting rationally ought not to pay more than they have to for a given service. Tips should not exist. So why do they? The conventional wisdom is that tips both reward the efforts of good service and reduce uncomfortable feelings of inequality. The better the service, the bigger the tip.
Such explanations no doubt explain the purported origin of tipping. In the 16th century, boxes in English taverns carried the phrase “To Insure Promptitude” (later just “TIP”). But according to new research from Cornell University, tipping no longer serves any useful function.
The paper analyses data from 2,547 groups dining at 20 different restaurants. The correlation between larger tips and better service was very weak: only a tiny part of the variability in the size of the tip had anything to do with the quality of service. Customers who rated a meal as “excellent” still tipped anywhere between 8% and 37% of the meal price.
Tipping is better explained by culture than by economics. In America, the custom has become institutionalized: it is regarded as part of the accepted cost of a service. In Europe, tipping is less common. In many Asian countries, tipping has never really caught on at all.
How to account for these national differences? Look no further than psychology. According to Michael Lynn, the Cornell paper’s co-author, countries in which people are more extrovert, sociable or neurotic tend to tip more. Tipping relieves anxiety about being served by strangers.
Passage 24
Football Team’s Only Game Was Drugs
They looked like a real football team — with snarling coach included. But the 10 men arrested at the weekend in Spain’s southern province of Cadiz were not going to play a match, despite their yellow and blue kit. They were drug traffickers who used their footballs, knapsacks and club strips, emblazoned with the team name of a local town, Guillen Moreno CF, as a ruse to fool border police as they passed from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in North Africa, to Algeciras, on the southern Spanish mainland, a police spokesman in Cadiz said.
The fake team would usually cross the Straits of Gibraltar into the province of Cadiz on Saturday afternoons with the hash tucked beneath their jerseys and stage a drama to enhance their credibility before border agents. The supposed manager, 49, would carry a roster in his hand and continuously bark at the young men “Everybody pay attention, everybody stay right here!” and “Come on, follow me!”.
The players would cross back to Ceuta on Sundays after the fictional match and actual drug sales in Spain. Police do not know how long the fake season lasted before a tip spurred an investigation. The game ended when officers stopped their cars in Cadiz and found a total of 16kg of hash hidden beneath the men’s strips in little pellets taped to their bodies.