I still remember the first time we ate at Circolo dei Forestieri in Bagni di Lucca. It was one of those unforgettable meals: aristocratic surroundings, old-world elegance, attentive service, and food that seemed to belong to another age. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, and at the end of the meal I naturally left a tip. It may have been ten percent or thereabouts, but whatever the amount, it seemed entirely obvious to me that one should reward such service. Only later did I realise that I had not merely tipped a waiter, but one of the proprietors themselves. In those days the establishment was run by two owners who later disappeared from the scene amid a certain uncertainty surrounding the business, but at that moment they were still there, serving their guests personally and accepting tips with old-fashioned courtesy.
Yet as time went on, and as I came to know Italy more deeply, I realised something rather curious: Italians rarely tip at all. In fact, we ourselves almost never tip in Italy. One pays the bill and, at most, pays the coperto, the cover charge. The coperto is an old institution, covering bread, table linen, cutlery, washing up and general table service. In other words, the service itself is already included in the culture of the meal. The waiter is paid by the establishment, not by the uncertain generosity of the customer. If one leaves a few coins behind, it is merely a small gesture of appreciation, not a moral obligation.
The same has generally been true in England. There may once have been occasions where one tipped a hairdresser or rounded up the fare in a taxi, but even there it was occasional rather than essential. Nowadays we scarcely even think about tipping. Here in Lucca, when we go to our Chinese hairdressers near Viale Giannotti, we simply pay the amount requested and leave perfectly satisfied, as do they. Nobody appears offended, deprived, or disappointed. The transaction is complete in itself.
And indeed, travelling across Europe, I have never encountered the kind of psychological pressure surrounding tipping that one experiences in America. Last year we travelled through Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, and Poland, and nowhere did we feel obliged to calculate percentages, evaluate service levels, or worry whether someone’s livelihood depended upon our generosity. We paid the bill, thanked the staff, and departed. The social contract was straightforward and complete.

America, however, is an entirely different world.
The first time I truly understood this was many years ago, in the 1970s, when, as a student, I found work as a waiter in a hotel somewhere in the hills and mountains above New York, in that great region stretching towards New England. It was one of those old American resort hotels where guests stayed for entire periods and took all their meals in the dining room. I arrived expecting to earn wages from the hotel itself. Instead, I suddenly realised that most of my actual income would come not from wages but from tips.
That discovery astonished me.
The guests did not merely tip at the end of their stay. They tipped after every meal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner — each encounter carried the possibility of reward or disappointment. I quickly realised that my survival depended not simply on doing my job but on performing it in a way that pleased the customers sufficiently for them to reward me personally. My income depended directly on charm, efficiency, memory, friendliness, and speed. One became not merely a waiter but, in a sense, an actor.
I will also say this: waiting tables remains one of the most exhausting jobs I have ever had to do in my life. The hours were relentless, the physical labour immense, and the emotional strain considerable because every interaction potentially affected one’s income. One was constantly “on stage”, constantly aware that one’s livelihood depended upon satisfying complete strangers.
There was one particular table whose occupants almost prided themselves on not tipping. They seemed philosophically opposed to the whole practice. For us waiters this became a source of dread because serving them meant working for virtually nothing. Eventually our frustration became so great that we placed little handwritten notices on their table asking them, politely but desperately, to tip us because we needed to survive. Looking back on it now, I realise how extraordinary that situation really was. We were not appealing for a bonus or a token of appreciation. We were appealing for part of our livelihood.
That experience revealed something fundamental about America: tipping there is not an optional courtesy but an integral part of the wage system itself.
Historically, this developed in a peculiar way. After the American Civil War, many service industries — hotels, railways, restaurants — adopted tipping as a substitute for proper wages. Employers discovered that if customers could be persuaded to pay service workers directly, businesses themselves could keep wages extremely low. In some cases, formerly enslaved Black workers were employed under exactly such arrangements: nominal pay from the employer and dependence upon gratuities from customers. Over time this practice became normalised and eventually embedded in American labour law.
To this day, many American states permit what is called a “tipped minimum wage”, meaning employers may legally pay restaurant servers far less than the normal minimum wage because tips are expected to make up the difference. Thus the customer effectively becomes part-employer. This is why Americans often regard failing to tip not merely as rudeness but almost as withholding somebody’s wages.
For Europeans, this feels deeply strange. We assume that the employer pays the employee and that the customer pays the establishment. In America, however, the boundaries blur. Every restaurant meal becomes a small moral drama. Was the service good enough for fifteen percent? Twenty percent? Twenty-five percent? Was the waiter attentive enough? Friendly enough? Fast enough? One is no longer simply purchasing a meal but participating in the economic survival of another human being.
And this extends everywhere. Sit down for a coffee, have a drink in a bar, take a taxi, eat in a diner — and at the end comes the moment of calculation. Modern card readers in America often confront one directly with suggested percentages before payment can even be completed. Fifteen percent, twenty percent, twenty-five percent. One feels almost guilty selecting too low a number, even when the prices and taxes are already high enough.
What makes this especially paradoxical is that America is also one of the richest countries in the world. The wealthiest corporations, the richest businessmen, the grandest displays of prosperity — all exist there. Yet at the same time millions of ordinary workers in the service industries rely upon what Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire” famously called “the kindness of strangers.” In a sense, America transformed that line into an economic system.
Of course, defenders of tipping argue that it rewards excellence. A particularly attentive waiter can earn more money than he might under a fixed salary. Customers can directly reward good service, and restaurants can keep menu prices lower. Some waiters in expensive American establishments earn remarkable incomes through tips alone.
Yet the system also creates insecurity and emotional exhaustion. Workers must constantly perform friendliness because their wages depend upon the moods and generosity of strangers. Customers, meanwhile, feel pressure and guilt where none should naturally exist. Instead of simply enjoying a meal, one becomes aware of participating in another person’s economic survival.

In Europe, by contrast, service remains part of the profession itself. The waiter may be warm and charming or formal and distant, but either way he is understood to be properly employed. A tip remains what it originally was meant to be: a spontaneous sign of appreciation rather than an essential wage subsidy.
Looking back now, I realise that my time travelling through America — from New York to the Deep South, from New Orleans to Carlsbad Caverns, from the Grand Canyon to San Francisco — were financed in no small measure by tips. The generosity of strangers enabled me to buy Greyhound tickets and see a vast continent in all its contradictions and magnificence. For that I remain grateful.
But I also came away understanding something else: America is not merely a country where people tip. It is a country where tipping became woven into the structure of everyday life itself, to such an extent that service workers often depend upon it not as a reward, but as a necessity for staying alive.