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No lawful behavior in the marketplace is as disturbing to me as the growing appeals for gratuities. Every gentle consumer of cappuccinos will know what I'm getting at: Just as you hand your money over to the man behind the counter, you notice a plastic beggar's cup beside the cash register. ''We Appreciate Your Tips,'' it reads in blue ink scrawled across the side with calculated indifference. The young man or woman behind the counter has performed no especially noteworthy service. He or she has merely handed you a $2 muffin and perhaps a ruinous cup of coffee and then rung them up on the register. Yet the plastic cup waits impatiently for an expression of your gratitude. A dollar bill or two juts suggestively over the rim -- no doubt placed there by the person behind the counter. Who would tip someone a dollar or more for pouring them a cup of coffee? But you can never be sure. The greenbacks might have been placed there by people who are more generous than yourself. People whose hearts are not made of flint.

The greenbacks might have been placed there by people who are more generous than yourself. People whose hearts are not made of flint.

“When you are a woman living off tips, you are forced to tolerate whatever a customer might do to you, how they touch you, treat you, or talk to you. Because the customer is always right. Because the customer pays your income, not your employer,” explains Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of ROC-United.

Suppose He Threw It In your Face

Please don't anybody ask me to decide anything, I do not know a nut from a meg,
Or which came first, the lady or the tiger, or which came next, the chicken or the egg.
It takes a man of vision
To make a decision,
And my every memory
Is far too dilemmary.
I am, alas, to be reckoned
With the shortstop who can't decide whether to throw to first or second,
Nor can I decide whether to put, except after c,
E before i, or i before e.
But where this twilight mind really goes into eclipse
Is in the matter of tips.
I stand stricken before the triple doom,
Whether, and How Much, and Whom.
Tell me, which is more unpleasant,
The look from him who is superior to a tip and gets it, or from him who isn't and doesn't?
I had rather be discovered playing with my toes in the Boston Aquarium
Than decide wrongly about an honorarium.
Oh, to dwell forever amid Utopian scenery
Where hotels and restaurants and service stations are operated by untippable unoffendable machinery.