No One Ever Told Us That: Money and Life Lessons for Young Adults

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TIPPING

I've always been a generous tipper. I know, originally, it was because after my junior year in college, I worked on Cape Cod as a busboy in a popular restaurant. The busboys received 15 percent of the waitresses’ tips each night, which we pooled between us. I never forgot how much the waitresses would complain about people who shortchanged them or stiffed them altogether. They all worked hard and came from modest means. I've learned over the years that in business and life, you get more out of people with honey than with vinegar. Tipping the right way can make certain adventures in life a lot easier for you. It's a cost of business and a pleasure, too, that you should do with grace and humor.

My friend George was in the women's shoe-manufacturing business, an industry long gone from America. They called themselves the “shoe-ies” and they were a rambunctious, high-energy lot. They were big gamblers, too, high rollers. Because every season they had to gamble on the styles that might be popular: the skins, the heel heights, the colors, the sizes, and the markets. Most of them also were highly leveraged, meaning borrowing of money to finance their always-risky operations. They liked the good life as well and always needed to be taken care of wherever they traveled on business. They traveled a lot: to shoe shows, to factories in Italy, and eventually to the Far East, where labor costs were much lower than in the United States. George was smooth, with slicked-back ...