...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
When four (male) (young grad-student age) (South Asian from South Asia) students have finished their meals and I brought out their individual bills and I'm clearing dishes, just as I start to move away from the table, the one asks the others how much do you tip again, ten percent, and another one of them says immediately and very sharply, "No! If you tip less than ten percent, people will think you're cheap."
. . .
(What's interesting to me is that the end-result is the culturally pro-social behavior of a proper tip, but the underlying logic is very different. The rationales could have been, "No, the culture here is minimum fifteen percent," or, "It's fifteen percent minimum, that's really part of their wages," but, instead, the rationale is self-focused, about your image among people of another culture... So, it's like ultimately selfish logic has this side-effect of seemingly pro-social behavior.... I don't think you'd see that logic cited among people born and raised in the United States, like maybe a college freshman who doesn't eat out with their family and just doesn't know, if they asked friends, if any rationale was mentioned in the response, it would almost certainly be a different rationale than that, that you'd look cheap... It's a very telling exchange, about a culture's prioritization of image and self over concern for others, or at least one major cultural logic that's operative among that culture... My one [Chinese from China] coworker once talked with a former [Indian] roommate about stuff like this, and he said that the guy kept saying to him that it's all about personal power and jockeying for power and proving power in everyday situations, so it seems like here tipping properly is part of image maintenance, perhaps versus low/no tip towards people who are disposable to you, in a different application of the power/hierarchy logic to the concrete situation of leaving a gratuity.)
No comments:
Post a Comment