Is restaurant tipping a moral issue? For my late sister, Ursula, it was. She was, I thought, a wild over-tipper, always adding 20 per cent to the cost of any meal (and to any taxi ride, good, bad or indifferent).
“It’s far too much!” I’d protest. But she’d insist that it was a Christian duty to be as generous as possible to those who had performed a service. And sometimes waiters and waitresses didn’t get paid much. Indeed, for this very reason, there was a left-wing view that you shouldn’t tip at all – whether generously, averagely or parsimoniously, because, by tipping, you were aiding and abetting an employer to under-pay the staff. If an employee was dependent on tips, that too was wrong.
