Tip me over and pour me out

First online groceries' arrival means the apartment now has some food, but stuff like flour and dry pasta. It felt both wonderful and shameful to all of a sudden have these groceries appear, while at home in slippers. While I eagerly await the opportunity to break free of its clutches, I will be heading to the allegedly-shuttle-accessible Whole Foods later simply because I know they sell prepared foods, and I have fond recollections of this thing called "eating," and will need to do some of that before attempting to fit enough semi-perishable food for a month into tote bags. (Bike needs air, rain needs to let up, P needs new passport to get new learner's permit to take driving lessons to get license.) I'm on that odd moving-time system where I occasionally sit down to enough food for a few, then an unpacking marathon ensues and that sense of being about to faint sets in.

And, who knows how to tip an online-grocery delivery person? Googling this question produced the usual spectrum of results, from 'Anything less than handing over your full paycheck is stingy' to 'Why on earth would you tip that guy?' We tried to tip in cash, but the delivery man ran off. There had been an option to tip with your credit card as you order, but that seemed a riskier option, given that we'd never used the service before - what if they never showed up? And aren't tips generally in cash?

Tipping, as I've mentioned on WWPD before, is endlessly confusing. There are a few hard-and-fast rules (15-20% in a restaurant/20% for a delivery or more if it started pouring since you ordered and the delivery is by bike, a dollar per drink at a bar, 20% or so for cabs/hairdressers), but even there, there's little agreement on whether 20% is generous or the bare minimum, on whether tipping low or not at all is an acceptable response to poor service, or akin to not paying.

And other than restaurant workers, whose pay virtually everyone (American) knows is below minimum wage because tips are assumed, the rationale/necessity of a tip is a bit of a mystery. I, for one, don't know why it is I tip in these other situations, other than that I know it's what's done. I've never looked into it, because I doubt it would impact my tipping in either direction. We did tip our building staff at Christmas both years, and I don't recall exactly how much, but I never figured out what was the correct amount to tip when sharing the lowest-rent apartment in a big renters-and-owners condo tower, where one makes less than the doormen, but obviously you tip in a restaurant even if you're unemployed...

My only experience on the receiving end of tipping, I made more than minimum wage (not much more) in a coffee bar, but this was a coffee bar in Park Slope, and thus all kinds of not representative of anything. I was happy to have that extra pay, but it didn't seem more merited than in other jobs I'd had, where the work had also been strenuous and the pay low.

And to keep the anecdata flowing, I tend not to like pampering-type experiences (food-delivery/spa/nail/anything-to-do-with-hair-beyond-twice-yearly-cuts), wasn't even in favor of living in a doorman building when against all odds an affordable apt. in one presented itself (but was ultimately persuaded by the sweet, sweet dishwasher), so my experience of the wide world of American tipping skews towards things like confronting a tip jar at a Greenmarket stand or purveyor of local dairy, or getting a cup of coffee at a Village hole-in-the-wall, situations in which a privileged-enough consumer might be assumed, but not quite luxury in the sense the term is generally used. So I've seen a disproportionate amount of tip-solicitation in unlikely places, a disproportionately small amount of its use in thank-you-kind-sir-for-fetching-that-for-me situations.

The latest Dear Prudence has set forth much debate on the question what to tip hotel housekeeping - a question addressed but never resolved in one of the L.A. episodes of "Seinfeld" - bringing up the following Big Questions:

-What do you do about the fact that in many arenas, it's simply not known/agreed upon if any tip should be given, let alone what it should be? Prudie was way off calling the letter-writer who'd never even heard of tipping in hotels a "cheapskate."

-Are consumers of services expected to know what employees get paid, and to make up for the difference between that and what they should (in the consumer's opinion) be paid with tips? Or is a tip just a way of saying, 'your job seems way crappier than mine, here's a penny for your troubles'?

-Even if in most cases, the served is better-off than the server and could totally afford to round up, that's not always true. Must each interaction include an assessment of relative privilege? And what if, in an individual case, the server's better off? The customer still comes off as cheap, and if he goes into how he's actually just poor/broke, will have to explain what he was doing in whichever establishment in the first place - a relevant question, maybe, at the Four Seasons, but in many more tip-ambiguous situations not so much. Isn't there an easier (and less personally intrusive) way?

The problem is that there are so many entirely valid excuses one might give:

-Not all difficult and poorly-compensated jobs come with the expectation of tips (a thought I had more than once while shelving books at the college library). Why some and not others? If one-time food-service workers are said to be good tippers for life, where does that leave one-time no-tip-but-otherwise-similar-job sorts?

-Obviously everyone, especially the not-super-well-paid, is happy to be handed extra cash; obviously if work was done, that money counts as earned. But do we think that all interactions between one party who could use $10 more than the other party should include a handing-over of that cash? If so, wouldn't the answer be to channel money - via taxes, large-scale-like - away from the rich? Isn't the tip just a way of making individuals feel like they've done their part, when they've only helped a few people who happen to be visible in their day-to-day lives?

-The 'where does it end?' objection generally comes across as the complaint of the cheap. The counterargument goes: so what if we're now expected to tip at the grocery store, the fish counter, for the black coffee poured into a paper cup at an establishment that doesn't even have seating. Surely all those workers could use the money, at least in upscale neighborhoods. To which the response must be: the proliferation of tip-jars and tip-expectations blurs the line between tips that actually make up for super-low wages and those that don't?

-They should educate themselves! replies the interlocutor. But the Internet provides the full range of opinion, and any site at all tied to whichever industry will explain that any tip under 30% is appalling. Confusion ensues, and there are no doubt customers whose refusal to tip in a restaurant stems from not seeing the difference between that tip and the ubiquitous jar-solicitations.

Or, in more general terms, the question is whether it's beneficial (and it's clear enough where I stand) not to have fixed prices for goods and services, but rather to leave it up to a highly subjective interaction in which a great number of variables having zilch to do with the level of service provided (stinginess and genuine confusion, genuine desire to properly compensate and a for-others attempt at showing off wealth/compassion) impact the ultimate price.

There is - paging PG - no doubt need for a systematic look at which route better-distributes wealth or, in more neutral terms which more appropriately compensates labor: the liberal guilt/showing-off-of-largesse tip-based system, or establishments just paying their staff a reasonable wage. Do restaurant servers actually end up making more because of the popular understanding that they're poorly compensated unless the individual customer nobly steps up with 25%? Is the income lost when a few don't tip/don't tip well made up for by the whoppers the tip option brings in? My guess would be that this works out in some rare cases, but not many.