A tip is a reward that is added to the price of a service as recognition for the attention received . It is a kind of gratitude or recognition to the worker .
The characteristics of the tip depend on multiple factors. On the one hand, the practice is linked to the cultural context : the ways of tipping depend on each country due to habits and customs . In the case of the restaurant, an amount of money is usually left on the table, but the customer can also tell the waiter to keep the rest and consider it their tip, among other options.
The tip is also associated with the item . While in some sectors tipping is considered almost an obligation or is even stipulated in the price , in others it is atypical or infrequent.
At a general level, it can be said that it is the customer who decides whether to tip or not and choose the amount of the tip . Many times a percentage of the total price is taken as a parameter or standard. In Argentina , to cite one case, it is customary for the tip in a bar or restaurant to be equivalent to 10% of the price paid for the drink. Thus, if a person spends 200 pesos on a lunch, they should leave 20 pesos as a tip to the waiter or waiter.
Because waiters generally receive tips, employers usually consider this extra income for the worker when negotiating hiring conditions. In other companies , on the contrary, employees are prohibited from accepting tips since such remuneration can distort the conditions of service.
In the case of cruises , many shipping companies incorporate the tip into the rate paid by the traveler. In this framework, tips become mandatory, although sometimes the cruise passenger is entitled to request a refund if he or she is not satisfied with the service.
Having said all this, we can distinguish two types of employment relationship with respect to the way in which they understand the tip: those that admit it as a possible gesture on the part of the client to express their exceptional agreement with the attention they have provided; those who consider it an essential part of their employees' income, which is why their salaries are very tight and would not be satisfactory to meet monthly expenses.
Among workers in the restaurant sector, for example, it is common for waiters to talk about their tips, taking them as a parameter to measure how good their day has been. In turn, this way of collecting your money makes the job very unstable, because it is impossible to accurately estimate the following month's income. As a positive point, there is the incentive to improve oneself to maintain or increase the amount of these complementary payments, and this also benefits the employer, since it assures him that his employees will make an effort in their dealings with the public.
Since, as mentioned above, tipping does not work the same in all countries, there are also differences in employees' expectations when it comes to completing their tasks and receiving payment for their services . Without going into precise examples, in some countries tips are expected to be generous, while in others they consist of discrete sums of money that are very often omitted without any "feeling of guilt" on the part of the customer. Therefore, in a store in the first group, an employee would be alarmed if he received a small tip, while in the second his surprise would be immense if he received a large tip.