All of this prompted me to look up Greta Foff Paules' ethnography of waitresses, Dishing it out, which I used when I taught sociology of work years ago.
In the book, Paules shows how waitresses in a truck stop engage in resistance against the low social status conferred on them, given their job and the tipping which, for waitresses, can mean something rather different than described by the restauranteur I discussed in an earlier post. The waitress Paules studied, as well as waitresses in earlier ethnographies (one of the first was done in the 1910s if I recall) indicates that waitresses mark a distinction between "making" a tip and "getting" a tip: one they actively go after, they earn; the other is conferred on them as passive recipients.
All of this has to do with what the restauranteur in the blog article correctly understands: tipping is a perverse form of gift exchange intended to show who is in control (the tipper) and who is helpless and powerless (the tip recipient).
Tipping is seen in the research on restaurants, as well as in research on gift societies, as a perverse form of gift exchange. Perverse because the "gift" is one-sided. Paules reaches into research on people who hire housekeepers and the origin of small gifts given to maids and other domestic service providors. The ritual was and remains one sided: the powerful gives the gift and the powerless cannot give back.
Paules says there is a 'symbolic force' in the unilateral gift: it's intended to create and recreate status differences between server and served. The blog post by the restauranteur goes into this, pointing out the gender, racial, and ethnic issues involved in the emotions surrounding tipping.
Paules draws on the anthropolgy of gift societies and then looks at Rollins' work on servants and those they serve:
"The employer, in giving old clothes and furniture and leftover food, is transmitting to the servant the employer's perception of the servant as needy, unable to provide for herself, and willing to accept others' devalued goods."
with regard to waitressing, Paules describes how waitress feel about the way they are given spare change - often given pennies, nickels, and dimes that might add up to a decent tip, but it still feels as if it's just the customer getting rid of something in his pocket that is worthless.
Paules goes on to show how, in the U.S., customers and waitresses engage in ways to subvert this unilateral exchange, so it's not so horrible, so it doesn't reproduce the status relations of powerful and powerless, superior and subordinate. Because we ostensibly are all equals, USers are uncomfortable with the symbolism. Thus, in the U.S. customers try to avoid giving a tip directly but, instead, leave tips on the table. Waitresses then go on to engage in ways of slipping money quickly into their pocket so as to not make a big deal of it. They engage in their own status performances to resist the implication that they are needy, powerless, and in need of the unilateral "gift."
There is a small subset of people who don't resist and subvert this power relationship. These, apparently, are conservatives - on the theory being referenced by the blog author: they enjoy and get a thrill out of living in a caste society.