Man, money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.
Omar Little, The Wire
When my mother moved from her apartment to a retirement community, she wanted to thank the building staff who’d made her life easier. Among them were two Filipino men, Manny and Jerry, who worked the parking garage below her building. When she went out for errands, she stopped to say hello. They asked where she was headed and kept track of her comings and goings.
On average, a trip to the supermarket took an hour, a visit to a physician, two and a half hours. If she hadn’t returned by the expected time, they phoned my sister, Anne, who’d then check in with my mother on her cell to see if she were OK.
Anne and I never asked Manny and Jerry to keep tabs on our mother, though in three years my sister received a half dozen calls. There were no crises—often my mother was doing an extra errand or had stopped to have coffee—but their watchfulness gave us peace of mind, even if she did live in one of San Francisco’s safest neighborhoods.
As her moving date approached, she asked me how much she should give the garage men. She was an eighty-eight-year-old Depression-era child with enough means to keep her living well had she lived to be one hundred and ten.
“Give them a hundred each,” I said.
“Oh, that’s crazy!” she replied. “Far too much.”
“Ma, they provided an invaluable service.”
She stood her ground. “I’m sorry, but one hundred apiece is outrageous.”
“How about seventy-five a piece?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Well, how much do you think is reasonable?”
“I don’t know. How about thirty?”
“Thirty? Thirty makes you look like you’re trying to appear generous by giving more than twenty-five, but you’re too cheap to lay out fifty.”
After a moment’s thought, she decided: “I’ll give them thirty-five.”
And that was the end of that.
Our difference of opinion on rewarding Manny and Jerry raises an important question about the value of a service. For my sister and me, who had busy lives of our own, their watchfulness was the kind of gift that bloomed from generous hearts—it certainly was not the kind of service we could have advertised for. I viewed their unsolicited gesture as priceless, though I couldn’t exactly tell my mother to write a blank check.
That interaction has me thinking about the economics of gratitude, about the concrete ways that we say thank you and reward people for their effort.
Take, tipping, for example. Some historians trace the practice back to medieval times, when traveling lords threw coins to hostile locals to ensure safe passage. Or to the Tudor custom when houseguests rewarded their host’s servants for good service. Some people believe the word itself is an acronym meaning “to insure promptitude.”[1]
But today, what modern-day American is not fatigued by the increasing pressure to tip an increasing number of service people, from college-educated baristas to Honduran house-cleaning crews? Twenty years ago, 15 percent was considered a suitable tip for waitstaff. Now, you look like a cheapskate if you leave less than 18. And how are we to determine a gratuity for which there is no common agreement—for services that are not on what one might call “the price list”?
There’s a complex psychology behind giving a gratuity. For example, if my mother had given Manny and Jerry $500 each, they might have felt embarrassed by the size of the gift. They might have assumed we thought them charity cases. Or how awkward and inappropriate would it be to give $10,000 to a lifeguard who drags you from the bottom of a lake? There’s a paradox here in that the lifeguard could probably use the money, yet the ten grand might spoil the experience. In this scenario, the lifeguard gives you something priceless—your life—and now that you’re putting a dollar amount on it, perhaps saving your skin warrants a $100,000 reward.
Manny and Jerry were immigrants. I imagine they could have used $100 each. The key, I believe, was to find a sum that was generous but not so generous that they could no longer feel we were, in some beautiful way, still in their debt. For my mother, who was born in 1933 and grew up in a third-floor New York tenement that cost her parents $19 per month, $35 was a little pricey but generally fitting. For me, born into an upper-middle-class family in the 1960s, a hundred bucks would buy them two tanks of California’s overpriced gas.
I’d experienced the price list issue before, as a clueless twenty-year-old college student visiting Czechoslovakia in 1981. While sightseeing, a classmate, Bryan, and I ran into a lithographer of some note who volunteered to show us around Prague. Jirí spoke decent English and gave us an insider’s tour, with sotto voce commentary about Gustav Husák, the country’s draconian communist leader. He also invited Bryan and me for supper the following evening, before we were to depart by midnight train for Vienna.
Jirí, his wife, and three-year-old son lived in a tiny three-room flat on the tenth floor of an ugly Stalinist apartment house. His wife served tough steak, a delicious local wine, and cake. Jirí gave us each a lithograph that resembled the work of Marc Chagall.
As Bryan and I prepared to depart, it occurred to us that we wouldn’t be needing our Czechoslovak koruna, which would be worthless as soon as we left the country, so we gave it to him, along with some US dollars.
The koruna might’ve been a nice gesture. But the moment we offered him American cash, I knew we’d made a big mistake. His wife’s face flushed, and I will never forget the look of disappointment in his eyes: to him, we’d become oblivious Westerners throwing their money around. I suspect that he believed Bryan and I thought we’d bought a unique experience. Any question of our starting a correspondence with Jirí, which we’d discussed at supper, went out the window.
As I write this, I am reminded of a bachelor friend, Dave, whose longtime cleaning lady hadn’t been able to come for several weeks because of a bad cold she’d caught after her ancient boiler died. She couldn’t afford a new one.
When he told me about her situation, the words, “God Almighty, Dave! Buy her a new one!” nearly leapt out of my mouth. My friend was retired but, like my mother, he had sufficient funds to last a lifetime. When I gently suggested the idea, it was clear that it hadn’t even entered his mind. He looked embarrassed and confused.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “It’s not like you’re going to have to live like a pauper now.”
He replied, “I don’t want to look like a sucker.”
At first, I didn’t understand. The woman wasn’t some grifter. She’d been with him for years, even driving through snowstorms to make sure his home was tidy.
Then I comprehended: What if—after some future catastrophic economic collapse—Dave lost his entire savings? He’d look back and kick himself for having bought the boiler. Sure, what a sucker!
In “Rioting and Looting,” the anthropologist Neal Keating describes a potlatch hosted by a Kwakiutl man named Dan Cranmer on the occasion of his marriage. During the six-day event in 1921, which three hundred guests attended, Cranmer gave away twenty-four canoes, pool tables, motorboats, guitars, blankets, kitchen utensils, gramophones, sacks of flour, shawls, bracelets, and dresses. Coins were tossed into the air for the children to snatch up.[2]
For this extravagance, Cranmer had criminal charges brought against him. The potlatch, a Native American ceremony that involves giving away or destroying wealth or valuable items to demonstrate one’s wealth or power, had violated Canada’s Indian Act of 1885. That law was enacted to help assimilate First Nations people into modern society—specifically, into a property-owning culture in which ownership was inviolate, practically sacred. As Keating writes, the potlatch “took commodities and turned them into gifts, thus mocking the entire system of capitalist production. Potlatch destroys property.”[3]
In sharing about the potlatch and the unjust arrests, I am not suggesting people bankrupt themselves when rewarding others or that they use giving as a way to boost their prestige. Nevertheless, when it comes to tipping or acknowledging the kindness of helpers like Manny and Jerry, I believe we can learn from the potlatch. We can learn from Christ himself, who said, “When you give . . . do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matt. 6:3 NIV).
In other words, calculation is the enemy of giving. We are not called to live in a mindset of fear and scarcity. We are to cast our bread upon the waters.
Why should my mother have cared whether Manny and Jerry saw her gift—even if it were $250 each instead of $35—as over the top? Their work is to receive the gift—unexpected and unexpectant.
In the next life, there will be no price list. So why should we confine ourselves to one here?
[1] Ofer H. Azar, “The History of Tipping: From Sixteenth-Century England to United States in the 1910s,” preprint, Social Science Research Network, September 27, 2002, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.397900.
[2] See Keating, “Rioting and Looting: As a Modern-Day Form of Potlatch,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 39 (Winter 1994): 32–35.
[3] See Keating, “Rioting,” 32.