I am trying to learn Russian, and in communicating with people in the USA who are from Ukraine or Russia, they often ask me "why is X done this way"? So that is why this book is interesting to me.
I've been on a visit to the US recently and while I do know quite a lot about it, some things I didn't know and it was an interesting puzzle to try to come up with reasons why certain things are done this way and not the other. So, a couple of points to keep this post interesting:
* You're mostly out of luck if you don't have the exact amount of money to ride a bus. Machines don't give change. Probably because everybody has a pre-paid ticket and tourists are expected to take a cab or rent a car.
* Showers are all built into the wall. Impossible to find a shower that you can hold in your hand. Seriously inconvenient if I want to shower my feet, for example.
* In Russia, it's the police who ask you for an id all the time. In US, it's bartenders.
* Lots of homeless people everywhere. They look much healthier than russian homeless and most seem perfectly capable of making money on some job, that requires minimum skills. But they don't work. Also, they're very entrepreneurial: unlike russian homeless, they approach you very actively and ask for a change or something else.
* Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction.
* Flight attendants and airline pilots still speak English I can hardly understand, although it's their native language.
* No kettles (been discussed here and on reddit before)
* Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism. Because if you think about it, it's just business owners redistributing responsibility of paying their employees to me, the customer. Might be a good idea, or might piss me off: I hate calculating how much I should tip after having three beers. It does make the system less centralized, but it also reduces customer convenience. And I was also not sure where should I tip and where it's not very common. For example, no one in Europe tips a person at a bar serving you one beer. It's just beer, for god's sake. Not so in US. Now the problem for me is that when I go to another country where they don't tip, I feel very guilty for not tipping. It's a very hazardous practice for some reason.
Homeless people may have jobs. But there's insufficient numbers of legal, decent jobs (which would keep them from being homeless); and they may be affected by other issues which keep them from actually obtaining/keeping a job. Whatever outward persona you may see in a brief moment of observation, may not be much indication of the person within.
Also, there's different beggar culture. In some countries, beggars may rely on eliciting sympathy for their miserable state. Whereas the US may have such an unsympathetic culture that this may repel the audience.
> In Russia, it's the police who ask you for an id all the time
Police rarely ask anyone with slavic appearance for an id. That mostly happens to people who look like gypsies or those from Caucasus (for some reason "caucasian" means "generic white race" in English and "people of the Caucasus" in Russian).
The idea of the "Caucasian race" comes from a German philosopher in the 18th century. It has to do with him considering the Georgian people (from the Caucasus) to be the most glorious looking white people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race#Origin_of_the_co...
Their showers frustrate me to no end. It's really hard to reach everywhere with them, I wonder why handheld ones haven't caught on.
Tipping is another major pain point for me. I never know when to tip (Do you tip cab drivers? If so, why? Their whole job is to take you to the place you asked for, that's why you pay them). This leads to me overspending a lot, since I didn't factor a 20% increase on the order prices (which usually are pre-tax anyway, so the increase comes to 30-40%).
Frustrating. In Greece, we only tip waiters and delivery people, and that's 1, 2, or maybe 3 euros if you're very generous. On orders of more than 100-150 euros, you might tip 5. It's not a percentage because the waiter didn't do proportionally more work in bringing me a 100 euro steak than in bringing me a 10 euro side.
I'm guessing you mean handheld showers like the ones on a bracket on the wall, and then you can remove them. I think it's mostly in newer construction. I've seen a few hotels with them. It's really not a big deal for the affixed one, so long as the shower head is above your head. In my current apartment, the shower head is about where my face is, so you have to squat down under the shower to wash your hair. I'm average height too, not NBA player height.
I agree tipping is a strange practice. If you tip too little you're stingy, if you tip nothing you're making a point. I've stopped tipping for some things that are just kind of ridiculous (I went and picked up a call ahead order the other day, no I'm not tipping you). The percentage makes sense in this context: In a nicer restaurant, you expect better service as a baseline. So at the $100 steak restaurant, the waiter is pulling your chair out for you, etc. But at the $10 steak place, it's not quite the same level of service. You're tipping off the total experience rather than the individual dishes if that makes sense.
I'm not sure. I know the wages are compensated like this: if your server wage + tips doesn't equal the standard minimum wage, then the employer has to make up the difference to get you to minimum wage.
Since the tips are higher in nicer restaurants, you'd net much more at the same server wage + tips than at a chain restaurant. I'm not sure they pay more, or if the promise of more tips is sufficient. There's probably is an increase as you go from $10 pp to $100pp meals, but I don't know if at the top end you're making the normal minimum wage yet.
For chefs, almost certainly. For waiters (i.e. the ones relying on tips), well, not so much. The expectation appears to be that nicer restaurants will be frequented by relatively wealthy patrons who are perhaps more willing to tip gratuitously for exceptional service. This keeps waiters on their best behavior without having to pay them a higher wage up-front.
Source: friend who works as a waiter at the most decadent restaurant in town.
Good head chefs are scarce. In a high-class restaurant, their pay should be comfortable with or without tips. The rest of the kitchen staff might rely on tips (though I'm not sure if it's legal to pay them less than minimum wage like waiters), but relative to the waiter they each have little interaction with the customer and hence comparatively little ability to influence the tip.
> (Do you tip cab drivers? If so, why? Their whole job is to take you to the place you asked for, that's why you pay them).
I tend to tip cab drivers here in NYC very high, anywhere from 25% to 50% depending on the fare. (I tend to tip high generally simply to avoid the embarrassment and accidental cruelty of tipping low)
NYC has crufty licensing rules for taxis, and the actual driver may be leasing the right to drive (the medallion) from a fleet owner or some corporate entity, which cuts into their profits a lot. Among my peers there seems to be a bit of disdain for cab drivers generally. A lot of people seem indignant about being able to pay with a credit card which results in less profit for the driver. I've seen people who are rude to drivers just as a matter of course.
So I tip high, and I pay in cash. I don't claim to be making the most perfectly rational economic decision here, but I hope that by doing so, I show a little appreciation and gratitude to someone who is performing a service for me.
It might be mostly cultural. I show appreciation and gratitude by using the service, reasoning that all the compensation necessary is included in the price. I don't see the US way as paying extra, it's more like "pay what you want in a specific range", whereas the European way is more "this is the price we've all decided is mutually fair".
The former way would be more efficient, if it weren't for the social stigma of underpaying. I'd love to overpay for good service and underpay for bad service, but nobody underpays, in practice. Still, I guess overpaying for good service is a good way.
The practice of tipping or not and how much is in a large part cultural, of course. I was just answering your question regarding the case of taxis specifically, since (in NYC, at least) I think the circumstances of "taxi economics" put most drivers at a disadvantage, and I try to acknowledge that by tipping.
As an Aussie who has to occasionally suffer without mixer taps, I must ask:
What do you do when it's cold and you want to wash your hands with warm water? Your choice is freezing-cold from one tap, or boiling hot from the other. Why separate them?
> You're mostly out of luck if you don't have the exact amount of money to ride a bus. Machines don't give change. Probably because everybody has a pre-paid ticket and tourists are expected to take a cab or rent a car.
This is actually a theft deterrent. Bus drivers can't get at the money to give change, so they can't be held up either.
> Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction.
That's part of it, but Americans are deeply distrustful of strangers. It probably plays along the same lines as our finding suburbs safer than inner cities.
> Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.
It's strictly a cultural thing. I'm given to understand that in Hawai'i tipping used to be considered insulting, and perhaps that's still the case in places (I've never been). Also, in different parts of the country tips are compulsory for different occupations. In the Southwest, restaurant service is about the only thing you tip for. In New England it's a different story.
Urban Americans are the most distrustful of strangers though. Also, (white) Americans moved to suburbs because of a combination of cheap availability of gasoline and racism ("white flight").
White Flight is what we were taught in school but really. White folks didn't move out of the city to get away from blacks, we moved out to get away from the dirty treeless city, shitty schools, lack of land, and overcrowding.
Also, suburban sprawl has happened everywhere from Africa, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico. Even black folk don't want to live in the city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight
An entire generation grow up in isolated lifeless suburbs where every facet of its life had to be planned and scheduled around traffic. Of course young people are sick of the suburbs and moving back into the city, the suburbs are boring as hell.
Even India, Australia, China, and other countries experience suburban sprawl. Oh did they move away from black folks too? Humans, like many other animals, like having territory, land, peace, and quiet. So people work in the city but live tucked away in the county. And that the fact that in St. Louis, we have Belfontaine (the black county which has nicer areas than many of the white counties) just proves that everyone likes living in peace & quiet.
There are advantages and disadvantages to urban and suburban life, and different people prefer different things. There isn't some universal human urge to live in suburbs. The cheap availability of automobile transport simply adjusts the cost benefit by reducing costs, as does racism.
I suppose another factor is that Americans don't really do cities right, but this is largely an effect of the other two factors, plus the awkward way the American political system gives disproportionate influence to people living in less density.
Yes, there are other countries with suburbs. In some of them, the suburbs are more dense and walkable than most American cities, which much better access to public transportation. In others, suburbs are the poorer and less desirable places to live. In fact, this is starting to happen in some places in the United States! It's not just the American 1950's pattern over and over again.
* Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.*
Tipping IS about capitalism. It provides the incentive for the server to do their job well, providing the best service possible to the customer. Especially in situations where the server can materially affect the quality: you might get a beer glass full of foam, or a mixed drink very thin on the alcohol, or a cabbie who takes the wrong route and gets lost, or a bellhop who drops your bag. Tipping provides direct connection between these and the compensation earned by the server, incenting the servers to deliver well.
There are flaws with the above argument. If there's sufficient supervision by the employer as to quality of service (think flight attendants, or fast food where the manager is always nearby), tipping isn't necessary. And the system doesn't work if people tip anyway on bad service, out of habit or perceived social compulsion. But by and large the tipping culture induces good quality of service.
Perhaps it's better said as: "Tipping WAS about capitalism". The problem is that tipping amounts in the US have become standardized as part of social compulsion. It's increasingly rare, and I think increasingly considered rude, to undertip a server unless they are very unusually bad. And overtipping is likewise looked on as decadent, the kind of thing hip hop moguls do.
Even so, having lived in cultures (Italy, etc.) where tipping is frowned upon, I think it is true that tipping cultures have somewhat better service. But it's also a pretty small difference, and the annoyance of tipping is so incredibly high it is simply not a worthwhile institution. It's basically a mechanism to keep most servers in poverty. Plus we don't tip for food or decor. Why just service?
In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week passes for the convenience of tourists. I don’t know how other cities do it. (Mass transit is good in Boston, superb in NYC, and mediocre-to-nonexistent everywhere else.)
I think attitudes to being approached by strangers on the street vary by region. People in California and the South are chattier than people here in the frozen Northeast.
