They worked long hours and relied heavily on tips for pay. Workers shined shoes, made beds, woke up passengers and so on. In the 1860s, the company purposely hired "formerly enslaved people to achieve the high-quality customer service the Pullman cars were known for," according to the Library of Congress. But the company that "really institutionalized" tipping, Zagor says, was the Pullman Company, which built and operated railroad cars. Various businesses within the service industry adopted the practice. This shifted the responsibility of paying workers to customers and cut employers' costs. Employers took advantage of this class of "low-educated, low-income" workers, he says, and hired them for jobs that paid very little, encouraging patrons to tip as a supplement to wages. Though many Americans rebelled against it, the practice spread.Īt the end of the Civil War, America's labor force "was flooded" with formerly enslaved people and immigrants, says Zagor. In the 1800s, Americans who had seen tipping on travels abroad "thought this would be a wonderful thing to kind of mimic our brothers and sisters in Europe" and brought the practice to the U.S., says Stephen Zagor, a professor at Columbia Business School specializing in the restaurant industry. ![]() As a practice, tipping has its origins in Europe of the Middle Ages (a period which lasted from about 500 to 1,500 A.D.) when the wealthy would give people in lower classes extra money for their services, according to Kerry Segrave's "Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities."
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